Health & fitness clubs are as common as vegetarian restaurants these days. Each one promises that after a few months’ membership you will look better, feel better, fit your clothes better, and be better. No-one can argue with that.
But listen: important though the body is, life is really experienced through the brain. Unless your mind is engaged in what’s happening, what’s happening hardly matters.
This is good if you’re under a general anaesthetic (who wants to know the gory details?), but it’s bad if you’re brooding about your blisters while walking on the Bruce Trail, or quarreling with your kids at the Science Centre. In contrast, a sensitive reader deep in the fictitious reality of a novel is living life fuller than a dullard driving absently through the Rockies.
When your brain is not active, Life is passing you by, my friend. And Rewind doesn’t work.
The Physical Fitness fad must not blind you to the more important consideration of Intellectual Fitness. Get the balance wrong, neglect your mental physique, and you could end up with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s torso and an attention span of twenty seconds.
Luckily for you, the Intellectual Fitness Institute is here to guard against such an outcome.
The Institute’s mission is to wipe out intellectual flabbiness from Canada! Enemy #1 is cerebral atrophy, the wasting away or loss of ability of the brain through lack of use. Brain cells do die off naturally, faster as you age. However, by keeping your dwindling supply active through regular exercise, you can preserve your mental powers - and indeed your life - longer.
There are many warning signs of cerebral atrophy: shallow thinking (e.g. you think this essay is entirely frivolous), blind belief in the mass media (widening the 401 will alleviate Toronto traffic), undue susceptibility to advertising (a fizzy drink can make you young & energetic), a dormant sense of humour (this essay is entirely serious). If your brain throbs with the effort of playing chess, if it gasps for breath when you write a memo, or aches the morning after a budget meeting, you are a prime risk candidate.
In our society it is all too easy to become a victim of cerebral atrophy. Comfortable living, job specialization, and the regimentation of office life all tend to dull the senses and stifle the imagination. Ubiquitous mental junk food served up by advertisers and the media only hastens the decay.
Fight these trends!
Never stop thinking at your place of work. Question standard procedures, so they don’t turn you to an automaton, challenge checklists so they don’t override common sense! Reduce your intake of TV & enfeebling tabloids, spend less time where loud music is playing. How can your brain think clearly, swamped by trivia and with its hands clamped to its ears?
Some of our pioneering early clients found this advice effective but not sufficient. They asked also for guidance, they begged for a customized recovery path, they demanded flexibility & feedback - and we listened.
For them - and for you - our experts at the Institute now provide a set of highly effective courses.
At the Institute we believe that cerebral atrophy can be beaten! Building mental strength, stamina, & flexibility by exercise is the key to optimal use of that highly sensitive organ, the brain.
In a healthy adult the brain weighs about three pounds, though it may feel more after a hard day - and it rather resembles a rotting cauliflower. For best performance brains need exercise in several different dimensions.
At your first visit to the Institute our experts assess your fitness needs, observing accuracy, effort, & anxiety levels as you answer questions touching on mental arithmetic, current affairs, Grade Ten homework problems, and so on. With this information we are able to personalize a program, choosing courses such as the following to suit your peculiar requirements...
Objectivity Training
Here we build up your analysis skills by teaching you to defend both sides of a proposition in turn. Once you have argued for home-brewed beer and against home-brewed beer, you will be able to analyze the subject without bias. Note that the novelty of lucid reasoning produces a brief but harmless period of disorientation in some students.
Training intensity is controlled, ever since we so successfully created an open mind in one client that it remained open - at the front and at the back - for many months, any passing idea lodging uselessly there till jostled out by the next one that drifted by.
Intuitional Argument
Reason & objectivity are not always appropriate. We introduce you to a higher negotiating plane through the use of intuition. By its very nature this is difficult to teach, but our calculated neglect of reason has proved highly successful.
Intuitional argument is of particular value in domestic situations, where it is often impervious to reason. You will learn when to be rational and when intuitive, as well as when to capitulate gracefully without doing further damage.
Flights of Imagination
The natural creativity so evident in children appears to hibernate in some adults. At the workplace they suppress that wellspring of creativity, their sense of humour - out of reverence for the corporation, perhaps, or from fear of failure. In classroom exercises you will practise making a fool of yourself (the effect is not permanent): this awakens your sense of humour and imagination, till you are again ready to take risks in the real world.
A supporting technique is to pretend that if you put forward an idea which requires money or effort for its fulfillment, you will not be the person who has to provide that money or effort. This theoretical distancing has a liberating effect on the imagination.
Sensitivity Boost
Some of our worldly-wise clients protect themselves from the tribulations & pains of life with the armour of insensitivity. To get their hearts throbbing, their tears pumping again, our therapy groups enact scenes from Walt Disney (the meeting of Cinderella & Prince Charming), Charles Dickens (the death of Little Nell), & other masters of emotion.
The fine arts offer vast opportunities for delight & spiritual enrichment. Classical music is said to make you more intelligent because it causes the synapses of the brain to fire in a certain way. We reward our clients with the contrapuntal ecstasy & IQ boost available only by listening to J.S.Bach. Students often leave this class in tears of joy.
Sign up soon for Institute courses, and enjoy a quantum leap in Intellectual Fitness!
A Professional Engineer with a BA from Cambridge and an MSc in Solid Mechanics from Aston University, Barry spent 30 years in IT development and management. He now works as a freelance communicator. Barry has written articles for in-house & external publication - in user manuals, technical documentation, reports, newsletters, websites, conference papers, speeches, skits, poetry, and a coffee-table book.