Answer: Do these simple brain-training activities. Work out which ones you feel weak in; practice those again and again until you get good.
- Write neatly but quickly.
- Work out how to tell an interesting anecdote in under two minutes.
- “Do consequences”— predicting possible positive and negative consequences arising from various actions.
- Spot logical inconsistencies in a statement or someone’s behavior.
- Follow long, complicated sentences.
- Make accurate, complicated decisions that involve weighing up several options in your head.
- Remember complicated instructions.
- Follow a complicated movie story line.
- Block out distractions when you’re trying to do something hard.
- Remember something when distracting new information arrives straight after you receive it.
- Follow a conversation with lots of background noise.
- Follow a conversation with someone with a difficult-to-understand accent or poor English.
- Express complicated ideas that you’ve just read into your own words.
- Think and talk at the same time.
- Listen and think at the same time.
- Eat and listen at the same time.
- Recognize situations that call for tact before you respond.
- Silently pronounce hard-to-pronounce words as you read e.g. proprioceptive, neurotrophins, neurobics.
- Pronounce hard-to-pronounce words out loud.
- Think up effective strategies for solving problems.
- See through a plan to completion.
- Reflect what you’ve said and done and spotting better ways of doing things next time.
- Set plans and goals.
- Spot the main point--the central thesis– of what someone has said or what’s happening.
- Consider all the relevant information and not getting swayed by just a few bits of information.
- Deep-learn the meaning of new words.
- “See” by touching–practicing doing simple activities with your eyes shut.
- Recognize objects by feel.
- Play “what’s that sound?” games.
- Identify ambiguous pictures.
- Identify familiar faces when hair and other non-facial cues are removed.
- Say tongue-twisters.When even just reading tongue-twisters silently, the brain has to work extra-hard and extra bits of the brain light up, as shown in this research:
Brain imaging of tongue-twister sentence comprehension: Twisting the tongue and the brainVisit this site that lists over 400 English tongue twisters to compile your own list of especially tricky ones. It turns out I have trouble saying “cricket critics” and “bed-bugs’ black blood” and “sniff sesh!” and ” “click, clap, pluck” and lots of others! But I can say them better now!
- Articulate the words quickly and clearly when singing.
- Read a map.
- Flip shapes in your head.
- Identify a shape when it’s been flipped.
- Visualize a couple of moves ahead in strategy games like chess and checkers.
- Sort items into categories. (I should sort these 50 items into categories!)
- Anticipate where the ball will go in ball games such as tennis.
- Vividly imagine different sounds and images and tastes and smells.
- Do complicated imagery such as rearranging the room furniture in your head.
- Vividly imagine all the different emotions e.g. feeling determined, ecstatic, discouraged, alert, etc.
- Reproduce/recognizing complicated geometrical figures from memory.
- Coordinate a complicated cooking task involving preparing several dishes at once.
- Do challenging sums in your head.
- Process your listener’s non-verbal behavior.
- Accurately identify other people’s non-verbal behavior.
- Accurately read other people’s facial expressions.
- Accurately pick up other people’s feelings (i.e. showing accurate felt empathy).
- Use your non-dominant hand to do simple tasks.
Wow! That’s a lot of basic brain skills to master! But, apparently it’s do-able, so it’s worth exploring!
We wouldn’t be weak in all these things — just on a few of them. We need to find out what we’re weak at, and to find exercises to strengthen those weaknesses. I am hopeless at spatial stuff and recognising faces and thinking while talking!
Free, fun,challenging skill-building materials for most of these activities already exist. I’ll add in the links later.