Don't Outsource Your Brain: How I Fight Mental Atrophy in the Age of AI

Independent Finger Movement

The Goal: Learn to move each of your fingers independently to build new neural pathways and improve your motor control.

• The Setup: Place your hand on a hard surface like a table while keeping the heel of your palm firmly planted.
• Single Taps: Tap each finger individually, starting with the pointer finger, then moving to your thumb, middle, ring, and pinky.
• The Tricky Bit: Keep your palm heel down and try to tap two fingers one after the other.
• Start with the pointer and middle finger.
• Progress to the thumb and middle finger.
• Challenge yourself with the most difficult pairings: middle and ring finger, or ring and pinky finger.
• Advanced Combinations: Create your own sequences to repeat, such as ring-pinky-middle or middle-pinky-ring.
• Flexibility: This is highly accessible; you can practice anywhere, even on your knee during a meeting or on the bus.
• Progression: Once you master one hand, move to the other hand, and then try combinations with both hands.
• Don't push to discomfort or injury, listen to your body.

Coordination Skills: Juggling & Yo-Yos

The second technique involves any sort of activity that involves coordination. My favorites are juggling and yo-yos.

• Juggling Progression: Start with one ball and practice throwing it from hand to hand for up to a week before transitioning to two, then three, or more balls.
• Equipment Quality: Purchase actual juggling balls rather than cheap knockoffs from reject shops, as the latter are often unbalanced.
• Yo-Yo Basics: Begin by learning to let the yo-yo out and catch it again in the same hand.
• Yo-Yo Tricks: Once basic catching is mastered, progress to more advanced tricks like the "sleeper" and "walk the dog."
• Skill Growth: Both activities offer significant room for progression through a variety of different tricks and levels of difficulty.

Speed and Logic Games

Simon and typing speed games are great to expand your brain's cognitive processes. BlazeWorks has just such a game.

Go to speed.blazeworks.online/games/math-test for our speed math challenge here.

This challenge doesn't just test your brain's reaction time, but also its ability to understand and calculate things under pressure. Don't worry, you can choose what difficulty and which math operators you would like to be tested on, unlike high school math classes.

Speed Up What You Listen To

The fourth technique I personally use involves speeding up whatever I'm listening to. This could be a lecture or a podcast, but don't speed up music. Music is supposed to be enjoyed at its normal speed. Only increase the rate to a level where you feel comfortable. After a while, the brain will adapt to process information a little faster.