Train your brain
Training and exercise are similar. Here’s why I’m telling you about them:
- Since everyone does physical exercise (walking and breathing counts!), everyone can understand the principles that I’m going to compare to learning.
- In other words, it will be easier to understand… how to understand, using examples that you know: exercise. Because exercise is similar to learning in a lot of ways, which I will of course detail over the weeks.
- I am an athlete, so I can confirm more similarities with learning, because I am equally good at both.
- I recently injured my ankle, and it’s really frustrating not being able to do anything. I’m just starting to walk again, and I see a HUGE difference between my injured ankle and my normal ankle. And I’m not talking about the pain I have, but rather its power and endurance, which are at least 10 times less than before my injury.
- For the brain, it’s the same thing: stop learning for just a few weeks and you’ll have a lot of trouble starting again (take the school holidays for example, it always starts again more slowly than the speed at which the last year ended).
You’ve probably all heard that the brain is like a muscle. Of course, in reality the brain is not a muscle. Your brain is even BETTER than a muscle!
Why?
Muscles, the more they’re used, end up becoming stronger. And if we stop using them, they end up atrophying and therefore becoming weaker. Like when I talked about my injury above.
So far, the brain is the same: if you use it, it will become better, faster and more efficient, and if you stop using it, it will slow down, and you will have more trouble doing what you did easily before.
On the other hand, when we use our muscles, they become stronger, stronger, stronger… until a certain point, where they can no longer become stronger, where they have reached their physical maximum, and will never be able to exceed it again.
This is where your brain stands out from your muscles: it has no limits!
You can learn every day, every hour, increase your knowledge and your mental abilities, and you will never reach a limit.
There are of course methods to advance more quickly and to be able to learn faster, just as there are methods to build muscle in less time.
This is what I will describe in more detail in the coming weeks. But until then, train your brain, you are not likely to fill it up, so do not be afraid to impress it.
Good training!
(This was an article I wrote 15 years ago!, Nov. 2009)