Train your mind: those who select personnel for companies know this well. They certainly count technical skills to fill a certain role, but equally important are the cognitive abilities.
Ability to concentration, caution, the memory, lucidity, resistance are the main skills needed to do your job well. Skills that only 20% are attributable to one's DNA, while the remaining 80% depend on the ability of each to know them stimulate and strengthen, regardless of age. “More and more companies are looking for personnel with specific cognitive characteristics to carry out a given job,” he says Giuseppe Alfredo Iannoccari Neuropsychologist, professor of Human Sciences at the State University of Milan and President of the Assomensana association.
Every job needs specific cognitive skills. From the worker in charge of checking a finished product, to the manager who must focus on several sectors at the same time. The same goes for a teacher who has to summarize and simplify difficult topics, perhaps in smart working, for a student who has to prepare for an exam, for someone who has to present a project at a conference.
Cognitive skills can be improved and with them also the relationship with life
“The most recent scientific studies have highlighted a great news: cognitive activities can be increased, improved, stimulated with the right strategies, obtaining excellent results at any age” says Iannoccari. “And on the other hand, improving one's skills allows one to have greater satisfaction in one's own work, increase self-esteem, generally make your relationship with the better life".
You have to think about the brain like a muscle: “We know that by training in the gym, the bicep improves. The same thing happens for the brain: it must be trained, stimulated, sprayed so that it can have the best possible performance in the present and also in the future".
What is the best approach to improve cognitive skills?
“First of all, to stimulate our mind we need never stop learning, of try new things and activities” says Iannoccari. "The neurons stimulated in this way will continue to produce those chemical substances that increase their volume and tone, allowing them to work better, at any age".
If, on the other hand, cognitive abilities are not stimulated, in the long run we experience frustrating situations that can lead depression, isolation, fear of not being good enough.
“A vicious circle is essentially created: the less I commit myself to doing, the less I learn and the less I am able to do. But if I do less, my brain is less active and we will arrive at the so-called "mental inflation": it's like thinking of leaving the capital under the mattress without making it bear fruit, over time it will be eroded by inflation and will decrease. If, on the other hand, it is put to good use, it will increase".
What makes the brain slow down? “In all professions they are always the automatic schemes to act as a brake. If the same activity is repeated over and over, nothing is activated in the brain: from the pianist who always repeats the same score, to the accountant who reviews the same accounts, to the worker who always performs the same job, up to those who always play the same card game or does the same sports training.
Changing the rules, changing the patterns: the strategy for a healthy brain
"Modifying the patterns, learning new ones, trying out the variations, experimenting with new games, changing the rules: these are all actions that get you out of the "comfort zone" of the brain and move the neurons".
Brain activity is not necessarily linked to age alone.
We all believed that life was a bell curve, ascending up to a certain point and then descending. Today, however, life is considered continuous growth, full of subsequent learning and opportunities.
This is evidenced by the ever-growing number of highly lucid, highly cultured people full of new projects even over the age of 90.
So the theme is right here. What do the cognitive activities of a 30-year-old and those of one of these seniors have in common?
Curiosity is the locomotive of the brain
The most important factor - which above all is an attitude and a state of mind - is the Curiosity: it is the engine for understanding new things, experimenting with new skills which, once acquired, open the way to new ones, and so on, broadening interests more and more”.
Those who, on the other hand, have a renunciatory attitude, at the age of 30 or 90, towards what is unknown, new or apparently difficult, is destined to deteriorate rapidly: renunciation seriously damages one's health.
Curiosity instead allows you to collect stimuli and bring them to other skills: to memory, considered the queen of all cognitive activities, to attention, to concentration.
There are well 17 different memory types – explains Iannoccari – the one for names, the one for faces and the one for numbers, but also the procedural one (the ability to know how to do things), perspective (remembering to do something later), semantics (remember what do the terms mean and what are the objects for).
There are people who are very gifted on some fronts, but less so on others. A bit like it happens for sportsmen: those who excel in the marathon do not necessarily have the same performance in the 100 metres.
Reduce the use of “mental prostheses”
Each of these can be stimulated with even fun tricks, exercises and strategies Assomensana has developed in the courses of Mental gymnastics which take place in more than 30 Italian provinces.
Some are very simple: for example, one could start by abandoning or limiting the so-called "mental implants" made up of electronic diaries and address books and start again to memorize some telephone numbers and memorize appointments and birthdays, suggests Iannoccari.
Or you can avoid fragmenting thecaution continuously moving from the main activity to the smart phone or social networks: one could create “Tech break” in the course of the day in which to concentrate these activities.
Another useful mechanism for the brain is the verbal storytelling: telling stories, telling episodes, repeating film or novel plots are all activities that keep the brain trained.
Finally the suggestion to experiment with any kind of new activities: a sport, a trip, a course, a hobby, a musical instrument, a game, even trying to use the non-dominant hand in small gestures.
“They are all side activities to the main job, but which become synergistic with it and improve it” concludes Iannoccari. His new book on the subject has just been released: “The 10 pillars for an efficient brain” published by Franco Angeli.
