52
with
underbrush. Instead, some cerebral areas in the creatures without sensory
exercise look more like a desert punctuated only occasionally by the scraggle
of a plant.139
But infants and adults can actually increase the density of connections
in their cerebral tissue, adding as many as 2,000 new synapses per neuron.
How? By mastering new experiences, seeing and doing new things.140 To
both body and brain, taking it easy is death. Vigorous activity, on the other
hand, is life itself.
The author of Ecclesiastes showed just how painful the deprivation of
anything stimulating can be. The man who penned these Biblical passages
was apparently one of the most wealthy and powerful in Jerusalem. He had
reached the pinnacle of society and had achieved what should have been a
delicious leisure.141 Suddenly all life bored him. Now that there were no
new obstacles to overcome, there was nothing new, he sighed, under the sun.
The ennui that struck the writer of Ecclesiastes can erode and defeat
entire civilizations. It is doing that to ours. In 1921, British author G.K.
Chesterton traveled the United States by train. He noted that Americans
were obsessed with discussing their work while Englishmen talked only
about their leisure.142 That may be one reason America was thriving while
England was on the wane. Today, thanks to the popular misunderstanding
of stress, it is we who chatter for hours about sports, fishing or meditation. It
is we who are slipping.
The Japanese know what we have forgotten: that work and challenge
are the keys to a vigorous life.143 They have kept alive the essence of two
American buzzwords that disappeared from our vocabulary in the early
sixties: American ingenuity, and American workmanship. The Japanese
out-study and out-work us. Mid-level Japanese executives start the business
day at nine AM and are frequently still at their desks by eight at
night...usually putting in six days a week. Many of them even volunteer to
work straight through their annual vacations.144 Contrary to a spate of news
stories about "working to death" that appeared in the newspapers of Tokyo
nerve cells, looking under the microscope like a densely tangled
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