Silk Road forums
Discussion => Drug safety => Topic started by: thecrackhead on October 03, 2012, 12:50 am
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Good evening ladies and gents, I'm not a doctor and I didn't study drug effects on the brain that much but whether you like it or not drugs are actually affecting your/our brain especially your/our memory. I'm not posting this because I just read an article about drugs affecting memory I'm just doing it because I like this community and I'm sure the advice will be helpful for some of the members here.
I started smoking weed when my brain was still developing and I've seen the effects directly. I can't recall many things I did and at some point it got so bad that I couldn't go back more than one day. I was just remembering roughly what I was doing in periods as short as 72 hours. Some of you will say oh, it's not the drug, are just the brain cells which are dieing because of aging. Well, I'm not over 30 and I've always seen myself as an intelligent individual.
I'm not saying weed is bad or drugs in general is that with a bit of exercise you can overcome the bad effects of drugs.
How to Improve Your Memory:
A strong memory depends on the health and vitality of your brain. Whether you're a student studying for final exams, a working professional interested in doing all you can to stay mentally sharp, or a senior looking to preserve and enhance your grey matter as you age, there are lots of things you can do to improve your memory and mental performance.
Harnessing the power of your brain
They say that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but when it comes to the brain, scientists have discovered that this old adage simply isn’t true. The human brain has an astonishing ability to adapt and change—even into old age. This ability is known as neuroplasticity. With the right stimulation, your brain can form new neural pathways, alter existing connections, and adapt and react in ever-changing ways.
The brain’s incredible ability to reshape itself holds true when it comes to learning and memory. You can harness the natural power of neuroplasticity to increase your cognitive abilities, enhance your ability to learn new information, and improve your memory.
Improving memory tip 1: Don't skimp on exercise or sleep
Just as an athlete relies on sleep and a nutrition-packed diet to perform his or her best, your ability to remember increases when you nurture your brain with a good diet and other healthy habits.
When you exercise the body, you exercise the brain
Treating your body well can enhance your ability to process and recall information. Physical exercise increases oxygen to your brain and reduces the risk for disorders that lead to memory loss, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Exercise may also enhance the effects of helpful brain chemicals and protect brain cells.
Improve your memory by sleeping on it
When you’re sleep deprived, your brain can’t operate at full capacity. Creativity, problem-solving abilities, and critical thinking skills are compromised. Whether you’re studying, working, or trying to juggle life’s many demands, sleep deprivation is a recipe for disaster.
But sleep is critical to learning and memory in an even more fundamental way. Research shows that sleep is necessary for memory consolidation, with the key memory-enhancing activity occurring during the deepest stages of sleep.
Improving memory tip 2: Make time for friends and fun
When you think of ways to improve memory, do you think of “serious” activities such as wrestling with the New York Times crossword puzzle or mastering chess strategy, or do more lighthearted pastimes—hanging out with friends or enjoying a funny movie—come to mind? If you’re like most of us, it’s probably the former. But countless studies show that a life that’s full of friends and fun comes with cognitive benefits.
Healthy relationships: the ultimate memory booster?
Humans are highly social animals. We’re not meant to survive, let alone thrive, in isolation. Relationships stimulate our brains—in fact, interacting with others may be the best kind of brain exercise.
Research shows that having meaningful relationships and a strong support system are vital not only to emotional health, but also to brain health. In one recent study from the Harvard School of Public Health, for example, researchers found that people with the most active social lives had the slowest rate of memory decline.
There are many ways to start taking advantage of the brain and memory-boosting benefits of socializing. Volunteer, join a club, make it a point to see friends more often, or reach out over the phone. And if a human isn’t handy, don’t overlook the value of a pet—especially the highly-social dog.
Laughter is good for your brain
You’ve heard that laughter is the best medicine, and that holds true for the brain as well as the body. Unlike emotional responses, which are limited to specific areas of the brain, laughter engages multiple regions across the whole brain.
Furthermore, listening to jokes and working out punch lines activates areas of the brain vital to learning and creativity. As psychologist Daniel Goleman notes in his book Emotional Intelligence, “laughter…seems to help people think more broadly and associate more freely.”
Looking for ways to bring more laughter in your life? Start with these basics:
Laugh at yourself. Share your embarrassing moments. The best way to take ourselves less seriously is to talk about the times when we took ourselves too seriously.
When you hear laughter, move toward it. Most of the time, people are very happy to share something funny because it gives them an opportunity to laugh again and feed off the humor you find in it. When you hear laughter, seek it out and ask, “What’s funny?”
Spend time with fun, playful people. These are people who laugh easily–both at themselves and at life’s absurdities–and who routinely find the humor in everyday events. Their playful point of view and laughter are contagious.
Surround yourself with reminders to lighten up. Keep a toy on your desk or in your car. Put up a funny poster in your office. Choose a computer screensaver that makes you laugh. Frame photos of you and your family or friends having fun.
