This brainercise will help you to:

• Improve your bizarrely creative side.
• Remember lists better.

Suppose you need these five things from the store:

• milk
• shampoo
• hamburger meat
• pantyhose
• Rice-a-Roni

You are driving so writing with a pen and paper, using Dragon Dictation or recording it in your Evernote app is dangerous. Regardless of your limitations, all the items on your list are important. How do you remember them?

In a previous blog post, we discussed acronyms and acrostics as mnemonic devices. In this situation, it will be more difficult to construct an acronym or acrostic than to just say them over and over until they’re actually in your basket. This is an undependable method. An alternate, and more fun, mnemonic device that is dependable is the use of imagination and association. Here is the process:

• Form a mental picture of the first object.
• When the second object is introduced link it to the first object is a pair of images.
• Do this for all subsequent items, one at a time, until you have a (perhaps complex) image of all items together.

For our example, imagine a gallon of milk. In your mind, pour in some shampoo. Now the gallon of milk has a weird substance at the bottom (what it would look like if shampoo sank to the bottom) and is slightly foamy. (Note that I have not researched the density of milk or shampoo and thus I don’t know if shampoo will settle or float. In my mind shampoo sinks in milk.)

Crumble some browned hamburger meat into the milk/shampoo mixture, in your mind. (Are you getting grossed out yet?) Tie pantyhose to the handle of the milk jug. Tie the other end of the pantyhose around a box of Rice-aRoni.

If I had Salvador Dali on my staff, I would certainly be able to show you a nice picture of it here.

With this image in your mind you can confidently going to the store and purchase all your items. If you have more items, so many more that your image gets out of hand, consider making two or three images. It is certainly easier to visualize three big, clunky, weird, disgusting images than 15 or 20 individual ones.

Brainercise Lite:

1. Sit in the car before your next trip inside the store with your grocery list in front of you.
2. Use the process described above to create images for the top five items on your list.
3. Tear that part off your list (or delete it let electronically) so you are not tempted to cheat.
4. Shop!

Brainercise Pro:

1. Sit in the car before with your grocery list in front of you.
2. Use the process to create images for all the items on your list.
3. Throw away or delete your list.
4. Shop!

Stay Curious!       
–Idearella            

“You don’t have to be right, just confident.” – Idearella

This brainercise will help you to:

1. Identify the type of answers you normally give to a yes/no question.
2. Learn about the world of gaming with dice.
3. Inject some clever fun into your workday.

The Magic Eight Ball, popular in the 80s, confidently proclaims an answer to any yes/no question. The icosahedron within only allows 20 answers to yes/no questions. Although it will occasionally request that you try again, it always does with confidence.

This simple device can teach much about confidently and blindly forging ahead. Because being smart isn’t enough – looking smart is the other piece – sometimes blind confidence is necessary to move things forward in your favor. Although blind confidence should be used with caution, semi-educated confidence is always worth the risk.

This brainercise teaches blind confidence; use this in the first step to semi-educated confidence. To learn more about applying semi-educated confidence, check out this blog post by Tucker Higgins. (I may even be tempted to create a brainercise based on it!)

Brainercise

1. At 8 AM on the first day pull out a piece of paper and title it, “Common Answers.”
2. Throughout the day, every time someone asks you a question that is either a yes/no question or begins with a yes/no question, write down your answer. Some answers might include, “Well that depends,” “I’ll have to consult the spreadsheet,” and so on.
3. Continue this exercise until you get 10 or 20 answers that you commonly use.
4. Go to a gaming store and buy a die with the same number of sides as number of answers. If there’s not one in your area you can find some online, like Roll Dice Online or Nano Games.
5. Make it a practice that when anyone asks you a yes/no question, roll your die, look on your sheet and give them that answer. Say it with confidence, smile, and wait. (Of course you might consider refraining from this practice with your boss or important clients.)

Stay curious!
Idearella

This brainercise will help you:

1. Expand your vocabulary.
2. Get strangely creative.
3. Apply skills you practiced in a past brainercise.

Acronyms have their place. They are useful for mnemonic devices, events, company names, processes and inventions. The rub is that often times people overuse and abuse acronyms.

