They would not have said this as recently as a few decades ago. Then, most biologists would have told you that your brain is fully formed during childhood and, like a photograph after it’s been developed, is doomed to degrade thereafter with neurons (nerve cells) fading like pigment on paper until you succumb to senility. Forget senility. Today we regard Alzheimer’s and other dementias as diseases rather than as consequences of normal aging. Moreover, we now consider the brain to be as labile as a digital image in the hands of a Photoshop fiend. The three-pound wrinkly glop of glopoplasm in your skull contains about a hundred billion neurons, one for every human being who ever be’d. Each neuron can hook up with up to ten thousand others (polygamy-style, not serially monogamously). Hence there are at least one hundred trillion neural connections in your brain, which is more than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy, but who’s counting.
Not only does the brain have a lifelong ability to create new neurons; like a government with an unlimited highway budget, it has an endless capacity to build new roadways. Networks of linked neurons communicate chemically and electrically encoded data to one another (Hey, neuron, pass it on: That stove is hot!) at junctures called synapses. Fresh neural trails are generated whenever we experience something new—learn the tango, try a liverwurst canapé, take a different route to work. Repeat the activity and the pathway will be reinforced. This is why London cabbies, whose job requires them to memorize a mesh of twenty-five thousand streets and thousands of landmarks, were found to have larger hippocampi than the city’s bus drivers, who are responsible for learning only a few routes. The hippocampus plays a major role in memory formation. This is also why certain regions of the brains of bilinguals are bigger than the corresponding regions of monolinguals, verstehen sie mich?
At the parking lot for bad drivers, you are not allowed to park in a spot that is next to two occupied spots. In other words, no three cars can be contiguous—vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. This cuts down on accidents, and gives everyone ample room to get in and out of their vehicles and to dump their shopping carts willy-nilly instead of properly returning them to the drop-off areas. How many cars can the lot fit?
ANSWER: 16
(Hey, monolinguals, don’t feel bad. Bilinguals are frustrated by more tip-of-the-tongue moments than you are. It is theorized that similar-sounding words get in the way of each other in the retrieval process, and since bilinguals know twice as many words, this is a greater hazard for them. Another theory is that words used less frequently than more popular words like the and wine are stored in harder-to-reach nooks and are therefore more elusive. Bilinguals, having accumulated all those words, must stash them away on the tippy-top shelves of their closets. Even deaf people who communicate with sign language have trouble fetching words from their mental dictionaries. Their glitches are called—can you guess?—tip-of-the-finger moments.)
The ability of the brain to reorganize itself as a result of learning and new experience is called plasticity. My typing this sentence, for instance, changed my neural wiring, and your reading my words changed yours. Reading a novel, new research has found, may cause heightened connectivity in the brain that could last five days. There is good plasticity and bad plasticity. If, say, you don’t keep up with your Urdu lessons, the Urdu-y connections in your superior temporal gyrus will become far less superior, and before long you won’t even be able to order a glass of water in Urdu.
The notion that we can affect the resilience of our brains by investing in it early on, banking mental health as if in a 401(k)—to borrow an analogy from the psychologist Sherrie All—hinges on the widely accepted theories of brain reserve and cognitive reserve. Kenneth Kosik, a neurologist and neuroscience professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, explained these two kindred concepts to me during a rapid discourse that he called “The History of Alzheimer’s in Thirty Seconds,” which lasted about half an hour. Here’s the short version: In 1988, autopsies of several elderly people revealed the plaques and tangles associated with Alzheimer’s disease. However, these individuals, during their lifetimes, had displayed no signs of dementia. It has been hypothesized that they’d been buffered from the effects of the disease by the extra neuronal capacity that they had been born with (brain reserve) or accrued through years of intellectual and physical pursuits (cognitive reserve). Similarly, a study that analyzed the essays written by 678 elderly nuns when they were in their twenties found that the sisters who had used the most linguistically complex sentences were the least likely to have Alzheimer’s, which is why I’ve added this unnecessary subordinate clause even though it’s been a long time since I was in my twenties. How is it that certain minds seem able to forestall senescence despite genetic programming? The damage to the brain caused by Alzheimer’s can be compared to traffic jams caused by tractor-trailer accidents. Someone who has a robust neural network can find ways around these obstructions using back roads.