Pay attention to children and emulate them. They are the experts on playing, taking life lightly, and laughing.
Improving memory tip 3: Keep stress in check
Stress is one of the brain’s worst enemies. Over time, if left unchecked, chronic stress destroys brain cells and damages the hippocampus, the region of the brain involved in the formation of new memories and the retrieval of old ones.
Improving memory tip 5: Give your brain a workout
By the time you’ve reached adulthood, your brain has developed millions of neural pathways that help you process information quickly, solve familiar problems, and execute familiar tasks with a minimum of mental effort. But if you always stick to these well-worn paths, you aren’t giving your brain the stimulation it needs to keep growing and developing. You have to shake things up from time to time!
Memory, like muscular strength, requires you to “use it or lose it.” The more you work out your brain, the better you’ll be able to process and remember information. The best brain exercising activities break your routine and challenge you to use and develop new brain pathways. The activity can be virtually anything, so long as it meets the following three criteria:
It’s new. No matter how intellectually demanding the activity, if it’s something you’re already good at, it’s not a good brain exercise. The activity needs to be something that’s unfamiliar and out of your comfort zone.
It’s challenging. Anything that takes some mental effort and expands your knowledge will work. Examples include learning a new language, instrument, or sport, or tackling a challenging crossword or Sudoku puzzle.
It’s fun. Physical and emotional enjoyment is important in the brain’s learning process. The more interested and engaged you are in the activity, the more likely you’ll be to continue doing it and the greater the benefits you’ll experience. The activity should be challenging, yes, it should also be something that is fun and enjoyable to you. Make an activity more pleasurable by appealing to your senses—playing music while you do it, or rewarding yourself afterwards with a favorite treat, for example.
Use mnemonic devices to make memorization easier
Mnemonics (the initial “m” is silent) are clues of any kind that help us remember something, usually by helping us associate the information we want to remember with a visual image, a sentence, or a word.
Tips for enhancing your ability to learn and remember
Pay attention. You can’t remember something if you never learned it, and you can’t learn something—that is, encode it into your brain—if you don’t pay enough attention to it. It takes about eight seconds of intense focus to process a piece of information into your memory. If you’re easily distracted, pick a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted.
Involve as many senses as possible. Try to relate information to colors, textures, smells, and tastes. The physical act of rewriting information can help imprint it onto your brain. Even if you’re a visual learner, read out loud what you want to remember. If you can recite it rhythmically, even better.
Relate information to what you already know. Connect new data to information you already remember, whether it’s new material that builds on previous knowledge, or something as simple as an address of someone who lives on a street where you already know someone.
For more complex material, focus on understanding basic ideas rather than memorizing isolated details. Practice explaining the ideas to someone else in your own words.
Rehearse information you’ve already learned. Review what you’ve learned the same day you learn it, and at intervals thereafter. This “spaced rehearsal” is more effective than cramming, especially for retaining what you’ve learned.
Here you have a website for memory games:
http://www.ahaf.org/alzheimers/resources/memorygames.html
Believe it or not it's actually useful. One of the most popular methods for getting brain cells working is to solve puzzles or riddles, which force you to think in unusual or creative ways. Puzzles and riddles help exercise your mind because they involve a host of mental tasks, including mathematics, logical reasoning, pattern recognition, and nonlinear thinking.
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thank you; sorry for your lack of recall; I haven't been sincere with my life lately, I've had heaps of stress and all of it incorporeal dependency. As long as I'm in America, in plain text; I'm depressed. I've been mean to my mother, who forced me to wake up early and drudge off to school, & made an irretrievable religious sacrifice of my penis because she thought it was civil. It makes me sad, turns me to a quaking mess. As unhappy as I am, I'm going to make amens with her; her life is but as a miserable machine and no one is human enough to actually care. I'm going to change my ways now, and stop being a damn fool. Maybe then my suicidal impulses will stop too.
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Hi
I'm going to throw a spanner in the works here. I am starting to get the feeling that a balanced intake of bush grown sativa is actually beneficial for long term memory. I can't prove this theory yet but I will be testing it extensively over the next few months :)
Interested to know if anyone else has experienced this?
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"..which leads us to the next topic: Hard solving video games can help your brain cells, eye-hand connection and skill, and learn English language."
I speak Spanish, and I can assure you that I learned a lot of English with movies and specially video games like Final Fantasy VII, and Silent Hill 1 and 2. The later can very get hard to solve, you can even increase riddle difficulty in Silent Hill 2. I guess I couldn't be here writing if it weren't for those. Also the music that I liked a lot and wanted to know what the lyrics meant.
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thanks for the post :)
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Who read and noticed there was no Tip #4?!
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He most likely forgot #4.......
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I actually deleted that paragraph as it was irrelevant. Thanks :)
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Good advice. Thank you!