BRAIN CAN ALWAYS WORK

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVI, Issue 26, 30 December 1925, Page 14

BRAIN CAN ALWAYS WORK

CHANCE AGAINST HURT BY STUDY. FAMOUS SURGEON TELLS WHAT REAL PERIL IS, LONDON, Nov. 1. Sir Arthur Keith, addressing the students at the opening of the winter session of King’s College Hospital Medical School, said it was not the eating of knowledge, but the digesting of it that made the real student. The nineteenth or twentieth year was a good time to begin to acquire the student habit, because it was about that time that the brain acquired its fullest size, when all its connections were formed. Nevertheless the power of study was extremely difficult to acquire because all inherited instinct was against it. There was a curious warfare between the stomach and the brain, he said. The two organs did not seem to go in harness well together. Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer—all students—were constantly complaining of their stomachs. That was because it was not realised that the brain required less food to maintain it than the muscles. He would not like to say exactly how much the brain consumed during study, but he had a suspicion that the energy in half an ounce of sugar would be quite sufficient to write any of Shakepeare’s plays if it happened to find its way to the brain of a Shakespeare. (Laughter). THE SAFETY MARGIN. The person who desired to acquire th student habit with success must adopt a regimen—a systematic course of diet. Just as men trained for a boat race or any athletic competition, so they must train for the life of a student. There was no fear of using the mature brain to its fullest capacity. Nature had supplied a wide'margin of safety in every bodily organ. The heart, if put to it, was capable of doing ten times its normal work. The same law was true of the brain. James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, learned Gorman at the age of seventyfive. Goethe, at sixty-five, mastered Oriental languages. For one brain in any way damaged by over use there were a million brains damaged by under use or misuse. He urged the importance of medical men preserving the student habit through life. The moment the professional man lost the habit he became a mere camp follower. It would be to the profit both of medicine and the individual practitioner if the student habit were well maintained throughout life.