“Who are your role models for aging? What are your expectations and attitudes about the progress of your mind as you get older? Do you expect your memory to be better or worse in ten or twenty years? How about your sex life? What are your fears, concerns, and worries about getting older? Are you hoping that someone will develop the mental equivalent of Viagra?
Let go of the idea of “anti-aging.” Resistance against getting older is futile. Instead, embrace the idea of aging well, with wisdom and poise. In the past thirty years, the scientific evidence supporting the notion that your mind can improve through the years has become overwhelming. Clearly, the question is no longer whether your mind can improve with age but, rather, how you can optimize your mental powers as you get older.
This book presents practical, evidence-based wisdom to help you answer this question. You’ll learn new skills to increase memory, intelligence, creativity, and concentration. And you’ll cultivate greater confidence and healthy optimism as you discover how to improve your mind as you age.”
~ Michael Gelb & Kelly Howell from Brain Power
Michael Gelb’s How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci (see Notes) is one of *the* most influential books I’ve ever read.
And, I’ve meditated to Kelly Howell’s amazing Brain Sync guided meditations for literally *hundreds* of hours. (My favorite: Retrieve Your Destiny (get it here) which I’ve listened to 250+ times. Seriously. :)
So, when I heard about this book called Brain Power that they created together I was very excited to check it out!
It’s a quick-reading, Big Ideas-packed book I think you’ll enjoy.
Here’s a great passage from the introduction by one of the world’s leading authorities on optimizing our brains, Tony Buzan: “Many people are concerned, however, that years of bad habits will prevent them from improving mental performance. In other words, they feel that it’s “too late.” But bad habits are simply neurological patterns that build up networks of probabilities by forming “memory traces” along the pathways between your brain cells. The more you repeat the behavior, the more these networks expand and the more the probability of your repeating the behavior increases. All you have to do, therefore, to reverse this trend is to establish new and more positive patterns of connection in your brain. By repeating these, you increase the probability that they will happen, and you decrease the probability that your old bad habits will persist. This book is a manual for the creation of new, more positive patterns of connection in your brain.”
Me likes!
Alright. Let’s have some fun with a few of my favorite Big Ideas, shall we? :)
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