What the brain looks like

Oxygen Your brain needs to be primed with oxygen. It gets this from exercise. You also get oxygen from iron in red meat, green leafy vegetables, dried fruit, breakfast cereals, and baked beans.  

Don't skip breakfast (or lunch) Your brain will perform less well if you haven't eaten. Brain scientists have shown that test results are lower when students haven't eaten. Slow-releasing carbs are best eg. beans on toast Banana

Water Don't go thirsty. Dehydration seriously affects your brain's performance.  

The brain needs to pump the oxygen-rich Exercise The brain needs to pump the oxygen-rich blood to reach every capillary. Exercise improves your memory capacity Exercise helps reaction time so you can process information quicker.  

Sleep Possibly the most effective thing for your brain is a good night's sleep. As you rest, the brain consolidates all the day's new learning. One hour less sleep can affect your test scores the next day. To maximise revision, take 5 minutes rest every hour.

Brains need rest sleep at least 8 hours every

Avoid caffeine Too much Caffeine overstimulates the brain energy is wasted getting rid of the caffeine. Similar effects occur with video games which affect sleep because the brain is still active.

Attention is made up of different parts – attention for things that we see and hear, selective and divided attention. Attention is impacted by factors such as lack of sleep, chemicals in our system such as caffeine, sugar and alcohol. Caffeine overstimulates the brain and makes it harder to concentrate -this then impacts on ability to learn. Memory is made up of encoding (getting information in) and retrieval (pulling information out, ‘remembering’). Use strategies to help encode and retrieve -= mnemonics.