🔗 Share this article

When I was a child, I consumed books until my eyes grew hazy. Once my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, studying for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for deep concentration fade into infinite browsing on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that cognitive flexibility, to halt the brain rot.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the list back in an effort to imprint the word into my recall.

The list now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a slight stretch, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of spotting, documenting and revising it interrupts the drift into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a journalling aspect to it – it acts as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

It's not as if it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my device and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and listed but rarely used.

Still, it’s rendered my thinking much sharper. I find myself turning less frequently for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect word you were searching for – like locating the missing component that locks the picture into place.

At a time when our gadgets drain our focus with merciless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after a long time of lazy browsing, is finally waking up again.