The brain is an amazing muscle.
And just like every other muscle in the body, it can be strengthened when used and atrophied when not. The easiest insight to the brain atrophying is with children’s test scores before and after summer. (Read the meta-analysis)
The prolonged inactivity of a child’s brain demonstrates what is visible to any newly retired athlete and person who’s arm has been in a cast for the past 6 months. Muscles becomes weaker without use.
But, they can also become stronger with use. Proper maintenance and practice can change a brain’s shape, performance, and speed. Further, merely imagining is a task which works out the brain. In fact, imagining practicing a skill can yield results similar to actually practicing.
Much has come about from this ability to imagine into reality. Take Oprah for instance:
To imagine is to achieve. Perhaps we should all
Fake it till you make it.
The brain makes connections, the more connections it makes, the stronger it is, just like the more reps on the bench a person makes, the stronger the pecs become.
I was never told this in school. It probably would have helped me understand and be more willingly to apply myself to a lot of the seemingly meaningless homework assignments and practice sets. Couldn’t we start all educational lessons with ‘why’?
Why are students given math time-tests? Why did it take you that many times of practice to understand the subtraction equation? Why do you probably not remember how to do long division or find the volume of a cone? Or that one foreign language you learned in high school?
The joke is that your 13 year old child comes to you for homework help in math and you can’t…because you’ve forgotten it all. Is that right? To spend all those years learning just to forget?
Consider another point, much has come about from studies demonstrating increased longevity through keeping the brain active in learning as we age. The more we use our brain as we age, there is a correlation of slower rates of decline and increased life span.
So perhaps we should attempt those math problems with our children. Perhaps there’s no age too old to freshen up on that foreign language, no time we can’t utilize for reading something new, it may just be that which lets you live a little longer.
Put another way in the wise words of Charlie Munger,
Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty.
Morality can be debated, but there’s no debate in whether or not exercising your brain at any age yields positive results. You might not be able to run a mile anymore (or ever) and you might not be able to bench press 215 pounds, but you certainly can workout your brain anywhere, any time, in a myriad of different ways.
So, does framing the brain as a muscle alter your perception on what is important for its health, maintenance, and growth? Does it make sense why children who are mentally stimulated year round do better on standardized tests than those that take the summer off? Would you be willing to workout your brain on a daily basis?