Remember the FDA food pyramid and your horror when you learned that it takes six loaves of sprouted wheat bread to balance the effects of a thimbleful of sour apple Nerds? The same is supposed to be true of your brain: to avoid vegetative zombiism, you need a semester’s worth of particle physics to counteract that Dancing with the Stars marathon you watched on Saturday. Make it two semesters if you scan the checkout-stand headlines.
Right?
Wrong.
This book has punk’d the pyramid.
In these pages, you can trick your brain into thinking it’s watching that reality-television marathon when in fact it’s exploring cutting-edge topics in neuroscience, psychology, behavioral economics, neuroanatomy, game theory, cognitive science, and more.
In short, what’s here is candy. But it’s candy that’s good for your brain.
Did you know that country music leads to a higher suicide rate among whites? Have you seen the neural signature of a daydream? Did you know that the smell of shoe leather can arrest epileptic seizure? That mirror neurons create human morality, or that liars are biologically different from truth-tellers? That red beats blue in Olympic grappling contests? If any of these topics intrigue you—or if you, like me, love geeking out on puzzles and illogic and perception oddities and questionable morality, and want to understand a bit more how the spittings of what is essentially a three-pound electric sausage make us human—read on.
• • •
Ten years ago, this book couldn’t have been written. As recently as the mid-twentieth century, neurosurgeons lobotomized patients by punching ice picks through their eye sockets and waggling them back and forth. And psychologists were amazed when a dog drooled to the soundtrack of the Westminster Bell Choir. Now neurosurgeons get an assist from fMRI-guided robots and chat with patients during tumor surgery. And psychologists have moved past drooling dogs to explore the basis of what it means to be human: consciousness, cognition, reality, free will, and the very subjective ways we experience the world.
Brain science is exploding.
And if brain science is exploding, then the niche of neuroplasticity—which describes how and how profoundly our actions shape our brains—is a nuclear bomb. You can grow your brain by flexing it in the right way, just as surely as Gold’s Gym grows muscles. Your thoughts, feelings, words, and deeds are more than ephemeral whims that happen and pass—they’re encoded into the basic architecture of our brains as neurons grow, die, and rewire, and as regions with different functions optimize or decay.
So flex your brain. Seriously. To put it bluntly, reading this book will make you smarter—that is, if you use it to force your brain into new, challenging terrain (see the topics “The Key to Brain Training” and “Do Crosswords Keep the Brain Young?”). A little challenge to nourish your neurons can delay the effects of Alzheimer’s, and who doesn’t need a little extra cerebral pop at home and in the office?
And nothing grows gray matter like disagreement. (The New York Times reports that the best way for adults to stimulate their brains is by “challenging the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate.”) Fortunately, because the majority of these topics are ripped from the headlines of leading academic journals, much is on the edge of “proven” and you will almost certainly find topics that you disagree with. Please: think, evaluate, decide, and then write me nasty e-mails—but before you take to the blogosphere like a winged monkey, check the original studies, referenced under topic headings at the back of the book. Also check the back of the book for scoring guidelines for the included self-tests, answers to the genius tester puzzles, and discussions of the game-theory dilemmas.
Now, sit back, get comfy (get a pencil!), and let this book turn a mirror to your mind.