But not forever. Unless you have the good luck to kick the bucket before your roadways become disastrously clogged up, sooner or later, even you, with your clever compensatory strategies, will have difficulty getting from here to there. Paradoxically, those with higher IQs, more education, or higher occupation achievement deteriorate faster than average once they show symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. To wit (if I may use that phrase), researchers found that every year of education postpones the memory failure associated with dementia by two and a half months, but once the pathology becomes apparent, the rate of diminishment is 4 percent faster.
Left or Right, Up or Down?
You were born with a sense of direction. I don’t mean that as soon as you plunked out of the birth canal you could find your way from the maternity ward to the gift shop—or even that your innate wherewithal is as sophisticated as that of a lobster, fruit fly, or bacterium. Still, like a new toy with batteries included, your hippocampus and entorhinal cortex came equipped with navigational neurons, though not all of them fully formed. The first to mature were directional cells, which tell you which way you are facing. Next to develop were place cells, which enable you to memorize landmarks; and finally, after you became mobile enough to explore hither and thither, your grid cells evolved, allowing you to keep track of your path by creating a mental map of your surroundings.
Whether you proceed from A to B by remembering to turn left at the 7-Eleven or by intuiting that after an eighth of mile you must go north depends on which cells are more commanding. In general, women tend to reference landmarks when moving through space, whereas men tend to rely on geometric clues, taking into account the lay of the land and estimating distances traveled. The method used by women requires a larger memory and results in their being less likely to be lost than men. (The average male drives an extra 276 miles a year because he doesn’t know where he’s going; a woman, a mere 256 miles.) By the way, if you are trying to find a woman with a good sense of direction, check her fingers. Scientists at MIT discovered that women whose ring fingers are equal in length to or longer than their index fingers are good at navigation (and can help you find the lost women). It is theorized that women with relatively long ring fingers were exposed to greater amounts of testosterone in the womb.
Language can also influence the way in which we get our bearings in the world. For example, the Aboriginal Pormpuraaw in Australia rarely use words such as left, right, forward, and back. Instead they talk in terms of east, west, north, and south. “I have a mosquito bite on my southeast leg,” a Pormpuraaw tribesman might say, or “Could you pass the salt to your west?” As a result the Pormpuraaw have a much better feel than we do for orienting themselves in space. Or at least than I do. (Which way did you say the next page is?)
In any case, the more you practice your spatial skills, the better they become. Conversely, if you rely on your GPS device, your way-finding cells will wither and you will have to use your GPS even more.
DIRECTIONS:
How good is your sense of direction? Speaking of direction
s, these are so straightforward, you can figure them out. If there are four options, choose two; if there are two options, choose one.
1. You’re in Australia, but hear a rumor that the grass is greener in New Zealand. You decide to find out. Which way do you go?
Left/Right/Up/Down
2. Uh-oh. Deported! They’re kicking you out of the United States. Russia gives you asylum but not forever. Holed up in the Moscow airport, you hear that Venezuela will take you. Quickest route is which way?
Left/Right/Up/Down
3. You are a polar ice cap in Antarctica. Which way do you melt?
Up/Down
4. You are—OK, were—Osama bin Laden, holed up in your so-called safe house in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But, oops, you forgot your favorite comb near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and your hair is getting gnarly. You command your lackeys to dig a tunnel. Which way?
Left/Right
5. You reside in Iowa Falls and read that Idaho Falls is one of the one hundred best places in the country to live—and also has great potatoes. You pack your car with all your belongings and drive along roads pointing…
Left/Right/Slightly up/Slightly down.
