Brain exercise can help improve the way your brain functions. Much like any other aerobic activity for your heart and muscles, brain exercise is essential for better mental function and improves its activity. It all has something to do with stimulating the nerve cells in your brain.

Active nerve cell stimulation helps in activating new brain cell connections that allows the cells to transmit and receive information from one another. Stimulation comes from the senses and it is activated as you encounter different types of stimuli from day to day.

Learning how to write, for example, helps provide the stimulus that enables the brain nerve cells to create new information pathways to one another. But when this stimulus becomes a routine activity, the neural circuits are set and no new connections are being made. What the nerve cells in the brain want is a new type of stimuli to allow it to develop new circuits.

In brain exercise, the idea of putting the mind into experiencing new stimuli is put to work. What you may be able to do is to try to do routine tasks in a different way.

As with the previous example as writing, the routine way may be to write by using either your right or left hand. But when you try to learn writing using your other hand, meaning the one that you don't usually use, you are putting your brain to a different kind of stimulus. This simple brain exercise will help the nerve cells in your brain to create new connections and therefore help your brain in functioning better.

In brain exercise, the simplest way to do it is to break away from seemingly routine everyday tasks. Try brushing your mouth using the left hand if your usual routine is using the right hand. If you usually stay at home, try camping out for the weekend and enjoy the different stimuli that come from being in another environment. The key is to break routine in order to help your brain cells make new connections; these connections allow new information pathways to be sent and received among the brain cells.