I vividly remember learning the acronym PEMDAS (which I previously had learned as the acrostic “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally“) for the order of operations. Only the cool kids pronounced it as “pemdas” and left the annoying aunt out of it. (It might be helpful to note at this point the subtle difference between an acronym and an acrostic. An acronym can be pronounced as a word, an acrostic creates a phrase or sentence. PEMDAS pronounced as “pemdas” is an acronym and converted to “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” is an acrostic.)

A useful acronym for mnemonic purposes uses the naturally occurring words for the processes or items to be remembered.

• ADDIE is an acronym used in training and development. It is based on the terms analyze, design, develop, implement and evaluate. These are the natural terms you would use for each of the steps in this process to improve performance in the workplace, typically with training.
• HOMES is an acronym used to remember the five Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior.

When people desperately want to create a mnemonic device, they often force an acronym.

• FINE-C is an acronym representing “a standardized series of controls to engage when starting a motorcycle”. It stands for fuel, ignition, neutral, engine cut-off switch, choke and clutch. The natural words would be gas, ignition, neutral, cut-off switch, choke and clutch. Apparently GINCCC doesn’t work as well as FINE-C, so the words were “massaged” so they would fit in a nice pronounceable word.
• SEE, also in motorcycle training, represents search, evaluate, execute. Here’s another example of words specifically unnaturalized so that they can fit in a clever term. I don’t know many people who search the road for things to evaluate so they can make a decision that they can execute. The people I know keep their eyes peeled for problems and when a problem arises, they make a decision and act on it simultaneously.

Even PEMDAS has its downfalls. The P, which stands for parentheses, actually represent any grouping. This includes square brackets and curly brackets, which is normally assumed as the same as parentheses. Less well understood is that it includes isolated things like groupings above or below a fraction bar which are implied parentheses.

Likewise the E for exponents includes radicals (also known as the square root, or nth root). It is often forgotten that radicals are fractional exponents.

Acronyms are also commonly found in the names of organizations, events and even items such as scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus). There is an organization named SMART that stands for Smart Motorcyclists Attend Rider Training. The Houston chapter of ASTD’s 2008 conference had a RODEO theme: “Raising Organization Development Excellence Overall”.

Brainercise:

1. Choose an event that you are planning. This could be a birthday party or dinner party at your home or a high budget gala. 
2. Write down the standard title.
3. Write down words surrounding the event, the honored person or organization.
4. Choose the word that you want to be an acronym. This is just a starting point, you might end up with some other word.
5. Take the last letter in your acronym and find a noun starting with this letter that actually means the event. (See the example below if you are getting lost.) You might have to consult a thesaurus. (If you’ve practiced the brainercise License Plate Fun, you will be more prepared for this brainercise.)
6. Take the other letters in your acronym and find adjectives appropriate to the event.
7. Put them all together and see what you have. If you are pleased, stop. If not, start back at number four and tweak things.

Example:

1. We’re going to plan an event for my best friend’s 40th birthday.

1. “Tammy’s Birthday Party” is the natural title for this.
2. Since Tammy will be turning 40, we could use old, curmudgeonly, party, get together, celebration, as words with which to start. We might add to this list.
3. We can choose the word OLD because it is small, and will be fun to write Tammy’s O.L.D. instead of Tammy’s Birthday Party. We’re going to follow this format to create our acronym:

 

4. We need a word that starts with D (the last letter) that means “party.” I couldn’t find a word that actually is a synonym for party, but I did find the word debauchery. So I’ll use that one.
5. I need to find words for O and D. I might use ornery and loud?
6. “You are cordially invited to Tammy’s O.L.D. – Ornery Loud Debauchery.” I’m not sure I like this. Perhaps if I used OLDER instead, I would be able to find a nice word starting with R. (Maybe riot or reception.) Furthermore, ornery describes Tammy not the party itself. I just found the word “orgy.” Depending on the type of party I could write this as “Tammy’s O.L.D. – Orgy of Lively Debauchery” or “Tammy’s O.L.D.E.R. – Ostentatiously Lovely Diversion and Entertaining Reception” – these are a little rough around the edges, but you get the point.

