Have You Exercised At All Today? No, I mean, exercised your brain!

There’s a book that’s been around since ‘99, but one which is the forerunner to many since. It’s called Keep Your Brain Alive by Lawrence Katz and Manning Rubin, and they’ve named their fitness practice, Neurobics.

The premise is that to keep our productivity up, we need to be exercising our brain — daily. For example, learning something new every day, like waking up and smelling something unexpected (vanilla instead of coffee), putting a chess game in a collaborative space so with each person throughout the day is responsible for making just one move, doing common tasks but with the hand you don’t typically use, and placing different gelatin filters over your lamps, (which create new associations).  These simple activities all lead the way toward increasing your mental fitness.

I particularly like the one that makes the shopping list into a treasure hunt. Instead of listing the ingredients, describe them so the shopper has to work a bit to figure out the ingredients for dinner.  Oh, and have a backup plan, just in case.

Both playful and very serious, Keep Your Brain Alive sells at Amazon.