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If you have ever lifted a weight, you know the routine: challenge the muscle, give it rest, feed it, and repeat. Over time, it grows stronger. Of course, muscles only grow when the challenge increases over time. Continually lifting the same weight the same way stops working. It might come as a surprise to learn that the brain responds to training in much the same way as our muscles, even though most of us never think about it that way. Clear thinking, focus, creativity, and good judgment are built through challenge, when the brain is asked to stretch beyond routine rather than run on autopilot. That slight mental discomfort is often the sign that the brain is actually being trained, a lot like that good workout burn in your muscles. Think about walking the same loop through a local park every day. At first, your senses are alert. You notice the hills, the trees, the changing light. But after a few loops, your brain checks out. You start planning dinner, replaying emails, or running through your to-do list. The walk still feels good, but your brain is no longer being challenged. Routine feels comfortable, but comfort and familiarity alone do not build new brain connections. As a neurologist who studies brain activity, I use electroencephalograms, or EEGs, to record the brains electrical patterns. Research in humans shows that these rhythms are remarkably dynamic. When someone learns a new skill, EEG rhythms often become more organized and coordinated. This reflects the brains attempt to strengthen pathways needed for that skill. Your brain trains in zones too For decades, scientists believed that the brains ability to grow and reorganize, called neuroplasticity, was largely limited to childhood. Once the brain matured, its wiring was thought to be largely fixed. But that idea has been overturned. Decades of research show that adult brains can form new connections and reorganize existing networks, under the right conditions, throughout life. Some of the most influential work in this field comes from enriched environment studies in animals. Rats housed in stimulating environments filled with toys, running wheels, and social interaction developed larger, more complex brains than rats kept in standard cages. Their brains adapted because they were regularly exposed to novelty and challenge. Human studies find similar results. Adults who take on genuinely new challenges, such as learning a language, dancing, or practicing a musical instrument, show measurable increases in brain volume and connectivity on MRI scans. The takeaway is simple: Repetition keeps the brain running, but novelty pushes the brain to adapt, forcing it to pay attention, learn, and problem-solve in new ways. Neuroplasticity thrives when the brain is nudged just beyond its comfort zone. The reality of neural fatigue Just like muscles, the brain has limits. It does not get stronger from endless strain. Real growth comes from the right balance of challenge and recovery. When the brain is pushed for too long without a breakwhether that means long work hours, staying locked onto the same task, or making nonstop decisions under pressureperformance starts to slip. Focus fades. Mistakes increase. To keep you going, the brain shifts how different regions work together, asking some areas to carry more of the load. But that extra effort can still make the whole network run less smoothly. Neural fatigue is more than feeling tired. Brain imaging studies show that during prolonged mental work, the networks responsible for attention and decision-making begin to slow down, while regions that promote rest and reward-seeking take over. This shift helps explain why mental exhaustion often comes with stronger cravings for quick rewards, like sugary snacks, comfort foods, or mindless scrolling. The result is familiar: slower thinking, more mistakes, irritability, and mental fog. This is where the muscle analogy becomes especially useful. You wouldnt do squats for six hours straight, because your leg muscles would eventually give out. As they work, they build up byproducts that make each contraction a little less effective until you finally have to stop. Your brain behaves in a similar way. Likewise, in the brain, when the same cognitive circuits are overused, chemical signals build up, communication slows, and learning stalls. But rest allows those strained circuits to reset and function more smoothly over time. And taking breaks from a taxing activity does not interrupt learning. In fact, breaks are critical for efficient learning. The crucial importance of rest Among all forms of rest, sleep is the most powerful. Sleep is the brains night shift. While you rest, the brain takes out the trash through a special cleanup system called the glymphatic system that clears away waste and harmful proteins. Sleep also restores glycogen, a critical fuel source for brain cells. And importantly, sleep is when essential repair work happens. Growth hormone surges during deep sleep, supporting tissue repair. Immune cells regroup and strengthen their activity. During REM sleep, the stage of sleep linked to dreaming, the brain replays patterns from the day to consolidate memories. This process is critical