Have fun!
-Idearella

This brainercise will help you

1. Question everything.
2. Make things up.
3. Exercise your creative side.
4. Challenge you in strange and unusual ways.

When you think something you’ve just experienced has actually happened previously, they call it déjà vu. Consider what would happen if you look at life with a sense of vu jà dé – knowing that you’ve experienced something previously but treating it as if it’s brand-new. Looking at things from a fresh perspective allows you to break out of the biases and perhaps see solutions that you couldn’t see before. You might even identify issues. It allows you to communicate better, seeing many sides of the same coin. The struggle here is to release yourself from your biases. Notice yourself or others in situations where an opinion has already been formed. Rarely do you see someone mean what they say, when they say, “I have an opinion but I’m willing to hear your side and take that into consideration.” Often what happens is they are willing to hear your side so they can dispute it and sway you to their side of thinking. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone would look at things with vujà dé, truly considering everything new without the biases.

In the movie Men in Black, J says, “Five hundred years ago people ‘knew’ that the world was flat….yesterday you ‘knew’ that we were alone in the universe…just imagine what you’ll ‘know’ tomorrow…” Consider that you don’t KNOW anything. Everything is flexible. I had a history professor in college who would often say that history is a study in ambiguity. History is not merely composed of recorded facts, the meanings and relationships behind the speeches recorded on video/audio (which ARE recorded facts) are subject to interpretation. Historians must piece together the “truth” mostly from journals and letters, which are human interpretations of actual events, which then have to be interpreted by historians. With all this interpretation, clearly the truth is negotiable.

To help us look at things from a different point of view, exercising our sense of vujà dé, we have to question everything, and make things up. I like to call it speculating, but in reality it is making things up. By far this is the most irreverent, and possibly offensive, brainercise of Idearella. So let’s have some fun!

Brainercise

1. Get a new e-mail account. You can do this through Yahoo, Gmail, or any other free service. Make it something like george_thrailkill@yahoo.com, so it sounds like it came from a real person that might be a friend of yours.
2. With your new e-mail account, write a fresh new junk e-mail. Here are some ideas:
   • Search Google for quotes surrounding a given topic. Assemble these in your e-mail. These could be positive, negative, humorous, etc. To practice making things up, change a few words in the quotes, or change the names of the people who said/wrote them. Shakespeare is always a good person to change to; he wrote darn near everything. (This one is a good place to start, before you move on to other more challenging e-mails.)
   • Search Google images for funny or interesting pictures of a common theme (like crazy toilet bowls, goofy things redneck do, etc.). Save each of them to your desktop so you can paste them in your new e-mail and make a caption for each. Remember, you’re not trying to represent the truth. You’re trying to practice speculating and making things up. Get creative and have fun with your captions.
   • Choose a topic with contradicting information. For instance, the conclusion of the TV show LOST, any recent scandalous event or anything political. Form an opinion and write it up, include any information that you have and some that you make up. You do not have to believe this opinion, it does NOT have to be your opinion. Remember, you’re exercising your ability to speculate. Include in this write up that it was written by someone close to the event who knows what is really going on.
   • Assemble, either from your daily experience or from Google (yes, you can Google), a list of clichés, phrases and idioms. Turn each phrase or sentence on its ear and rewrite it. For instance, “Making you mad is the last thing on my list” normally means, “I don’t want to make you mad.” It also could mean that making you mad is STILL on my list, it is just last. Furthermore, if your list is rather short, making you mad might come sooner than later. Collect all these in your e-mail.
3. Send that e-mail to yourself so that it will have all the appropriate forwarding monikers. (You want it to look like it was forwarded, that is why you created the bogus email account.)
4. Choose 10 or more people on your e-mail list and forward it to them. Make sure to include a few people who’ve never believe anything, and include a few people who believe everything. Then stay and watch the fun!

Stay curious!
– Idearella

This brainercise will help you

1. Make yourself clear when communicating.
2. Find the answers you need online.

I have a friend in her late 20s, you would think was in her 80s if you heard her speak of technology. If she needs research, from AAA to opening times of the zoo, she calls me. I haven’t the heart to use Let Me Google That for You on her.

She is not incapable of going to www.google.com and typing in a word, indeed she has fingers. The trouble is that she will only ask the question in one way, and when the results do not come up with the answer she needs, she gives up.

I wonder how many people have the same problem. There is a reason why Let Me Google That for You was created.

