“Use it or lose it.” That’s one way it is being put – about our muscles – and especially about our brain. When we do not have things to busy it with it will ‘dry up’ after a certain time. One reason why apparently in extreme situations such as being shipwrecked in lonely spots, people started to busy themselves with simple riddles and small games done with chalk or flint stones and twigs.
A very fine account you will find in the book by Alexandre Dumas, “The Duke of Monte Christo”: Rarely was the dreadful daily routine of prisoners in solitary confinement captured with more details and vivid imagery.
The curiosity of human beings is an aspect of that drive: To constantly busy our brains with something so they won’t ‘run to seed’.
When you are raised to the idea though that nosiness is impolite and even disrespectful, you also learn how to busy yourself.
Even more: The Humanistic ideal based in turn on the bible’s adage to multiply your ‘talents’, makes it a matter of course as a grown, accountable person to take care of your faculties and skills and develop them.
(The bible’s meaning differs slightly, yet the underlying principle applies.)
So, in that respect with even a sizable amount of reading, experience and observation to my name I may appear to some to be a particularly ‘un-nosy’ person: I know such a lot about people and life, in several cultures even; have read since childhood books in the amount of a mid-sized library; I often know what is going on without anyone telling me.
Doesn’t mean to me that I would call myself perfect – far from it. As the German saying goes, ‘I cook with water, only, too’, just as anyone else.
But my brain does not need ‘input’ from daily encounters or the general, common human activities around me. I love family and friends telling me about what moves them or happened to them. If they like. I just don’t depend on it.
I love to respect people who feel differently; just as I love to be respected the same way. As in:
Peaceful coexistence.
A peaceful day to all who might be reading this!