Personalized Brain Power

Your intelligence is not fixed. You have the power to improve and enhance your mental powers. For this final project, you will create your own personalized cognitive plan to maximize your brain’s power. This plan will include caring for and challenging your brain while reducing stress, as well as strategies for significant learning and self-directed learning breaks.

Use all of your knowledge from the course and from what you have discovered about yourself: how the brain works, Growth Mindset, grit, mental challenges, assessment of your study skills, reflections on your fears and strengths, attention and focus, evaluation of “brain improvement” products, stress reduction and joy breaks. You will be gathering nearly all of the content for this project in our activities and discussions, journals and assignments. Use this information to produce your plan.

The components of your Personalized Brain Power plan are:

Written Analysis

This portion of the project is communicating what you’ve learned about the brain and yourself.
Summarize how your brain works and what it needs to function optimally. Assess your mindset and grit. Use the Cognitive Self-Assessment and Re-assessment, along with the mental challenges and Skills Assessment/Improvement, to rate your academic skills and abilities. Reflect on your fears and strengths, as well as your attention and focus, noting if they, or your perception of them, has changed. Measure your stress management and taking effective learning breaks.

Be specific in creating a schedule and set of goals for yourself. Consider this to be akin to a health and fitness plan where you map out

what you are going to do, how much and when. Be sure to develop the following categories:

Nourishment-such as sleep, food, hydration and what to avoid

Stress reduction-specific activities that help you reduce your stress

Learning breaks-specific activities that refresh you

Attention & Focus skills-specific activities that refocus your thinking

Academic skills improvement-specific activities to continue improving your study skills

Mental challenges-activities that challenge your thinking.