Brainercise

1. Think of a question to which you either don’t know the answer or want more information.
2. Go to www.google.com, type in your question and click search.
3. Notice how many results you get. Don’t get intimidated by this large number, the most relevant results will be at the top of the list. When I write “most relevant” I mean the ones that best fit your collection of search terms. The goal of this brainercise is to satisfy your curiosity through one of the links on the first page. You don’t want to have to go to the next page of search results to find an answer (that gets frustrating).
4. Find a result that appears to have the answer to your question. If you find the answer, great. (You can start over with a new question.) If you don’t find it, consider why those results don’t have the answer to your question. The idea is to think like Google. “If what I searched on gives me these results, how can I change it to give me the results I really want?” (You might realize that the question you asked is not really the question you wanted answered. See my example below where I did just this.)
5. Narrow and refine your search, or change your question. Using the information from your failed search, think of other terms to add to or replace the original terms. Also, consider eliminating some of the terms. You want to NARROW your search, so you would think you would add more terms. You must also REFINE your search, which means you have to think of better ways to ask the question. You can find additional tips on searching at Hubspot or Google Search Tips.
6. Go back to 4 and 5 until you are satisfied.

Example

1. I started with the question, “Why does a hurricane only hit June through September in Houston?”
2. When I searched, I had about 2.5 million results. The first few were for businesses, news and a Wikipedia article on Houston climate.
3. I look through the rest of the first page. Seventh in the list was a link for “When is hurricane season ?” This looked promising. Reading through the article, I found that June through September had 97% of all hurricanes, thus it was named hurricane season. That seemed to be a sufficient answer, if I was only curious about why those months in particular are hurricane season. This led me to refine my question to be: “What is going on in the atmosphere or weather system that causes hurricane season to be six months out of the year, and not all year long?”
4. I used exactly the question above in my new Google search. Second in the list was an “Asked Weather Dan” article. Weather Dan seemed like a nice name for someone who might be able to answer my question, so I clicked. Sure enough, the refine question on this blog was “Why is hurricane season when it is, and what makes it hurricane season? Is it hurricane season at the same time for everyone everywhere?” I had the answer to my question.

Now it’s your turn.

Stay curious!
– Idearella

This brainercise will

1. Improve your vocabulary.
2. Exercise your creative side.
3. Challenge you in strange and unusual ways.

Roget’s International Thesaurus has a long and rich history. Peter Mark Roget, obsessed with list making, compiled the first modern thesaurus in 1805. He cataloged words and ordered them by their meanings instead of alphabetically. The first edition was called Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition and was published in 1852. Thankfully the title has been shortened over the years.

Literacy Education Online defines a thesaurus as a collection of synonyms and antonyms. This is a rather shortsighted definition. Wikipedia defines it as a book that lists words grouped together according to similarity of meaning. “Aren’t they the same?” you may ask. Not entirely. If you have a collection of synonyms and antonyms, you will need to have a clear idea of the word for which you are looking for a synonym or antonym. Roget’s thesaurus allows so much more flexibility. As Trivia Library notes, “the user can start with nothing more than a general idea and from that find the exact word or phrase to express his or her thought.”

The beauty of Roget’s Thesaurus is in the organization by concept. You start with a word that somewhat describes the general idea and look up that term in the index. This will guide you to the category you seek. The numbers listed next to the words in the index or entry numbers, not page numbers. The entries above or below the concept typically give the antonymous concept.

A thesaurus “in dictionary form” typically is nothing more than a collection of synonyms and antonyms. Roget’s thesaurus on the other hand is a treasury of concepts. This entry on www.wikihow.com explains how to use both type of thesauri.

Brainercise:

1) Get a Roget’s Thesaurus. Here are a couple of sources if you need to purchase one: Roget’s International Thesaurus, Bartlett’s Roget’s Thesaurus

2) Pick a word.

3) Look it up in the index.

4) Choose an entry that appears to have no relation to your word and turn to it.

5) Find your word in the entry, or figure out how your word relates to that entry.

6) Think of how this concept applies to your life (or the life of someone you know).

7) Make a sentence using the word and this concept.

Example:

1) I found a 1979 edition of Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases; Classic American Edition in my bookshelf.

2) I happen to be sitting at a table while writing this so I chose the word “table” to look up.

3) In the index it has 16 different entry numbers for the word table – I had no idea I would get so many! Reading through the different options in the index, makes me realize how many different concepts surround the word. Here is the list:

• - arrangement
• - list (like a table in Excel or Microsoft Word?)
• - defer (“to table an issue” means to put it aside for a while)
• - layer
• - support
• - flat
• - repast
• - writing
• - on the table (two entries)
• - turn the tables (rearrange the situation in favor of the opposite of which it was) (two entries)
• - under the table hidden (figuratively or literally?)
• - under the table drunk (nice!)
• - table of the Lord
• - table the motion (legal version of defer from above?)

