Does Mental Inactivity Lead to Mental Freeze?

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I don't feel as quick-witted, creative or as able to retain factual information as I was when I was younger. This may be an illusion. This may be just a result of getting older. But I wonder whether it is to do with having a job which, like so many jobs is rather procedural and does not require vast amounts of innovation on my part.

ok, so maybe I expressed this rather fuzzily. What I was trying to say was if you don't use yr brain do you lose the *ability* to use yr brain?

Uh...

there's the whole issue of college culture vs. office culture which comes into play as well. It is frowned upon to be creative in offices in ways which are not actually advancing the business, whereas students have more creative freedom I suppose.

Working in an office stiffles my mental activity. If it weren't for ILX my brain would have seized up long ago. The problem is that ILX only stimulated certain kinds of activity.

Last night, at this party, I was actually having trouble trying to come up with things to talk to people about, it had been such a long time since I saw some of them. Sudden ::click:: and mental readjustment and thought "what would I do if I were on ILX?" and then I was fine again, and able to have random bar chatter conversations without a problem.

Weird, that.

It was strange, however, getting back into database mode when I first took this job. I'd be staring at the indexing screen or something like that and be unable to remember how to write a query. It did come back, though, that was useful.

I would say yes, definitely. Brain is like any muscle - don't use it, and it withers away.

I have been getting busy doing random stuff (like reading heavy books and listening to heavy music) and and I can feel my neurons reconnecting as I ponder.

I think if you dont do something for a while (e.g. reading) you often also lose the desire to, but when you actually pick that book up you enjoy it so much.

(Except the brain isn't a muscle, it is a bundle of neurons and nerves.)

neurons are nerves, but yes it certainly isn't a muscle.

maybe it's not so much atrophy which occurs to the academically minded brain once it has been exposed to office culture for a while, but a kind of re-training, or re-tooling, from which it is impossible or difficult to return. I'm more comfortable with this idea, but being comfortable with something doesn't make it an accurate analysis of what is really going on (quite the reverse in some cases). One positive thing which has happened in the time I've been working in offices is that my ability to concentrate has improved immeasurably. Every little distraction in the office used to distract me and I was forever leaving tasks undone to work on something else instead. I'm far more organised and methodical than I used to be. I suppose the positive thing to do would be to concentrate on that rather than to bemoan my loss of ability to think in imaginative and innovative ways. Maybe. What do you think?

The human being is really amazing that way, in that it does form pathways and connections, and it *likes* to use pathways and connections that it uses a lot. This is helpful, because it speeds learning, and makes you more able to remember things that you do frequently. However, this is annoying, as it makes it harder to remember things you don't access as often. Or *patterns* of behaviour that you don't access often.

It may be that you've trained your brain to the concentration pattern, making your lateral thinking pattern less familiar. But the amazing thing about the brain is you can train situational memory - i.e. you use the "concentration" pattern in work, and use another method to train your brain to associate the "lateral thinking" pattern with other situations. Maybe?

Because very little is actually *lost* in the brain. Your brain just forgets where it put it.

I don't know! I'm not a brain surgeon! ;-)

what you mean the way that yr a musician and a database designer, which kinda fulfills both? So now all I need to do is find something creative to do out of the office and I'll be ok! The big question now is - what?

Well, I used to be able to have a balance between my logical computer brain, and my lateral thinking musical brain. Depending on if I was in an office or in a studio, I triggered different pathways.

This has got harder for me as I've got older. Or maybe this is because I've spent more time concentrating on one or the other - i.e. being a musician and not working, or else now working and not being a musician.

yes

Easy solution = not to devote ANY mental energy to office work whatever. Not really a problem, since everyone else there likes it better that way anyhow. They'll always come up with stupid shit for you to do, time flies when you're retarded. Just do whatever they tell you, don't even think about it. And for fuck's sake don't start contemplating the deep meaning of what you're doing or develop any emotions related to work whatever, then you're well and truly lost. I smoke weed right in front of the boss, he's not stupid, he knows a yoghurt-brained zombie is easier to deal with and is better at sitting still. Conserve your mental resources!

What do you do if you're in a position in an office where you have to think but the thinking is about stuff like cash flow and giant plastic tanks and 5% discounts on H0nda engines? You do what I'm doing and look for a new job. Just give me a mindless job so that I can think about other important things like my latest lottery win fantasy and all the songs about cereal that I want to write.

the looking for a new job thing sounds good in theory, but this is the best job I've ever done yet I still feel the way I do. Which makes me think that there is a kind of "job sheen" which goes when the novelty wears off.