I hope no one takes offense at this, but I despise almost all books. I have tried to read many books, fantasy, fiction, non-fiction, scientific, linguistic, biographical, historical, and almost no book can keep my attention. Partly because I've got mild ADHD - I've got to do something physical almost all the time.

I've read approximately 5 books ever in my 18.5 year lifespan. I'm in the middle of one of the only books that has ever been able to keep my attention - [u] Gödel, Escher, and Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid [/u], a book about the connection between math, art, and music. Other things I've read - [u] The Bible[/u], [u] The Tao Teh Ching [/u], [u] The Art of War [/u] (by Sun Tzu, not by that European guy who wrote a book of the same name), and [u]1984[/u] by... I forget who (George Orwell, maybe?). Hmm, I think that's about it. It took me almost 3 years to read the bible through, and about a few months each for the other books. I have read about 10 pages of many other books, but I can't ever keep going.

I believe that physical stimulation begets mental stimulation as long as it's not the same repetitive task over and over. For example, I constantly come up with difficult coordination tasks to challenge myself. One of my first ones was setting down my hand and simultaneously lifting my index and ring finger, then setting them down, then lifting my thumb, middle, and pinky fingers and setting them down. Repeat. It's hard to do at first, but stimulates your brain and muscles in a new way and thus you get more coordinated and dextrous, which is advantageous to any other motor skill you use your hands for (guitar playing for me). Actually, my first conscious effort to increase coordination was with my butterfly knives. I learned to open one right handed in about 1/10 of a second (I open them upside down from normal, my own way). Then I learned left handed, now I can do two at once. To get more coordination, I have also learned to write pretty well with my left hand in both print and cursive, and I learned to write completely backwards (text is perfectly readable in a mirror) right handed. The ultimate mental stimulation that I'm working on (and I can do, just not up to speed yet) is multi-hand writing. I can write two different sentences at once, or one sentence with both hands (writing two letters at a time). I find that this type of stimulation is to me what reading is to some of you. Everyone's brain works differently...

Another thing that you might find interesting - I do not watch TV, nor do I play video games. I occasionally watch movies with my girlfriend, but I find it a bore to sit through one by myself (unless it's a martial arts movie... I have a nice collection of Jet Li and Jackie Chan movies). My ADHD is kicking in... I forgot what this thread is about. I have an extremely short term memory except when it comes to schoolwork (except history... I get names and dates and who did what confused, though I managed to pass the American History AP test) and music. I rarely listen to music on my cd player or the radio unless it's a new song or I'm with friends. I can hear songs perfectly in my head just as if it were coming out of a radio - just as enjoyable.

Once final note - an old English teacher of mine once said that "You can't be smart unless you read a lot of books", and another teacher said that to have a good vocabulary and grammer, you must read a lot. This thoroughly pissed me off. I hope to have proven them quite wrong. I had the highest test scores in my parish (though that's not saying much since I'm from Louisiana :), and I'm in the top .1% of the nation academically, and I read less than those people in the bottom 25%, and I think I have a pretty decent vocabulary and grammer since I'm not supposed to be intelligent.

I have a lot more to say, but I just realized how much I've already written and I'll shut up now. Feel free to comment, and please do.