 
4) I can’t see how the word arrangement has anything to do with the word table. I’m going to entry number 60 for “arrangement” to see what’s up.

5) The entry states, “[Result of arrangement] order, orderliness, form, array;… syntagma, table, atlas, register…”

6) The word “table” can mean the result of an arrangement. Indeed when I arrange the tasks for the day, I put them on a mini-table that I call a list.

7) Here is my sentence: “I have arranged the things that I want to do today in a table on this notepad.”

If you are following along, you might notice that at the end of the portion of the entry containing my word “table” there is a number: 551. If I go to entry 551 I find “record.” This does not actually contain the word table but is similar to the concept of “result of arrangement.” Curious, huh?

In the process, I also looked up the word syntagma as I have no concept of what this word means. So as to not keep you on the edge of your seat, it is a table or arrangement of linguistic terms with special similarities to one another. This is outside of the scope of this blog post or of this writer’s knowledge, although it is interesting to know that this word exists. Perhaps I’ll come back to it on another day when my brain isn’t so full.

Let me know which word you chose, what sentence you created and any other interesting things you come across.

Enjoy!
– Idearella

Last week I took a webinar by Pamela Jett. She said something that I found very interesting about hemisphere switching. She suggested that in an emotional situation in business it helps to switch your brain hemispheres so that you can get back into a logical mode.

The left and right hemispheres of the brain are not the same as the front and back parts of the brain. The left and right hemispheres control the logic and the emotions. I thought it would be an interesting brainercise to practice switching between these two hemispheres.

The idea is to help you be able to tap into your emotions and then quickly flop over into the other hemisphere and do some raw thinking. This should help in those emotional situations when you quickly need to get back into the logical brain. For other people who tend to live in their logical brains, this can help them to quickly get into their emotional brain when the need arises.*

Here are the basic rules:

1)       Make a list of seven things that are important emotionally to you. This might include snuggling with your child, sitting in a locked room for four hours with your boss or sitting peacefully in a park.

2)      Make a list of seven things that make you think. Not mental brain puzzles, merely things like adding two or three digit numbers, thinking of three of the Seven Dwarves (this one is Pamela Jett‘s idea) or coming up with five words that start with the letter T.

3)      Shuffle the two lists together so that every other line is an emotional thing and every other line is a thinking thing.

4)      Sit quietly with the list and, as quickly as you can, go through each line and either do the thinking exercise or re-live/imagine the emotional one.

I have developed a nifty spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel that will customize this brainercise. I’ve made it so that the “thinking” part isn’t difficult, only challenging enough to force the logic part of the brain to come out. Remember, it is not important to get the answers right. The point is to get into the logic hemisphere.

The spreadsheet Hemisphere Switching Brainercise will do steps 1-3  for you. You input your name, then input a person, activity and a situation that you love or feel positively about and finally a person, activity and a situation that you dislike/hate or feel negatively about and then print it. You can change your inputs and get different variations. If you want the same six emotional items, put your cursor on the name field (c1) hit F2 and press enter. This will recalculate the spreadsheet and change the thinking items while leaving the emotional items intact.

Download the Hemisphere Switching Brainercise here.

Enjoy!

 *It does not escape me at the latter sentence might tend to apply to men while the former sentence might tend to apply to women. This seems like merely a tendency, not a stereotype.

This brainercise will help you to:
• Improve your vocabulary in your front brain
• Remind you of your current vocabulary
• Offer front brain distractions

“Stop that rhyming and I mean it!”
“Anybody got a peanut?”
- The Princess Bride

Occasionally you might find yourself with an accidental rhyme. Take advantage of this. Incessant rhyming allows you to practice your alphabet, remember your current vocabulary, makeup and try out new words and have fun with silliness. When playing with a partner, they might use words that you don’t know, thus actually improving your vocabulary.

(more…)

This brainercise will help you

1. Exercise your front brain
2. Train your front brain to stay out of the way while your back brain works

My friend and I used to commute over 60 miles each day together. There’s only so much talking you can do to your best friend. We started playing “License Plate Fun” to pass some of the time and give us new things to think and talk about.

