The Teaching Company TTC Optimizing Brain Fitness 2011'

The Teaching Company TTC Optimizing Brain Fitness 2011'
English | wmv@640x480 29.97fps | wma@stereo 128kbps | 4.38 GB

Type Tutorial

Taught By Professor Richard Restak, M.D., Georgetown University School of Medicine,
The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences

With its up to 500 trillion synaptic connections, your brain is easily the most powerful machine in the world. These connections are what create your thoughts, what drive your emotions, and what control your behaviors. Even more incredibly: This amazing machine is constantly changing through a process known as brain plasticity. And you can take advantage of this process to improve and enhance your brains jaw dropping powers at any age.Brain plasticity, the secret to optimizing your brains fitness, is one of the most revolutionary discoveries in modern neuroscience. While it was traditionally thought that our brains were fully formed by adulthood, the truth is that our life experiences continually shape and mold our brains in fascinating ways. In fact, optimal brain fitness is the gateway to improvement in a range of areas, including

memory;
attention and focus;
learning and creativity; and
sensory acuity and fine motor skills.
Now, discover the secrets to increasing and expanding your brains power to meet everyday challenges and enhance the quality of your life with Optimizing Brain Fitness, an engaging 12 lecture course that shows you how to take advantage of the basic principles of brain operation and build the brain you want to live with for the rest of your life. Delivered by Dr. Richard Restak, an award winning teacher, practicing neurologist, and professor at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, these lectures are packed with vital information and research based exercises you can perform every day to tap into your hidden mental potential.

Explore Your Brains Most Important Functions

Optimizing Brain Fitness centers on the idea that your brain is a continual work in progress, one whose development depends on the best possible use of your brains most important everyday functions. You explore many functions in these lectures, with a strong focus on three.

Attention: Optimal attention skills open the door to top notch performance in math, reading, and auditory and visual memory. They provide you with the basis for learning what to focus on and what to ignore, and they also coordinate the brain networks that involve sensation, movement, emotions, and thought.
General memory: General memory facilitates the formation, activation, and retention of neurological circuits that contribute to your brains optimal functioning. Memory is the veritable bedrock of superior brain health and serves as the basis of your personal identity.
Working memory: Working memory is linked with your IQ and is the first brain function to decline as you age. It is central to your ability to manipulate stored information and can easily be improved by practicing a series of simple exercises.
Youll also spend time delving into the neurology of motor skills, visual spatial thinking, creativity, and more.

Engage in a Wealth of Delightful Exercises

Professor Restak proves that exercising your brain doesnt have to be a burden or a chore. Rather, it can be an exciting and eye opening way to explore how the brain works and to discover your own brains potential.

Dr. Restak has designed Optimizing Brain Fitness with a wealth of exercises, challenges, practice problems, and tests that will enhance and improve your brains essential functions. Here is just a small sample of the enjoyable ways that you can improve your brain.

In one minute, name as many animals as you can without repeating them. Youll have to use your working memory to mentally eliminate animals youve already named. A desirable score is between 17 and 20 animals.
Close your eyes and envision the room around you, and then open them and check for accuracy. Repeat this memory recall exercise and pay closer attention to smaller details, such as the number of magazines on a table.
Take a number of spices at random and set them on a table; then close your eyes and try to identify each of them by smell alone. Take this same approach by identifying spices in a meal that youre eating. Both exercises are great ways to sharpen your senses of smell and taste.
Winner of Georgetown University Medical Schools Linacre Medal for Humanity and Medicine, Professor Restak is an accomplished neurologist, prolific author, frequent public lecturer for prestigious institutions, and above all a champion of brain fitness. Rooted in the startling new findings emerging from groundbreaking experiments and detailed research studies, his course is the perfect way to maintain or improve the health of the most important organ in your body.

Insightful, instructive, and undeniably fun, Optimizing Brain Fitness is an invaluable part of your personal tool kit for lasting health and wellness.

About Your Professor

Dr. Richard Restak is Clinical Professor of Neurology at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. He earned his M.D. from Georgetown University School of Medicine and completed his postgraduate training and residency at St. Vincents Hospital, Georgetown University Hospital, and The George Washington University Hospital. Professor Restak also maintains an active private practice in neurology and neuropsychiatry in Washington, DC.

