by A. J. Jacobs
And yet . . . if you cut through all the hype and the Learning Annex quackery, most scientists believe we can improve our own brains, at least somewhat.
And for my health project, improve it I must. The World Health Organization defines health as a state of emotional, mental, and physical well-being. I dealt with emotional last month. While I’m on this side of the Cartesian duality, I figure I should tackle the mental.
On the advice of brain experts, I’m following a list of mind-expanding activities.
• Do the crossword puzzle (several studies suggest that doing the crossword puzzle could help delay cognitive decline). I fill out The New York Times crossword puzzle on my computer every morning, or at least a few boxes. Crosswords have joined my list of Healthy Vices alongside chocolate and naps. Whenever I get a sidelong glance from Julie that says, “I thought you were so busy,” I tell her, “It’s for my brain!”
• Play logic games. I downloaded the allegedly scientific Brain Challenge onto my iPhone. You’re given a Brain Trainer—a muscle-bound cartoon character in a white lab coat who berates you when you don’t solve the logic problems quickly enough. “What’s the matter with you today? You don’t seem yourself.” I deleted it. I don’t need to be trash-talked by a bunch of pixels.
I prefer the logic puzzles created by my son Lucas. They are a version of that game “Which one of these doesn’t belong?” The trick is, instead of offering three or four items, Lucas gives only two options. He’ll ask me, “Which one of these doesn’t belong: the chair or the tomato?” “Chair?” I’ll say. “No, tomato.” It’s more challenging than a Zen koan.
• Do the math. I tried one of the genre’s most popular books, Train Your Brain, by Dr. Ryuta Kawashima. It involves a nightly routine of solving simple math equations. The promise is that the “delivery of oxygen, blood, and various amino acids to the prefrontal cortex,” will “result in more neurons and neural connections, which are characteristics of a healthy brain.” The equations were so simple, even for a math idiot like me, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of accomplishment, especially when my time dropped by fifteen seconds in six weeks. Plus, I like to exhale loudly while doing the exercises, as if I were doing some lat pull-downs. That makes me feel virile.
• Memorize poems. In his book The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge argues that memorizing passages—as schoolchildren did in the nineteenth century—has surprising benefits. “When students used to memorize poems, it helped them with the ability to speak fluently,” Doidge tells me when I call him for guidance. I’ve been reading Alice in Wonderland to my son, so I spent a few days memorizing the poem “You Are Old Father William.” I’m a sucker for any poem that rhymes “suet” with “do it.”
• Become belligerent. Well, maybe that’s not the way the research puts it. But that’s what has resulted. One of my brain books says that one of the best ways to keep the brain sharp is to argue. Nowadays, I’m always looking for a fight. Just today, I bickered with Julie about our Netflix queue, towel usage, and the placement of the apple juice in the refrigerator. I want it tucked out of sight so the kids won’t see it, since it’s so sugary.
Yesterday, Julie told me she read an article about how songbirds are being illegally hunted in Europe.
“Isn’t that terrible?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. Then I saw an opening. “But let me ask you this. Is it any more terrible than people killing and eating turkeys or chickens?”
“So you’re taking the side of songbird hunters now.”
“No, I’m just asking, why should I have more empathy for songbirds? Because they look pretty and sound pretty? That’s really unfair to ugly birds.”
I then ranted about how we think it’s okay to eat ugly animals: cows and turkeys. But if you’re a beautiful creature, like a horse or a swan, you get a free pass. And we also treat ugly people horribly. Studies have shown that parents inflict less punishment on their attractive kids.
By this time, Julie had stopped listening, and I’m following her around the kitchen as she puts away glasses and bowls.
