I have always thought that the concept of retirement was a precursor to the many debilitating brain anomalies that afflict the elderly. I have no scientific basis for this conclusion nor have I read anything that directly supports it; but it makes intuitive sense to me.
It is important to realize that by retirement I don't mean the cessation of work but more generally the shift from a productive life to a leisurely one. You'll find both retirees that are more engaged in life than they were while working as well as young people who fill in the gaps between a dead-end job and sleep with bouts of reality television and take-out orders from the same three restaurants.
Today I read an article in Seed titled The Reinvention of the Self by Jonah Lehrer. I was led there by a series of blog entries. First an entry in PicoBusiness linked me to an entry in Creating Passionate Users which linked to the article in Seed.
The article is quite dense - the broad topic is neurogenesis, the brain's ability to regenerate. It was once thought that this was impossible. It is now thought that a decrease in neurogenesis is the cause for depression -- and that the effect that Prozac has in increasing neurogenesis is the reason it is so effective in combatting many forms of depression. The article summarizes scientists' findings in the effects of increasing and decreasing neurogenesis, and most interesting to me, how to increase it. This is what the other bloggers picked up on as well.
The simple idea is that you need to stimulate the mind. Learn new things, change your environment, and so on. Even if what you do for a living is cerebral in nature, just doing it might not be enough - your brain is already used to it, you need to feed it something new for it to grow.
What have you done new this year? How have you challenged yourself?
For myself, the past year or so have been filled with many new things:
What do I want to do this year?
What will you do this year?
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