With its up to 500 trillion synaptic connections, your brain is easily the most powerful machine in the world. These connections are what create your thoughts, what drive your emotions, and what control your behaviors. Even more incredibly: This amazing machine is constantly changing through a process known as brain plasticity. And you can take advantage of this process to improve and enhance your brain's jaw-dropping powers—at any age.

Brain plasticity, the secret to optimizing your brain's fitness, is one of the most revolutionary discoveries in modern neuroscience. While it was traditionally thought that our brains were fully formed by adulthood, the truth is that our life experiences continually shape and mold our brains in fascinating ways. In fact, optimal brain fitness is the gateway to improvement in a range of areas, including

• memory;
• attention and focus;
• learning and creativity; and
• sensory acuity and fine motor skills.

Now, discover the secrets to increasing and expanding your brain's power to meet everyday challenges and enhance the quality of your life with Optimizing Brain Fitness, an engaging 12-lecture course that shows you how to take advantage of the basic principles of brain operation and build the brain you want to live with for the rest of your life. Delivered by Dr. Richard Restak, an award-winning teacher, practicing neurologist, and professor at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, these lectures are packed with vital information and research-based exercises you can perform every day to tap into your hidden mental potential.

Explore Your Brain's Most Important Functions

Optimizing Brain Fitness centers on the idea that your brain is a continual work in progress, one whose development depends on the best possible use of your brain's most important everyday functions. You explore many functions in these lectures, with a strong focus on three.

• Attention: Optimal attention skills open the door to top-notch performance in math, reading, and auditory and visual memory. They provide you with the basis for learning what to focus on and what to ignore, and they also coordinate the brain networks that involve sensation, movement, emotions, and thought.
• General memory: General memory facilitates the formation, activation, and retention of neurological circuits that contribute to your brain's optimal functioning. Memory is the veritable bedrock of superior brain health and serves as the basis of your personal identity.
• Working memory: Working memory is linked with your IQ and is the first brain function to decline as you age. It is central to your ability to manipulate stored information and can easily be improved by practicing a series of simple exercises.

You'll also spend time delving into the neurology of motor skills, visual-spatial thinking, creativity, and more.

Engage in a Wealth of Delightful Exercises

Professor Restak proves that exercising your brain doesn't have to be a burden or a chore. Rather, it can be an exciting and eye-opening way to explore how the brain works and to discover your own brain's potential.

Dr. Restak has designed Optimizing Brain Fitness with a wealth of exercises, challenges, practice problems, and tests that will enhance and improve your brain's essential functions. Here is just a small sample of the enjoyable ways that you can improve your brain.

• In one minute, name as many animals as you can without repeating them. You'll have to use your working memory to mentally eliminate animals you've already named. A desirable score is between 17 and 20 animals.
• Close your eyes and envision the room around you, and then open them and check for accuracy. Repeat this memory-recall exercise and pay closer attention to smaller details, such as the number of magazines on a table.
• Take a number of spices at random and set them on a table; then close your eyes and try to identify each of them by smell alone. Take this same approach by identifying spices in a meal that you're eating. Both exercises are great ways to sharpen your senses of smell and taste.

Winner of Georgetown University Medical School's Linacre Medal for Humanity and Medicine, Professor Restak is an accomplished neurologist, prolific author, frequent public lecturer for prestigious institutions, and—above all—a champion of brain fitness. Rooted in the startling new findings emerging from groundbreaking experiments and detailed research studies, his course is the perfect way to maintain or improve the health of the most important organ in your body.

Insightful, instructive, and undeniably fun, Optimizing Brain Fitness is an invaluable part of your personal tool kit for lasting health and wellness.