• Try new things. The theory here is that the brain is similar to a ski slope. The more times you perform an activity in the same way (shop at the grocery store starting at the left aisle, for example), the deeper the rut you carve in your brain. The great, bumper-worthy phrase that describes it: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”
If you want to keep your brain flexible and open to new ideas, you should eliminate rote, repetitive activities. A book called Keep Your Brain Alive has dozens of “neurobic exercises” to shake up your brain. I brushed my teeth with my left hand (wacky!). I took a different route home from the drugstore (superwacky!). I ate dessert first, then my entrée. (Get me to a psych ward!) I don’t mean to be flip. There really is something wonderful about these exercises. They force mindfulness.
There’s a tradition in Judaism that on the Sabbath, you should do things differently from the rest of the week. I once had an Orthodox Jew describe to me how she took this edict to mean that even lipstick should be applied in a new way—counterclockwise instead of clockwise. And this small tweak reminded her to focus on how pleasing the putting-on-lipstick ritual can be.
Of course, nonstop mindfulness is exhausting. You need a little dull repetition for balance. And there’s another danger as well. When Julie found out that I had committed myself to embracing new things, she took full and cruel advantage. “We’re going to try Momofuku,” she said, referring to a trendy restaurant I’ve been avoiding. “I know it’s loud, but you’ve never been there before. You should go. For your brain.”
Testing My Brain
I decide to seek professional assistance. The Brain Resource Center on New York’s Upper West Side promises to help my brain reach “peak performance.”
On a Thursday morning, I meet with Dr. Kamran Fallahpour, a forty-eight-year-old neuroscientist with a trace of an accent from his native Iran.
Our first task, he says, will be to assess my brain. Kick its tires.
Minutes later, I’m sitting in a spare white room with a whole bunch of stuff on my head. There are squirts of maple-syrupy hair gel. There’s a rubbery contraption that resembles an Amelia Earhart aviator cap, with dozens of electrodes sticking out of it. All that is topped by a white hairnet.
The equipment is meant to track my brainwaves and eye movement as I go through three hours of mental games and quizzes. Dr. Fallahpour dims the lights; I slip on the headphones and focus on the computer screen.
My first task is to stare at a red dot for six minutes. I stare, and I stare. Dr. Fallahpour tells me I can’t clench my jaw. It might throw off the measurements. So my mouth is ajar. I look dumb. I feel dumb. Will this affect my score?
I do mazes, I memorize word lists, I arrange letters on a checkerboard pattern. I study photos of random faces and try to discern their emotions—even as a horrible gunshotlike noise blasts in my ear to distract me.
The test’s narrator is a British man with a voice that’s both reassuring and condescending.
“Well done,” he says after each task, even if I flubbed it.
On another test, I have thirty seconds to say—out loud—all the words I can think of that start with the letter F. I begin with the perfectly acceptable “father, fancy, frankfurter.” But inevitably, my brain starts working blue. Do I say the F-word? What about a particularly offensive slur for gay men? I am torn between my conscience and my competitive side. My competitive side wins.
A week later, I return to Dr. Fallahpour’s office to go over the results.
“Do you want the bad news first or the good news? I always tell people that the bad news is actually good news, because then we know how to treat it.”
I’d rather have the regular old good news.
“Overall, you have no abnormality in the cognition areas.”
He clicks on his Mac and pulls up my file. It shows charts with frenzied zigzag lines, and grape-size pictures of my
brain glowing in red or yellow or green.
I did well on the verbal fluency, possibly because I resorted to slurs.
“You’re in the right occupation,” he says.
And the bad news?
“There’s a little bit of slowing in the frontal sites. It could mean that you have some problems with executive function and parts of attention. Also in the affective area, you may have trouble with moods.”
I’m also, I discover, terrible at memorizing word lists. Oh, and NASA should think twice before hiring me to help with liftoffs—I’m in the eleventh percentile for counting backward.
So . . . a mix.
“Overall, you have a pretty good brain,” he says. Above average in many ways, below average in others.
My brain is not a Lamborghini. It’s more like a Lexus, or a Toyota.
