More from my coming book on creativity:
Your brain is a lump of fat, weighing about 1,5 kilos. But it’s an impressive lump of fat. Buried inside there are hundred billions of electromagnetic command posts, known as neurons, each linked to ten thousands other neurons.
You are, in fact, walking around with as many neurons inside your brain as there are stars in the universe. Altogether it creates an astronomical web of switchboards in order to send forward bits of information at the speed of 150 meters a second – ten times the speed of a killer storm.
Your brain is more powerful than all the world’s computers united, with the capacity to generate an electric power of twelve watts. All this costs energy, of course.
Feed it.
Your brain works in quite the same way as the rest of your body in one respect: fuel. It claims 15% of the blood you pump around, it consumes 20% of the oxygen you breath and 25% of the food you eat. But it also needs nourishment in an intellectual sense. Words. A lot of words.
If you starve it, it will idle, repeating the same old patterns over and over – widely known as inbreeding.
It also needs words of high quality. You know how the saying goes: “Garbage in, garbage out.” To be able to make more connections you must let your brain chew on a wide range of information. Feed your brain with a rich and healthy diet, and it will be happy and shift into a mood of creative playfulness.
Exercise it.
Brain-building is not like body-building. Instead of expanding your brain, you train it to make more connections (within the neural network, which consists of one hundred billion neurons). The more connections you can make, the smarter you are. So how do you train the brain?
It’s all about subjectivity.
Learn how to associate by seeing what you’re feeling. A clear-cut forest might evoke an image of a bald man. A bald man could lead you to think of an egg. The egg is regarded as a symbol of life and this might lead you in the direction of a tree, which, in turn, could be a human lung.
What else? Here are a few other good habits to get into:
Start doing mind-puzzles. Play chess or bridge. Take on crosswords. But most important of all:
Develop a sense of humour.
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