Do I Need a “Brain Gym”? | Monday Advice

0:00Someone recently sent me one of those long-form idea articles that you post on X and hope that it does well.

0:08This one was titled, Your Brain is About to Need a Gym.

0:13Now, at a high level, this new piece is responding to my own New York Times op-ed that came out in March, in which I argued that we need a cognitive fitness revolution to save our increasingly fried brains, much in the same way that in the 20th century, we needed a physical fitness revolution to save our increasingly unhealthy bodies.

0:34Now, this new article takes that proposal and follows it through to all of its implications.

0:40Here, I want to read a quote from it.

0:42I also think cognitive fitness becomes a market, a big one.

0:46Imagine the cognitive equivalent of what the fitness industry built between 1980 and 2020.

0:51Apps that force you to think slowly, coaches who train your attention the way trainers train your hamstrings, schools that reteach deep reading after generation lost it to scrolling, corporate programs that audit and report your team's cognitive endurance the way they currently audit lines of code, insurance discounts for verified daily reading habits, a strava for hours spent away from a screen, the Peloton of writing by hand.