not only for cognitive skills like learning an instrument but also for physical skills like mastering a move in sports. On the other hand, chronic sleep deprivation impairs attention, disrupts decision-making and alters the hormones that regulate appetite and metabolism. This is why fatigue drives sugar cravings and late-night snacking. Sleep is not an optional wellness practice. It is a biological requirement for brain performance. Exercise feeds the brain too Exercise strengthens the brain as well as the body. Physical activity increases levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, a protein that acts like fertilizer for neurons. It promotes the growth of new connections, increases blood flow, reduces inflammation, and helps the brain remain adaptable across ones lifespan. This is why exercise is one of the strongest lifestyle tools for protecting cognitive health. Train, recover, repeat The most important lesson from this science is simple. Your brain is not passively wearing down with age. It is constantly remodeling itself in response to how you use it. Every new challenge and skill you try, every real break, every good night of sleep sends a signal that growth is still expected. You do not need expensive brain training programs or radical lifestyle changes. Small, consistent habits matter more. Try something unfamiliar. Vary your routines. Take breaks before exhaustion sets in. Move your body. Treat sleep as nonnegotiable. So the next time you lace up your shoes for a familiar walk, consider taking a different path. The scenery may change only slightly, but your brain will notice. That small detour is often all it takes to turn routine into training. The brain stays adaptable throughout life. Cognitive resilience is not fixed at birth or locked in early adulthood. It is something you can shape. If you want a sharper, more creative, more resilient brain, you do not need to wait for a breakthrough drug or a perfect moment. You can start now, with choices that tell your brain that growth is still the plan. Joanna Fong-Isariyawongse is an associate professor of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
The oil tycoon J. Paul Getty was rumoured to have said that his three rules for how to become rich were: Rise early. Work hard. Strike oil. Its one of those eminently quotable remarks because it captures something we all know to be true, that luck and chance have as much to do with success as anything else. Yet we dont value people for their luck. We dont exalt those who win the lottery or walk away from a roulette table flush with cash. Instead, we praise talent, skill, and dedication. And that creates tension, because although luck plays a big role in outcomes, it is only the effort we put into developing our abilities that we can control. That is the nature of what the French writer Albert Camus called existential rebellion. It is through our own efforts and actions that we find meaning in an indifferent universe, even if the rewards for those efforts have a significant random element. Believing in luck, then, is itself an act of defiance. To work, to strive, to build skill in such a world is not naveté but rebellion. How Einstein became an icon Although we remember him as an icon today, for a long time, Albert Einstein wasnt very popular, or even well liked, in the early twentieth century. He was German in the wake of World War I, Jewish in an age of heightened anti-Semitism, and so seemingly aloof and full of himself that he claimed that only a handful of people on earth could understand his strange theories. That abruptly changed when Einstein first arrived in America on April 3rd, 1921 and a handful of journalists dutifully went to meet him. When they arrived at New York Harbor, they were amazed to find a crowd of thousands waiting for him, screaming with adulation and waving handkerchiefs. Surprised at his popularity, and charmed by his genial, off-kilter personality, the story of Einsteins arrival made the front page in major newspapers. It was all a bit of a mistake. The people in the crowd werent there to see Einstein, but Chaim Weizmann, the popular Zionist leader that Einstein was traveling with to raise funds for Hebrew University (and who the WASPy science reporters didnt recognize). Nevertheless, thats how Einstein gained his iconic status, which would overshadow the other great lights, such as Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, in the golden age of physics. From there, the Matthew effect (or what network scientists call preferential attachment) took over. Because Einstein was now so well-known, newspapers wanted to report about him and ask him about the other scientific breakthroughs of the day. Just as the rich get richer, the popular get more popular. Einstein became more than a scientist, but a cultural touchstone. Yet Einstein didnt study physics for fame. In fact, it was his failure to follow convention that mired his early career in misery, unemployment, and poverty. And, although his groundbreaking work was behind him when he entered New York Harbor, he continued to work on physics until his death in 1955, long after he had become, as Robert J Oppenheimer put it, a landmark, not a beacon. The Wunderkind almost