Image via Wikipedia

Neurons are probably the most energetic and active parts of your entire body. A neuron is not static like you see them in whole brain videos. Under a microscope the neuron does not move itself that much, but it’s synapses are always looking forward to make new and better connections. Your brain is the ultimate use it or lose it tool. It never gets tires according to Dale Carnegie’s book on How To Stop Worry, plus the brain is the only organ that will be exactly the same since you were born until your death, only connections between neurons change, the neurons themselves do not change, ever.

Very recently scientists found a way to measure Human intelligence more accurately. Basically now they can see how fast neurons spread water all over the brain. The theory is very simple, the faster water spreads through the brain, the more intelligent a person is because his brain works faster. Thanks to this mathematical and factual experience, they have been able to measure how much you can improve your brain and which parts of it depend only on genetics. I am very sorry I lost my bookmarks so I cannot point you the site directly, you will have to find it, I found it on Google at the time searching for brain facts.

Now the best part of the article. The brain and the neurons being an organ that needs usage to become more effective and being the ultimate survival organ and also the one that can adapt better to any changes in your life, you just need to start doing now the thing you want to be able to do. No one ever learns how to swim outside of the pool, no matter how many seminars you visit or how many books you read, to learn how to swim you must be in the pool. This is a simple truth yet few people understand it, I only understood it in full only recently.

“Do the thing and you will be given the ability to do it” – from the book Thoughts To Build On by M. R. Kopmeyer

Want a simple example? Search for Flash games on Bing. Click on the first result. See a game. You will never be able to play it well if you just read the FAQs about it, or visiting forums or just by meditating right? You need to experience it yourself, you need to put yourself inside the pool, only then your neurons will act based on that real input and make the appropriate changes in their synapses to adapt themselves to faster reaction time, new information you got from the game experiences and also memories about both failures and successes in the past.

You can see in this video how important proteins are. If you miss only one particular protein, your neurons might not be able to make ANY connections between them!

The more you excite a neuron, the more you exercise a neuron, beyond your comfort zone, beyond your past experiences and beyond your safety zone, the stronger they will become.

Read this Wikipedia fact on it.

Something called LTP is the responsible for making your neurons stronger. Long-term potentiation increases the number of information senders and receivers in neurons in order to make it more effective. It’s called long term because the effect does not fade, instead it stays with you forever.

Read this site and see the Flash animations to understand it better.

The opposite is also true, if you stop exercising your neurons, they will become weaker by reducing the number of receivers in the synapses. This is called LTD or Long-term depression. It’s sad when this happens, but you have full control over it, just give your brain more work, increase it’s workload to limits beyond your sane imagination, and the brain has no choice but to make itself stronger to cope with your new demands.

What it’s the importance of new experiences in your life? After seeing the same image over and over again, you will be less stimulated by it right? The same is true for a computer game, a music, a video, a girl, any experience.

This is a fact proved by science. Your neurons are less active when presented with the same experience more than once. The neurons already have memories based on the past experience and will load the old data rather than getting it again from the second experience. Since they exercise less, they are more prone to become weaker. This is why it’s so important to have new experiences daily or you are just weakening your brain.

See the same site for LTP about this with an interactive Flash animation.