The brain, like any other organ of the body, needs regular exercise in order to function well and stay healthy. Many activities in daily life will keep you mentally fit and boost your brainpower, whatever your age. Four areas of mental activity that are particularly important to all-around mental fitness are language and number skills, reasoning, and creativity.
Do you like adding new words to your vocabulary – or do you stick with fam liar words and phrases? Increasing your vocabulary is one of the simplest and most effective ways to keep mentally alert – and it’s something that others will notice as a sign of intelligence. If you get into the habit of looking up the meaning of new or unusual words, you’ll soon become more precise in your use of language generally.
Start by treating yourself to a good dictionary; you might like to buy one that gives the derivation of words, as well as their current meanings, as this will show you where their original meaning comes from. Check the meaning of words you think you know – you may be surprised! As well as keeping your brain working, thinking more about your choice of words will improve your abilities as a communicator. Read books by more literary authors, perhaps from an earlier period, as this will gradually instill an intuitive sense of good grammar.
Do you regard mental arithmetic as something you gladly left behind during your school days? Everyone can afford a calculator nowadays, but going back to using your head – or pencil and paper – for dealing with figures is a great mental exercise that anyone can do.
- When you next go to the supermarket, keep a running total in your head of what your shopping is going to cost. To make this easier, you can round the cost of items up or down to the nearest pound. Either way, this will help you budget, as well as provide a keep-fit exercise for your brain.
- If you’re tempted by some of the points schemes that supermarkets and other businesses use to keep your custom, do a quick calculation to see if you’re really saving money. For example, if the supermarket five miles away offers you one point for every pound you spend, and you need 100 points to get a pound back, that means a £15 shopping bill will produce only a 15 pence bonus – hardly worth the petrol.
- If you go abroad on holiday, you’ll have ample opportunity to keep your brain fit with mental arithmetic. Try to find a quick and easy way to estimate currency conversions. For example, if you are visiting Spain and there are 250 pesetas to the pound, you can convert from pesetas to pounds by doubling the amount twice, then dividing the result by 1000 (because 1000 divided by 2 twice equals 250). Combining several simple arithmetic operations like this is often easier than carrying out one complex one, so see if you can come up with your numerical strategies.
Do you think you are a logical thinker? Are you aware of what makes the difference between a logically valid argument and an invalid one? Sharpening your logical skills will help you to appraise information from all areas of life and will help you to get your point across in discussions. While you may not always have all the facts at your fingertips, developing a critical way of thinking helps you to spot fallacious reasoning and will keep you – and others – mentally alert. Many people assume that an argument is logical if the conclusion seems sensible. In fact, all that matters in logic is how the conclusion is reached, not what it 1s. A logical argument consists of one or more initial statements, or ‘premises,’ followed by a conclusion that follows directly from the premises. For example, suppose a friend says he thinks Pam Ayres is a good poet because her verses rhyme and rhyming verse is the criterion for good poetry. In that case, his argument is logical as the conclusion follows from the premises, even if you don’t agree with it. But read that genetically modified foods are bad for you because multinational companies produce them. The conclusion does not follow from the premise, so the argument would not be logically valid.
Next time you read a newspaper, see if you can analyze which arguments are logically valid and which are not. For invalid arguments, supplying missing premises may make them valid. Looking for these extra premises helps to reveal the hidden assumptions that the article is based on.
Do you think of yourself as a creative person – or do you feel that you are not ‘artistic’ enough? Everyone has the potential to be creative, and millions every day demonstrate it through activities such as cooking or gardening, creating delicious tastes and special places using their imagination and experience.
- Creativity can’t really be measured, but psychologists see the originality of ideas and the number of possible solutions to a problem as important components. This is the basis of the following exercise: take a simple everyday object, such as a paperclip or a house brick, and write down as many possible uses for it as you can think of. If you do this with a group of people, scores can be allocated on the number of unique ideas each person has (ideas that no one else in the group has thought of). Don’t be shy of making wild and wacky suggestions – you’re not expected to put them into practice!
- On a more practical level, try applying your imagination to your leisure activities. For example, if you are cooking a special dinner, try including just one dish based on a recipe you have invented. If it’s good, you‘ll have made something new and delicious. If not, it won’t spoil the dinner, and you can use your creative powers to improve the recipe for next time. Remember that creativity is a matter of trial and error, as well as leaps of imagination.
