Eat the Colors of the Rainbow, With Your Brain
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The ideal food diet: every color of the rainbow, a wide variety of veggies, fruits, meats, and grains. Not too much sugar, plenty of fiber, and lots of nutrients.
Why should our mental diet be any different?
The phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none” gets thrown around as a deterrent from trying to be good at too many things. Does it really matter if we are a master of anything?
Learning about different topics grows your understanding of the world.
The more context you have, the more you can relate to other people. The more general knowledge you have, the stronger your specific knowledge becomes.
We all exist within a context. The context of our planet, our country, our language, etc.
Everything exists because of its relationship to something else. Light is characterized by being the opposite of dark, cold is not hot, and you are not me.
Opening your mental diet allows for you to expand your understanding of the potential differences between people.
When cold becomes so extreme, it feels hot. The same happens when your list of differences reaches a breaking point. There are so many things that make us different, that its easier to focus on what makes us the same.
Exploring a wide range of topics gives your life a bit of excitement and color, and you’ll be able to find shared interests with anybody!
Learn:
Learn a language to discover how it shapes our world. For example, English versus Mandarin Chinese.
In English, we can say a word that can be analyzed on its own, without the need for its context in a situation. In Mandarin, words need to be in a relationship with their context to form a useable phrase.
This difference in the structure of these two languages can also be seen in the differences in cultures.
In English speaking culture, we are a very individualistic, “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” type of society. We are conditioned to believe that we should strive to do everything ourselves, even at our own detriment.
In Chinese culture, there is a strong focus on building and maintaining community. This community is the context that the individual resides within. Liu Ming called it the ‘social body,’ the web of relationships between social beings in a community.
The contextual focus of these two languages reflects the perspectives of their cultures.
This is why it is important to learn languages, without it, we would never understand that there are massively different ways that humans construct the world!
A fun part of learning Mandarin Chinese includes how animals are named! For example, a kangaroo is named 袋鼠Dàishǔ, which literally translates to “Pocket rodent,” and a panda bear is 貓熊Māoxióng, literally “Cat bear.”
How awesome is that!
Listen:
Listening to music activates many parts of our brains, and is an important part of every mental diet.
Exploring new music is great for keeping up with the times, however, researchers have found that listening to music from your childhood activates emotional memories. This has been found to be beneficial to people with memory loss as it stirs up very deep-set memories, and makes them get up and dance!
Listening to music enhances the frontal lobe of the brain, where we make most of our decisions and plans.
Playing an instrument may improve your ability to communicate better, as the two skills come from Broca’s area in the brain.
Music increases dopamine in the reward center of the brain (the nucleus accumbens), like a party drug. Music really is a drug!
Music can promote new neuron growth in the Hippocampus, where we store our memories.
Read:
I’ve written a few times about the importance of reading. Having a wide range of topics in your reading diet brings many benefits.
Novels take us on an adventure in someone else’s shoes. We can experience the choices they make, without the consequences. This experience of being in another’s shoes grows your empathy.
History books are required reading so we can see why our world has become as it is today.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905
Any topic that you may be curious about! Pick up a book on psychology to analyze your friends, or a book on architecture so your daily walk becomes a sight-seeing tour, or a tale of adventure into the Amazonian jungle in search of a lost city.
Wrapping Up:
Let go of your need to be the best at anything and try a little of everything. A variety of experience makes human life unique.
We get caught up in a rigid capitalist mindset of only doing things that we are either good at, or can make money with. Everything else is deemed a waste of time.
Not every path needs to be followed to mastery. We don’t have to be so serious about our every action, we should engage in play as adults!
Just because we want to try an activity or sample a topic does not commit us to that path forever.
Try things out, see what it’s all about, move on to the next thing that catches your fancy. This allows for an enjoyment in life beyond the rigidity of money or being a ‘serious adult.’
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