Do I Need a “Brain Gym”? | Monday Advice
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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... the prop I used in that episode from a month ago.
So we can use that again. And let's just briefly review the sort of moderate intensity commitment that I'm suggesting for cognitive fitness. My first suggestion, was to read every day. Consuming the written word is like getting steps for your physical health. It forces your brain to work together in a ways that otherwise wouldn't do. It forges new connections. And over time, this literally makes your brain more capable. You become smarter. So you want to have a certain number of pages you read every day. that you treat similarly in your physical health to getting a certain number of steps every day. All right, the second easy exercise I recommended was don't avoid writing. It is very tempting because of AI tools to offload that strain you feel when you look at a blank page by just having that chat bot or just clicking on that Gemini button in Google Doc.
Just like, hey, give me a draft of this.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Do I need a brain gym for cognitive fitness?
0:00–7:38
2
What are the three tiers of cognitive fitness advice?
7:38–16:30
3
How can reading daily improve cognitive fitness?
16:30–23:41
4
What are some easy exercises to enhance cognitive fitness?
23:41–38:59
5
How does immersive thinking work for cognitive enhancement?
38:59–58:17
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Deep Questions with Cal Newport
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