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

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