6. You went to Timbuktu, and then realize you meant to go to that other place that nobody thinks exists: Transylvania. Your GPS recalculates, sending you…
Left/Right/Up/Down
7. You are lost luggage. On your way from Paris to Beijing, you got shanghaied to Shanghai. You are put on another plane in Shanghai, this one allegedly headed for Beijing. You make sure the aircraft’s nose is pointed…
Left/Right/Up/Down
8. Manhattan’s so passé. Move to Brooklyn before that becomes passé. Tell the Uber fellow to turn…
Left/Right/Up/Down
9. You are, no offense, a slave ant, slogging away in an ant colony in Vermont. When you learn that the motto of New Hampshire is Live Free or Die, you make up your mind to flee to that land of promise. Which way do you crawl?
Left/Right
10. You are in the land of the Munchkins, but need to be in the Emerald City. How to get there? Follow the Yellow Brick Road. Yes, but this-a-way or that-a-way?
Up/Down
ANSWERS:
1. Right, down
2. Left, down
3. Up
4. Left
5. Left, slightly up
6. Right, up
7. Up, left
8. Down, right
9. Right
10. Up
SCORING:
0: Do not leave your house without a paid companion.
1–3: If you venture outside, leave a trail of bread crumbs.
4–6: If you are a Boy Scout, you deserve a merit badge in Space Exploration. While you’re at it, award yourself a Pulp and Paper badge because there are extra.
7–9: You should teach a class instructing Pacific salmon how to swim from Hawaii to Alaska.
10: You are a homing pigeon.
Where in the World Are These French Fries?
So what if you don’t know anything about geography? Nobody does around here. A British news team asked random Americans on the street to name a country that began with U and nobody came up with United States.
How much do you know about our global neighbors?
This is the only quiz that assesses your geo-cultural intelligence by measuring your potato aptitude. The directions are simple, even if the questions are not. Below is a list of ways in which French fries are served around the world. Your job is to identify the nationality of each tater. Next to each item is what I’d like to call a clue, but, as you may have already figured out, my drawing abilities are not good enough to be considered helpful. At the very least, the pictures should discourage you from answering “United States.”
ANSWERS:
1. Vietnam
2. Philippines
3. Canada
4. Australia
5. Netherlands
6. Romania
7. Belgium
8. Pakistan
9. Denmark
10. Ireland
11. Spain
SCORING:
If you recognized any country other than Canada (so obvious!), you deserve to be secretary of state. If your only correct answer was Canada, award yourself the Department of Agriculture. If your score was 0, we must report you to the secretary of the interior.
Chapter Three
I Get Me Smarter Soon
OK, let’s get back to me now. It’s time to turbocharge my brain. During the next four months, I plan to cram my days and nights with as many brain-boosting pursuits as I can stand. If there’s a shred of scientific evidence that a certain intervention might help, then it goes on my list. My list is very long and the bigwig in my head is very lazy (it takes after me). Not everything will make the cut. You don’t really expect me to eat legumes and unrefined cereal, do you? Both are staples of the Mediterranean diet, which has been universally and tediously endorsed for its wholesome effects on brain function. And don’t ask me to give up Diet Coke.
Liquid Capital
You thought the merlot tonight was expensive? Ho, ho, ho. Try ordering a bottle of Azature Black Diamond nail polish. At $250,000 for a half ounce, it would set you back $64 million for a gallon.
DIRECTIONS:
Order the entries below from most expensive to least, assuming you’re buying a gallon of each and that you’re not shopping for deals at Costco. This quiz is as much about critical thinking and unit conversions as it is about recalling your last trip to the grocery store, apothecary, or sperm bank.
