By far the biggest purveyor in the field is Lumos Labs, the neuroscience research company that sells the Lumosity training program. As of April 2015, this brain trust, which has grown 200 percent every year since the launch of its software in 2007, had sixty million subscribers in at least 180 countries. This is about the same as the population of Italy.
One of the subscribers is me. Another is Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Secretary of State John Kerry, who began using Lumosity on her iPad after she had a stroke and credits the program with accelerating her recovery, but this isn’t a self-help book for Theresa. Every day I, Patty, am presented with five games in my in-box.
This is the part where I should probably describe how to play all of these games, but that would be as peppy to read as the booklet on how to care for your new washer/dryer unit. Suffice it to say, each task seems to have been specially tailored to make me feel bad about a specific mental faculty (memory, attention, speed of processing, flexibility, or problem-solving, depending on the game). Moreover, most of the challenges are timed, and so, as the clock ticks, my heart pounds like a Gene Krupa solo. I am especially undone by the game Raindrops, which calls on the player to solve equations that reside inside descending raindrops before those numeral-filled drips reach the ocean. Under this kind of pressure, can anyone be expected to add even 1 + 1? (Brain scans of subjects who are afraid of math show that the mere thought of having to do math triggered responses in the subject that looked just like the images of someone experiencing physical pain.) Also nerve-destroying is Brain Shift, which requires one to, ever so speedily, press the right arrow key when the number is even or the letter is a vowel, and the left arrow key when the number is odd or the letter is a consonant. This doesn’t sound hard but, believe me, people have telephoned 911 for less.
According to the Lumosity website, in the past 103 days, I have played 876 games. I know what you’re thinking: “5 × 103 does not = 876. No wonder she is having trouble with simple arithmetic.” You are probably also thinking, “Is she on steroids?” Or, if you are my mother, you are thinking—actually, saying, “You’re sure you’re not doing too many exercises? What if something in your head snaps?” Here’s the thing: The reason my count is this ridiculously high is that so determined am I to have an enviable LPI (Lumosity Performance Index) that I play each game not just once but repeatedly. Feel free to substitute the word repeatedly with until the cows come home. A session is supposed to last about ten minutes. Mine can last up to two hours. Lumosity recommends three to five workouts a week. I never miss a day. Now you are really starting to wonder about me, aren’t you? Maybe I shouldn’t tell you, then, that in addition to those completed games I’ve chalked up, I’ve started many others and then, sensing that things were not going well, thrown in the towel and pressed restart, blaming my bad performance on my computer or on hearing my boyfriend breathe in the next room or, though we haven’t met, sometimes even on you, who I so don’t want to disappoint. The next game, I tell myself, will be perfect. Is this cheating? Sort of, I guess. Pathetic? You bet!
LPI is like the Dow-Jones average of your brain. The number goes up or down daily, depending on your performance that day—as well as on previous days. The index is based on an algorithm that takes into account the scores of millions of players. Thus you can not only feel bad by comparing your today self against yesterday self, you can also feel bad by lining up against those in your age group or any other age group you choose. This is the only advantage to getting old I can think of—that your Lumosity competition is not as stiff. Tip: Whatever you do, don’t compare yourself against the twenty-to twenty-four-year-olds. They are the worst, by which I mean the best.
As anyone would predict, my LPI increased over time.
Do these scores translate to increased intelligence in my so-called real life? I guess we’ll find out soon. In the meantime, isn’t it curious that on one of my absolute highest-performing days, as I was setting up the Lumosity app on my phone, I forgot my password?
Are You Smarter Yet? (Part One)
Is this book doing its job? Here’s a diagnostic crossword to help you find out if you are less stupid than you were on here. Don’t be discouraged if you can’t complete this puzzle within two hours. If you’re stuck, give me a call, and I’ll provide a hint. Ready? Don’t be afraid to answer
YES.
