Cognitive Endurance
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Cognitive Endurance
There are countless "meta-skills" we might develop that amplify our capacity across a broad range of other skills.
I would argue that communication is a meta-skill, as are self-discipline and figuring out what "healthy" feels like to each of us, personally, and how to maintain a healthy baseline (and improve upon it over time).
Such pursuits inform our potential when we're learning new things, doing all sorts of work, and even just living our lives, building relationships, playing sports, engaging in hobbies—anything we might do.
I recently read a working paper on another meta-skill called "cognitive endurance," and though it still needs to be put through the wringer of replication and further study, it makes intuitive sense that this might also be a capability worth refining.
The general idea is that cognition—thinking—is like a muscle in that we expend energy when we engage in thinking, and in that it's possible to really tax ourselves by thinking hard and for extended periods of time.
Also like a muscle, this paper posits, we can train ourselves to be able to think longer and harder, but doing so requires we exercise—which in this case means engaging in strenuous mental effort over long periods of time.
This might initially seem to be a simple enough task, but considering the vast array of appealing distractions we have available 24/7 today, and the general propensity of many people to remain in a constant state of task-switching-related distraction, I would argue it's anything but.
This type of mental exercise requires that we sit with our thoughts and mull things over in a productive and focused way without picking up our smartphones, without distracting ourselves with music or other stimuli, and without succumbing to our brain's suggestion that we go get a snack, read a book, or otherwise pull ourselves from this energetically expensive state.
Definitely a concept worth thinking about (perhaps for extended periods of time).
You can read a quick summary by the paper's authors here (there's a full PDF version of the paper available via the link, as well): https://www.nber.org/papers/w30133
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