Scientists have come close to studying the nature of genius, and are also trying to answer the question - is it possible to keep the brain clear, even at a venerable age? The British Sunday Times reports on the latest developments in these areas.
The population of the Earth is rapidly aging, and the issue of preserving the intellectual level of the aged inhabitants of the planet is extremely acute. The human brain is not just another muscle, as some scientists like to claim, but one of the most complex instruments in the universe. With age, it wears out, and by the age of 30 a person already reaches his intellectual peak, after which a slow deterioration in brain activity begins. We forget phone numbers, the content of conversations with friends, we lose glasses and bags on the territory of our own apartment, we forget where we put certain things. Modern medicine has learned to prolong the human life, and the longer we live, the more stupid we become. How to deal with this paradox of modern science?
Some neurophysiologists recommend solving logic puzzles or solving Sudoku as a “brain spa”. If you play chess every day, then at 80 the brain will be as clear as at 40. Scientists recommend reading books (preferably, not only romance novels and other pulp fiction). Another technique for keeping the brain in order: set aside 30 minutes a day and engage in the study of any area of knowledge that you are unfamiliar with, paying special attention to observing and describing objects of study, as well as developing the imagination. There are several more methods of "training" the brain. For example, some psychologists suggest reading aloud during breakfast, writing out objects related to each other (for example, yellow, or starting with the letter A) on a piece of paper. An interesting "fitness" for the brain can be a simple change of hands: if you are right-handed,try brushing your teeth with your left hand and vice versa. Thus, the brain will be faced with an unknown situation in which the previous attitudes do not work, and it will have to "renew".
Many scientists even believe that brain cells are not only able to recover, but also to renew due to the "intellectual challenge" that each of us must throw to ourselves. An important part of this concept is the "plasticity" of the brain - the ability of cells to change and adapt.
One of the most important discoveries of recent times has been evidence that some of the qualities of our intelligence, namely intuition, inspiration and creativity, inherent in all people, can become the starting points for understanding the nature of genius. There are two ways to solve any problem: analytical and intuitive. Scientists are inclined to believe that geniuses tend to make decisions and make discoveries precisely on an intuitive, and not on an analytical level.
The mechanism for the emergence of intuition is approximately the following: analytically, the brain works with a limited number of logical connections. Having reached a dead end, logical connections are lost, and there is a possibility of the emergence of new, intuitive connections that can be born literally out of nothing - from observations of some object, snatches of accidentally heard conversations, etc. It is at this moment that we exclaim after Archimedes: "Eureka!"
However, opponents of this theory argue that intuition or insight does not exist at all, and the cry "Eureka!" is not the result of the triggering of some ingenious component of the brain, but only the complex work of neurocognitive processes, which at a certain moment "allow" us to see all the logical connections and make the only correct decision.
On one point, scientists agree: the process of making an ingenious decision, whether it is based on an intuitive or neurocognitive approach, takes place in a small area of the brain called the superior temporal gyrus. Researchers believe that this is where all the fragments of the necessary information are concentrated, which for the time being were stored in different "boxes" of the brain. This discovery could be an important part of understanding the question of brain self-organization.
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Scientists are also trying to decipher the connection between creativity and genius. Try to answer a simple question: what can a brick be used for? If dozens of different options come to your mind, you think divergently, that is, provide for several ways to solve one problem, and if you answer: "For building houses," then, alas, you think convergently, that is, guided exclusively by linear logic.
Divergently minded people tend to seek connections between facts and events that, from the point of view of a convergently thinking person, are absurd or unreal. But it is precisely among the divergently thinking people that the largest number of those whom we call geniuses is found. However, too creative thinking can lead to the other extreme: it's not for nothing that parallels are often drawn between genius and madness. Too much creativity has been linked to diseases such as manic-depressive disorder and bipolar brain disorder.