Chapter Twelve

Faster, Bigger, More Smarter? The Reckoning

That’s not all I did to see if I could get sharper.

I listened to Bach regularly for weeks—and once, in an elevator, Chopin was playing. Or maybe it was “The Girl from Ipanema.”

I watched a thirty-six-episode graduate-level series about cosmology—mainly so I could brag about my accomplishment even though the only thing I learned was that everything is either very, very, very, very small or very, very, very, very, very big.

I bought a smartphone.

I ate blueberries because studies show they can protect neurons from fashionably nasty free radicals and excitotoxicity (not as thrilling as its name), and also because blueberries are featured on just about every list of elixirs to eat.

I ate dark chocolate because one clinical trial found that its compounds help improve your arithmetic abilities, but I probably didn’t eat enough because I decided that long division wasn’t worth being fat for.

On the ardent recommendation of an acquaintance, I downed Mental Clarity pills. If everyone who’s reviewed this product online had truly become as cognitively enhanced as claimed, then cancer would have been cured and someone would have invented earphones that never tangle. The little green pellets, available at health food stores, contain eleven ingredients, if you count nutmeg. The most prevalent, brahmi, is used to treat Alzheimer’s disease, ADHD, allergies, irritable bowel syndrome, stress, backache, epilepsy, joint pain, hoarseness, and sexual performance problems in both men and women; indeed, its sundry uses make it the shalom of dietary supplements.

I tried to obtain one of the so-called study drugs such as Ritalin, Adderall, and Provigil that temporarily help a user concentrate and improve mental function, and are more popular on college campuses than beer, but I couldn’t find anyone who’d part with a tablet. (Tip from a friend who learned the hard way: “If you ever do get your hands on an attention-enhancing drug, make sure you have an attention-deserving project in front of you on your computer screen, for if you are in the middle of shopping for an antique porcelain platter, you are liable to spend the day as the most dedicated and zealous eBay shopper who ever patronized that site.”)

I also took fish oil pills because why not.

Overall, I spent so much time trying to improve my brain that I had no time left to use it. Was it worth it?

Nearly four months after my brain was scanned the first time, I returned to the Neuropsychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Stanford.

A few weeks later, Dr. K (give yourself ten points if you remember that she is the director of the lab at Stanford) e-mailed with renderings of my brain and analyses. The MRI, she reported, indicated that certain regions had increased in volume between 10 and 33 percent. “To be honest,” she said over the phone, “the results are very surprising to me. I didn’t expect to see this much improvement.” Hmm. Could that be a comment on my starting point?

“Thirty-three percent bigger? That’s ridiculous,” said my boyfriend (to me, not to her). “Your soft tissue would be popping out of your skull.” “But what if the areas of expansion were relatively small?” I said. “They’re hardly minuscule,” he said, looking at the images. He trained as a neuroscientist. He would want you to know that his name is Paul Roossin and that he does not believe size matters. Brain, that is.

I asked Dr. K for clarification. “If parts of my cortex got bigger,” I said, “did other parts get smaller?” “Probably not,” she said. “The regions aren’t huge percentages. You might have less cerebrospinal fluid or possibly more complex foldings—called gyrification—in the gray matter.” No, no, no! By the time you’re born—in fact, by the time the fetus is forty weeks old—your brain has all the wrinkles it’s ever going to get. As for the cerebrospinal fluid, it courses through ventricles, which are cavities in the brain bringing nutrients and removing wastes from the neural tissue. If my ventricles shrank by 33 percent, this book would likely be posthumous.

I was also informed that my fMRI revealed a more beautiful, richer, taller, thinner brighter me compared to the dull me of four months earlier. An fMRI, as you will remember if you’ve become as brilliant as I have, measures brain activity by recording accompanying changes in blood flow while the subject performs a task—in my case the spatial n-back game in which I was asked to recall the positions of dots on grids. Less blood movement means less neural activity means less exertion means either you are executing the task more efficiently or you have had a stroke. How’d I do? Wrote Dr. K, “Your n-back test showed statistically significant change (p < 0.0001) in functional brain activation with a 47 percent difference from time 1 to time 2. The attached figure illustrates in cool colors where your brain showed decreased activation and in warm colors where your brain increased activation.”

With my swelled head, I e-mailed Paul the good news. He sent me an article entitled “Spiraling Difficulty of Reliably Interpreting Scans of People’s Brains.”

He has a point.

Now, about my IQ: I probably shouldn’t admit this so late in the book, but I don’t like information about myself. I don’t weigh myself, I wince every tax season when the accountant tells me what I’ve earned that year, and, don’t yell at me, but there are certain de rigueur medical tests I’ve never had. Finding out my IQ is something I just can’t bear, but knowing whether it went up or down is something I’ll have to live with.

The psychologist who had divined my IQ score met me one night at a Japanese restaurant. Before she revealed the verdict, I pretended over the edamame appetizer to be interested in other things besides myself. It was a good sign that she’d ordered edamame, I deduced—with my fabulous new reasoning powers. Or do I mean induced? Whatever duce it was, edamame is green and that is a nice positive color, as opposed to bad depressing red, which says “Stop, stop, stop, you dumbbell.”

The waitress asked whether we’d like some sake. “Yes,” said the psychologist. Another encouraging omen. If you were going to deliver unfavorable news, you’d want to be sober, right? Okay, forget the sake argument. “I’m thinking of getting the salmon,” the psychologist said.

“The California rolls are supposed to be good here,” I said with insistence. Salmon is red, I thought. California is green.

“I’m going to go with the salmon,” she said.

Come to think of it, I thought, salmon is orange. Come to think of it, maybe my thinking skills are subpar.

