Let me put it to you straight: The brain is a muscle.

Few people think of it in that way, but it’s perfectly true. It behaves exactly like a muscle. If you don’t exercise it, then it gets weak and if you put it through its paces day-after-day it gets strong. You can see this with people who play chess or bridge or do crosswords or sudoku. They are exercising the “logic muscle” and as they do so it gets stronger. If you want to have a high IQ, it easy to achieve, just take IQ Tests day-after-day and watch your scores rise.

I did that when I was a teenager. I bought a book about IQ and there were lots of tests in it and I did them all and eventually I had a big IQ. As formulated, IQ isn’t supposed to be like that, but the dirty little secret, that many IQ fanatics would prefer was untrue, is that you can train the brain with exercise. True, there are people who are not good at visiospacial puzzles and there are those who have problems with words and some with numbers. Mostly they need practice, that’s all.

You can have intellectual disabilities (like dyslexia – and by the way, why is it spelt with a y) that are difficult to fix. But if you don’t have such problems, and you have no intervening psychological blocks (like you were forever told by your parents that you were stupid) you can exercise your brain muscles and get better at any kind of intellectual activity.

What Does That Have To Do With Mac Productivity?

The answer is; much more than you think.

First of all let me tell you a rather unpleasant psychological truth:

For most of the things you do, you don’t know how you do them!

It sounds unlikely, doesn’t it? But it’s true. Consider the very simple question: How do you move your arm? Let me give you the context. You’re sitting at your Mac and you are typing on the keyboard and you suddenly get to the point where you need to move the mouse. So you have to move your arm to get your hand to the mouse.

So how do you do that?

Don’t give me some bullsh*t explanation about how you have a thought and it sends signals to your body and so on and so on, because if you try that, I’m going to tell you that you’re making it up – because you are. Unless you’re one in a million, you don’t even know what a thought is, exactly. I’m not interested in “how you think you do it.” I’m not interested in the most convincing lie you can tell about it. I didn’t ask that question.

Of course you can know the answer to this question very easily. Just do it and watch yourself to see what happens. Do it now. Move your hand to the mouse.

So if you just did that, you’ll now know how you move your arm. And you’ll realize that you have no easy way to explain how the process works, because we don’ t have words for this. You kinda know how you did that, but you can’t articulate it. We don’t have a good model of how the muscle we call the brain works. I want you to understand that, because it helps with productivity. Actually it helps with many things. Productivity is one of them.

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