__ Diet Coke
__ V8
__ Vodka
__ Scorpion venom
__ Scorpion antivenom
__ Mayonnaise
__ Paint (sienna)
__ Rockstar Energy Drink
__ Gasoline
__ Human blood
__ Bear blood
__ Nail polish
__ Cough syrup (medicinal)
__ Cough syrup (recreational)
__ Black ink for computer printers
__ Ketchup
__ Skim milk
__ Molten gold
__ Salad dressing (ranch)
__ Prison wine, aka pruno, aka white lightning
__ Holy water
__ FIJI bottled water
__ Wite-Out
__ Horse semen
__ Human semen (male)
__ Chloroform
__ Sodium thiopental, aka truth serum
ANSWERS:
1 Scorpion venom ($39,000,000)
2 Scorpion antivenom ($270,227.80)
3 Molten gold ($166,694.40)
4 Human semen ($108,154.57)
5 Sodium thiopental, aka truth serum ($26,676.54, not counting the plane ticket for your drug mule)
6 Horse semen ($6,032)
7 Black ink for computer printers ($2,700)
8 Cough syrup (recreational) ($2,600 for recently discontinued Actavis, the brand most abused by Southern rappers)
9 Human blood ($1,500)
10 Nail polish ($890)
11 Wite-Out ($601.60)
12 Holy water ($435.20)
13 Chloroform ($239.36)
14 Cough syrup (medicinal) ($106.24)
15 Vodka ($100.69)
16 Salad dressing (ranch) ($43.52)
17 Mayonnaise ($38.27)
18 Paint (sienna) ($25)
19 Ketchup ($19.20)
20 Skim milk ($17.92)
21 Rockstar Energy Drink ($15.36)
22 V8 ($9.79)
23 Diet Coke ($8.67)
24 Prison wine, aka pruno, aka white lightning ($8)
25 FIJI bottled water ($7.68)
26 Gasoline ($3.76)
27 Bear blood ($0)
SCORING:
Use the same daffy method to score this quiz as for “Will Reading This Book Kill You?” (here). Compare your ranking with the correct lineup. If you were correct at least eight times, off by one at least nine times
, or off by two at least ten times, you are ready to wean yourself from the bottle and introduce solids to your diet.
Should you ease off the drinking in any case? Contrary to popular opinion, alcohol does not kill brain cells. What’s more, drinking boring, I mean moderate, amounts of liquor protects you to some degree against age-related cognitive decline. According to a study done at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (where, yes, wine does stand in for the blood of Christ), 29 percent of those who never drank suffered from mental impairment versus only 19 percent in the merrier group. Alcohol does, however, damage dendrites—the branch-like neural ends that conduct electrochemical impulses from adjacent cells and carry them toward the cell body. If there is a problem with your dendrites, your cells will therefore have difficulty receiving messages from one another. It’s like the Internet going down. But cheers: If you can just cut down on that copious amount of booze you’ve been consuming, the damage will undo itself.
Another thing you don’t have to worry about: No matter what you may have heard during Prohibition, drinking will not lead to spontaneous combustion.
(I hate to end this on a down note, but some dipsomaniacs suffer from a neurological disorder called Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, which can cause confusion, memory problems, and other things you don’t want, such as death. It does not come from alcohol per se but rather from a deficiency of thiamine [vitamin B1], whose absorption by the body is blocked by alcohol.)
Like boozing it up, napping will also be absent from my get-smart-quick plan—even if scientists try to lull me asleep by alleging that during a siesta, the brain cleans itself up, consolidating short-term memories and trundling them over to long-term storage areas. I will keep my eyes open even if I am presented with evidence claiming that dozing off during the day would make me be more alert, remember more, be more focused, and have a greater sex drive. I will say that I don’t care—maybe because, as studies have shown, after my existing on five to six hours of sleep a night for the past few decades, my decision-making skills are sorrily compromised. If these scientists are still awake, I will also let them know that a psychologist at the London School of Economics named Satoshi Kanazawa reported that people who go to bed later and get up later have higher IQs. Here are his findings regarding the bedtimes and wake-up times of the smart and the dumb as reported in STUDY Magazine, and only the unstudious could refute a publication by that name.
Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties Page 3