Page 11 - Benjamin Franklin\'s The Way to Wealth: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation - PDFDrive.com

1 USE IT OR LOSE IT

As Franklin puts it, ‘sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears,
while the used key is always bright.’ These days we’d most likely skip
the key/rust analogy and simply say ‘use it or lose it’.

Franklin was literally an expert on the potential of used keys, having once
attached one to a kite and flown it into a thunderstorm as part of an
experiment into electricity. Indeed, as a physicist and inventor—as well as a
musician, writer and politician—you could say he was an expert on energy
of all kinds.

DEFINING IDEA…
Cultivate all your faculties;
You must either use them or lose them.
~JOHN LUBBOCK, ENGLISH BIOLOGIST AND POLITICIAN

The idea that the brain can be exercised and even trained to perform better
is one that has long fascinated scientists and continues to be a source of
heated debate today. What we know for sure is that learning is partly a
function of brain cells making connections with each other as they fire, so
that as we repeat a task and those cells fire repeatedly they wire together a
bit like an electronics circuit. When you repeat an activity, that circuit kicks
in and performs better and faster than your initial attempts. It has also been
observed that different parts of the brain can be retrained. For example, the
visual cortex doesn’t cease to function in blind people just because there is
no visual information to process; indeed there is evidence that it is active in
interpreting Braille. So the argument goes that the brain can be trained like
a muscle to get stronger and stay stronger for longer.

Medical studies into brain training have mainly focused on older adults (the
group most concerned with losing brain power) and have shown that these
older adults will show improvements in memory and attention when they
are given thinking games and tasks.