Forget your body. Exercise, Massage, Feed Your MIND!

I'm intrigued by a 2012 book titled The Agile Mind although I don't have it in my hands yet. I'm captured by the synopsis, quoted below, which ties in to a variety of topics recently discussed on intelligentwomenonly.com: flexible thinking, intuitive and rational thinking, creative thinking, brain development and health.

 The final sentence in the paragraph below tells all. "Mastering the many factors that can help to promote mental agility is important to each of us, both individually and collectively, as shapers and makers of our selves and our societies." To simplify, and overly so I acknowledge, to take care of the brain/mind very well becomes more significant than taking care of the body. Understanding and using our brain effectively remains essential in the process of taking good care all aspects of life: physical, emotional, mental, social, social, and spiritual. We can't change habits, (negative self-talk and others) think flexibly, expand our creativity by bouncing between rational and intuitive thinking, solve everyday problems, come up with innovative ideas for self-management without the full, energetic work of our high-functioning brain. What are you doing right now to exercise, massage, feed your brain? I'm writing this blog — playing duplicate bridge below averagedly, acknowledging being wrong more often, reading outside (Night Circus) my usual choices (Patchett, Leah Hager Cohen, psychological journals), imagining my brain bouncing around, back and forth, up and down, meditating. Weird? Yes!


"The Agile Mind proposes a new integrative framework for understanding and promoting creatively adaptive thinking. Mind is not only cognition, narrowly construed, but is deeply intermeshed with action, perception, and emotion. This means that optimal mental agility is realized at the dynamic intersection of environment, brain, and mind. Building on empirical research from the behavioral and brain sciences, from developmental and social psychology, and from neuropsychology, psychopathology, and allied disciplines, this book argues that understanding our agile minds requires that we go beyond dichotomous classifications of cognition as intuitive versus deliberate. When we are optimally creatively adaptive, we are able to adroitly move across not only a wide range of levels of cognitive control, but also across multiple levels of detail, or representational specificity. Neither abstraction nor specificity, neither controlled nor automatic processes alone are what is needed. Contextually sensitive variation is essential, including rapidly intermixed modes of cognitive control, if we are to realize our fullest capacities for insightful innovation, fluent improvisation, and flexible thinking. Written for an interdisciplinary audience, empirical findings are enriched with insights from the arts and literature. Mastering the many factors that can help to promote mental agility is important to each of us, both individually and collectively, as shapers and makers of our selves and our societies."