lost to history On a January morning in 1913, the eminent mathematician G.H. Hardy opened his mail to find a letter written in an almost indecipherable scrawl. It began inauspiciously: I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of 20 per annum. I am now about 23 years of age. I have had no university education but I have undergone the ordinary school. I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics. Inside, he found what looked like mathematical nonsense, using strange notation and purporting theories that scarcely seemed possible. Much of it was incomprehensible, except for one small section that directly refuted a conjecture Hardy himself had made just months earlier. Assuming it was some sort of elaborate prank, he threw the letter in the trash. Throughout the day, however, Hardy found the ideas gnawing at him and he retrieved the letter. That night, he took it over to his longtime collaborator, J.E. Littlewood. By midnight, they realized that they had just stumbled upon one of the greatest mathematical talents the world had ever seen: a destitute young man in India named Srinivasa Ramanujan. Living in extreme poverty and largely self-taught, Ramanujan had come across an advanced text as a teenager, devoured it, and began filling notebooks with theorems and proofs. He showed his work to local mathematicians, but no one quite knew what to make of it. With the help of friends, Ramanujan sent letters to three prominent professors at Cambridge. The first two ignored him. Hardy was the third. It is doubtful that Ramanujan was the first aspiring mathematician to send his work to famous professors. Most, like his first two letters, were lost to history. But Ramanujan gave it a shot, got a little lucky, and were all better off for it. Even now, more than a century later, his notebooks continue to be widely studied by mathematicians looking to glean new insights. Hardy, a genius by any measure, was one of the most important mathematicians of his time. But when asked to name his greatest discovery he replied, without hesitation, Ramanujan. The miracle cure we almost missed In 1891, Dr. William Coley had an unusual idea. Inspired by an obscure case in which a man who had contracted a severe infection was cured of cancer, he deliberately infected a tumor on his patients neck with a heavy dose of bacteria. Miraculously, the tumor vanished, and the patient remained cancer-free even five years later. Looking to repeat his success, he created a special brew of toxins designed to jump-start the immune system. Unfortunately, he was never able to replicate his initial results consistently. His idea was met with skepticism by the medical community ad, when radiation therapy was developed in the early twentieth century, Coleys research was largely forgotten. Dr. William Coley was unlucky. Yet his daughter, Helen Coley Nauts, refused to let the idea die. With a $2,000 grant from Nelson Rockefeller, she founded the Cancer Research Institute in 1953 to study immunological approaches to cancer. While mostly dismissed by the medical community, it did inspire a small cadre of devotees to keep looking, albeit mostly in vain. A little luck came in 1996, when a researcher named Jim Allison, following a hunch, published a landmark paper suggesting that there may be some merit to Coleys idea after all. Using a novel approach, he was able to show amazing results in mice. The tumors just melted away, Jim would later tell me. Excited, he rushed to pharmaceutical companies, hoping to secure funding. Instead, he was turned away. Drugmakers had already investedand lostbillions on similar ideas. Hundreds of trials had failed. It was depressing, Jim recalled. I knew this discovery could make a difference, but nobody wanted to invest in it. Nonetheless, he persevered. He collected more data, pounded the pavement, and made his case. It took him three years, but eventually he found a small biotech company, Medarex, that agreed to back him and his work. The drug that resulted would open the floodgates and make cancer immunotherapy a viable treatment. Jim would win the Nobel Prize in 2018. Becoming an existential rebel Camus believed our existence was absurd. He compared the human condition to Sisyphus, the mythical Greek king condemned to roll a boulder uphill, only to watch it roll back down again, for eternity. Incredibly, Camus imagines Sisyphus, returning to his labors at the foot of the mountain, as happy, having found meaning in his task. That is the nature of existential rebellion: to create meaning for yourself in a universe that provides none. In two decades researching innovation, transformation, and change, one constant I have found is that you cant control your luck. Anything can happen. Sure things often fail while low-probability events occur all the time. We can easily imagine a world in which Einstein remained a clerk in a patent office, doing physics in his spare time; Ramanujan died an anonymous pauper, his genius never recognized; and William Coleys vision of a revolutionary cancer cure remained a pipe dream. But each persevered against an indifferent universe, and were all better off for it. We cant control our luck, but we can decide for ourselves how we seek meaning. Einstein spent the final decades of his life in Princeton, NJ, working on theories that would never pan out. On his deathbed, Ramanujan defined a new class of mathematical function and the number that bears his name. Dr. Coley, now recognized as the father of cancer immunotherapy, died surrounded by his loving family who were dedicated to his legacy. And, like Sisyphus, we can imagine each of them happy, and maybe hoping for a little luck.