By John Ostapkovich

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - The human brain gives each of us a major advantage in the world, if we choose to use it, which a John Hopkins professor says we too often don't do.

P.M. Forni, professor of Italian and director of the Civility Initiative says his book, The Thinking Life, is not a call to head to the mountaintop for meditation. It's a practical argument, aimed at high school seniors and college freshmen, on why the life of the mind is critical.

"Pursuing good thinking is, for the soul and for the mind, the equivalent of pursuing a good diet for our bodies. Thinking does two important things for us: it expands our range of options, and it helps us choose wisely among those options."

Too often, he argues, we in America are in the grip of "gadgets of mass distraction."

"We are not taught how to think. Thinking is harder than not thinking, so we often take the entertainment default choice about what to do. Thinking is what makes us humans, and so, to say I don't have time to think, it's almost as saying, I don't have time to be human."

Forni says America's anti-intellectual strain and the pace of life conspire against quality thinking time, but if philosopher Descartes was right in saying, "I think therefore I am," what does that make us if we don't?