Brain worker

“ In this way they have been enabled to astonish the world by their mental achievements, which is very largely a matter of skill in exercising alternate sets of faculties, allowing rest to some while giving healthy exercise to others. The continual use of one set of faculties by an ambitious worker will soon bring him to grief. No set of brain cells can possibly set free more brain force in the combustion of thought than is stored up in them. The tired brain must have rest, or nervous exhaustion, brain fever, or even softening of the brain is liable to follow. ”

“ If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had better turn to hand work—it is an indication on Nature's part that she did not mean him to be a head worker. ”

“ Intensity of this cross-section activity now tends to unity, so that all parts of the brain energize together. In a brain with this switchboard function well organized, each reaction has grown independent of its own stimulus and may result from any stimulation, and each act, e.g., a finger movement of a peculiar nature, may tire the whole brain. This helps us to understand why brain-workers so often excel laborers not only in sudden dynamometric strength test, but in sustained and long-enduring effort. ”

“ Such people, I conceive, snatch eagerly at their vacations as opportunities for mental activity, and pack into their trunks, as a necessary item, many stout volumes of history, philosophy, and so forth. That is their holiday-literature. I address myself not to them, but to the many people who, like myself, may be called brain-workers: the people who depend for their comfort on the activity of their brains in this or that direction—in the direction of a business, or of an art, or of a learned profession. ”

“ He believed in the truth, too little recognized among brain-workers, that men can develop themselves into splendid mental conditions, wherein they can accomplish almost double their ordinary amount of labor. ”

“ Occurrence of Psychasthenia.—It must not be thought that these curiously interesting conditions occur only among people of low intellectual caliber, or in those of narrow intellectual interests, mere specialists who may have acquired a reputation for doing one thing well. They are frequent among the most intellectual classes. Brain workers of all kinds, unless they are careful to vary the interests of life, unless, as suggested in the chapters on Occupation of Mind and Diversion of Mind, they have a hobby besides their usual occupations, are likely to suffer in this way. ”

“ Brain workers, or habitual worriers, use up force and become thin quite as quickly [Pg 16] as those whose work is muscular. The term “brain workers” is commonly applied to professional men or women,—to authors, editors, teachers, or to those engaged in business, but the woman who manages her household judiciously, or the woman who spends her life fretting over existing conditions, or worrying over things which never happen, uses quite as much brain force. ”

“ I refer to the brain workers. I say large and important, because in their ranks are to be found literary men and journalists, members of the professions, active-minded, busy men of the commercial world, and the vast array of those having mental work and clerical occupations. In one of the latest books on the subject of food and diet by Dr. ”

“ That the brain-working classes—clergymen, lawyers, physicians, merchants, scientists, and men of letters—live very much longer than the muscle-working classes; that the greatest and hardest brain-workers of history have lived longer on the average than brain-workers of ordinary ability and industry; that clergymen are longer-lived than any other great class of brain-workers. ”

“ As I said just now, when we talk of an overtaxed nervous system it is usually the brain we refer to, and not the spine; and the question therefore arises, Why is it that an excess of physical labor is better borne than a like excess of mental labor? The simple answer is, that mental overwork is harder, because as a rule it is closet or counting-room or at least in-door work--sedentary, in a word. The man who is intensely using his brain is not collaterally employing any other organs, and the more intense his application the less locomotive does he become. ”

“ A great physiologist, well known among us, long ago expressed to me the same opinion; and one of the greatest of living naturalists, who is honored alike on both continents, is positive that brain-work is harder and more hurtful here than abroad, an opinion which is shared by Oliver Wendell Holmes and other competent observers. ”

“ I would desire this evening to lay down and to enforce a principle that is, I think, not sufficiently, and often not at all, considered in practical medicine and surgery. It is founded on a physiological basis, and it is of the highest practical importance. The principle is that the brain cortex, and especially the mental cortex, has such a position in the economy that it has to be reckoned with more or less as a factor for good or evil in all diseases of every organ, in all operations and in all injuries. ”

“ One of our ablest medical scholars reports himself to me as having never been aware of any sensation in the head, by which he could tell that he had worked enough, up to a late period of his college career, when, having overtaxed his brain, he was restricted by his advisers to two or three hours of daily study. He thus learned to study hard, and ever since has been accustomed to execute all mental tasks at high pressure under intense strain and among the cares of a great practice. ”

“ But is the superior longevity of these classes due to the fact that they are brain-workers, or must it not be traced to a complication of causes? If brain-work is per se salutary and conducive to long life—which I do not deny—and if, as we may gather from Dr. Beard's second proposition here given, its beneficial influence is proportionate to its intensity, we should find the men whose brain-work is devoted to origination stand highest in the list. ”

“ I have chosen here as examples men whose brains are engaged constantly in the higher forms of mental labor; but the difficulty of arresting at will the overtasked brain belongs more or less to every man who overuses this organ, and is the well-known initial symptom of numerous morbid states. ”

“ It is true that in some cases of very dangerous brain tire, mental labor is performed with extraordinary vigor and ease; the power of work, is, for the time, markedly increased, and even the quality of the product may be raised. The patient may glory in a wild intellectual exaltation, a sense of mental power, with an almost uncontrollable brain activity. It is probable, however, that these cases are not instances of pure neurasthenia, or brain exhaustion, but that there is active congestion of the gray matter of the brain. ”

