La scrittura a mano e i congiuntivi sono le medicine per la mente

The rediscovery of slow thinking to counteract hyperconnection and keep brain creativity active. Interview with neuroscientist Brustenghi

The most effective medicines for the mind are free and have no side effects. Those who want to give themselves a gift should start writing a little by hand again; don’t abandon the subjunctive; memorize something that gives them pleasure. These are the suggestions with which the neurologist and psychotherapist from Perugia, Pierluigi Brustenghi, with thirty years of hospital experience, fills rooms with his lectures on the brain to spread knowledge without trivializing, convinced that “just as fish swim in water, men are immersed in narration.” The news and the return to school focus on the “emotional pathology” of the youngest and on a perceptible fact: “Often adults do not know the emotions of young people and vice versa.”

Should we believe in the so-called reverse Flynn effect, that is, the reduction of IQ after decades of growth in developed nations?

A plausible hypothesis is that it depends on the hegemony of multimedia, but to what extent is difficult to determine. A Chinese study found that adolescents who spend ten hours a day online have a twenty percent brain atrophy. Beyond the research, we know that the brain develops slowly: the frontal lobe, fundamental for ethical choices and behaviors, matures at twenty, twenty-five years old.

Late compared to the parameters of today’s society.

Society pushes to anticipate. It was so with the driver’s license, with the right to vote, but neuroscience says something else. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate for economics in 2002, drew the distinction between slow and fast thinking. There is the thinking of Ulysses and that of Achilles, which, unlike the former, involves a high error rate. Losing the ability to wait is giving too much space to Achilles and his impulsiveness.

What do you recommend?

“Festina lente.” Recovering space for reflection increases the ability to connect cortical and subcortical areas and gives greater plasticity to the brain. Synapses change organization every time we learn something, for example words. Those who are richer in words will be more successful in life. If it’s true that language tells who we are, the changes in youth languages are a sign of the times. There is an excessive use of the present tense while the subjunctive mood, which expresses dreams, desires, possibilities, is disappearing. Not using it means neglecting important areas of the frontal lobe, with an impoverishment of expressiveness and behaviors.

Why do you encourage people to pick up the pen again?

When we write by hand we activate twelve brain areas, when we type only one or two. Maria Montessori said that the hand is the expressive tool of human intelligence and the gesture corresponds to the emotion: the congruence between mind, emotion, and gesture is a goal we should transmit to young people. Those who write by hand have a more functional memory and young people who have lost the habit use block letters because the brain is not aligned with the hierarchical organization of words, and therefore of thoughts. Writing by hand requires planning, executing the letters, correcting them. It’s about re-evaluating embodied cognition: the body that shapes the mind.

And digital reading?

If we read on paper we encourage reflective capacity: we underline, take notes, tend to go back whereas online reading pushes us to move forward. Moreover, the visual cortical area is very developed in young people, particularly the V3 which is activated for moving things to the detriment of the V2 which is activated for still images, so those who binge on video clips amplify the V3 and will be less inclined to read. They will not develop slow thinking.

Is there a suggestion other than banning smartphones in class?

Reconsider mind-wandering, the wandering of the mind, which serves to plan the future and acts as an incubator for ideas. A teacher must know that when a student looks at the ceiling, they are experiencing that moment, which is inevitable if the lesson is a ramble.

It’s Conrad’s “when I look out the window I’m working.”

Yes, but now unfortunately we are in constant overload. We need to contemplate the sea, listen to music, revitalize embodied cognition. We pay little attention to the autonomic nervous system, which instead guides choices and prevents mistakes, as Antonio Damasio’s theory of somatic markers maintains. Hyperconnection makes us live too much in chronos and too little in kairos, young people suffer from chronic sleep deprivation which leads to synapse congestion. They should sleep nine hours to allow the brain to reorder what has been learned, prune the useless, and make itself available for further acquisitions. For creativity.

Is memorizing poems useful?

Memory skills must be stimulated. There is this idea that the brain is hardware and the mind is software, but the mind is much more and is affected by what the body has memorized. And if emotion helps to memorize, the best way to revive memories is to relive them by resorting to the senses, even if we will memorize them differently because life has changed us and we will give different value to things. We must not think of time as fragmented, but as a flow that allows us to draw in retrospection by reshuffling everything. Memory is the present of the past, vision is the present of the present, waiting is the present of the future.