ANSWERS:
Paradox at the Greek Diner
Late one night Frank stops at a Greek diner that has only two waiters, Nick and Zorba. One always tells the truth, and the other always lies. Which is which is unclear. I know, I know—this is a bad business model, but can I get on with my paradox? To wash down his baklava, Frank orders a cup of decaf from Zorba. “You’re sure it’s decaf?” says a nervous Frank to Zorba as the waiter pours him some coffee. “I always tell the truth,” says Zorba. Nick appears at the table with another pot of coffee, which he insists is decaf. “Don’t believe Zorba,” says Nick. “He’s a liar.” “Nick’s a liar,” says Zorba. “Zorba’s the liar,” says Nick. This witty badinage continues, but we don’t have to bear witness. What’s important is that only one of the pots of coffee is indeed decaf. Is it, then, Zorba or Nick who is telling the truth? Are there any question(s) Frank can ask to find out? Or should he just order tea?
ANSWER:
Frank can uncover the truth by asking just one question. In fact, two different questions will each provide all the enlightenment he needs, coffee-wise.
1. “If I ask the other waiter whether your coffee is decaf, will he answer yes or no?”
If Frank asks Zorba this question, and Zorba is the truth-teller, then Zorba will say that Nick, the liar, will say that no, Zorba’s coffee is not decaffeinated. If Zorba is a liar, then he will say that Nick will say yes, Zorba’s coffee is decaf. If Frank asks Nick this same question, the same logic applies. Thus no means yes and vice versa.
2. “What would your answer be if I asked you if your coffee was decaf?”
If Zorba is the truth-teller, he will say yes if his coffee is decaf, and no if it isn’t. If he is the liar and his coffee is decaf, he will lie about his lie and say no if his coffee is decaf and yes if his coffee is not decaf. Thus, in this hypothetical, yes means yes and no means no.
You are on your own with figuring out the tip.
Chapter Seven
Pole-Vaulting My Way to Intellectual Heights. I Mean Stepping on a Kitchen Chair to Reach the Low-Fat Mayonnaise.
As someone whose favorite sport is sitting, I would just once like to hear some bad news about physical exercise. Why can’t researchers discover that lunges cause a decline in SAT scores or that spinning class makes you so addled you forget how to use a semicolon? Regrettably, you will hear nothing of the sort if you talk to neurologists. They will tell you that whether you are young or old, aerobic exertion—even a schlumpy amount—increases the number of blood vessels carrying oxygen to your upper level. They will say that tiring activities spur the growth of neurons and trigger the formation of a class of proteins that stimulate the growth of axons, enabling your brain cells to reach out and touch one another, thus expanding your circuitry up there. As if there were not already enough reasons to work out, neurologists, armed with clinical trials and studies, have added “better thinking” to the list.
I sought an exercise routine that was suited to my strengths and schedule. No, not darts. Every day—dutifully, resentfully, tediously, miserably, and always without the slightest hint of an endorphin to cheer me along—I engaged in a high-intensity circuit training program comprised of twelve exercises, such as tricep dips (on the chair) and push-ups with side rotation (too boring to explain). The drill was developed by the Human Performance Institute and recommended by the New York Times. In total, including the rests between the exercises, it lasts seven minutes.
There is only one thing more boring than exercising. That is reading about exercising. Let us move on to the next paragraph because it is a hopeful one.
Scientists are devel
oping a pill that may mimic the beneficial cognitive effects of exercise. Essentially, the pill contains a hormone (FNDC5) that prods the expression of BDNF and other neurotrophic factors, which in turn activate genes involved in learning and memory. Now that is something to sit down and shout hooray about.
This just in: Researchers in Norway have come up with the four-minute workout.
You will have to flip to here for the answers. This counts as exercise.
ANSWERS: 2, 4, 3
May I interrupt myself here and say that the way you’ve been turning the pages lately shows uncanny astuteness? Let’s see how smart you’ve become.
This psychological test is designed to evaluate your planning, reasoning, and problem-solving skills as well as your ability to find a pencil. This maze could also be helpful in gauging your spatial learning and memory, especially if you are a rodent.
