In the last few years we have been hearing a lot of people talking about Brain Training games and the benefits that these games have on children. I was a little curious to know what exactly they meant by Brain Training, because I have heard of training which means developing the muscles and the body, but mind?
I delved into it a little and found that just like we can go to the gym and exercise various parts of our body; similarly we can also exercise the brain.
Since I normally deal with Children in the age group of 7 to 16 years, I was wondering what type of effect these exercises would have on children. I found that if the children were to perform Neurobic Exercises then it would immensely benefit the child. So what is Neurobic exercise?
Explained in a very simple term
“Neurobics is the science of brain exercise. Its primary goal is to help you keep your memory, along with the ability to learn new information. The term "neurobics" was coined by Lawrence Katz, Ph.D and Manning Rubin to describe these brain exercises and it includes many practices that help the brain stay fit.
Just like aerobic exercises & going to the Gym lays emphasis on different muscle groups to enhance coordination and flexibility, neurobic exercises involve activating many different brain areas to increase the range of mental motion, they result in a mind that's fit to meet various challenges — whether it is enhanced memory skills, retention and recall of learned content or being creative.
In order to be effective, a neurobic exercise should do one of the following:
Make you use one of your senses in a new way — by dulling the sense you normally use the most - common sense that we use is the sense of vision. So if one can bypass this sense and get our other senses involved it would work wonders.
Engage your emotions. Make your brain sit up and take notice! Step outside the box and do something unusual or surprising.
Break a routine — make it unexpected.
Some of the examples of Neurobic exercise are as follows:
Follow the Rabbit
Thumb and little finger – Exercise
Brain Teaser Riddles
Brushing your teeth with Non Dominant Hand
Shower with your eyes closed
Do Mental Maths Problem in your head & Many More.
This Brain Training Exercise actually helps us in coordinating the right and the left brain functions and these, in turn, lead to the overall development of the children.
Apart from Neurobic Exercises, we can also have them try:
Website based Game Engines
Traditional Games.
Traditional Games
Brain Training Exercise can also be in the form of Games one of the most know games for Brain Exercise in Sudoku which is an alignment of numbers in a box of squares. There are also many other games that we can ask children to play for exercising the brain.
Some of the popular games are:
Sudoku
Scrabble
Monopoly
Spot the Difference between Pictures
Riddles
Puzzles
Maths Problems being done without the use of Paper or Instruments.
Websites
There are also a few websites which use Game Engines which are programmed to throw up different puzzles and challenges based on the age group of the child. These websites help the child to develop their response time to problems and also build their logical thinking ability hence help in Increase of IQ.
These types of games help the Children jog their memory and in turn help in the overall development of the brain.
There are many training centers in India which have specialized courses on Brain Training with an internationally researched and proven Best Brain Training Program. Brainy from Brain Child Learning is one of the leading companies involved in this, having a presence in over 13 countries and over 30 centers in India.