Train your brain

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John Syme

John Syme graduated from Davidson College with a bachelor of arts degree in French in 1985. He worked as a general-assignment reporter at The Winston-Salem Journal, where he later wrote freelance travel stories during his first solo cross-country road trip in the summer of 1989. He worked as a copywriter at a Charlotte advertising agency, as a research translator at a French nutrition center outside Paris, and as a politics and education newspaper reporter in Charlotte. He returned in 2001 to Davidson, where he is senior writer, alumni editor and instigator of the "Road Trip 2009" blog, which evolved into his current blog, "Daybook Davidson."

Sometimes bits and pieces of a day coalesce, if only fleetingly, in a moment of insight. To wit:

Yesterday, a cold and rainy Monday morning, I heard on WFAE that it turns out the “chemical imbalance” hypothesis of serotonin deficiency as a primary cause of depression is, and in fact always has been, rather deficient itself. Hypothetically speaking.

I huffed and said “duh” to my reflection in the mirror and went back to my shaving in quiet desperation.

Normally I would have forgotten all about the depression story rather immediately, had it not been followed by another NPR snippet about a study showing that a full 25 percent of British office workers reported “extreme boredom” in their jobs.

Happily, I do not count myself in that 25 percent. I am rarely bored, and never British.

Still, the two stories are related, methinks, boredom and depression. Nietzsche said, “He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how.’” I suspect the inverse to be true, too. This particular morning, my “why” was an early meeting, my “how” a busted Totes umbrella and a patently phony smile. It is what it is, Friedrich.

Later at my desk, I clicked a link on LinkedIn or Facebook or maybe in a cyber-journalism newsletter I get. It was for a Forbes (or maybe a Fortune) article on “How to train your brain.” As I started to read about how to focus my brain for greater workaday serenity and productivity, I’ll be damned if a pop-up ad didn’t pop right up in there and block my view. It was an ad for… well, now I forget, so all is lost except the irony. Take that, Internet. Nyah.

The pop-up ad did have the bizarre effect of making me take the Forbes (or maybe Fortune) article a little more seriously. When it started to talk about ADHD, in both a clinical sense and a broader cultural one, I realized how blurred is the arbitrary line that separates the two — clinical and cultural, not Forbes and Fortune, although that, too.

Finally, I followed this somewhat singular thought about how we currently view things in America down a twisty path of my very own neurons, unblocked by accursèd pop-up, and came to a small clearing of understanding: Maybe we oughtn’t to pathologize every single little piece of bellybutton lint our psyche stops to examine, but rather train our minds, like our dogs, just to stop and examine and then move on.

Not an earth-shaking insight, I grant you, but a moment of clarity on my cold, foggy morning.

And this I do know, kind of on the topic: We are wired to function optimally in real time and real space with real people. I have found that the more I do of that in some form or another, the better I feel when I wake up in the morning — rainy, cold, Monday, or otherwise.

For some stellar opportunities to focus on some of the rising semester’s real-time, real-space, real-people arts and entertainment and edification stars at Davidson, train your brain on the campus calendar!

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