Ahhh, bless those rose coloured memories. Jennifer Lorch; Sergio Sokota; Judy Rawson - if we only knew then what a glorious time we were experiencing.

No, the mind is not stretched in the same way today by executive marketing summaries, excel sheets, office politics or whatever we now spend our working hours engaged in.

I too like to remember that I wrote essays discussing Dante's treatment of women and debating the fate of the peasant in Fontemara. (also that I used to be able to punctuate and complete a grammatically correct sentence)

The only thing I can suggest is read, read, read. Pick up the new Umberto Eco 'Baudolino' and be amazed as memories of Orlando Furioso are dredged from a lost corner of your mind.

Read 'Sight & Sound' and make sure you spend tube delays comparing their reviews to your opinion of the film you made the effort to see. If you're going to let your blood pressure rise about the state of London, the world etc. read editorials and commentaries in the media. Stretch out to great reading like Polly Toynbee's "Hard Work".

If you surround yourself by friends, publications and media that question literature, politics, arts etc etc you cannot help but get those old brain cells working again.

I think when we were 22 years old, we thought there was nothing 'humble' about our opinions. Several years down the line, I wonder why that changes....
(although I have found my choice of degree has created a lifetime of italian restaurant discounts and free digestivos)

"The advantages of playing go are obvious. The fact and survey indicate that the people playing go and practicing to improve skills are likely to improve in the aspects of intellectuality and ability of close reasoning and analyzing, it is also very healthy for human body and mind, especially for the kids and teenagers to enhance their ability of understanding, memory and habit of concentration" - Feng Yun Go School.

Ah, go on. It'd be fun!

Yes, just read stuff. Read a huge range of stuff, too - don't just pick stuff you already know about, try to broaden your range. And don't just take it all in, open a wee critical eye to it all at the same time.

I also once wrote an erudite piece on Henry the Fourth.
But it just took me ten minutes to remember what happened in it and who wrote it.
Moral of the story: pretending to be crazy for decades is always the wisest course.

I often feel like that when people start to get all deep and meaningful about things. Whether its stuff like marxism, and philosophical thoughts that are "proven" by people with waaay too much time (and possibly access to cheap drugs) on their hands. And people who know how theories work (the proper sort by so called "well known" academics rather than by you and yer mates down the pub). And people who feel a profound passion for music created by some bloke in Louisville scratching a rusty metal bucket filled with differing levels of sand across a studio floor and recording it for two hours. People who understand more than Naomi Klein ever wrote in "No Logo", and feel strongly about anti whateverism. People who do understand the ins and outs of fizzy physics and atomic super electric particular chemistry or whatever and insist on destroying my belief that magic exists, or pulling apart my whole faith in God or reincarnation. Damn them.

These people are musos. Would be musos. and they have bigger mouths than genitialia. They like to argue with others and get a feeling of sense when they run proverbial rings around you and your meagre thought that started off with "I wish they'd give Kat in Eastenders a haircut" and ended up with them ranting on about the meaning of meaning and whatever.

I've stopped bothering with these people. If I want a deep and meaningful conversation, I'd rather seek out people who won't talk over the top of my head, who don't talk at me but rather with me, and who don't give off some vibe of getting some sense of superiority over my intelligence. People who go to the pub for a pint, not to recreate the atmosphere of some stuffy seminar class. I become frustrated by people who do things like that, who talk, loudly, and I end up with my words going "It was just a thought..." to the point where you feel like appologising for your existance.

To put it into a theory: they were never given the chance to believe in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, and they've realised that they aren't good looking in any way or have a personality of their own. As a result, they've ended up learning other peoples theories in a parrot fashion, to make up for their own lack of character; they end up dishing out the high IQ stuff to make up for their lack of sex life, or knowledge of pop culture that will ever help them feel remotely useful and popular in a pub quiz; and they're still unhappy they had gobots instead of a proper transformer at Christmas and got teased mercilessly at school for it. They probably have jobs in telemarketing as well.

Recommended reading (or carrying about in your hand) for faux braininess:
"Mother Tongue" by Bill Bryson - damn funny, quite interesting, educational and the chapter on swearing is fantastic.
"To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf - its a wee bit dull, but she was meant to be like, this pioneer of writing about what you were thinking as you were writing and stuff. I don't think it works, cos my own experience is my thought pattern is too random and too fast (stop sniggering at the back.) to actually be effective. And its got a bit of sexual lesbian tension too. And I think, if I remember rightly, V. Woolf killed herself by jumping into a lake with stones in her pockets to weigh her down.
And its a bit hip right now, what with "The Hours" and all.
"The Bell Jar" Sylvia Plath - bloody depressing, but I like the image of 1950s America. So chic in a retro way.

failing all that, I recommend carrying Trivial Pursuit cards in your pockets for random moments of being able to say something slightly brainy.

I have a dreadful memory for facts, which can be a bit of a problem seeing as i'm a scientist. The thing to remember though, Mark, is that theories are not the truth, merely a way of getting closer to it. All science does is say which theories are untrue - by falsification - so you know that the truth must be somewhere in all the mess of theories which are left. When it comes to Relativity this can give quite solid facts, but for Art, Politics etc. things can't be so neatly pinned down. What I do to make up for the hole in my brain is to try to keep things simple and, if I possibly can, to work things out from first principles.

The Scientific Method and Occam's Razor are good tools for sorting out ideas in your mind. Look them up. They can be applied to almost anything.

When it comes to art, music or literature all I believe is if it touches a part of your soul then it must be good, and that's the only judgement that needs to be made.

Mark, you were reading MY Enrico IV essay that you copied - the fact that you had to look "erudite" up in the dictionary should have suggested you were (are) not capable of such a beautifully constructed word-fest...

My immediate group of friends often get into quite deep and ranty socio-political arguments that tend to move pretty quickly. I frequently find myself constructing a well thought-out point only to find that the debate has moved on to some other aspect entirely. So I sit quietly or chuck in a one-liner, now and again, to maintain an air of wit without really getting involved.

The resulting quietness sometimes comes as a disappointment to my friends who know that a) I know a lot of stuff and b) have read enough books to know how to string a pretty sentence together. Especially when I'm finally centre-stage and, like yourself, I can only make a few vague comments which lack the Earth-shattering profundity they expect.

The point is, that after having my defence mechanisms exasperatedly hacked away, I often find I have something worthwhile to add. When I'm on form, the confidence, I think, comes from realising that 'they' don't really have any more capability for empirical debate than me - they're just a bit less airy-fairy about getting the point across.

Or they just listened to 'Today', that morning while I listened to Sara Cox*.

*Not that I do. Obviously

you asked, why laser?. laser is an acronym: it stands for light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation. so now you know.
if you're interested in scientific stuff, how about going to cafe scientifique? there're a couple held in london (see cafescientifique.org).