Table of contents
Your brain is a muscle. You need to exercise it regularly. The exciting thing is that you don't need to be a millionaire to increase your brain capacity. All you need to do is invest a little time to train your brain regularly. So how do you increase your brain capacity?
Seek out the new
When you seek out novelty, several things happen. First, you create new synaptic connections with each new activity you engage in. These connections build on each other, increasing your neural activity. By the same logic, click for info and you can create more neural connections.
Constant exposure to new things helps put your brain in a state of readiness to learn. Novelty also triggers dopamine, which not only kicks motivation into high gear. It also stimulates neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons and prepares your brain for learning. Just feed the hunger.
Challenge yourself
There are absolutely loads of terrible things written and promoted about how to "train your brain" to "get smarter". Indeed, brain training games refer to memorization and fluency games, designed to increase your processing speed, etc. These games make you more competent in brain training games.
The brain uses more energy during the training periods and gains thickness. This means more neural connections or new knowledge gained after intense training.
Thinking creatively
Creativity will help you achieve neural growth. And once again, you need to look for novelty. Indeed, cognition refers to creativity itself, and what that means in terms of the process that takes place in your brain. Creative thinking is not the same as "thinking with the right side of your brain". It involves engaging both halves of your brain, not just the right side.
Creative cognition involves divergent thinking, making remote associations between ideas, moving from conventional to unconventional thinking. It also involves generating original and novel ideas that are also appropriate for the activity you are doing. To do this well, the right and left hemispheres must work together.