One idea that I really like, is that our brain works a lot like a muscle.
What I used to mean by this is that, just like a muscle, our brain needs exercise to develop itself. Just like to be able to run 5 kilometers you need to practice running 2 km, then 3km, then 4km every day, in order to be able to make logic arguments and understand them, you need to work on logic problems and questions, and keep your brain active.
And just like by making regular exercise you make your body stronger and generally healthier (and happier), by making regular mental exercises you also make your mind sharper, and yourself a more interesting person.
To sum it up, people use to think that intelligence and wits are something that either you have, or you don’t, and if you don’t you should just not think about it (ha!), while my argument is that we can and should practice our brains and critical thinking, and as we do it, the world will naturally become clearer and make more sense for us.
That said, recently I started to build a little bit more on the above analogy. I started to think about mental sugar.
We have evolved to find very highly caloric foods tasty, and crave for them. This is probably because in our hunter-gatherer times, food was scarce. It was beneficial to gorge yourself in highly caloric foods in order to compensate for the times when you couldn’t find any. However, nowadays due to technological and economical progress, sugar/fat/etc is really easily accessed by a large number of people. And thus we consume too much of it, with negative effects on our bodies and health.
Just in the same way, the excess of pre-digested information easily available works like sugar for our brain. Because in ancient times we needed to be alert to survive, our brains were rigged to give a lot of attention to things that are new and unusual. However today we have very easy access to a LARGE volume of bit-sized, easily digested news, one after another. So much that in fact we can eat the next piece of new information before we have had the time to fully digest the previous one. So much that not only news are available, but a variety of comments of all kinds to even the most banal kinds of news.
I don’t say this because I hate information and the internet age. Actually, I love it. But I started to notice that in recent months my thought process had grown fat and sluggish. I was absorving so much new info, in so little time, that I was losing the ability to generate new info myself. The sugar and fat where going straight through my saturated mental digestive system, much of it was being lost, and very little of it was becoming “muscle”.
Of course, bite sized pieces of curious media and discussions are tasty, and they are good and have their value. But just like with our non-brainy part of the body, they need to be consumed with moderation, balanced with “healthy” information (varied nutrients, need work and effort to be digested), and lots of mental exercise if you want to keep your brain in a good shape.
Easier said than done, obviously, but at least now I gave this problem a name and a shape.