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

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