Get another brain by learning another language

Here’s another reason for me to start learning Spanish again. 

Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.

The article gives neurological reasons why knowing two languages makes you smarted and keeps your brain healthy. However, the sustained mental effort necessary to learn a second language probably provides the biggest brain boost. 

by Jonathan Frei

Turn on your brain with metaphors

We need writers to seek out fresh metaphors and turn on our brains. Annie Murphy Paul explains why. 

[A] team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not.

Colorful metaphoric language activates the mind while reading in a way that flat words cannot.

by Jonathan Frei

Post PC

Jeff Atwood’s article, Welcome to the Post PC Era, shows how the age of the onesizefitsalldoeverythingPC era has come to an end because of its own success. Smaller devices are able to do much of what we once needed full desktops to accomplish. 

When was the last time you saw a desktop or a home without a computer? 2001? 2005? We’re long since past the point where Microsoft’s original BHAG was met, and even exceeded. PCs are absolutely ubiquitous. When you wake up one day to discover that you’ve completely conquered the world … what comes next?

Apparently, the Post PC era.

The ubiquity of desktop computer was ultimately its undoing, since it left no room for future improvements and a door wide open for alternatives to enter the marketplace. 

by Jonathan Frei