Do you lie about age, or do others find inspiration from your maturity?

Do predictable answers fly from your tongue like corn pops over heat, or do you investigate new insights about aging and weigh different viewpoints?

Would friends describe you as gracious and set in your ways, or as alive and curious?

Myth has it that aging should be gracious living, but rejuvenating brain facts favor voracious curiosity. You?

1. Voracious seniors defy age by tapping multiple hidden and unused intelligences that keep them active in unique performances.

2. Inquiring minds spark more working memory which is less available to those who settle for old or  revert to ruts that shape old socks.

3. Curious elderly hold Alzheimer’s disease at bay, and reboot their minds well beyond golden years.  Check out the Sisters of Notre Dame who beat the pathology of aging brains.

4. Interested seniors learn from opposites, and suggest solutions with more of the brain in mind.  How so? While satisfied seniors tend to burn out through boredom,  lively elders adjust mental thermostats to burn stronger with interest that leads them to life’s peaks.

5. Flexible seniors tap natural chemicals to refuel their brains for better flexibility as they go. While it’s true that older workers sometimes get sidelined unfairly, lively seniors rewire their dendrite brain cells daily for change and winning solutions even when life loses its grip.

Whether your brain is active at a vital workplace or retired from a lifelong career, every action you do today will physically and mentally reshape your brain for more of the same tomorrow. Why not survey your intelligences to see what’s up and running well today, and don’t forget to also look at what still lies hidden or unused.  Both strengths and weaknesses can help you shape life-changing tasks you plan for tomorrow.

Each choice you make in any day will shape your brain for age. Dr. Robyn McMaster shows how nutrients also turbo-charge voracious senior brains, for instance, and sleep choices are vital too. What could you do today shape mind-bending performances?

Pause for a moment and listen to opinionated or narrow-minded people you know. Listen to them tell others why they are far more qualified to give one-sided versions of a  topic than other people hold. Notice the put downs and attacks that fall like pellets in a hail storm?

You’ll likely hear choice words such as bogus or ridiculous to describe any differing view. Not surprisingly,  opinionated people who comment online,  rarely leave names or other ID beside their terrible tone tactics. Hmmm.

While it’s true that opinionated people can also be highly specialized in their fields, it’s also true that they have few skills to engage other people’s views in order to learn from the other side. My own love for research leaves me understanding a thing more clearly when I look at it’s opposite hues and shapes through other people’s eyes. Have you noticed that too?

People who diminish opposing views also tend to cause flame wars. They tend to truncate discussions that could lead to amazing understanding from deeper and wider angles across different minds.

Research helps us to discover and support with specific examples… rather than defend our views and attack others. Great team players tend to avoid polemics in favor of reflecting on interesting opposites, in ways that generate a new whole with facts from both sides.

Here are topics with interesting, supportable opposing viewpoints

TOPIC	One view	Opposing view
1. Education	Back to basics	Brain based
2. Sports	Paid fairly	Paid unfairly
3. Politics	Builds community	Erodes groups
4. Media	Represents most	Represents few
5. Depression	Treat with drugs	Without drugs
6. Immigrants	Great asset	Not an asset
7. College	Necessary	Overrated
8. Salaries	Fair for most	Unfair for most
9. Family	Helps most kids	Hinders many
10. Healthcare	Fair to most	Unfair to most
11. Weightloss	More diets	Less diets
12. Nature	Over-stressed	Under-stressed
13. Animals	Spay	Don’t spay
14. Equity	Growing in US	Shrunk in US
15. Outsource	Good idea	Bad idea
16. Arts	More emphasis	Less emphasis
17. Creativity	Can teach	Cannot  teach
18. Tone	Can help all	Cannot help all
19. Birthrates	Too high	Too low
20. Intelligence	IQ is fixed	IQ is not fixed
21. Friendships	Easy to keep	Hard to keep
22. Divorce	Is a good idea	Not a good idea
23. Stress	Good at  times	Always harmful
24. Music	Should copy free	No free copies
25. Gender	Fair treatment	Unfair
26. Age	Young preferred	Aged preferred
27. Power	From hard work	From privilege

In order to extend insights, from ideas you and others put forward, why not start with a question to hear more of what they understand about their view? Or affirm something you seem to share in common. Suggest another angle that person might appreciate. Or better still, why not suggest a project together – that would build from ideas on opposite sides of the issue. Take the tone survey to see how you do with this intrapersonal intelligence.

Any of these suggestions would free people to add their names beside their ideas in online discussion boards. They’d likely also leave you learning from unexpected melodies that tend to come from opposing views of interesting topics. Worth another look at  tone tactics that replace flame wars with peace plans to move genius ideas forward together?