Shut Your Brain off Periodically, Before it Shuts off Permanently

colinchamp June 1, 2024 2 Comments

As the 1970’s approached, creativity researcher George Land set out to investigate how creativity changes as we age. The study, funded by NASA, tested children aged 3-5 on creativity via a test utilized on NASA recruits. An astonishing 98% of the children were found to be creative geniuses based on the results. The children then entered a Head Start public school program and the test was repeated in these 1,600 children at age 10 and 15. The same test was then given to 280,000 adults with an average age of 31. The level of genius dropped from 98% to 30% by age 10 and further down to 12% by age 15. The adults were even worse at 2%.

Land quotes several reasons for this, with the primary being our school systems, which seem to extract creativity from children with their teaching methods. Specifically, by bombarding them with a mishmash of divergent and convergent thinking. The former can be thought of as creativity and the process of forming new ideas, while the latter is questioning ideas and critically thinking about them. I would argue that the latter is barely allowed these days in education, from grade school all the way up the academic ladder. Regardless, Land states these processes need to be nurtured individually, and the mishmash is the problem. (I would also add the prison-like existence of most massive public schools, which totally violate the fact that Small is Beautiful and as nearly everything gets too large it miserably fails—and for those of you that will lose it at any questioning of our school system, you need to step up your convergent thinking before you lose all creativity.)

I could not agree more with Dr. Land, and unfortunately, this mishmash can be expanded to now describe our life and the modern brain, which has been disrupted with pings and beeps, short descriptions shot at us, texts, and devices pulling our brains in multiple directions simultaneously. The result is difficulty focusing on a task, difficulty finishing, and the near impossibility of experiencing silence or the ability to concentrate—even at our jobs as we are bombarded with calls, texts, emails, Microsoft Teams messages, Epic chats and Epic messages, and the requirement to check three other software programs throughout the day. Simply keeping up leaves my brain feeling like scrambled eggs from caged, grain-fed chickens. Worse yet, our schools now mandate these mishmash devices in the classroom, ensuring our next generation of children will continue the creativity decline. These same schools ignore the data and boast about their Apple Awards, publishing their accolades in local newspapers in an effort to say “our school district in the best, send your kids here!”

The result? A cacophony of processes and chattering voices that never leave our brain; a result that we, as humans, have never experienced during 99.999999% of our existence. Our brains are left with no time to think, and no time to recover. It is as though we are constantly walking around the gym and performing a random amount of exercises in a haphazard fashion with terrible form and no focus on what weights are appropriate, then wondering why we are constantly injured.

These injuries build up over time, as we are left with a middle-aged and elderly population with rising rates of dementia, anxiety, and the inability to think. In fact, dementia rates continue to skyrocket, with an expected 131.5 million cases by 2025. Further worsening the problem is our glucose levels, as we now refer to dementia as type 3 diabetes. Dysregulation of insulin, much like in type 2 diabetes, leads to poor metabolism within the brain, the inability to clear potentially harmful substrates, and the accumulation of free radicals and inflammation within the brain. Blasting our brains continuously with insults then feeding it cupcakes instead of giving it the silence it needs is a bad combo.

Unfortunately, the combination of school lunches and Ipads in kindergarten doesn’t bode well for the next generation. We can fight this brain blender of a push in society by avoiding the apps, putting away the devices and engage in contemplative activities that allow the brain to rest, like reading, tending a garden, creating something (real, not digital), spending time with loved ones, and of course eating food that actually nourishes our bodies.

I firmly believe a combination of the above is largely responsible for the degradation of our brain health. The real question is what are we doing to fix it?

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