The human brain is the centre of the human nervous system and is a highly complex organ. It is responsible for self-control, planning, reasoning, abstract thought, and vision. It monitors and regulates the body's actions and reactions. It continuously receives sensory information, and rapidly analyses such data and then responds, controlling bodily actions and functions. It controls breathing, heart rate, and other autonomic processes and is the centre of higher-order thinking, learning, and memory. It is also responsible for the body's balance, posture, and the coordination of movement. Despite the fact that it is protected by the cranium, it is highly susceptible to injury which can lead to anything from amnesia to dementia to Parkinson’s disease. The human brain is three times as large as that of other animals with the same body weight.
You've probably heard it before that the brain is a muscle that can be strengthened. It's an assumption that has spawned a multimillion-dollar computer-game industry of electronic brainteasers and memory games. Recent research as revealed by Nature Journal has confirmed what a lot of people, scientists and lay people alike have long suspected: that engaging in a particular mental task continually helps you improve on that task (practice makes perfect) but that improvement does not carry over to cognitive function in general.
Brain power basically refers to more effective thinking, better memory, more creative problem-solving, thinking faster, improved memory, comprehending information better and unleashing your brain's full potential, which is the topic of our discussion. If brain power refers to intelligence as inferred from preceding statements, then different people must have different kinds of brain power. Intelligence is generally divided into:
1. Linguistic Intelligence: People who are smart in this area can argue, persuade, entertain or instruct effectively using the spoken word. They often love puns, word games and trivia, read voraciously and write clearly.
2. Logical Intelligence: People with talent in this area have the ability to reason, create hypotheses, think in terms of cause and effect, and find conceptual or numerical patterns in the things around them.
3. Spatial Intelligence: People with spatial ability can perceive, transform and re-create different aspects of the visual spatial world. They are sensitive to visual details, can visualise vividly, orient themselves in three-dimensional space and often draw or sketch ideas.
4. Musical Intelligence: People with this intelligence have a good ear, can keep time, sing in tune, and listen to music with discernment.
5. Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence: People with gifts in this area are good at controlling their body movements, handling objects skilfully and performing other physical activities.
6. Interpersonal intelligence: Those who have this intelligence are able to perceive and be responsive to the moods, temperaments, intentions and desires of others.
7. Intrapersonal intelligence: People gifted in this area are introspective, good at assessing their own feelings and capable of deep spiritual or intellectual thought.
Of course no one person is limited to one type and the ideal is for us all to have all the different types of intelligence combined, which is not usually the case. It is however up to each and every one of us to make deliberate effort to develop skills and talent in those areas of intelligence we will like to excel in.
Talent therefore is not something we acquire but something we develop. Humans however generally believe that people without a particular natural talent for some activity will never be competitive with those who possess that talent, meaning an inborn ability to do that activity so we engage in something new and, finding that it doesn’t come naturally to us, conclude that we have no talent for it, and so we never pursue it.
In my article, Redefining Success, which reviews two books talking about the issues of success and achievements, (Talent is Overrated by Fortune Senior Editor at Large, Geoff Colvin and Outliers by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell,) it is argued that successful people are those who have made the most of a series of gifts that have been given to them by their culture or their history or their generation and success is not just about our personality, our intelligence, and all of our innate characteristics. Gladwell advocates what he calls the 10,000-Hour Rule as the most obvious key to success (Colvin also advocates same calling his own, Deliberate Practice.) Studies suggest that the key to success in any field has nothing to do with talent. It's simply practice, 10,000 hours of it. The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at what you do unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly ten years, if you think about four hours a day or 20 hours on a five day week.
What then can we do to significantly improve our brain power and utilise our brain’s full potential?
(1) Be a lifelong learner.
(2) Be slow to speak and quick to hear
(3) Be self aware
(4) Be self motivated
(5) Surround yourself with smart(er) people
(6) Develop an interest in a variety of different things
(7) Keep a journal, diary or booklet
(8) Don’t allow your environment to limit you
(9) Learn to relax and not be too busy
(10) Have and show initiative
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