Welcome back to the Cactus Blog. I was thinking in the shower (I seem to do a lot of my most productive thinking there…) about several articles I’ve read recently in different publications and making a mental commentary I thought I’d share with the Cactus readers:
It all starts with an article I read titled ‘The Hazards of the Couch’ (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/the-hazards-of-the-couch/?src=me&ref=health) out of a blog linked to the New York Times. The article summarises the results of several medical studies about the unhealthy effects of prolonged hours spent in front of a screen. It concludes that even people who exercise regularly offset the benefits of exercising by spending time in front of a television or computer screen in activities which I describe as vegetative and the article describes as dormant states for the brain. This dormant state is transferred to the rest of the body, slowing the metabolism down and making us addictively lethargic.
On the other hand, intellectually stimulating sedentary activities like reading, doing a crossword or a puzzle, also stimulate the rate of activity of the rest of our body and actually burn calories. According to Sharon Begley in her article ‘Can you build a better brain?’ (http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/03/can-you-build-a-better-brain.html): ‘taking up a new cognitively demanding activity...is more likely to boost processing speed, strengthen synapses and expand our functional networks.’ So the more smart-building activities we practice, the smarter we become, and apparently we burn some fat too...
This, of course, leads me to education, because one of the big controversies of the week is due to the article from the Wall Street Journal ‘Why Chinese Mothers are Superior?’ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html). Written by Amy Chua, professor at Yale Law School, she very eloquently and not without doses of humour and hyperbole, advocates a style of parenting which pushes children to develop their cognitive ability, expecting them to succeed in school and extra-curricular activities in a proactive way. Needless to say, Western-style parents (after the WSJ’s own denomination) are in uproar. Not just in New York but across the Atlantic too, you only have to type ‘Any Chua’ into the search engine of the New York Times or The Guardian to be bombarded with a wealth of opinions on the subject.
I am the result of a style of parenting closer to that of the ‘Tiger Mother’, although not so extreme, and as a teacher in my adult life, I cannot but advocate it: promoting intelligence breeds intelligence. We are all familiar with the debate about private schools vs. state schools, but children in private schools not only do better because they have better teachers and facilities, but because they are expected and motivated to. To quote ‘Can you Build a Better Brain’ again: ‘being told that you belong to a group that does well on a test tends to let you do better’. So children are expected to do well but also encouraged to do so by the fact that most of their peers will too.
Promoting cognitive-enhancing for children is fine, I hear you say. They have the time, but what about us adults? How do we stimulate our own intelligence? We don’t have the time! For us it’s all about work, the gym, housework, emails, car maintenance, banking, tax, and a very long etcetera. We’re overwhelmed by our mundane daily activities and never seem to get around to what we really want to do. I found an uplifting article about managing our time in the Evening Standard Magazine (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/article-23914187-have-the-time-of-your-life.do). It’s all about having a plan, apparently; prioritising our activities in terms of what we want to do instead of what we have to do, and almost always what we really want to do turns up to be brain-food too. It’s about being proactive and assertive about our lives and not just responding; not wasting our time: ‘the point of time management is not just to improve efficiency but to avoid disappointment and regret’.
I’m going to go and try to take control of my life now...
Guillermina Chivite for Cactus Music School
Guillermina Chivite for Cactus Music School
