Prime Your Gray Cells

Wiring your brain for happiness and success

Susan Reynolds, Teresa Aubele Ph.D.

Coronavirus and Blocked Writers

Unfortunately, with a pandemic, the danger is invisible. Nevertheless, your threat-attuned brain is in overdrive, which makes it a challenge for you.

Study Reveals Thought Processes that Foster Creativity

What drives the need to create is not creative ability per se, but rather a tendency toward self-reflective pondering and the ability and penchant for letting your mind wander.

Empirical Study Reveals 14 Key Components of Creativity

While we all have a generic idea of what creativity is and assume we easily recognize creative individuals, defining what makes someone highly creative has eluded many.

What Creates Superior Brain Connectivity, According to Study

Participants on the “positive” side reflected stronger connectivity associated with higher cognitive functions, including memory, language, introspection, and imagination.

Tapping Into the Genius of Hamilton's Creator

Have you tapped into your creative genius? The creator of Broadway's "Hamilton" reveals eight cognitive strengths that you can mine to bolster your creativity.

What You Read Matters More Than You Might Think

You are what you read: Why deep reading makes you a better writer.

Yoga and Kirtan Kriya Meditation Bolster Brain Functioning

Fire up your brain in 15 minutes a day: Seven easy steps for performing Kirtan Kriya mediation.

To Spark Genius, Read Outside Your Comfort Zone

Reading works very different from what you're writing and has multiple benefits for your brain. Here are six that will pay off immediately.

6 Ways Reading Fires Up Your Writing Brain

Our brains are amazing thinking, dreaming, imagining, and producing machines, reliant upon their masters to program, nurture, guide, and direct them. Luckily, reading does wonders.

How Images Can Fire Up Your Writing Brain

Stimulation prepping via images lights up the specific neuronal network focused on your particular writing project and fuels imagination and creativity.

7 Ways to Trump Brain Games

Now that the shine has been dimmed on “brain games” in staving off aging-related decline, it’s important to revisit scientifically proven ways to keep your brain healthy.

5 Ways to Crystallize Your Intelligence Around Writing

To excel at writing, crystallize intelligence specific to the task, i.e., bolster neuronal connections related to writing and your topic.

7 Ways Meditation Supercharges Your Brain

Pausing daily, or at least regularly, to meditate can have amazing benefits for your brain, from increasing brain volume, to boosting focus and supercharging neurons. Here’s the lowdown on 7 long-term brain benefits.

Fire Up Your Neuronal Network

Meditation serves as a gateway between the everyday lives we lead and our innermost selves, that which makes us unique and feels most authentic to who we are—in life, and in art. The more access we have to the innermost, sacred parts of our self, the more we are able to express what matters most to us in our work.

Yes, You Can Sculpt Your Brain to Be More Creative

Studies have shown that you can sculpt your brain by being more adventurous in exploring your environment. Even identical twins develop unique skills and talents dependent upon how much they embrace and unleash their individual curiosity and pursue particular interests.

Are Your Dreams Keeping You Awake?

Dreams are our brain's way to process emotions while we sleep. If you're super stressed and suffering from restless nights, even nightmares, image therapy can be an effective way to "rewrite" your dreams.

Always Reward Your Writing Brain

When you feel good, your brain releases and bathes itself in what are called the feel-good chemicals—dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin, and others—which is so pleasurable for your brain that it eagerly awaits new opportunities to repeat this experience.

Five Reasons You're Experiencing Writer’s Block

Five reasons you're experiencing writer's block, and how you can get your brain back on task.

Super Bowl: Battle of the Quarterback Brains

Both quarterbacks obviously have superior ability to absorb information, process stimuli, and integrate information faster than most of us, and both are able to overrule their emotions under the gun—so which brain wins the trophy?

Can You Prime Your Brain to Get Rich?

Thanks to millions of years of evolution, we are highly intelligent biological organisms, but when it comes to making financial decisions, we can be unduly influenced by ancient brain skills, such as hair-trigger responses to perceived fear.

New Year, New Brain

If you've created resolutions or a game plan or a list of goals you'd like to achieve in the new year, your brain stands ready to become your strongest ally in making them happen. By fulfilling 5 simple resolutions, you can significantly boost your brain's firepower.

Why a Sugar High Leads to a Brain Low

Excessive glucose in the form of refined sugar can be very detrimental to your brain, ultimately affecting your attention span, your short-term memory, and your mood stability.

The Skinny on Brain Fats

Approximately 60 percent of your brain matter consists of fats that create all the cell membranes in your body. Do you know what kinds of fat your brain needs to function at its peak capacity, and to create all the cell membranes in your body? If not, read on . . .

Have You Fed Your Brain Today?

One of the easiest ways to recognize nutrition deficiency is not from a change in body activity but from a change in mental functioning. This is because the frontal lobes, the area of the brain that acts like the CEO of you, are particularly sensitive to falling glucose levels.

Plastic Is Fantastic . . . for Your Brain

For centuries, scientists believed that the human brain and its connections were formed during gestation and infancy, and remained pretty much unchanged after childhood. In the last decade, however, researchers have found significant evidence that something called neuroplasticity continues throughout our lives.

Happy Brain, Happy Life

Focusing on negative thoughts saps your brain of its positive forcefulness, slows it down, and can even dim its ability to function and cause depression.

Are You Smothering Your Brain’s True Genius?

Your brain needs time to subconsciously integrate new information with existing information and make novel connections or identify hidden patterns. Being bombarded by TMI or multi-tasking clearly impinges on your ability to think creatively.

Is Your Brain Asleep on the Job?

Your brain is capable of neuroplasticity, the ability to change itself, throughout your lifetime. You are not stuck with the brain you were born with and have the ability to consciously cultivate (by using your mind) which parts of your brain you wish to strengthen, rewire, or even regenerate.

Does Coffee Perk Up Your Brain . . . or Not?

If you like coffee, like we do, you probably justify excessive consumption by saying, and perhaps believing, that it fires up your brain, making you more productive and, well, smarter. You think the shot of caffeine you get from coffee is the perfect pick-me-up drug . . . but is it?

What Was Happening in Anthony Weiner’s Brain?

While there’s no way to know what former Congressman Anthony Weiner was thinking—or if he was thinking—it is possible to understand how his brain contributed to his demise. Basically, the man had an electrochemical itch, one that he compulsively sought to scratch.