5 Simple Ways to Nourish Your Mind
Pursuing Novelty as a Means to Upgrade Your Thinking
It’s easy to undernourish our minds. Many of our pursuits involve entertaining but generally unenlightening pastimes. Hello, Instagram. It’s me, Netflix! It’s the mental equivalent of high-calorie, low-nutrition food. But our intellects are meant for more, and ultimately such fare fails to satisfy.
Here are five ways I’ve found helpful for nourishing the mind. The first is obvious. After all, reading is one of the most effective ways to begin, but . . .
1. Challenge Yourself with Books
Start with the books you like, but put a twist on it. If you like genre fiction, try something more literary. If you like biographies, try narrative nonfiction, particularly if the subject is new to you. If history’s your thing, go for a period you don’t know well. When in doubt, whether fiction or nonfiction, try anything outside your typical time period. The point? Encountering something you already enjoy from a different vantage or vintage.
If you’ve thought of reading a certain author before but never followed through, use this as the excuse to do so. One year I read a ton of Mario Vargas Llosa for no better reason than I’d always been meaning to. Why wait any longer?
Time-honored wisdom dictates that you should never drink alone. Neither should you read alone, at least not always. Ideas are enjoyably explored among friends, especially people who will inject the conversation with reflections different from your own. You’ll be able to discover more of the elephant in a group than by yourself. Which leads to the next reason.
2. Join (or Start) a Discussion Group
I sometimes attend a monthly discussion group that has now been meeting since 2004. The idea is pretty simple: Members select a topic each month. Someone works up a paper or provides some reading on the subject and then presents on the topic. We’ve covered everything from Shakespeare to economics, patristics, medical ethics, fractals, ecclesiology, Flannery O’Connor, and much, much more.
It’s a diverse group with significantly varied opinions, so the room can get a bit warm. But everyone loves and respects each other. Attendees hash it out. We rarely reach consensus, but it’s always enlightening and fun. And it’s a great venue for new thoughts and perspectives—all of which can feed the mind, even if, perhaps particularly if, you don’t agree with them.
3. Watch an Online Lecture or Take a Course
I used to attend conferences for work many times a year. I rarely do so nowadays but recall how stimulating it could be. The great thing is that you can find compelling and intriguing lectures of all sorts online, same with complete lecture series and courses.
Somebody out there already knows something about anything that might interest you. And they’re on YouTube. Whatever topic you want: There’s a class for that.
4. Go Analog
By which I mean take the above advice on lectures and courses and apply it to the world of bricks and molecules.
Most every decent-sized town will have events at which authors and other topical experts will speak on their subjects. It could be the arts, music, social or spiritual issues, a reading from a new novel, whatever. Bookstores, community colleges, universities, and churches will often host such events, and they can be very enriching. You might even try auditing a course a your local college.
What if there isn’t anything like that where you live? Start it yourself.
5. Add Something New to Your Podcast Feed
Most of us have a few regular shows. They drop into our feed and fill our earbuds. But one easy way to inject some intellectual diversity is to jump outside your feed and find some new shows. Search, scan, browse for something fresh.
Better: Ask your friends via text, Facebook, Substack Notes, whatever, about their top-three podcasts. Someone in your current circle will have something you’ve never encountered before but which will be right up your alley.
Stretch Your Mind
By the way, that’s a fun trick for books too. Have a friend or colleague pick out your next book for you. Provide some parameters upfront if you feel you need to, but don’t influence the choice beyond that. Just ask, “Is there something you recommend I read?” Then take their answer to your favorite bookseller.
Will you like it? Maybe not, but the main thing is to avoid ruts. Don’t get stuck. And that extends beyond subject matter. If reading isn’t your thing right now, try an audiobook. If books aren’t your speed right now, try a documentary. If documentaries fail to spark your interest, find something that does.
You can find great stuff by following whatever the various algorithms in your life suggest, but don’t be limited by the suggestion engines. If you’re looking to nourish your mind, you want to expose yourself to new inputs, new ideas.
Novelty is not the point, per se. But novelty can spur new thought, and that’s what nourishes the mind. By encountering and sometimes wrestling with new ideas we stretch our minds and provide them with the raw ingredients for growth and renewal.
What about you: Have any helpful tips for nourishing the mind? Leave them in the comments below.
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An under appreciated area for readers is poetry. At one time it was very popular but has fallen into desuetude. I recommend an anthology of 100 best poems in English or if not used to poetry try Perrine’s Sound and Sense which teaches the reader how to read and enjoy poetry and uses some of the very best poems in English to teach you. When you find a poem you love, memorize it! Nothing better to explore the full meanings of words than poetry with both denotation and connotation!
1. I’m big on checking footnotes and endnotes - they’ve led me to numerous other sources.
2. I’m a frequent Thrift-Store, Used Bookstore, and often a “for sale shelf” at a college to pick up titles I’ve never heard of.
3. I endorse the common practice of taking a book to a coffee shop, listen to some
Instrumental music and read.
4. I’ve done some reading groups - I need to do that more, as you aptly encouraged us to do.