How Fit Is Your Brain?
We have become remarkably sophisticated at measuring physical fitness. We track our steps, heart rate, sleep, pace, strength, and recovery. We understand that healthy behaviors support fitness, but they don't tell us how fit we actually are. Eventually we want to know what the body can do. How far can you run? How much can you lift? How long can you sustain effort? If we want to improve, we establish a baseline and train from there.
We approach our brains very differently. Most advice about cognitive performance has focused on protection: turn off notifications, spend less time on your phone, stop multitasking, reduce screen time, or try a digital detox. Those strategies can be useful, but they primarily remove interference. Putting your phone in another room may make it easier to concentrate, but it doesn't tell you how much concentration you actually have. We have spent years asking, “How do I become less distracted?” A more interesting question may be, “How cognitively capable am I?”
I recently heard Cal Newport describe this as moving into a new phase of cognitive fitness. Instead of focusing only on protecting attention, begin measuring and training specific cognitive capabilities. One of his proposed measures is reading endurance: How long can you read challenging nonfiction while maintaining meaningful concentration without checking your phone, looking at your computer, or switching to something else? Theodore Roosevelt represents an extraordinary historical example. Despite an intensely demanding life, Roosevelt was known for his remarkable reading capacity and ability to concentrate deeply. Most of us aren't trying to become Roosevelt, but his example reminds us that our current attention span does not necessarily represent the limit of our capacity.
Try the reading test yourself. Pick something challenging, start a timer, and read until you can no longer maintain meaningful concentration. Maybe your number is eight minutes. Maybe it is 12 or 30. The number is less important than what you do with it. Instead of saying, “My attention span is terrible,” you now have a baseline. If you can sustain difficult reading for 12 minutes, train for 15, then 20. This changes cognitive fitness from something we vaguely worry about into a capability we can deliberately develop.
That shift may become increasingly important as technology makes it easier to remove cognitive effort from our lives. We learned with our bodies that eliminating physical effort and developing physical capacity are different goals. Modern life removed enormous amounts of physical work, so we deliberately put some of it back through exercise. We may be approaching a similar moment with our brains. As AI and other technologies do more of our cognitive work, we may need to become more intentional about the thinking we still want our own brains to practice. The question worth considering is no longer simply how to protect your attention. It is what you want your brain to remain exceptionally good at doing, and whether you are actually training it to do so.
Cal Newport "Monday Advice Podcast". How to build a cognitive training program.
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