How to Get More Mental Marbles

When I was in elementary school I had a collection of marbles. My favorite marble, because it was so different from the others, was a black and white striped one that I named “speedy-speed.” Although I liked my marbles, I didn’t actually play the game of marbles very often. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, you have a circle on the floor and you use your marbles to try to “shoot” or knock other marbles out of the circle. You get to keep marbles you knock out. If your marble gets stuck in the circle and someone else shoots it out, you lose it.

I didn’t like the game of marbles because I lost my second favorite marble in a game. So, I decided to be more careful with my marbles because I really wanted to keep the marbles I had.

I just turned 58 this year (2012), and while I don’t have the marble collection I had as a kid, I still want to keep my marbles. Of course, I’m talking about mental marbles, as in maintaining a sound mind. In fact, I’m a little greedy when it comes to mental marbles—I want as many as I can get!

With the rising problems with Alzheimer’s and dementia among the elderly, many people besides me are concerned about keeping their marbles. However, focusing on the negative—in this case avoiding losing your marbles (memory)—is not productive. Focusing on the positive—as in increasing your brainpower—is what will really get you what you want. And, it is possible to increase your brainpower.

Most of us assume that our intelligence is something that is fixed. We think that some of us are smarter and some of us are just plain dumber, but this is simply not the case. It’s true that all of us are talented in different ways, but most of us are quite capable of learning just about anything we want to. The idea that we can’t is a warped belief, usually brought on by parents or the intellectual damage done by the public school system.

We are a lot smarter than we think we are. Unfortunately, most people don’t access this extra mental capacity simply because they don’t believe it is there.

Well, I do! And the goal of this article is to teach you how to tap into your extra brainpower and start using it.

As is my typical pattern, I’m going to divide this topic into two parts. The first is more physical and has a lot to do with nutrition. The second is psychological and deals with how we approach learning something. So, let’s get started by talking about how to supply the brain with what it needs to generate more mental marbles for us.

Click the link below to read page two of this article.