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Chapter 1: Do I need a brain gym for cognitive fitness?
Someone recently sent me one of those long-form idea articles that you post on X and hope that it does well. This one was titled, Your Brain is About to Need a Gym. Now, at a high level, this new piece is responding to my own New York Times op-ed that came out in March in which I argued that we need a cognitive fitness revolution to save our increasingly fried brains.
much in the same way that in the 20th century we needed a physical fitness revolution to save our increasingly unhealthy bodies. Now, this new article takes that proposal and follows it through to all of its implications. Here, I want to read a quote from it. I also think cognitive fitness becomes a market, a big one.
Imagine the cognitive equivalent of what the fitness industry built between 1980 and 2020. Apps that force you to think slowly, coaches who train your attention the way trainers train your hamstrings, schools that reteach deep reading after generation lost at the scrolling, corporate programs that audit and report your team's cognitive endurance the way they currently audit lines of code.
Insurance discounts for verified daily reading habits, a Strava for hours spent away from a screen, the Peloton of writing by hand. I'm half joking and half not. All right, so this new article, in other words, is asking a fascinating question. Fitness is a $100 billion industry. What would our commitment to cognitive fitness look like if we got equally serious about it?
Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to explore some answers. All right, so here's my plan. I want to approach this topic with tears. Organized from moderate to intense commitment to cognitive fitness.
At each tier, I'm going to give you an ever more intense set of tools or ideas to think about for how to push your cognitive fitness to the next level. We'll end up on some prediction for some perhaps truly insane places that this revolution might end up. in the near future.
So if you feel like the onslaught of the digital, from hyperpalatable distractions on your phone to the increasing urge to offload mental strain to AI, is making you dumber, and if you're fed up and you're ready to start pushing back, then this episode is for you. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world.
All right, so let's start on our first tier of commitment to cognitive fitness. We'll call this moderate intensity. Now, last month on this show, I described a collection of five simple exercises for your brain that I say are the laying the foundation of sort of good cognitive fitness. They're the...
The mental health equivalent of what we do in physical health where we say like get enough steps or eat some vegetables. Easy things you can do on a regular basis that will really make a big difference over time and starting to get more fit. This is our least intense tier of cognitive fitness intervention. So I want to go through these five exercises again real quickly. I actually have the...
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Chapter 2: What are the three tiers of cognitive fitness advice?
I'm gonna go through an exercise routine. It's gonna take 45 minutes. I'm gonna sweat. It's gonna be hard. That is the next tier of intensity in physical health. We need that equivalent. and cognitive fitness. We need something that is like a brain gym. Well, I've been thinking about this recently.
I've been thinking about more intense cognitive fitness style activities I've been doing in my own life that might be the mental equivalent of going to the gym. And I have two techniques here that I want to share. I think it's the first time I've talked about either. So this is ratcheting up our intensity here. All right, the first technique I call immersive thinking. and here's how it works.
You build out a mini excursion, something that might take anywhere between one to four hours. It is designed to leverage novel environments to help push your brain temporarily into a higher gear than you would normally be. Just like going to a gym, You're going to lift much heavier weights than you're going to sort of come across in your everyday life.
Immersive thinking is about trying to leverage novel environments to push your brain to a new level of thinking that you want to normally do in everyday life and therefore get both comfort with thinking and growth of thinking ability. Now, there's three elements for an immersive speaking thinking rather mini excursion to actually work.
Element one, you need an environment that's novel and thought-provoking, so a place that you associate with contemplation and that you don't associate with other things in your life. That's why your kitchen doesn't work or the conference room at your office doesn't work. You have too many other associations with that that will be distracting.
The second element of making this idea work, have a warm-up routine. Now, just like at the gym, you need to do a warmup routine before you start lifting those heavy weights. I'm gonna argue when you're doing immersive thinking, you need some sort of cognitive warmup routine that should be based on the consumption of information that just sort of gets those brain circuits fired up.
Your brain activity is going. Now you're in a mode of, I wanna, my brain is connected in different ways. I'm ready to start using it. And then finally, the third element of immersive thinking will be some sort of exercise routine in which you use this warmed up brain to produce new information, information that is a stretch for you or otherwise demanding and interesting.