Professor Restaks awards include the Chicago Neurosurgical Centers Decade of the Brain Award and Georgetown University Medical Schools Linacre Medal for Humanity and Medicine. A former president of the American Neuropsychiatric Association, Professor Restak is the prolific author of 20 books on the human brain 4 of which were chosen as Main Selections of the Book of the Month Club as well as numerous articles in national newspapers, including The New York Times and USA Today.

Professor Restak has delivered lectures on neurology to prestigious institutions and associations around the world, including NASA, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Brookings Institute.

Available Exclusively on Video

This course features more than 350 visual elements to help you optimize your brain fitness and enhance your learning experience, including detailed diagrams and x rays of the brain at work, vivid images and graphics, and on screen text.

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=1651

Videos and Audio Files

Course Lecture Titles
12 Lectures
30 minutes / lecture

1. How Your Brain Works
In order to best optimize your brain fitness, its important to understand how the brains circuitry works. After a brief introduction to the course, Professor Restak guides you through a range of intriguing topics, including the principles of brain operation, the organization of the brain, patterns of brain growth, and more.

2. How Your Brain Changes
Your brain and your intelligence can change throughout your life span. Here, look closer at the way changes in your brain can improve the way you function in your day to day life. Also, explore how a series of visual, sensory, and spatial exercises demonstrate the powerful effects of brain plasticity.

3. Care and Feeding of the Brain
You can optimize your brain function by paying attention to three key habits: what you eat, how well you sleep, and how much you exercise. Ponder the science behind this three pronged approach to caring for your brain, and come away with helpful tips you can apply to your own lifestyle.

4. Creativity and the Playful Brain
Whats the connection between daydreaming and creativity? What are four steps for increasing your creativity? Which puzzles are the best for optimizing your brain function and how can you more efficiently solve them? Learn the answers to these and other questions in this fascinating lecture on creativity and the brain.

5.Focusing Your Attention
The basis of improving your memory: focusing your attention. Here, explore a range of topics, including the physiological effects of attention on your brain; the dangers of inattention; the benefits of enhanced attention; multitasking; exercises to improve your sustained attention, divided attention, and processing speed; and much more.

6. Enhancing Your Memory
In the first of three lectures devoted to memory, Dr. Restak proves just how essential memory is to your brains optimal functioning. After surveying the details of memory and its roots in the hippocampus, learn ways to sharpen your sense memory and augment both your short term and long term general memory.

7. Exercising Your Working Memory
Focus now on working memory the most important memory process of all and one that involves manipulating stored information. After an overview of the topic, dive into a series of engaging exercises that use your creativity, your powers of observation, and your heightened awareness to enhance and improve your working memory.

8. Putting Your Senses to Work
Imaginative memory techniques such as mnemonic devices and personal associations have been used to improve memory for over 1,000 years. Try your hand at some of them right here, including chunking numbers to aid in number recall, creating a vivid story to memorize words, drawing free form designs, and playing mental chess.

9. Enlisting Your Emotional Memory
Turn now to an aspect of memory we dont usually consider when thinking about the subject: emotional memory. How did scientists uncover this specific aspect of memory? How does it actually work? And what kinds of playful exercises can you perform to help you relive the emotional experience of your past?

10. Practicing for Peak Performance
Exceptional performers arent born with superior brains. Rather, anyone thanks to brain plasticity can achieve high performance levels in an area of interest through deliberate practice. Focus here on two aspects of deliberate practice: remaining fully aware of what youre doing, and concentrating on the most difficult aspects of your performance.

11. Taking Advantage of Technology
Take a closer look at the impact of modern technology on how our brains function. Youll explore the positive and negative effects of electronic journals, personal computers, and more with a lengthy discussion on the impact of one of todays most powerful and controversial influences on brain function: video games.

12. Building Your Cognitive Reserve
Professor Restak concludes his course with ways to immediately start optimizing your brain fitness. These include trying new and unexpected things, learning in an informal and self directed manner, keeping things in perspective, opting to prioritize instead of multitask, developing an appreciation for art and music, and surprisingly preparing home cooked meals.

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