brains...brains...brains...

One quick aside before I begin: the job hunt has been going OK. I'm still asking for opportunity and guidance. Hopefully, the seeds sown will find fruit soon.

Now to the blog post...

The third aspect of my New Years resolution is to sharpen the grey matter between my ears. It occurred to me that if the human body could become physically better at a task by doing it (e.g. weight lifting makes you stronger, running regularly makes you run faster), then it follows that you should be able to improve your brain by exercising it. While I've always valued my faculties, I've often wished I was "smarter". So now it's time to add in the "mental" weight training to try to make myself brainier.

I'm doing this a few ways. First of all, I grabbed a number of iPhone apps that tout themselves as "brain trainers", such as, Brain Challenge, Brain Toot, and Brain Exercise. Every day, I run through the exercises they recommend followed by a few turns with ArithmeTick and Sudoku.

The next step is practicing "lateral thinking" and logic problem puzzles. These are a dime a dozen at your nearest half-price books. Currently, I'm working on The Mensa Genius Quiz-A-Day Book. When I've finished this, it's on to The Riddle of Scheherazade.

Third is to step up my learning. I downloaded a few Linux distributions this past weekend so that using VirtualBox, I could practice my Unix scripting and bring a few other programming skills up to snuff using the exercises from my old programming books and applying them to new languages.

When I get re-employed, I'll probably pick up Rosetta Stone and start learning Spanish.

So here's to sticking it out and becoming smarter and a better person in 2010.