A manual for your brain

I want to start by asking you a question: Suppose you spend a lot of money on a smart device you’ve never used before, how would you use it?

I think most people would carefully read the manual and gradually try to use it. They might also take steps to protect it, such as buying a protective case or a screen protector. From time to time, they might perform maintenance on it. They would cherish it very much.

However, we each have a smarter, more important, and more expensive device that most people don’t realize they need to maintain.

How expensive is it? Even if you were the richest person in the world, you couldn’t afford a second one, nor can it be repaired or replaced.

How important is it? Every decision we make in life requires its participation.

How smart is it? To this day, even the smartest scientists in the world haven’t fully understood how it works.

At this point, you’ve probably guessed that this device is our brain. But for such an important device, we never think about reading the manual, let alone how to properly maintain it.

For most of us, once we ‘turn on’ our brain, we never manage it again, and even a lot of what we do is continually harming it.

You may not know that many of the problems we encounter, such as lack of focus, low mood, poor sleep quality; rising rates of dementia, and increasingly common strokes, are all related to our failure to properly maintain our brains.

Why do we treat such an important organ so casually? I think the answer might be because the brain is too special.

First, we can’t see our brains on a daily basis. It’s not like other parts of our body that are often seen and felt. For example, if your skin is slightly off, you can immediately perceive it and apply a few more masks. But we can’t see our own brains, we don’t know if there’s a problem, so it’s hard to think of taking care of it proactively.

Second, the brain has no pain nerves, so it won’t actively alert you to any problems. What does this mean? Normally if something’s wrong with our body, symptoms will show up, like a stomachache, but the brain doesn’t hurt.

What we often refer to as a headache is actually the pain of the muscles, blood vessels, or nerves in the head, not the pain of the brain tissue itself. Therefore, even if the brain is injured, you won’t feel it.

This might also be a self-protection mechanism evolved by humans over millions of years. Imagine, if the brain hurt frequently, wouldn’t the whole body be unable to work? So, because the brain tissue has no pain nerves, it won’t send out an alarm for us to take care of it.

Of course, there’s a third reason: most of us don’t know how to take care of it.

Now, the level of medical development is very high, and many chronic diseases including hypertension and diabetes, and even cancer, have made significant breakthroughs in treatment. Because of this, I have the confidence to say that many of us can live to 100 years old and enjoy a century of life in this century.

However, human understanding of the brain has been extremely slow. For example, in the past 30 years, no significant new drugs for dementia have been produced. Because it’s too difficult, many large pharmaceutical companies have given up investing in this field.

For instance, our clinical diagnosis of depression still relies on filling out questionnaires and scoring, because the workings of the brain are simply too complex.

What could this lead to? In the future, we may face a significant dilemma: humans have evolved over millions of years, and we have invested so much effort in medicine that we can finally live over a hundred years. However, by the time we reach our seventies or eighties, we might become senile.

This is not an exaggeration. Scientists have found that after the age of 30, the human cerebral cortex and hippocampus shrink at a rate of 0.5% per year. This means that our memory will decline with age.

What’s even more terrifying is that by the time you’re 80, the prefrontal cortex of your brain, responsible for cognitive functions, will have shrunk by 24%. And this is just the average scenario. If you are overweight, have high blood sugar, lack exercise, are under too much stress, or have poor sleep, the rate of brain shrinkage will increase significantly.

At this point, I would like to formally introduce this course to you.

This course is an instruction manual for your brain. I will combine the latest research and my own practical experience to explain in detail how you can make your brain stronger and healthier. I hope to help you slow down the rate of brain atrophy through a series of scientific methods.

In general, there are three steps.

First, avoid harm. You need to stop doing things that damage the brain.

Second, we need to supplement the brain with essential nutrients and nourish it scientifically and regularly.

Third, we need to find ways to activate the brain and tap into as much of its potential as possible.

In addition, different people at different stages have different goals and expectations for the brain. So, I will also tell you how to stimulate the potential of the brain in a short time before exams or high-intensity work; for children, how to promote brain development; for the elderly, how to help slow down brain aging.

At the end of the course, I have prepared an action checklist for you. I hope you can implement this brain instruction manual into action.

Link to original article:A manual for your brain