Our eyes are closed and we are concentrating. ''Release the stress, relax, create a void around you,'' Mathieu Monnet, our coach, says. We breathe deeply and prepare to leap into a higher intellectual sphere.
Welcome to the Learning Club, France's first fitness centre for the brain, where you can hone your memory, imagination and other cognitive functions. The six participants are all women. Their mental faculties seem good - but they are paying £20 an hour to improve them. Mental fitness is big business.
The US abounds with psychologists who claim to be able to make you cleverer through such methods as monitoring your brain waves. But no one dreamt of suggesting that the mind also needed to get into shape until executive Jero Dutrieux met Jerome Blin, a neurologist and director of the Memory Clinic in Paris.
Both were convinced that a little mental gymnastics would not go amiss - as long as it was cloaked in lofty cultural thoughts.
The exercises involve art, science, literature, history and even the study of wine. ''You need to be passionately interested in the subject you are learning to learn it well,'' said Dutrieux.
You are given tips on how to perform the exercises, such as linking new information to images in your mind's eye. But Dutrieux says there are no short cuts. You need to practise, work hard and to keep your body in shape as well, since good health and brain fitness go together.
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