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump has strong-armed many of Americas biggest trading partners into pledging trillions of dollars of investment in the United States. But a study out Tuesday raises doubts about whether the money will actually materialize and questions how it would be spent if it did. How realistic are these commitments? write Gregory Auclair and Adnan Mazarei of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan think tank that supports free trade. The short answer is that they are clouded with uncertainty. They looked at more than $5 trillion in investment commitments made last year by the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the Persian Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Trump used the threat of punitive tariffsimport taxesto pry concessions out of those trading partners, including the investment pledges. The White House has published an even higher investment figure – $9.6 trillionthat includes public and private investment commitments from other countries. Trump himself, never one to undersell his achievements, has put the number far higher$17 trillion or $18 trillionthough Auclair and Mazarei note that the basis for his claim is not clear. All the numbers are huge. Total private investment in the United States was most recently running at a $5.4 trillion annual pace. In 2024, the last year for which figures are available, total foreign direct investment in the United States amounted to $151 billion. Direct investment includes money sunk into such things as factories and offices but not financial investments like stocks and bonds. The pledged amounts are large, Auclair and Mazarei write, but their time horizon varies, and the metrics for measuring and thus verifying the pledges are generally unclear. They note, for example, that the European Unions pledge to invest $600 billion in the United States carries no legally binding commitment. The report also finds that some countries would strain to meet their pledges. For the Gulf countries, the commitments are large relative to their financial resources, the researchers write. Saudi Arabia appears capable of meeting its targets, with some difficulty. The United Arab Emirates and Qatar would find it even harder and might have to finance the investments by borrowing. In all three cases, the commitments are nonbinding, and investments from these countries could fall well below headline numbers, they write. Moreover, these agreements have been reached under duress, Mazarei, a former deputy director of the International Monetary Fund, said in an interview. Its not necessarily being done willingly. So trading partners could look for ways to escape their commitmentsespecially if the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs Trump used to negotiate the one-sided agreements. A ruling is expected as early as February. Other countries may find a way to wiggle out, Mazarei said. Still, the Trump administration can turn to alternative tariffs if the justices rule the current tariffs illegal. President Trump agreed to lower tariffs on countries we have trade deals with in exchange for investment commitments and other concessions,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said. The president reserves the right to revisit tariff rates if other countries renege on their commitments, and anyone who doubts President Trumps willingness to put his money where his mouth is should ask Nicolas Maduro and Iran for their thoughts. U.S. troops overthrew and arrested Venezuelan President Maduro early this month, and Trump ordered the United States to join Israel in bombing Iran last year. Auclair and Mazarei agree that the investment Trump lands could end up creating jobs, spurring economic growth, and making supply chains more secure by bringing production to America. Trump, they note, is in some ways taking a similar approach to Biden, using government industrial policy” to encourage more manufacturing in the United States. But Biden tapped taxpayer dollars to finance infrastructure projects and incentives for companies to invest in green technology and semiconductors. Trump is using the tariff threat to get foreign countriesand their companiesto pick up the tab. And he has dropped the push to encourage clean energy, focusing instead on promoting fossil fuels. In their report, the Peterson researchers worry about how the investment decisions would get made and whether they would reflect sound economics. This approach may yield real investments and jobs, they write, but it raises familiar industrial policy concerns: opaque projection selection, weak accountability, and the risk that political criteria crowd out economic efficiency. Paul Wiseman, AP economics writer
Category:
E-Commerce
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