It’s decent. I kind of expected that, but it’s a little disappointing to hear it from a guy in a white lab coat. A little part of me still clung to the delusion that Dr. Fallahpour would burst through the door, clutching the results and saying, “I’ve never seen anything like this! Your brain is a national treasure!”
The Nerd-vs.-Jock Fallacy
I’ve always liked stories about eggheads versus jocks. When reading the Bible, I came to see David versus Goliath as a sort of prequel to Revenge of the Nerds. On one side, you had big dumb ’roidedout Goliath. And on the other side, skinny but smart David with a sling instead of a pocket protector. Everyone assumes David’s going to get crushed. But clever David uses his high IQ to pummel the blockhead Goliath, and then goes off with the hot cheerleaders. Or at least he gets to marry eight wives, the biblical equivalent.
You can even view history as a nerd–jock battle for supremacy. In his book American Nerd, writer Benjamin Nugent argues that tensions rose when the Industrial Revolution forced men indoors and into unmanly, chair-bound jobs. Some men felt they had to reassert their virility.
So the split became more extreme: In one corner, you had folks like our jockiest president, outdoorsman Teddy Roosevelt, who railed against young men with shoulders “sloped like a champagne bottle.” And in the other corner, you have people like geek hero Marcel Proust, a champagne-shouldered Frenchman who rarely left his bed during the decade he wrote his masterpiece.
As you can imagine, my friends and I always empathized more with the champagne-shouldered, bookish side. My motto: a sound mind in an unsound body.
But this project has been a shock to the nerd’s-eye worldview. Because the stereotype of the smart nerd and the dumb jock is not accurate. Quite the opposite. Scientifically speaking, it’s more accurate to talk about the smart jock. Aerobic activity increases brainpower. Which seems unfair. Nature doing another one of her cosmic jokes.
Fortunately for the skinny and uncoordinated, you don’t need to be an all-star rugby player to boost your brainpower. Any movement, any type of exercise, works. (The sales guy at my gym coaches a Quidditch team, a good option for the athletically inclined dweeb.)
The expert on exercise and intelligence is John Ratey, a Harvard psychiatry professor and author of the book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. Exercise, argues Ratey, improves your brain in both the short term (you’re sharper for the couple of hours after aerobic activity) and the long term (it staves off brain aging and Alzheimer’s). It bucks up the brain in all sorts of areas, including focus, memory, mood, and impulse control.
There are dozens of studies on exercise in his book, so I’ll just pluck one out to give a taste. A study in the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport found that Georgia students who did forty minutes of daily exercise showed more academic improvement than those who did twenty minutes a day. Those who got no exercise showed no improvement.
These findings make evolutionary sense. As Ratey says, “While tracking their prey, our ancestors needed to have the patience, optimism, focus and motivation to keep at it. All these traits are influenced by serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine.” So we evolved to have higher levels of these chemicals when we walk or run.
On a cellular level, Ratey says, exercise increases neuroplasticity, blood flow, and levels of a protein called “brain-derived neurotrophic factor” (BDNF), which he nicknames “Miracle-Gro for the brain.” If only Albert Einstein had an elliptical machine in his office, he might have cracked the Grand Unified Theory.
It would stand to reason, then, that those on sports teams would also be academic superstars. Except for one complicating factor: Jocks may not spend enough time studying. There are only so many hours in a day.
I haven’t found any rigorous studies on school sports teams and GPA. But Ratey says kids on the lacrosse and soccer teams are generally above-average students, but those on football and basketball teams are not. They are too busy being “kings of the school.” Thankfully, his theory hasn’t yet resulted in Ratey getting beaten up by angry high school football players.
Because of my treadmill desk, I’m sort of already combining thought and movement. (I’m up to mile 652, by the way.) But after reading Ratey’s book, whenever I come to a hard problem, I do jumping jacks to try to dislodge the solution from my brain. Sometimes it works, if only by waking me up.
A couple of weeks ago, I had to make a presentation in front of a bunch of intimidatingly smart people. I spent the ten minutes prespeech jogging in place backstage, though I stopped whenever anyone walked by.
