As we age, our memory power takes a beating. If you don’t want to simply sit back and let nature takes its course, you should know about the effective ways that could help you improve your memory. Apart from physical fitness and intake of a healthy diet, you can also consider the consumption of certain vitamins that are known for their memory improvement power.

When you consider vitamins to improve memory, Vitamin A, C and E as well as B Vitamins top the list. Vitamin A – also called Beta Carotene, is often clubbed under the category of “Antioxidant Vitamins” as it protects the brain cells against the damaging action of free radicals. Vitamins C and E also belong to the same category and help in either stopping or slowing down the spread of damage caused by free radicals. While consumption of citrus fruits and dark green leafy vegetables will help you get enough dosage of Vitamin C, intake of nuts, seeds and fish oils will ensure that you have enough amount of Vitamin E in your body.

Many research results have shown that B Vitamins protect the neurons in the brain by creating a protective shield around them. They also break down the amino acid – homocysteine, which is toxic for the nerve cells. These vitamins play an important role in the production of red blood cells, which help in the transport of oxygen to the brain. Important B vitamins that improve memory include B12, B6, and B9 (Folic Acid). You may either take them as vitamin supplements or opt for the preferred option of consuming food items rich in these vitamins.

So, make a habit of eating spinach, other dark, green leafy vegetables like broccoli, soybeans, strawberries, melons, asparagus, black beans, legumes, and citrus fruits like oranges and grapefruit to enjoy improved memory. Remember that these vitamins will be helpful in addressing memory problems ranging from mild to moderate level. You may even steer clear of dreadful ailments like Alzheimer’s diseases if you complement the intake of these vitamins with a balanced diet and regular exercise regimen. So, take the first step towards memory improvement by ensuring the intake of these helpful vitamins in your diet.

The more active you keep your brain, the more fit it will be for performing certain tasks. Just like we can keep our body healthy through exercises, brain fitness exercises are also there with the same aim – to keep your brain healthy and active. However, before you start jotting down some brain fitness exercises from here and there, you should have a proper idea about the concepts behind these fitness regime for your brain. So, here are some facts to help you in your endeavor:

• Your brain grows better when you keep your focus on a single idea or item as the brain thinks through association.
• Your brain gets very active when it finds varieties of exercises and activities. On the contrary, if you fall into the habit of regular patterns of work, your brain gets adjusted to it and tends to get sluggish.
• Challenging your brain with new activities can really stimulate it and improve memory power as well.

Now that you are aware of some of the ways that your brain works or loves to work, creating and following brain fitness exercises becomes easier. Here are certain exercise ideas that you can try to keep your brain active and fit:

• Speed Reading: This is one of the easiest and effective fitness exercises for the brain that you can try. Speed-reading helps in improving photographic memory and increase knowledge fast through building neural networks in the brain.
• Color Recalling and Picture Visualization: This is a very effective brain training exercise. It helps in improving memory a lot. There can be several types of color recalling and picture visualization exercises, from which you can take your pick.
• Playing with Words: When you are trying to improve your memory by training your brain to become more active, playing with words can be very helpful.
• Physical Exercises for Brain: There are several brain training exercises and a physical exercise for the brain is one of them. You can, for instance, stare straight ahead and focus your eyes in front. Then without turning your head, you have to slowly roll your eyes fully by 360°.

Try to follow some of these exercises for a more active brain and memory power.

There are several ways that can help in stimulating the brain and increase memory power. Music and brain training has become one of these many options that are gaining much popularity these days. It has been seen that music can do wonders in making our brain more active and target memory improvement through the same. The fact that music helps in training our brain in a more channelized way to gain substantial results is now a proven truth. Here are the benefits of music:

• Music helps in improving reading and literacy skills by enhancing brain activity.
• Spatial-temporal reasoning faculty can also be improved through music.
• It has been seen that children who suffer from attention deficit problem can do better in mathematical examination after listening to music.
• Music and brain training also helps in gaining emotional intelligence.

Having known all these benefits, you must be wondering how exactly music helps in stimulating our brain. So, here are some facts that will give you a better insight:

• There are music with particular rhythm pattern and beats that target the right and left parts of our brain. We can play this type of music to train those parts of our brain to achieve more. For instance, the music with 60 beats per minute pattern, created by Mozart or in baroque music, can actually stimulate the left and right parts of our brain.
• When our brain is trained, it can process information better. It has also been seen that playing particular music instruments can activate both parts of the brain at the same time. This is an amazing effect of music and brain training.
• Our recalling faculty can also be improved by training our brain through music. In fact, researchers have found that certain music act as great keys, which play important role in improving our recalling faculty.
• Children who take music lessons from their childhood have shown greater capability in memorizing rather than other kids.

Music and brain training has come to the fore as a very convenient way of improving our memory, and is gaining more popularity with each passing day.

At some point of time in our lives, all of us have either tried or are still trying to employ strategies to improve memory. There are certain ways that you can depend on instead of trying the much-hyped medicines or other memory solutions available in the market.
There are generally four basic ways as mentioned below, which can help in overall memory improvement:

• Development of the mind

Just like we train our body through several exercises, we can train our mind too. The main objective is the same in both these cases – achieving fitness – both for the body and the mind. There are several areas where we can improve our mental fitness like imagination, awareness, and analytical skills. The more active our mind becomes, the more fit it is. Even an improvement in memory power is observed at the same time. You can even use various self-help books for improving your mental health and fitness.

• Conversion of information

It is generally harder to remember a chunk of information than remembering small bits of information. That is why if you convert a chunk of information into little bits using charts, diagrams or color-coding to make it attractive and interesting, it will help in remembering certain things easily. Taking the dullness away and converting the same piece of text into small, spicy ones helps a lot to memorize and improve memory.

• Memorizing techniques

There are several ways and exercises that you can follow to improve memory. One good way is to relate some dull information to something that appears to be interesting to you like color, music or funny facts.

• Power of recalling

Another great strategy for memory improvement is to guide and train your mind to recall things. Sometimes it happens that we really don’t forget anything, but fail to recall certain events. This is because most of us do not bring our conscious mind to full work. We should train our conscious mind to work more, which in turn will help to improve memory . For instance, you can start by recalling the day’s event just before you go to bed. Gradually, you can extend this exercise to other fields of life and improve memory.

Gianni Golfera’s video “How to Improve Your Memory” was featured on AolVideo.

Gianni Golfera featured on improving-your-memory.com, created by Ashley Clark, an open forum community of resources, advice, reviews and recommendations for improving memory and life.  See Gianni Golfera’s video.