Like
other muscles in your body, if you don’t use the brain, you’ll eventually lose
it. This means it’s crucial to exercise your brain and keep it stimulated.
Tara
Swart, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, notes
that it’s especially important to target areas of your brain that you use
less frequently. Good suggestions for stretching your brain muscles include
learning to speak a new language, learning a handy skill, or even learning to
juggle.
To
enhance his own cognitive prowess, author James Altucher tries to
come up with new ideas every day. He writes about his daily
system:
Take
a waiter’s pad. Go to a local cafe. Maybe read an inspirational book for 10 to
20 minutes. Then start writing down ideas. The key here is, write 10 ideas … a
waiter’s pad is too small to write a whole novel or even a paragraph. In fact,
it’s specifically made to make a list. And that’s all you want, a list of
ideas.
Mid-way
through the exercise, Altucher says his brain will actually start to “hurt.”
Whether he ends up using the ideas or throwing them away is not the point. But
it is important to vary your routine.
Harvard
psychologist Shelley H. Carson, author of Your Creative Brain, also
believes that mixing things up and even allowing yourself to become
distracted can be an important cognitive tool.
- Vivian Giang
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