Saving Your Brain, One Word At A Time
Sun Mar 13 11:26:11 2011
How a dictionary helps to enhance your brain and protect it from debilitating mental diseases.
In today's society, big words are often treated as if they exist solely for some people to “try to sound” smart. Some personality tests will assign you a higher chance of suffering from schizophrenia, depending on how many big words you tend to use. Using a lot of advanced words in your speech and writing causes many people to be confused and frustrated. Why bother learning those words in the first place?
Richard Restak, M.D., author of a brilliant book Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance, says there's plenty of merit. Whenever you encounter a new word, you exercise your language centres of the brain, prefrontal lobes, as well as your working (short-term) and long-term memories. Of course, you also obtain the benefit of a wider knowledge of our world; and if the philosophers' debate on whether thoughts can exist without words ever ceases, you'll be on the winning side either way.
Exercising your brain can be compared to exercising your body. Just as a person who exercises regularly feels more energetic than a couch potato, so is the person who exercises their brain regularly has more mental juices flowing. Not surprisingly, a person who exercises their brain has a lesser chance of developing Alzheimer's disease or other mental disorders.
There's a handy source of new words. Go to WordSmith.org and subscribe to their free daily newsletter. Not only will you receive a new word to learn every day, the newsletter has weekly themes to help you remember the words better. It also provides the history of the word, along with a thought of the day for you to ponder.
In his book, Richard also mentions a neat thing his dad did to make young Richard learn new words; I suppose the fact that Richard grew up to become a neuroscientist can be thought of as a proof the method works well.
Get a decent dictionary, a pen, and a notebook. Ask your child to learn a new word a day (preferably of their choice; give them freedom), and to write it down in the notebook. On some days, you will place a dollar into the dictionary. Thus, a new word will be the reward every day, but on some days the reward will be double: the dollar and the word.
If you do not have an up to date dictionary handy, or simply find it more convenient to use a computer, sites like Dictionary.com or another source of words for kids can be of use. To simulate the random dollar in the dictionary, you can use the Word-a-Day Bank page I created. Simply enter the word the child has learned, and the page will display, with 50/50 chance, whether or not the bank is open today – if it is, they get paid.
It doesn't matter if you're 8 or 80, learning a new word every day will improve your brain, and reduce the effects of ageing and the chance of disease. Save your brain, one word at a time.
Sources:
- Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance by Richard Restak (ISBN: 978-1-59448-443-8)
- Personality: What Makes You The Way You Are by Daniel Nettle (ISBN: 978-0-19-921142-5)
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