“ There is a form of overwork, exceedingly common and exceedingly disastrous—one which equally accompanies great intellectual labors and minor tasks. I allude to worry. When we medical men speak of the workings of the brain we make use of a term both expressive and characteristic. It is to cerebrate. To cerebrate means to think, to reason, and to reach conclusions; it means to concentrate and to work hard. To think, then, is to cerebrate. To worry is to cerebrate intensely. ”

“ When we emerge from this necessary field of labor, we come to those functions peculiar to the proper brain. Here all is continual action. Thought, imagination, will, the conflicting passions, language, and even articulation, claim their first impulse from the nervous centre. The idlest reverie, as well as the most profound study, taxes the brain. ”

“ While we cannot do much to lessen the amount of brain-work [Pg 239] or check the ambitions of adult life, as they have become so intensified by modern modes of living and the requirements of business, yet we may hope to do something by the judicious training and education of the young.
That this may be effectually done, we must study the action of the brain and nervous system when under the influence of different external conditions and agencies. ”

“ Book-knowledge, lecture-knowledge, examination-knowledge, are all in the brain. But work-knowledge is not only in the brain, it is in the senses, in the muscles, in the ganglia of the sympathetic nerves,—all over the man, as one may say, as instinct seems diffused through every part of those lower animals that have no such distinct organ as a brain. See a skilful surgeon handle a broken limb; see a wise old physician smile away a case that looks to a novice as if the sexton would soon be sent for ”

“ It is certainly clear, without a knowledge of anatomy or physiology, that for pure, unadulterated thinking, only the brain is needed; and if vital force is given to other parts of the body to hold them in unnatural contraction; we not only expend it extravagantly, but we rob the brain of its own. When, for purely mental work, all the activity is given to the brain, and the body left free and passive, the concentration is better, conclusions are reached with more satisfaction, and the reaction, after the work is over, is healthy and refreshing. ”

“ The occupation at this period becomes, so to speak, wrought into the texture of the nervous system, constituting, as it were, a part of it, so that in after-life it is conducted with much less friction and mental anxiety than would otherwise be certain to exist; while the discipline which comes to the brain in the process of learning, should be of quite as much value as may come from other modes of education. ”

“ Accordingly, the important factor is not merely the quantity of brain matter, but more especially the brain organization, and, not least of all, the exercise and use of the brain power.
The brain, if it is to fully develop its powers, must be diligently exercised, the same as any other organ, and also correspondingly fed. ”

“ But yet, as I look back and see myself going thru these various maneuvers, I am fully confident of the fact that all this time I was also doing something else—that my poor brain cells, which really needed recuperation more than any other part of my body, that these brain cells were still at work, that I was all the time carrying on a more or less strenuous train of thought as exhaustive as tho I were seated in my study chair, or standing before my class in the recitation room. ”

“ All Mind Labour means Wear of Brain.—​And first of all, the more educable powers of the child—his intelligence, his will, his moral feelings—have their seat in the brain; that is to say, as the eye is the organ of sight, so is the brain, or some part of it, the organ of thought and will, of love and worship. Authorities differ as to how far it is possible to localise the functions of the brain ”

“ Who is going to do better brain-work: he whose brain is steadily fed with vigorous, rich blood, made by machinery kept constantly in excellent order, never cramped, aided daily by judicious and vigorous exercise, tending directly to rest and build him up? ”

“ With all that soul-searching and brain-scratching, your mind now ought to be sufficiently elastic and sensitive to attempt a general reorganization of a deranged cerebral cortex—psychokinesis—the goal you've been working toward. ”

“ A paper was read several years ago before the members of a society in London, in which the author maintained that mental labor was never injurious to a perfectly healthy human organization, and that the numerous cases of break-down, which are commonly attributed to excessive brain-work, are due, in reality, to the previous operation of disease. ”

“ But the application for us, in studying the results of manual training, lies in the thought that the poor, undeveloped brain centers in the deficient might be strengthened by exercise brought about at the extremities. It is a logical suggestion. The bodily faculties are peripheral, the brain central. As a matter of experience, and as a necessary inference from our philosophy, the interaction between them is complete. The health of one means the health of the other. ”

“ And that "course of treatment for the mind," by means of which we are to "realize some of the ambitions which all of us cherish in regard to the utilization in our spare time of the magnificent machine which we allow to rust within our craniums"—that desiderated course of treatment has not apparently been devised by anybody. The Sandow of the brain has not yet loomed up above the horizon. ”

“ His visits to the farms, his planning for the prevention of the spread of disease, his deep interest in the reports and the constant improvement of conditions, instead of hampering his other intellectual activity by wasting brain force, probably proved restful by diverting the blood stream away to the cells that occupied themselves with this other and very different problem, and so proved a benefit, not an evil. Perhaps other men might not have had the store of nervous energy to enable them to carry on work in this way, but for those who have, this is the ideal arrangement. ”

“ A physiologist ought to be able to discover some curious distinction between the brain of a person who has never given a thought to the means of subsistence, and that of one who has never known a day free from such cares. There must be some special cerebral development representing the mental anguish kept up by poverty.'
'I should say,' put in Amy, 'that it affects every function of the brain. ”

“ This is the rationale of the pathological treatment of the brain. Tell an overworked president of a railway company, who falls asleep at the directors' meeting, that he must rest, or die of softening of the brain, and he will smile a sad reply that he can not rest. He is right, thus far: he can not rest his whole brain, but he can rest the cerebellum—the seat of the will-power—by bringing into higher activity and more frequent exercise the upper and frontal lobes. ”