How do I keep my brain intellectually healthy Veeky Forums?

Become manic depressive and drink a lot

Best answer you're ever going to get. Good post

How does one cultivate spiritual and aesthetic attributes? These seem rather vague and ill defined concepts to me.

But I'm a literal minded STEM autist.

Spirituality is a catch all for existential romanticism. STEM people tend to be a lot more atheistic and that's okay but a lot of classical philosophy is reconciling the significance of self and deciding first on what God is actually defined as, and then later whether or not you believe in it. Most science bois decide that God is a deity that created the Earth and so they decide it's stupid -- it's missing the point of personal spirituality.
Regardless of what you believe or how much you think it's infallibly correct, that mentality is just the type of stubborn obstructionism that's made uninformed atheism/theology so common. It's significantly improved my life to ponder these things frequently and encouraged me to challenge my beliefs and ideas, and so I think it's benefited my intellect. If you still have identical religious or spiritual beliefs to those you reconciled in high school you're probably holding yourself back, regardless of what they are.
It goes hand in hand with the aesthetic appreciation, it's a part of human experience that you can't avoid even if are predisposed to minimizing it.

That's something you'll have to define for yourself since it differs from person to person; whereas activities that stimulate the body and intellect are easy enough to determine, the concepts of beauty or meaning, and thus the activities which elicit them, are a bit more intangible. I think there's often significant crossover between aesthetic or spiritual undertakings and physical or intellectual ones. For example, reading literature, in addition to its intellectual qualities, also has an aesthetic and spiritual dimension (say, in appreciation of its prose or in internalizing its themes to widen your perspective on life), for the avid reader at least. Similarly, a great athlete might not find much value in fiction but may nevertheless find beauty and meaning in his sport of choice. I have a chemist friend who finds immense beauty and fulfillment in his craft, so surely these faculties are not alien to the STEM crowd.

love this poster immensely

Eat berries. Blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, mulberries, etc

:) right back atcha buddy

Elaborate

Religion, beauty and fulfillment are absent from my life. To the point that I suspect they are only memes, and no one honestly feels or believes these things.

I don't know that we ever attain them in themselves, rather we continuously strive towards them to catch as many glimpses as possible. At least with regard to beauty and fulfillment; I don't have a definitive place for religion in my life at the moment either. Have you never felt moved by a work of music or a literary passage or even just a scenic view?

It reminds me of the very common problem these days where people constantly mention they have no energy or that they are tired with an air of humor. Problems like this are only present because you lack the agency to fix them. A tired person needs to exert themselves physically in order to adapt to physical demand, and to eat well in order to supply themselves with energy to do so. A depressed person needs to take steps to find happiness and help. A lonely person needs to challenge themselves to be social. A hollow person needs to pick up the pieces of their life and grasp for more substance in this world beyond themselves, if they can ever claim to be anything but a projecting narcissist.
A theme common to all forms of betterment is that it is struggle. If it was not hard, and you had not accomplished something after, then it would not be good. You can't be better without challenge.
So to recenter onto the point of the thread, reading might make you smarter if it is always in the pursuit of greater challenge. The things which you seem to avoid are even greater challenges for your mind.
You can believe that no one feels or believes in happiness or meaning if you want, I wouldn't expect any less from a person fetishizing intellect on Veeky Forums.

Copious amounts of LSD

bump

Mathematics is the brain equivalent of isolation exercises. Philosophy is the compound lifts.

get a job you pathetic filth

You can further the analogy
>analytic philosophy is brosplits
>continental is SS
>greeks are GOMAD

bump

For some reason I hate you. It's not even ressentiment, I agree with you and lead a happy life, but this sounds really gay the way you put it.

>homophobia

Sounds like your latent homosexuality is leaking out bro

>cognitive

Is this the middle-brow word of the year?

>direct coalition
>cognitive health

As soon as you stop trying to sound smart, by using vocabulary beyond your understanding, I can guarantee a massive increase in intelligence.

Learning of any kind improves the generation of new neurons in your brain.

WHO ARE YOU QUOTING?????