This is now the cognitive equivalent of actually lifting that heavy weight, trying to push things towards failure. Environment, warmup, exercise. That is what you need for the immersive thinking strategy to work. Now, what I want to do here is give you a case study from my own life. This is something I've actually done on multiple occasions here in my hometown of Washington, D.C.
I'm going to sort of describe the three elements of an immersive thinking mini excursion that I've done before. All right, so for my example immersive thinking excursion, the environment I used was the National Gallery of Art. here in Washington DC down on the mall. So for me, I can jump on the Metro where I live, go a few stops.
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Chapter 3: How can reading daily improve cognitive fitness?
Anyways, if we go back and read Cooper's early work, Here's what's interesting to me, how he advised people how to get enough cardiovascular activity. A lot of people have forgotten this about his work, but it's really interesting. He introduced back in the 60s and updated it throughout the years, a point system. He got lots of different activities and assigned them points.
These would be like appendixes in the back of his books, even to today. And then he gave you a goal. 30 points a week. So you had some flexibility in when and how you got your cardio, but you knew your goal was to get to 30 points. And this would often require quite a bit of activity. I actually loaded up here, I mean, his systems evolve, but I have here to load up
a version of his system from 1982. So he kept updating it just to get a sense of what we're talking about here. I don't know, Jesse, we'll see how we stack up. All right, so at the top here, he's talking about points for various walking and running sessions. So if you run a mile, how fast would we run a mile, Jesse? You think between 641 and eight minutes? Or are you faster?
Yeah, that's probably over seven now. All right, so over seven would be five points, right? If you can run a mile under 543, that's seven points. Look, he goes, if you run two miles, let's see what it would take here. If you can run two miles, oh, man, I think that would take me 20 minutes.
If you could get it under 20 minutes, you could get nine points, but between 20 and 24 minutes is seven points, right? Walking is going to give you fewer points. What do we got here? Look how detailed this is, Jesse. It's like every distance you might go and every time he tells you how many points. Oh, look, all you got to do is run 15 miles under an hour 25 and you get 120 points.
It wasn't just walking, running, like here's cycling. I don't know cycling well, but look, if you do a two-mile ride in seven minutes, you get 1.5 points and so on, right? So we had all these different... He had all these different mappings of activities to points. And maybe you like cycling. Maybe you like running. Maybe you like walking. Maybe you like doing high-intensity weight training.
You would add up your points and try to get to 30 in a week. And it would take a non-trivial. You really had to be putting aside time and training in order to hit the 30 points. So that was a good way of conveying it takes a lot of exercise to get as much as you need. I think we could use, here's my idea, we could use an equivalent point system for cognitive fitness.
That we could have a collection of assignments of points to different types of cognitive fitness activities and then following Cooper's model, say your goal is to get 30 points a week. as a way to get you past just doing some basic activities and actually doing a lot of the stuff you need. Now, I came up with a sample point system. I'll read a few of these ideas off here.
Maybe you get one point for 20 pages of easy reading, two for 20 pages of moderately complex, and three for 20 pages, just say pages, not minutes, of hard reading. Maybe two points for a 30-minute thinking walk, two points for 15 minutes of deliberate practice, five points for 20 minutes of writing.
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Chapter 4: What are some easy exercises to enhance cognitive fitness?
but let's go and talk about what their training actually includes. Areas of focus and training with Whitskins Company involves training to love training and the growth it unlocks, embodying quality as a way of life, cultivating presence and mindfulness, the systematic cultivation of the art of focusing on what matters most, developing introspective sensitivity,
Identify and supporting windows of peak creativity and flow, developing, let's see, non-local and parallel learning, training to learn the mini from the one, and so on. So this is just an offering where they're going to help you get more out of your brain. I think weight skins on to something because in a lot of industries, that is a huge difference.
We'll pay money for software or tools or productivity ideas, but getting your brain sharper is the ultimate productivity hack. I think for a living, I don't use social media. I was trained professionally to be a thinker. And because of that, to use myself as an example, I can, for example, write incredibly quickly.
