This capacity for neurogenesis, when combined with the brain's proven ability to change its structure and function in response to external stimuli, leads to the significant finding that cognitive function can be improved at virtually any stage in life.

What do we mean by improving your cognitive function? It's increasing your ability to:

• process information quickly
• complete more decision cycles per fixed unit of time
• perform multiple tasks simultaneously (multi-tasking)
• retrieve old information more rapidly
• learn new information more easily
• concentrate in the presence of distractions

To insure you're not doing anything to harm your cognitive abilities, you should consider the following:

• Good diet and exercise habits reduce the likelihood you'll develop high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease, all of which can decrease blood flow to your brain.
• Tobacco use generates free radicals that impair the message transfer process (neuron to neuron) within the brain.
• Abuse of alcohol not only impairs the message transfer process in the same manner as smoking, but also causes the destruction of brain cells.
• Stress causes your body to pump out increased levels of the hormone cortisol. Excessive cortisol levels can lead to the destruction of neurons in the hippocampus (the learning and memory center of the brain).

While not harming your cognitive function is one thing, actually enhancing your cognitive abilities is quite another. It's long been recognized that staying mentally engaged by working, volunteering, reading, doing crossword puzzles and brain teasers, etc. can keep/make you sharper. But recent studies have shown that there may be a more targeted and effective way to improve your brain processing speed - the use of highly interactive mental challenges called Elementary Cognitive Tasks (ECT), as are used in the MyBrainTrainer.com program. These ECTs, also known as Brain Speed Training Exercises, provide a brain workout in the same fashion that Nautilus exercise equipment provides a workout for your body. Each ECT isolates the specific region of the brain that you are exercising. By pushing yourself to respond as rapidly as you can to the random stimuli contained in the exercise, you increase the delivery of oxygen, blood flow, and various critical amino acids to that particular brain region. The end result is more neurons, more neural connections and increased brain processing speed.