We aren’t so much talking about the physical structure of the brain itself – or are we? Medical and psychological research recently has pointed to the emerging idea that the more you exercise your brain, the better it will work in your old age and the more resistant you will be to Alzheimer’s, dementia, and general cognitive impairments. It is very difficult to say exactly how this works – what, for instance, are we to make of the recent clinical test where a group who was taught how to juggle showed a marked improvement in abstract intelligence after one month?
It is becoming certain that the less people exert themselves mentally, the less able they are to handle mental exertion. The classic case is the “couch potato”, particularly someone with a desk job by day and not much recreation beyond watching television at night. “Use it or lose it.” An interesting footnote to the couch potato effect is that the acts of sitting still and staring at a lit screen for periods of time don’t seem to be the causes of mental atrophy in themselves. Computer users do the same thing, but the difference is that computers are interactive while television demands that you sit and watch and thus, computer users – even if they’re just playing video games – tend to keep their mental skills sharp where the television-watchers slowly lose their edge.
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