I can sit down and have an idea and 30 minutes later have like a polished newsletter article or draft of an op-ed or a script for a podcast. That's an incredible productivity boon that I've gained, not by using like AI. but by training a brain to produce better. So I think that's going to be something we see.
Another thing we're going to see as we get to sort of insane mode cognitive fitness industry is going to be the rise of non-instrumental courses. People taking classes in person or online, like learning languages or hard math or training about puzzles or mastering difficult crafts, just to get their mind sharp. Like the whole point is this is going to push your mind. It's going to be hard to do.
Like your hardest course you took in college, you're doing it now as like a middle-aged man because you want to make sure you keep pushing your mind, not because the skill you're learning is instrumental, but because the learning itself is going to get your mind sharp.
I think we're going to see this process-focused marketing as opposed to skill-focused marketing for courses in the near future, all a cognitive fitness play. Finally, I want to elaborate an idea that was mentioned in that article that we opened this episode with. I do think cognitive endurance testing is going to be something that actually we do more often.
It's going to be numbers we know, and it's going to be numbers that we are going to use, which will completely change our conception of cognitive fitness, how to quantify it, and its value. There'll be some sort of standardized test that gives you a number that I think might play a role in hiring people. I mean, why wouldn't it?
If you're in a non-trivial knowledge work job, what is your capability of sustaining focus on a hard task and actually making progress through complexity? Can you resist distraction and actually use your brain to add value to information? This might be like a primary ability we're looking for if I'm hiring in one of these jobs, right?
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Chapter 5: How does immersive thinking work for cognitive enhancement?
This is when the alarm sirens went off for a lot of physical health practitioners. This is the equivalent, I think, for cognitive health. College students. High school graduates wrote essays to get into college, had the test scores, are looking at a 20-page article and say, I can't read that. That is the cognitive equivalent of having type 2 diabetes. Your brain is not working.
It is not anywhere near where it needs to be to be a functioning, thriving member of our sort of civic democracy and a knowledge work economy. This is a big deal. It's the type of thing that makes us say cognitive fitness matters. And it goes back to that cognitive endurance testing. That's what I want if I'm a college, maybe. I want to see where you are.
Take one of these tests in a testing center. I don't care about your AI-generated college essay. Take one of these tests. How much can you focus? That's what I'm looking for. Do that one change. Let me tell you what you could do right now. I'm thinking about this on the fly. You want to change the trajectory of this country.
You want to give new opportunities and the ability for our current young generation to have the best chance of thriving in their lives. Add alongside mandatory SAT testing for college admissions, add cognitive endurance testing.
You get all these kids knowing, oh, my ability to focus and sustain concentration is going to play a role in whether I can go to whatever school I want to go to, be it Georgetown or Dartmouth. Now suddenly they're going to look at their phone like a liability. They're going to look at TikTok like the thing that's going to keep them out of the Ivy League. They're going to look at a book like
like the activity that's going to help set up my future. And as a side effect, and this might be sort of leveraging a sort of crass instrumentality, but a side effect is these brains are going to be stronger and these are going to be more capable, more thriving, more successful citizens and individuals. So this is a crisis, but it's also an opportunity.
I'll tell you what we don't need to do is say – Well, AI is not going away, so why don't we just let all of our kids do everything with AI in school, and then are we high-tech? Looking around, we're cool, right? I'm going to put on my 90s-style skater chain wallet because I'm a 45-year-old, right? I'm cool, right? We're all cool. We're all going to use AI, right? It's going to be cool.
No, the whole point is to get smarter. Having a machine do your work for you. What does that have to do with getting smarter? Which is the whole point of school. So I appreciate that message. Jesse still wears and insists on wearing a chain wallet. Is that true? Yeah, it's true. With carpenter pants and vans. Yeah. Jesse's a big skater. It's always him with like 13 year olds at the skate park.
He's always like, man, tubular, man. Radical. Radical front nose. Ollie. Goofy foot? Yeah. Or an ACL. Yeah, he's like, all right, kids, watch out this. And up, tore my ACL. And then you just hear an ambulance come, and they just sort of pick him up and walk off into the stretcher. All right, do we have a third message?
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