My daughter is constantly asking me if I know where her keys are and I usually don’t because she never hangs them up on the key thingy in the kitchen–like I do every day.  Turns out I might be doing my middle–aged brain a disservice through this rote behavior–and my daughter is working her brain in a beneficial way by dropping her keys in a different place every day.

Scientists have found that the brain does not, in fact, loose millions of brain cells daily between the ages of 40 and 60 as previously reported.  In fact, while some neural connections become folded into corners of the brain and become a little harder to retrieve, we actually gain a fuller understanding of the bigger picture as we age.

What we can do to keep those neural connection sharp, is to do things differently.  Drop your everyday routine, be it good or bad and shift things up.  Take a different route to work.  Do yoga instead of cycling.  Pull out the cookbook and make something you’ve never tried.  Learn a foreign language.  Or at least try.

The same thing goes for marketing.  Get in a rut, use the exact same process for every client, go back to the old tried and trued standards and you’ll be left behind.  Unearth the unexpected.  Don’t think out of the box, there is no box.  Comfort zone be damned.

For all my fellow geezers, here’s the NYTimes article I referenced.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/education/edlife/03adult-t.html?scp=1&sq=brain&st=cse

And for all you youngsters, keep mashing it up.  You’ll be here soon enough.  If you see a set of VW keys laying around, they’re mine.