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The brain is a muscle. We control a lot of it, and a lot of it takes care of itself and your body.
And just like any muscle in your body, it needs exercise. And this exercise makes you a better person by making you more intelligent.
But sometimes we tend to be careless in our worlds. It may be because of laziness or just daily routine, but little do we know – we end up harming ourselves.
By becoming dumber.
1. Group projects
Group projects and meetings are not productive. Add to this, they are not good for your brain either. Because in meetings, we tend to focus on other insignificant things like how do I look, how I am sitting, how am I putting my point across, etc.
Team meetings focus rarely on the task alone. This becomes worse when the group consists of both males and females.
Studies have shown that people who worked alone always fared better.
2. Jet Lag
No, it is not about the amount of sleep you get. It is about resetting your body clock that determines when you sleep and wake up. Turns out that this frequent messing with the body clock leads to permanent damage in the way your brain stores memories.
Like for example, a study found that flight attendants suffer from this memory loss because of frequent jet lag.
3. Thinking you are gifted
Because talent isn’t enough. There is still a lot of hard work left to be done, and when you get smug about yourselves, there isn’t really any need or will to improve and hone our natural abilities.
That doesn’t mean we discourage ourselves instead of encouraging. Encouragement and praise are needed but the focus on hard work should always be there.
You probably have heard this piece of wisdom, but now even science confirms it.
4. Distractions
Distractions are bad. Very, very bad.
So bad that it can hamper the way your brain processes information to up to 20%. That’s a lot.
5. Dieting
Not in a direct way, but in a way that you only think about calories and percent fat in your milk instead of important stuff you got to do.
Dieting puts a load on your cognitive abilities and reduces your efficiency to think and execute better tasks. Stop thinking so much about what you eat. It literally makes you dumb.
6. Getting spanked in childhood
It’s true. A research study showed that people who were not spanked in their childhood fared better in intelligence tests than the people who were spanked.
The second part of the study showed that nations that accepted spanking kids as a part of the culture had lower IQ levels than nations that didn’t indulge in spanking their kids.
7. Watching the news
Because news channels aren’t exactly informative these days. They are more about the sensation of the news than the cause behind it that makes the viewers think.
Also, skewed agendas make the news channels omit out important bits and pieces of the news, making them less informative and making you more dumb.
8. Junk food
Studies have found that feeding children junk food makes them dumb later in life. They grow up with poor social skills, bad logical reasoning, and sad behavioral skills.
This is because they did not get the rich nutrition good food naturally has – vitamins, minerals and fats that help the brain to develop properly.
Feed your kids good food and not junk.
9. Living in a city
A research study made two groups of people. One group was told to walk through the city and the other one was told to walk through vegetation.
The group that walked through the city fared poorly in memory, learning and attention tests. And that is because the city throws our brains in a tangle. The hustle bustle of the city occupies our brains even when we don’t realize it, and as a result, it is tired at the end of the day to be intelligent.
On the other hand, the other group fared much better by just walking through trees. Now you know where to live when you retire.
10. Multitasking
Remember how you use your laptop, phone and iPod all at the same time, thinking that you are a multitasking genius? Yeah. That makes you dumb too.
Because your brain gets into a habit of doing irrelevant things rather than focus the task at hand.
Also, there are no allegedly talented multitaskers. The study showed that researchers couldn’t really find anything
that they were really good at.
11. Chewing Gum
Remember those studies that showed that chewing gum improved short-term memory?
Crap.
Chewing gum actually reduces your ability to recall short term memory. Stop chewing gum to stop becoming dumb.
12. Secondhand smoke
If you are a parent reading this, stop smoking around your kids. Studies have shown that children exposed to secondhand smoke tend to have lower IQ scores later in life. They also perform poorly in school.
No need to mention the effects of first hand smoking now, is there?
13. Eating refined sugar
Sugars screws up your brains ability to learn and memory in just 6 weeks. It also slows your brains ability to process problems and hence, directly affecting your intelligence. Keep away from excess refined sugar people.
14. Watching reality shows
Reality shows make you dumb. AÂ study showed that people who watched reality shows fared poorer in knowledge tests as compared to people who watched normal shows.
15. Powerpoint presentations
If you believe a top US Army General officer then yes, it does make you dumb. Because according to him problems cannot be solved by making a powerpoint presentation with attractive slides and graphs and pie charts.
Also, the very nature of a powerpoint presentation is to make the information appear dumber. You are literally dumbing the whole thing down.
It is time to work your brain out, guys!
Take care of your most precious asset.
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