Intellectual Wellness Essay

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Intellectual wellness is defined as a person who is engaged in mental activity that they find stimulating and challenges them in creative ways in order to develop greater skills and knowledge. In order to engage one’s self intellectually, a person must both strive to understand new concepts and ideas and come up with creative ways to apply them and explain them to others. An astounding example of an exercise that forces participants to practice these two pillars of intellectual wellness is the party game “Taboo”. In the game Taboo, one partner struggles to explain a word written on the back of a card to teammates. The “giver” (the person describing the word) must be creative in order to explain a word. One would assume that there is a greater rate of success if the giver approaches this task with a logical approach than if their descriptions lack a clear direction. However, our classroom activity suggested that clues given in a less logical fashion were better. Logical thought requires people to engage their left brain much more than their right brain. For this reason it can be hypothesized that givers who are stronger left brains will be more effective than givers who have stronger right brains. However, in our class activity, the right brains proved to to be better at this game. The right brain is also used while one plays Taboo. When, for example, a receiver is stuck and feels like they’ve hit a dead end with their guessing, a flash of insight—a moment of creatively interpreting the givers words—can lead to a breakthrough and a point one. The same applies to a giver—if the receiver isn’t getting the clues being given, the giver must come up with a creative way to explain the word. For these reasons, I was a successful taboo player. I can be logical when need be and I like to be on time and organized. This helped me as I tried to understand
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