DIRECTIONS:
Trace a path from the mouse to the cheese. Try to avoid dead ends. No backtracking is permitted. You have seven days to complete the test.
Chapter Eight
Om, Um, Oy
During my hitchhiking days—that would be in the 1970s, when I was in college—I was picked up by a free spirit in a VW Beetle. She wore beads and a dress seemingly made out of an old Indian bedspread or an old Indian. Handing me a piece of paper printed with the words Nam Myoh Renge Kyo, she promised that if I chanted the phrase a few times a day, I’d be granted happiness or whatever. Don’t say I didn’t try. I was sick of hitchhiking. I wanted a car. To this day I have never owned a car. (I no longer want one, so maybe that’s how the magic works.)
Years later I met a man at a party who explained why he meditated: “You know how when you’re born into the world, you’re pure love and essence, but it gets covered by your personality so you’re not living? Meditation realigns you with the universe. I also do a lot of spiritual work, such as past-life regressions. I try to live in the present in the presence.”
I know I know I know: It is unenlightened of me to let these encounters prejudice my view of meditation—or to equate the discipline with daydreaming, napping, yoga pants, or Seinfeld’s show about nothing. Sixty-seven percent of Americans ruminate and reflect for at least thirty minutes a week. I made this figure up, but sometimes you just have to do the right thing. Don’t all your friends, and not just the dumb ones, swear to you that meditation has transformed their lives, made them more productive, less agitated, and kinder—as well as better skiers.
Lately scientists have become very rah-rah about meditation. The claim is that it makes gray matter denser in the hippocampus (camping grounds for memory and learning) and less dense in the amygdala (anxiety and stress). Training a mere twenty minutes a day for four days supposedly can make you remarkably better at processing information and sustaining attention. In other words, it raises your IQ in less time than I spend deciding what to wear. Meditation can supposedly even treat attention deficit disorders.
They also say it works wonders on your immune system, lowers your blood pressure, and makes you more altruistic and less likely to become obese, but that is a different book, not this book. Let’s return to what those scientists said about attention.
I could use some buckling down. My mental skyscape has too many aircraft aloft.
There are more techniques for elevating your state of consciousness than there are Heinz varieties. You can do it with or without a mantra, sitting up straight or lying down (it’s called bed med and I didn’t make that up), allowing your mind to wander freely as if it were a Montessori school student or reining your thoughts in as if they were citizens of North Korea. Among the odder types of meditation are labyrinth (walking through a maze as a way to spark creativity and problem-solving), laughter (giggles supposedly boost soothing hormones while lessening stress-inducing ones), and fire (staring at a flame can create a trance; not to be confused with arson meditation).
After some meditation on meditation, I chose the kind called mindfulness because feeling a little mindless, I thought I could use some more mind.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist turned secular god in the mindfulness movement defines the approach as “paying attention, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.” A friend said, “It’s about treating your thoughts like sheep. They come in, you herd them out. The more you practice the stronger your anti-ADD muscle becomes.” Although Buddhist-inspired, the technique is secular enough that the US military dabbles in it. I could have signed up for a Transcendental Meditation course but that costs around $1,500. (Participants are sworn not to divulge what they learn, but I found out; I can’t tell you how—e-mail if you want to know.)
I clicked on a cosmos of instructional videos on YouTube that featured vistas of fluffy clouds, waves breaking on the beach, sunsets, and any number of other pictures that look like the photographs you’ve removed from store-bought frames, and as I listened to earnest disembodied voices intone about how sublimely relaxed I was feeling, I couldn’t resist the urge to buy under-eye concealer on Amazon. Later, with a hundred or more others, I took an introductory meditation class at the Tibet House in Manhattan, and while everyone else was presumably letting the sounds wash through them, bringing their attention to the sensation of their bodies sitting, and not judging themselves, I spent my time wishing everyone would put their shoes back on. During the Q&A portion, a woman asked the teacher, “My dogs crawl all over me when I meditate. What should I do?” Teacher: “I don’t know. I don’t have that problem.” Finally a friend and I took a series of four one-hour private lessons with a student of Kabat-Zinn who talked a lot about her personal journey and then led us in a raisin consciousness exercise in which we were encouraged to explore a single raisin using all our senses. “If you understand the raisin,” said our teacher, “you understand mindfulness.” That’s a big if.
