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

I was not breastfed.

Therefore my IQ is six to seven points lower than it could be. At least in theory. This news is disturbing. Six to seven? That’s not a trivial amount. Imagine what I could have been like. Maybe my Netflix queue would be filled with Truffaut films instead of Albert Brooks movies. Maybe I’d read The Mahabharata in its original Sanskrit. Maybe I’d be decoding genomes myself instead of sending my drool out in a FedEx box.

What do I do? Do I mention this news to my mother and give her a guilt trip? It’s hard to blame her. In her day, formula was seen as breast milk’s equal, if not its superior.

Perhaps I should compensate. Watch more Yale literature classes on YouTube. Buy a calculus textbook. On the bright side, my slightly lower IQ means I probably have worse recall. Maybe I’ll soon forget I have a depressed IQ.

I’m also trying to remember this is far from gospel. I went with one of the most reputable consumer services—it’s called 23andme—but genetic testing in 2011 is still in its infancy. Think of it as better than tarot cards but much less reliable than X-rays. It has a long way to go before it’s considered an accurate diagnostic tool.

The problem is, there’s rarely a one-to-one relationship between a gene and a trait. There’s no single “you will go bald” gene. It’s dozens of genes, interacting with one another and the environment. It’s going to take a while to put this jigsaw together.

Services such as 23andme do give some results that you can act upon immediately to improve your health. This is especially true with the information about your sensitivity to medications. But mostly, for now, it’s more about curiosity and potential future knowledge.

That will likely change. In a few years, genetic testing will probably be a massively important health tool, yielding tons of useful information. If we have an elevated risk for lung cancer, we can avoid secondhand smoke. We will be able to tailor prescriptions.

This tidal wave of information will come with its own complications. There will be a whole class of information that we can’t act on. Diseases for which there is no known cure. Vulnerability to environmental factors—like the breast milk—that are too late to fix.

I just read a great but scary book, Origins, by Annie Murphy Paul, about the many ways gestating infants are affected by the mother’s behavior. Poor Julie. My sons will come to know all sorts of things she did wrong while pregnant. “You breathed unfiltered New York air? What were you thinking?”

DNA testing will present us with a Tree of Knowledge problem. On the whole, I think I would bite that apple of full bodily knowledge. I’d like access to unlimited information, despite the perils.

Julie’s not so sure. She argues there’s some benefits to blissful ignorance. But to humor me, she agreed to have her spit sent to 23andMe as well. Again, we got lucky. Aside from higher odds of heroin addiction, which has yet to be a problem, she’s relatively free of risk factors.

We called the genetic counselor together to make sure we hadn’t missed anything. She assured us, yes, Julie’s genes looked okay.

“I do want to ask about one result in her DNA,” I say.

“Yes?” asks the counselor.

“I’m interested that she has rs1800497,” I say. “It says people with this genotype are much less efficient at learning to avoid errors.”

“Well, it’s only got a single star next to it, so that indicates it’s a finding we have the least amount of confidence in.”

“But it is interesting,” I say. “Do you think she’s not efficient at learning from mistakes?” For instance, Julie keeps deleting episodes of The Office before I have a chance to watch them.

“My husband’s trying to bait me,” says Julie.

The counselor stays professional. “It’s from just one study with twenty-six Germans. It’s really too small a sample to have a lot of confidence in the data.” At this point, she says, rs1800497 is more for curiosity than actual valuable data.

“Well, it’s interesting is all,” I say.

After we hang up, Julie asks me if I have a gene for being a schmuck.

Chapter 23

The Hands

The Quest for Magic Fingers

I JUST FINISHED READING a 1980 book called Hands by British physician John Napier. It’s a lovely work. A mix of anatomy, history, and lyrical odes to our fingers, it’s a classic of hand literature (a genre that’s bigger than you might think). And it has made me a convert. Consider this sentence alone: “Visitors at the zoo indulge in transports of delight at the way an elephant reaches for an apple with its trunk . . . but give not a moment’s thought to the ineffable capabilities of their own hands.”

He’s right. We take our hands for granted, unless you happen to be a stoned college sophomore staring slack-jawed as your palm opens and closes. Most of us give all the glory and attention to the brain and the heart. We view them as our body’s CEO and president. The hands? We dismiss them as mere interns.

Not me. If my goal is total body health, I can’t overlook this gorgeously complex package of twenty-seven bones and thirty muscles. I will heed Napier and try to improve the ineffable capabilities of my own hands. I will have the strongest, nimblest hands I can.

The benefits might be surprising. George Washington University neuroscientist Richard Restak writes in his book Think Smart, “Since no part of the body is more functionally linked with the brain than the hands—with larger areas of the brain devoted to the fingers than to the legs, back, chest or abdomen—developing nimble finger skills is a surefire way of improving brain function.”

Another pro-hand book—The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture—argues that we have it all backward. The brain isn’t king. The brain is the hand’s handservant. We evolved our complex frontal lobes—at