Chapter 28. System Reboot: Mind Optimization Protocol

With the new problems crashing down on my head, I had to reset my priorities from scratch, and do it ruthlessly. French, which I had been attacking so enthusiastically, went onto the back shelf along with every other mental discipline. My ambitious plan to become a universal soldier hit an unexpected obstacle, my own brain started sending distress signals.

My daily routine became stripped down to the limit and purely physical. Every morning began with the heavy smell of rubber and sweat in the gym, where I pushed my body for overall development. After lunch, I headed to parkour classes. My personal trainer there, a wiry guy who seemed to be made of nothing but tendons, did not let me jump across rooftops yet. Instead, he methodically forced me, again and again, to drill proper falling technique.

“Land softer, shift your weight, roll through it!” he barked.

I obediently dropped onto the mats, trying to turn my body into a spring so I would not wreck my knees or turn my bones into dust in a real jump. Parkour had its own specific slang and trick names, but for my overheated mind it felt like a walk in the park. It had nothing in common with that hell where I forced myself to cram a thousand foreign words a day, feeling the gray matter inside my skull practically melting.

By six in the evening, I was completely free. My body ached pleasantly from fatigue, but my head demanded answers. Until deep into the night, I sat in front of the monitor, greedily consuming video lectures about memory neurons. The blue glow of the screen reflected in my eyes while another gray-haired professor on screen talked about the boundlessness of human capacity. He claimed that our brain is so vast it could hold almost all of Wikipedia.

“Sounds nice,” I thought, rubbing my temples, “but in practice it is much more complicated.”

The human brain, for all its brilliance, has the same limits on information intake as an old computer. Trying to cram a massive amount of data in one sitting is like transferring a terabyte from a cheap flash drive onto an ancient hard disk. The process does not just drag on, it overheats the system. If you do not hit the brakes in time, the processor in your head can simply burn out.

I came across a video describing real cases of this kind of extreme learning, and a chill ran down my spine. It talked about a boy genius from Texas. At eight, he had already finished the school curriculum, and at thirteen, he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with honors. It seemed like every door was open to him: a brilliant career at NASA, global recognition, the future of science. But reality turned out to be terrifying. Now he is only twenty, and he is living out his days in an Alzheimer’s clinic. His brain simply could not handle the pace and self-destructed, turning into mush.

That example hit me like an ice-cold shower. Yes, my memory might be bottomless, but it has to be filled carefully, giving knowledge time to settle and take root. I had somehow managed to cram two foreign languages into myself in just two months, not counting a dozen other skills. My neural connections were still intact only thanks to the invisible influence of [Trainer]. This system worked like a perfect safety fuse, protecting not only my muscles and joints from overload in the gym, but also keeping my mind from collapsing.

At some point, I realized a simple truth: the brain is just another muscle. Any muscle can be overtrained or injured with the wrong approach. Before, I used a blunt command: [study a foreign language until midnight]. Now I understood how stupid and dangerous that was. The correct instruction should sound different: [study a foreign language until optimal retention]. Yes, progress will slow down, but at least I will not wake up one day in a hospital room with an empty head and drool on my chin.

I started wondering whether deleting my memories of endless, pointless forum arguments had been a mistake. After a dozen lectures, I found confirmation that I was right. It was not an act of vandalism against my own personality, it was a necessary system cleanup.

The mechanics are simple. When the brain tries to retrieve the needed information, it searches through all archives. The less junk in those archives, the faster the response. Imagine searching for a file on a computer. Where will the system find it faster: in a folder crammed with a million system logs and temporary files, or in a clean directory that holds only important documents? The answer is obvious.

On top of that, getting rid of mental junk brought incredible relief. You can endlessly justify keeping in memory the nicknames of people you will never meet, or replay arguments from fifteen years ago, thinking, “I should have answered him differently!” But in reality, it is ballast. I compare it to that broken water cooler that sat in our office for a month. It did not provide cold water, it was useless, it just got in the way and collected dust. I simply threw that “cooler” out of my head.

However, I drew a clear line. There is useless junk, and there is unpleasant but necessary experience. The things that shape your personality cannot be deleted. I still remember how in middle school I fell asleep on a bus, leaning my head against the window. The bus hit a bump, and I slammed my ear against the metal frame so hard that tears burst from my eyes. It was painful, embarrassing, and humiliating, but I will keep that experience. Because of it, I never sleep on transport anymore, that lesson is carved into my subconscious forever.

Another unshakable rule for me became a ban on interfering with early childhood memories. I barely remember details of life before school, but I know those shadows of the past lie deep in the cortex. That is where the foundation of who I am was formed. Accidentally erase some “insignificant” detail from infancy, and goodbye, Tom Ross. In his place, someone else would appear, a stranger with my face.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

After carefully weighing all the pros and cons, I arrived at three options for what to do next.

Option one: drop all mental disciplines entirely. Declare a total vacation for a month, maybe more. Let the two languages fully cement themselves in memory without layering anything new on top. Schools and universities have breaks for a reason, it is a physiological necessity.

This path seemed the safest and most logical. But there was one major downside, loss of time. There was not much left before military conscription, and I valued every day. My evenings were free, and the idea of spending them watching cat videos did not appeal to me at all. Especially now, when under the supervision of [Trainer], any studying turned into a highly efficient process.

Option two: continue the deep cleanup. Honestly, I understood it was not a cure-all. Clearing the memory cache did nothing to protect neurons from physical overheating, it only slightly sped up my internal processor. The help was minimal, to be blunt, but I still did it every evening. Why? Because it brought a kind of pleasure nothing else could match.

It is amazing how much toxic junk we carry with us over the years. I still clearly remember an incident from eight years ago: some pimple-faced clerk in a mobile phone shop answered me with open rudeness. I do not remember his name, I would not recognize him in a crowd, and that shop itself has long since turned into a café. But my brain carefully preserved that stale resentment, forcing me to replay that conversation again and again. That information was completely useless, it taught me nothing new, it simply poisoned my mind while taking up precious memory space.