Neurofeedback
I’m back at the Brain Resource Center for my cerebral workout. I sit on Dr. Fallahpour’s black leather chaise longue, my eyes trained on a computer screen, five electrodes dotting my scalp. The screen has three vertical bars—blue, red, and green—that bounce up and down in response to my brain’s electrical activity. My job is to keep the bars inside their target zones.
How? It’s hard to explain. “Think of it this way,” says Fallahpour. “It’s like one of those freeway signs that shows your speed in real time. It says you’re going seventy-five mph in a fifty-mph zone, and you slow down.”
If my brain nudges the bar above the line, I get a reward: relaxing Tibetan chimes through my headphones.
This regimen is neurofeedback, and Dr. Fallahpour is one of the country’s experts on it. Neurofeedback, the idea that you can learn to control your brainwaves to improve your concentration and lower your stress, is a controversial procedure. It’s far from proven science, and some dismiss it as flaky. But there’s some evidence that it might be useful, including a study by the National Institutes of Mental Health that found it could help combat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in kids. A Stanford experiment has used neurofeedback involving brain imagery to alleviate some chronic pain.
It’s a strange feeling to try to manipulate your brain waves. “Okay, now focus on the sounds of the bells,” I say to myself. That seems to work. The bells chime, the bar stays up. So I tell myself, “Let’s make a note of that strategy. Concentrate on the bells.” But as soon as I take myself out of the moment and make a note of the strategy, the bells go silent and my bar drops. It’s like meditation turned into a video game.
I did neurofeedback a half-dozen times, not as many as Fallahpour recommended. So many body parts, so little time. What I did, though, I liked. I always left feeling calm but energized, like I’d just had espresso but with no jitters.
Overall, after my month of neurofeedback and neurobics and math and arguments, do I feel like my brain is less flabby? It’s hard to quantify, but . . . yes, a little. I’m faster at math problems. I took an online intelligence test and scored 23 percent better at the end of the month. I can memorize poems more quickly. I played the card game hearts last weekend. Usually, I’m happy to play on hunches and vague approximations. But this time, my well-toned brain felt up to counting cards. I still lost the game, but I felt more precise doing it.
It could all be the placebo effect. But as I’ve said before, the placebo effect is a godsend.
Memories of My Grandfather
I go t
o lunch at my grandfather’s on a chilly Thursday. I open the door and spot him in his usual pose, sunk deep in his recliner, his slippers up, watching CNN. He smiles and gives me his signature raised-fist salute.
With his daughter Jane’s help, my grandfather heaves himself up and shuffles over to the lunch table.
“We went out to dinner last night, didn’t we, Poppy?” Jane says as we settle in.
“Where’d you go?” I ask my grandfather.
He pauses, searching his brain.
“Well, I know I had something to eat, so that’s a start,” he says, then chuckles.
My grandfather’s memory is slipping away. But it’s a selective vanishing—only for recent events. Any story that happened in the fifties and sixties—he knows it cold. This is officially called “Ribot’s Law,” named for the French psychologist who first studied it. The more times we recall a memory, the more encoded it becomes. Recent memories haven’t had time to gel into the brain’s circuitry.
And in my grandfather’s case, Ribot’s Law means that visitors spend a lot of time reminiscing about the distant past. Which is okay by me, even though I’ve heard the same stories a dozen times.
Today, we talk about the time my grandfather bought a pet alligator for my aunt Kate. They kept it in the bathtub until it nipped a guest and had to be given to the Bronx Zoo.
A mention of Egypt leads to his favorite Africa story. I know it so well, I could recite it in stereo with him. In 1959, my grandfather helped organize what’s called the “Airlift to America.” The goal was to get hundreds of Kenyan students to study in United States colleges and then have them return home to lead their country. My grandfather raised money in New York, then, on two days’ notice, he flew to Kenya to conjure up some more.