Here’s how it works:

• While driving down the road, observe the letters on license plates that you pass,
• With the letters, create a phrase or sentence.

The rules are simple, the variations are endless.

This brainercise engages your front brain in ways that are uncommon. You have to create something out of almost nothing at all. You have a small starting point, a seed as it were, in the initial letters of the words in your phrase or sentence, and virtually no boundaries.

Below I have given some ways to start playing the game as well as some variations that make it more challenging if you apply these as “rules.” As I was writing this, I noticed that the variations I thought would be simple turned out to be rather difficult when I tried to do some examples. So I will encourage you to begin in the following way:

Let the first letter inspire you – whatever word you think of for the first letter, let that be your guide. Here are some examples* and explanations:

• EPL – enjoy people laughing. The first word that came to my mind when I saw the E, was “enjoy.” The other two letters just seem to flow from there.
• WKS – we kill solutions. Again, I see the W, and the word “we” comes to mind. Perhaps I’ve been in corporate America too long, as is evidenced by the second and third word.
• NHK – nobody hates Kate. You might find yourself reusing certain words. The N words, nobody, no one, never, etc., are easy to use and insert anywhere. Once you get really good at this game, try to avoid these to stretch yourself.
• AMI – all my intelligence.
• FPN – fun pretty nap.

You might notice that these come in different forms: sentences, dependent clauses, adjectives with nouns. If you have a shortage of cars on the road, to make the most out of your time with each license plate, observe the format that you tend to use, and try different ones.

• EPL – everyone pleases Linda.
• WKS – walk (in) krazy shoes (Remember there are no rules here, if you need to insert a preposition, do so. The Idearella police will not come after you.)
• NHK – never hit kids, noodles hate kolaches, nerdy halitosis’ed Kevin
• AMI – annoying mushy iguana, all men (are) intelligent, all men (are) idiots (Depending from which side of the fence you come.)

Once you feel comfortable, consider restricting yourself to create the following challenges:

• Use the first two letters as adjectives and the last letter as a noun.
• Use the first letter as an adjective, the second letter as a noun and the third letter as a verb.
• Use all three letters as adjectives – I found this one particularly difficult.

If you want to practice this and not be on the road, go to www.random.org and generate a handful of “license plates” with the password generator. Click here to create ten, six character passwords.

I will expand (via speculation) in another blog post as to how this helps the front and back brains. For now I encourage you to try it out, see what you think.

Enjoy!
– Idearella

*In the state in which I live, most license plates have three letters. Thus, all examples use three letters. You can extend this to as many letters as license plates in your area have or choose to use the first three letters of each license plate.

We each have two brains – a front brain and a back brain.

In day to day functioning, we use the front brain. When someone asks a fairly easy question, we think about it, in the front brain, and respond.

So what’s the other brain for?

You’ve heard the phrase,”Let me sleep on it”? “Sleeping on it” is the work of the back brain.

A more difficult or challenging question requires using this “back” brain. This isn’t to imply that every challenge needs a nap (indeed wouldn’t that be great!), only that it is important to allow time for the back brain to engage.

Like in hypnotism, you have to force the conscious to take a hike so the subconscious can be accessed and taught. The back brain doesn’t work with our help. It works on its own.

The “brains” need each other.

Generally the process works like this:

1. Encounter a problem.
2. Think about the problem in the front brain.
3. Allow the back brain to think a while.
4. Think about the problem again in the front brain.

When you have a challenge, your front brain gives it structure, starts the work and then you can take a break.

The back brain kicks in and does the internal processing so that when you come back to the problem the front brain can apply the processing to the structure and come up with a solution.

You can exercise both parts of your brain.

Reading about strange and different ways to look at the world help inspire you to think differently. Doing logic puzzles, word games or even word finds also exercise your front brain. You will find patterns, curiosities and things to ponder in your everyday world.

In essence, looking at things from a skewed perspective will lay the foundation for the back brain to work.

Then you need the front brain to get out of the way. Listening to music, watching TV, running or vacuuming will work. Anything that doesn’t take focused “thinking” attention.

Lifting weights doesn’t teach you how to play sports, it gives you the strength and power so when you learn a game you can do it better. Exercising your brains gives you

What do you do to exercise your two brains? Share in the comments.