MUSIC

Music-making, in particular, produces a wash of stimulation throughout large areas of the brain that are used to combine visual, motor and auditory skills. This appears, in turn, to boost academic performance significantly.

According to research by the Institute for Music and Brain Science, at Massachusetts General Hospital, the primary brain benefit from playing music is in the act of co-ordinating all of your senses and remembering it.

It can even make your brain bigger. Dr Gottfried Schlaug, of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, found from MRI brain scans that the corpus callosum is larger in professional musicians than in non-musicians. This area is key to transferring information from one side of the brain to the other.

And research at the University of California, Irvine, shows that music lessons can boost your spatial reasoning abilities, which are crucial for such higher brain-function tasks as complex mathematics and chess.

The potential link with maths ability continues to fascinate researchers. While some studies are inconclusive, others are far more positive, such as a survey by the College Entrance Examination Boards in America, which found that students who study music score higher on the verbal and maths portions of their Scholastic Aptitude Tests (very roughly the American equivalent of GCSEs).

But it’s not just maths and other science-friendly areas of the brain that can be improved. Dr Schlaug’s scans of musicians’ brains have also found that playing a musical instrument increases the density of areas that seem to overlap with regions that are useful for learning and using languages.

LANGUAGES

Like music, language-learning can also be a significant brain-booster, though the effect is stronger among the under-35s. A study of 105 people, published in Nature in 2004, by Andrea Mechelli, a neuroscientist at University College London, found that those who are bilingual have more grey matter in the left inferior parietal cortex of their brains, an area that deals with language. The more proficient someone is at their second language, the larger this area of the brain grows.

The brain changes prompted by learning another language after the age of 35 are not as pronounced as in early learners, the research adds. But, nevertheless, it can act as a powerful brain stimulant, as it encourages the ageing grey matter to stop bumbling along on autopilot and instead commit more resources to developing new synaptic connections.

SWIMMING

That process can only be helped by the flood of oxygen to the brain that is stimulated by aerobic exercise such as swimming. Swimming is also beneficial because it strengthens core muscles; it’s also a low-impact sport, avoiding the risks of strain on the joints that other execises, such as running, can incur. But swimming also has a more subtle benefit; it appears to improve adults’ morale and self-image.

A study by Phillip Whitten, a professor of human behavioral biology at Harvard University, of adults who swam an average of an hour a day, several days a week, found that 80 per cent of the swimmers rated themselves as attractive or very attractive, and no one rated himself or herself as below average.

That is way above the response rate among non- swimmers, and seems to be linked to the body’s production of endorphins, our natural feel-good opiates, in response to exercise. And if you’re feeling slinky and sexy, surely it can only improve your French-speaking skills.