Have you ever heard the expression “use it or lose it”? It is true! If you do not use your body, you will surely lose it, your muscles will become flabby and weak, your heart and lungs won’t function efficiently, your joints will become stiff and easily injured. Inactivity is as much a health risk as smoking!
For the same reasons, a ‘healthy brain exercise’ is also critically important for the health of the brain. But what can be counted as healthy brain exercise? All things which make ‘interactional’ demand on the brain, all activities that make our brain process or recall/recollect something are healthy exercises for the brain.
Essentially, six activities make more significant interactional demands on the brain: reading, writing, listening, speaking, seeing and doing. The ‘rigour’ of these six activities could be evaluated along the following four dimensions:
a. Amount – refers to the amount of time that could be spent on the activities in a typical day
b. Diversity – refers to the maximum extent of variation in the content of the activities
c. Interactivity – refers to the ‘liveness’ of the activities for the brain of the reader (the level of 2-way interaction)
d. Bonding – refers to the extent of concentration on the main theme/message
To summarise, reading delivers/demands the highest engagement level among the six key activities performed by our brain.
