Just before he flew off to Martha's Vineyard for a two-week vacation, President Barack Obama fielded some questions about the U.S. military campaign against Islamic State militants in Iraq. We imagine that he also had Syria (rebels besieged in Aleppo), Afghanistan (election recount debacle), Ukraine (plane shot down, Russian troops lurking), West Africa (Ebola epidemic spreading fast), Libya (militias rampaging), Iran (nuclear negotiations floundering), Obamacare (court ruling could bury it), immigration (what to do with all those kids) and, oh, about 947 other crises on his mind.
Critics carped that now was not the time for him to take a vacation. They always do, when presidents, Republican or Democratic, decamp in August. (George W. Bush took 25 days at his Crawford ranch in 2002). How can the president leave when the world is in crisis, they ask. Bulletin: The world is always in crisis.
Maybe you've seen the movie, Lucy, or heard the notion that humans use only about 10 percent of those billions of neurons floating around in their skulls and many brain cells are, in a sense, on permanent vacation, just waiting to be roused from their idyll. Wrong. That notion grew from a 19th Century experiment in which a researcher removed ever larger portions of brain tissue from a range of animals and then observed how that affected their behavior, University of California at Irvine cognitive science professor Gregory Hickok recently wrote in the New York Times.
Trouble is, the French neurophysiologist who did the experiments, Pierre Flourens, got it all wrong, "because his methods for assessing mental capacity were crude and his animal subjects were poor models for human brain function," Hickok wrote.
Conclusion: If we had a huge amount of brain power in reserve, we might not need vacations. We could just tap those beach-lolling brain cells. But we don't.
Time off tunes up a well-functioning brain.
Your brain basically has two modes: 1. Undistracted, focused on a task and 2. Daydreaming and mental wandering. When one is active, the other is not.
Encouraging news: America's "vacation deficit" is declining. More Americans--just over half of those polled--say they intend to take a vacation in 2014, reports Ipsos Public Affairs. That's up 5 percentage points over last year.
So let your neurons roam free this summer. Take a break. The challenge: Try hard to use less than 10 percent of your brain.
Editorial on 08/21/2014