Top Six Reasons Model Kit Making Is Good For Your Brain

We all know that model making is a fun hobby than can be very relaxing after a stressful day at work or school. Its also a great way to take your mind off of the stresses of the daily routine. So is all this planning, following instructions and constructing good for your mind.

Is model kit making good for the brain? Yes, there is a long list of benefits of building models. It’s great for maintaining focus, encourage concentration abilities, follow directions, build motor skills, and gain a sense of achievement with your finished model.

If you would like to learn the benefits to the brain from model building, read on.

1. Skill Development

Model kits come in many different scale sizes and many different skill levels. So no matter if you are a beginner or have been building models for a very long time, each new model will bring new challenges.

You have to be able to follow step by step detailed instructions and organize from fifty to hundreds of parts in a manner that will end up in a successful build in the end.

If you bypass any steps or sections in the instructions, in the end you may have a model that appears nothing like the picture on the front of the box.

As you become more experienced your skills will improve, but at the start, following instructions and learning to organize is one of the great benefits of model kit building.

Here is a list of some of the skills that model making will help you develop:

Researching
Planning
Cutting
Drilling
Sculpting
Sanding
Gluing
Painting
Detailing
Photography

2. Stress Release

We all seem to live stressful lives. There is a lot of demand on our time and it feels like we are always in a hurry. Sports, hobbies going to movies are all good ways to relieve some of the stress we incur.

A few hours a day or week working on our models is a great way to get away from all the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Its very relaxing to have an area in our homes that we can retreat to and enjoy a few hours of relaxation in model making.

If you like to spend some quiet time by yourself this is the perfect outlet for you. There are no demands on your time to finish any part of the build by a certain time. A few hours spent painting or glueing pieces of your model together can give you a very restful and relaxing time away from the problems of the world.

3. Exercise Your Artistic Skills

For some of us that thought we didn’t have any artistic abilities it is quite surprising and gratifying to see the outcome of our planning, organizing and finishing of a model.

When I finish a car model that is a copy of the car I drove in high school or a plane that I thought of as a piece of art it gives me great satisfaction and I look forward to my next project with anticipation.

Then we find the more we build the better our skills become and the finished product looks even more like a piece of art.

4. Learn the History of Your Models

It doesn’t matter if your building muscle cars, military machines or Star Wars crafts model building teaches you the history of all the subjects you build.

A big part of the enjoyment of model building is searching out the history of your subject, learning all about the paint schemes and the years of production of the actual vehicle.

There is a lot more satisfaction in building your subject when you understand the meaning it has in our history and how it affected the lives of the people during its era.

6. Our Brains Love The Work

According to Professor Kelly G. Lambert of Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, VA, the brain is programmed to derive pleasure and satisfaction when efforts produce something “tangible, visible, and—this is extremely important—meaningful in gaining the resources necessary for survival. To find a correlation between depression and physical efforts, she took two groups of rats and trained one group to dig for treats (the “worker rats”) and the other group to expect the treats in a lump sum, despite the effort they exerted (the “trust fund rats”). Next, she placed a treat inside a clear plastic ball, which couldn’t be opened no matter how hard the rat tried. Lambert found that the worker rats spent 60 percent more time trying to reach the treat than the trust fund rats did. The moral of the story: The workers were more confident they would succeed than the trust fund rats.

“A lot of our brain is devoted to movement,” she says. “So hobbies and activities that use our hands are engaging in more of our brain’s real estate. Gardening, building model airplanes, and knitting could be the key to mental health because they activate a lot of our brain.”

She adds that people born prior to 1950 are ten times less likely to develop depression in their lifetimes than people born after. “What has changed? Our lifestyles. Technological advances mean that we have stopped doing a lot of basic work,” she says, adding, “I think building model airplanes could be very good for us.”
Modelmaking: How this Hobby Makes You Smarter

6. Sharpen Your Organizational Skills

Every day of our lives we need to keep things organized. We may have three kids with different after school activities, what we are supposed to accomplish at work today and may other busy, busy things we have to keep organized everyday in our lives.

Our lives don’t come with a detailed instruction sheet that tells us what needs to be done and in what order, but model kits do. We can pattern our lives schedules like a detailed set of instructions to keep everything running smoothly.

I keep an ongoing list of things I need to get accomplished and places I need to be so that I feel like my life is always organized just like in a set of detailed instructions.

Final Thoughts

Here is a list of 10 reasons to build models:

There fun to build.
Each tells a bit of our history.
They teach us how to organize.
Our brains really love to do work.
It can bring out the artist in you.
They relieve stress.
They develop skills.
There rewarding when there done.
They give us a sense of accomplishment.
You can build your own trophy collection.
Happy Modeling!