Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Alison happens to be going through a tough stretch. Her partner died seven years ago, and she hasn’t dated since. Then her cat died. Then her other cat died.

“We’re having dinner at about six-thirty.”

“That’s nice,” I say.

“Do you want to come?”

I pause. “It might not be the healthiest thing for me.”

My dilemma: Hanging out with a close-knit group of friends is healthy. But what kind of friends? To be truly healthy, some research indicates you want fit and happy friends. Your social circle has enormous influence on your own behavior.

Obesity, for one, is socially contagious, argue some scientists. A 2007 study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that a person’s chances of becoming obese increased by 57% if he or she had a friend who becomes obese, 40% if they have a sibling who becomes obese, and 37% if a spouse becomes obese.

Surprisingly, the scientists claim this correlation was true even if the friends or family members were hundreds of miles away. The same study suggested that losing weight is also socially contagious.

Not that Alison is overweight. She’s svelte. But the same two researchers (Nicholas Christakis from Harvard, and James Fowler from the University of California–San Diego) posit that happiness is similarly contagious. Happiness, they say, spreads like a virus even among people not in direct contact.

A happy friend increases your chances of being happy by 15 percent.

A happy friend of a friend boosts your chances by 10 percent.

And a happy friend of a friend of a friend lifts your odds by 6 percent.

The study is controversial. But if you think there’s a grain of truth to it, maybe you should avoid associating with anyone who is sad or pudgy. Maybe I should cut ties with my friend who hates his job. Or my other friend whose husband left her for a coworker. Or anyone with a BMI over thirty.

Maybe I should skip dinner with Alison. That’d make sense in a cold-blooded Spock-like world, right?

But it’ll also make me feel like a bastard. And just as important, when I’m depressed and fat, as I’m sure I’ll be sometime in the next decade, I’ll need the support of my friends, all of them, no matter what their waist size or serotonin level.

I don’t explain my thinking to Julie, who has lowered her gaze and is looking at me over the top of her glasses.

I just say: “Yeah, I’ll come. Looking forward to it.”

Checkup: Month 10

     Weight: 157

     Bottles of flaxseed oil consumed this month: 2

     Trips to Whole Foods this month: 8

     Pounds lifted on squat machine (15 reps): 300

     Minutes of TV watched per day: 60

     Minutes of TV watched per day while standing: 30

Project Health continues to startle me with unintended consequences. This month’s surprise: I’ve actually begun watching professional sports.

The last time I paid much attention to team sports was when I was a kid—the year my dad took me to the legendary Game Six of the 1977 World Series. He made us leave in the seventh inning to beat the traffic. “But what if Reggie Jackson hits a third home run, Dad?” “Don’t worry. He won’t.” On the upside, we did have the subway all to ourselves.

But now that I’m feeling more connected to those parts of me below the neck, I’ve rediscovered spectator sports. I want to see how Amar’e Stoudemire of the Knicks sprints and jumps. I want to study how Roger Federer snaps his wrist on the serve.

This renewed interest dovetails with my sons’ innate obsession with watching men bounce and throw spheroid objects.

Jasper and I tuned in to the Jets in the play-offs recently. And when they scored, Jasper laughed like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, and I laughed with him, and we stomped triumphantly around the living room, doing coyote howls. So this is what all the fuss is about, I remember thinking. I’d forgotten the joys of tribalism. I’d forgotten the deep irrational pleasure of belonging to an arbitrary group.

As with everything I do now, the question arises: Is it healthy?

Maybe not. A study of German soccer fans found that heart attacks in men more than tripled during the World Cup on days the German team played. The stress is too much.

But another study, published in The Journal of Clinical Hypertension, says that it might depend on which sport you watch. Football raises the blood pressure, but baseball lowers it. The latter’s nineteenth-century pace puts us into near-coma states.

And there’s one more health benefit: Watching sports may be good for your brain. In a 2008 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, psychologist Sian Beilock says that spectators’ spatial reasoning and language skills improve when they watch sports. Which brings me to . . .

Chapter 11

The Brain

The Quest to Be Smarter

THERE IS NO BETTER TIME in history to be an idiot than right now. Never before have so many people believed that if you work hard and apply the right techniques, you can upgrade your brain and become a nonidiot.

For decades, intelligence was thought to be fixed from birth, like eye color. You’re born smart or born dumb. You can jam more facts into your brain, but your basic intelligence—your IQ, your reasoning skills—remains static. But now? As University of Michigan professor Richard Nisbett explains in his well-respected bestseller Intelligence and How to Get It, we’re starting to discover how malleable the brain is. The scientific term is “neuroplasticity.”

According to the metaphor du jour, the brain is like a muscle. You can build its strength. You can keep it from withering with age.

You can create new connections and carve new pathways among the brain’s 100 billion neurons.

The key is to keep the brain active and challenged: do crossword puzzles, memorize poems, learn new languages. Meditation helps thicken the cerebral cortex. And make sure to eat the right brain food—namely, the good fats from nuts, olive oil, along with omega-3 fatty acids in fish. With these strategies, you can