Yikes! The younger generation says that my generation is stuck in its ways … and it seems they might be right. In response, I can buy new knitting needles, gum raisin bagels, rock back my yesteryears, or I can change. I say let’s leap for the latter and look again how the 50’s-something generation either gains or loses brain cells daily.

Focus on brain facts, and you’ll likely spot five realities to support those young generation rants about our ruts. Why? We fail to change, and our minds stall in deadly pit stops, whenever we …

1. View IQ as a fixed number that represents limitations – and miss more intellectual opportunities to think and act like Aristotle or Einstein than most people realize.

2. Insist we can teach through lectures and talking as if trumping the verbal approach, when multiple intelligence facts show a speech’s inability to pass on much of anything but boredom.

3. Think that hard knocks make us wiser and abandon our roles as lifelong learners - alongside experts of any age. It’s no longer true, about the hard knock thing, according to new research at the University of Leicester. Conversely, they found that adversity makes its victims more vulnerable to suggestions and lies. Oops –another rock in the bag?

4. Fail to reverse, “I can’t” expressions into, “I can” opportunities through increased serotonin and decreased cortisol for new adventures.

5. See ourselves as having arrived rather than still en route. From the brain’s perspective, that false vision, leads you to fall back on comfortable storage places in basal ganglia regions with promote, old shoe tactics. Your foot ware may have been fashionable in another era, but has long since ceased to move much of anything forward. When we operate more from the brain’s basal ganglia, than from its working memory – we fail to mix in newer ideas or to wear new shoes that fit the current generation’s facts and discoveries at their fingertips.

More importantly? How can we jumpstart our brains – so that they perform better than a bag of rocks? How can we reboot pulsating mental engines for change and adventure to replace one rut today, and avoid living the dreaded words, “too old to change.”

Now there’s another brain boomer blog that will be fun to write soon! Any ideas that could kick off that topic?

Do you remember that well known scene with Jack Benny as the popular cheapskate? When he encountered a gun-wielding rogue, who yelled… “Your money or your life!” Benny’s face showed surprise … and then he squeaked out the words … “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.” Benny’s target?

He’d wired his brain as a cheapskate by acting like one daily… and now Benny’s neuron network slipped into auto mode, when confronted with danger, and it simply chose for him.

If the human brain benefits from targets we set, and if targets work at any age to guide our choices, the next question is how could a target improve your present situation? Targets root themselves into the brains’ neuron network system in two main ways.

First, we tend to target vital life choices - based on beliefs that we wire into our brains simply by what we do daily. The brain operates by building and rebuilding itself according to what you do. Whether consciously or not, people build beliefs daily … based on what we do. Count, scrimp or save money daily and cheapskate becomes a target every time. In response to what you do, your brain creates dendrite brain cell connectors and new neuron pathways soon appear for cheapskate.

What have you planned for today? Can you name a specific target that shows a value you hold dear, based on what you prioritize and do?

Second, targets for successful people tend to be clearly laid out at the start of every day, through a bulleted list, and then followed and tracked regularly for progress. It’s as simply as jotting down over coffee in the morning, a list of 5 things you expect to do that day, and then checking off each item completed.

A study on targets in Success Magazine, surveyed Yale’s 1953 class concerning their targets. Only 3 per cent of this Yale class listed specific targets, for a day or for their lives. Thirteen per cent said they had targets in mind … with no need to write them out daily. The final 84 percent held no specific targets they could name… and simply let what they did define targets formed in their minds. The results?

In 1973, after 20 years, researchers revisited this same class, and discovered alarming differences between those who jotted down targets and those who did not. The 13 percent who wrote out targets … earned double the salary amount of the 84 per cent classmates with no written targets.

More alarming yet … the 3 per cent who wrote daily targets, earned at least 10 times as much as the other 97 percent of graduates combined. Targets create new neuron pathways that move you from where you stand now, closer to that desireable place you envision.

My top targets today include … do financial statements … read my new book on the brain … take a walk to shift several priorities for the coming work week … buy a new CD player. Do you have targets for your day, or is your brain left in auto mode like Jack Benny’s when danger struck?