Distance running to a professional athlete in my day was five laps around the field. And you stopped each lap to take your pulse.
If we keep practicing mental skills it is likely we can strengthen neural connections and make new connections.
When we had to survive on our wits, gather and kill our food from scratch and be more at the mercy of our environment than we are today, we probably had enough challenge to keep our brains healthy.
It used to be thought that you stopped making new neural connections in your youth and from then on your brain was fixed and it was downhill all the way. But in fact as we know from our own experience we can keep on learning and learning means changing our brain on a physical level.
Whether you plan or whether you flow in order to be creative probably isn't the point. The point is to keep practicing to maintain neural pathways and to establish new ones by learning new skills.
Neurogenesis continues throughout life and we have the capacity to establish new neural pathways and strengthen existing ones.
Our brains do not have to be fixed, they can be plastic.
Beware of the temptation to see yourself as unfairly treated.
I've a long list of things I don't know how I've done, but I've done them. In the end, it's always about perseverance.
All of our media is made of language: our films, our music, our images, and of course our words. How different this is from analog production, where, if you were somehow able to peel back the emulsion from, say, a photograph, you wouldn't find a speck of language lurking below the surface.
I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.