“So?” I said, eyeing the psychologist’s folder of papers.

“You have nothing to worry about,” she said.

OH NO, OH NO, OH NO, OH NO, OH NO, OH NO, OH NO, OH NO, OH NO, OH NO, OH NO, OH NO!

“Of all the people I’ve tested,” she said, “you are one of the healthiest and cognitively resilient.” Who wants to be healthy or resilient? I want to be a genius or at least as smart as Dwight D. Eisenhower. “Your anxiety does not seem to interfere with your cognition,” she added, but I was so anxious by now I could barely understand a word she said.

A few of her words did penetrate my mental miasma. Here are some things I remember hearing:

• My best scores were achieved on the verbal parts of the test, which included questions that gauge vocabulary, breadth of general information, comprehension, and ability to glean similarities between two items. The verbal component is the one most contingent on education, which means it cost my parents many thousands of dollars for me to be able to determine out how car is like airplane.

• I am better at naming fruits and vegetables than animals.

• My worst scores were in the area called processing speed, which has to do with how quickly you can carry out certain cognitive tasks under pressure. Since I’d been relatively slow the first time I took the test, it was also the index on which I exhibited the most improvement. I will never get a job as a Waring blender.

• May I brag that I scored “very superior” on the Tower of Hanoi test, which is a mathematical puzzle consisting of disks of different sizes arranged on three rods? The objective is to arrange the disks in size order, largest to smallest, following a specific set of rules. On the other hand, I am weak in block design (which brought down my perceptual reasoning score).

• Even though I consider myself uncommonly adroit when it comes to remembering past and present phone numbers (a useless skill), my working memory is probably not as excellent as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s. Ditto my attention faculties.

• Though I am left-handed, my right hand is more coordinated.

• The scores on my sub-tests showed an unusual amount of variability. Most people perform more consistently across the board. For this reason, one general number, I was told, does not capture my overall intelligence.

Enough detail. Did my IQ go up or down or stay the same?

Can you guess whether I’ve become more or less stupider or have stayed just as stupid as I started? You’ve known me long enough to venture an answer. While you think about my mental capacity, I’ll be drying my hair in the next room if you need me. Turn the page for the results.

ANSWER:

It headed south!

The drop was insignificant, akin to the water weight a dieter loses in the first few days of eating no carbs. Still, that’s not what you want to hear after you’ve spent days and days trying to tune up your thinking machine. Or perhaps it is. If my IQ had gone up a few points, which would have had marginal to no effect on my mental capacities, would I have felt compelled to devote my life to green tea, jumping jacks, Sanskrit, and ukulele lessons? Yes. It’s kind of a relief to be free of that. That might be the smartest thought I ever had.

On my way home from dinner that night, I thought about how, in the old days, kings and emperors would send people on missions to find the fountain of youth, the elixir of life. These attendants would travel thousands of miles and come back empty-handed. I accomplished the same in four months without picking up a tropical disease.

Then I realized I lost my hat. It was the second hat I’d lost that day. Two hats! It could have been worse. At least I still had my head.

Second Opinions from My Friends:

“The delta in your cognitive abilities cannot be properly assessed because there are too many independent variables that are not controlled in this experiment. For example if I were to say you seem smarter to me it could just be that in the past year I have gotten stupider. Proper protocols for this project would have required cryogenically storing all your friends for the year while you did your mishuganah cognitive enhancers. Then defrost us and ask us our views.”

George Hornig

“As your agent, I can’t comment—what if I was funnier?”

Esther Newberg

“I would say that you probably can’t divide up a check any faster than you ever could.”

Sybil Sage

“You smarter? That’s hilarious. Seriously, that better be hilarious.”

Mark Moffett

“The challenge of assessing the differential in your cognitive abilities 10 years ago vs. today is too daunting to me. Can you still conjugate the verb amo? If so, I can detect no decline. Likewise, if you are still able to differentiate ‘dumb stuff’ from ‘smart stuff’ (something I could never do), then your cognitive track is a flat horizontal line.”

Bob Kerrey

“Changes in your cognitive abilities? Mmmm… no. But then I didn’t know the colors of my wife’s and children’s eyes when they asked me ten years ago. From now on I’ll pay attention.”

Kurt Andersen

“Have I noticed any particular uptick in your intelligence from all of your meditation, Lumosity, etc.? The answer is ‘no.’ Moreover, I did notice when we were having lunch in New York that you were not capable of explaining Lumosity to me in a way that made me understand what Lumosity is, but that may reflect more on me than you. I am clearly less luminous than you.”

Victoria Rostow

“I have definitely detected, since you’ve started the brain training, that you send many more mass emails.”

Lynn Grossman

“You’re exactly the same as you were a year ago, although you seem to be more concerned about what I think of your brain than you used to be.”

Steve Radlauer

“A mutual friend tells me you have been making a lot of baskets lately, and braiding leather. What’s with that?”

Melinda Davis

“I think that you have become funnier. Not sure about the other stuff.”

Julie Saul

“Your brain seems the same in truth.”

Kent Sepkowitz

“There are sparks coming from the top of your head. It’s all right with me if it’s all right with you.”

Melinda Wingate

“Please send the Cherokee for ‘Wish you were here’ (an expression the Cherokees probably never used).”

Lorrie Moore

“This is just an impression, and please ignore if there’s better data—but I feel that since you started this your breasts have gotten really perky.”

Philip Weiss

“Hey, how tall are you anyway? I mean, really?”

Gordon Lish

“Forget memory—you get to my age it’s all about teeth or feet.”

Jennifer Rogers