    52

    with

    underbrush.  Instead, some cerebral areas in the creatures without sensory

    exercise look more like a desert punctuated only occasionally by the scraggle

    of a plant.139

    But infants and adults can actually increase the density of connections

    in their cerebral tissue, adding as many as 2,000 new synapses per neuron.

    How?  By mastering new experiences, seeing and doing new things.140  To

    both body and brain, taking it easy is death.  Vigorous activity, on the other

    hand, is life itself.

    The author of Ecclesiastes showed just how painful the deprivation of

    anything stimulating can be.  The man who penned these Biblical passages

    was apparently one of the most wealthy and powerful in Jerusalem.  He had

    reached the pinnacle of society and had achieved what should have been a

    delicious leisure.141   Suddenly all life bored him.  Now that there were no

    new obstacles to overcome, there was nothing new, he sighed, under the sun.

    The ennui that struck the writer of Ecclesiastes can erode and defeat

    entire civilizations.  It is doing that to ours.  In 1921, British author G.K.

    Chesterton traveled the United States by train.  He noted that Americans

    were obsessed with discussing their work while Englishmen talked only

    about their leisure.142 That may be one reason America was thriving while

    England was on the wane.  Today, thanks to the popular misunderstanding

    of stress, it is we who chatter for hours about sports, fishing or meditation.  It

    is we who are slipping.

    The Japanese know what we have forgotten: that work and challenge

    are the keys to a vigorous life.143  They have kept alive the essence of two

    American buzzwords that disappeared from our vocabulary in the early

    sixties: American ingenuity, and American workmanship.   The Japanese

    out-study and out-work us.  Mid-level Japanese executives start the business

    day at nine AM and are frequently still at their desks by eight at

    night...usually putting in six days a week.  Many of them even volunteer to

    work straight through their annual vacations.144  Contrary to a spate of news

    stories about "working to death" that appeared in the newspapers of Tokyo

       nerve cells, looking under the microscope like a densely tangled

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