Achieving inner calm may be the simplest thing I cannot do—that, and making coffee. The instructions regarding the former are straightforward: (1) Sit down. (2) Close your eyes or, if you don’t feel like it, keep them open. (3) Pay attention to your breathing—the way it feels in your nose, lungs, etc. (4) When your mind forgets to pay attention to your breathing, and trust me, it will, take note of where your mind goes but don’t be high-handed about it. It’s only a mind, after all. (5) Return to the tedium of keeping track of your breathing. (6) Do this for the rest of your life.
I did everything I was told, but to no avail. Again I am reminded of the 1970s, which were my days not only of hitchhiking, but also of limited drug sampling. “Do you feel it yet?” a friend who was feeling it would say after we’d both ingested something that was supposed to be mind-altering. “Not one bit,” I’d say. It could be argued that I did not give meditation my all—or for that matter, my any. Perhaps this is because living with contentment and reduced anxiety doesn’t seem natural. Awareness doesn’t do it for me, either.
Mantra or Indian Bread
Which is which? A feature of many but not all forms of meditation, one of these is a sound you repeat silently in order to achieve a state of boredom (but in a good way). The other you eat too much of. You think you know the difference, but let’s see.
1. Keema naan
2. Hum Dum Har Har
3. Aloo kulcha
4. Bhakri
5. Ram Nam
6. Pesarattu
7. Khakra
8. Thalipeeth
9. Mrityormooksheya
10. Shiam
11. Baati
12. Shreem
13. Em
14. Sheermal
15. Shring
16. Ham-Sah
17. Tat Tvam Asi
18. Aloo paratha
19. Aum
20. Uttapam
21. So ham
22. Sev puri
23. Hirim
24. Bhatoora
25. Hong-Sau
26. Benne dose
27. Pumpernickel
ANSWERS:
&
nbsp; 1. Keema naan: bread
2. Hum Dum Har Har: mantra
3. Aloo kulcha: bread
4. Bhakri: bread
5. Ram Nam: mantra
6. Pesarattu: bread
7. Khakra: bread
8. Thalipeeth: bread
9. Mrityormooksheya: mantra
10. Shiam: mantra
11. Baati: bread
12. Shreem: mantra
13. Em: mantra
14. Sheermal: bread
15. Shring: mantra
16. Ham-Sah: mantra
17. Tat Tvam Asi: mantra
18. Aloo paratha: bread
19. Aum: mantra
20. Uttapam: bread
21. So ham: mantra
22. Sev puri: bread
23. Hirim: mantra
24. Bhatoora: bread
25. Hong-Sau: mantra
26. Benne dose: bread
27. Pumpernickel: bread
YOUR SPIRITUAL QUOTIENT:
0–5: Remind me never to hire you as a waitress at the Taj Mahal Luncheonette.
10–27: You have transcended the worldly realm. Can I borrow a double sawbuck?
Perfect score: You are like the Buddha—at peace and fat.
Chapter Nine
Let’s Learn Cherokee!
The only time I feel that I have a fighting chance while speaking French is when I am in a non-France foreign country. Hearing all those non-English words, my brain snaps into action. “Default to foreign language,” it commands and presto, I am jabbering French to people who do not necessarily speak French. “Très bien,” I say, and “Ou est le Métro?” Otherwise, in France and for that matter in America, my French just isn’t French. The last time I tried to use it in public, I was in Paris. I’d left the book I’d been reading (Kafka’s letters to his girlfriend) in a movie theater and, returning the next day, put on my most mincing accent and asked the mademoiselle at the ticket booth, “Avez-vous ma liberté?” For those of you who know even less French than I do—if such a person exists—their word for book is livre.
Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties Page 7
