Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties (6 page)

ANSWERS:

SCORING:

If you recognized any country other than Canada (so obvious!), you deserve to be secretary of state. If your only correct answer was Canada, award yourself the Department of Agriculture. If your score was 0, we must report you to the secretary of the interior.

O
K, let’s get back to me now. It’s time to turbocharge my brain. During the next four months, I plan to cram my days and nights with as many brain-boosting pursuits as I can stand. If there’s a shred of scientific evidence that a certain intervention might help, then it goes on my list. My list is very long and the bigwig in my head is very lazy (it takes after me). Not everything will make the cut. You don’t really expect me to eat legumes and unrefined cereal, do you? Both are staples of the Mediterranean diet, which has been universally and tediously endorsed for its wholesome effects on brain function. And don’t ask me to give up Diet Coke.

You thought the merlot tonight was expensive? Ho, ho, ho. Try ordering a bottle of Azature Black Diamond nail polish. At $250,000 for a half ounce, it would set you back $64 million for a gallon.

DIRECTIONS:

Order the entries below from most expensive to least, assuming you’re buying a gallon of each and that you’re not shopping for deals at Costco. This quiz is as much about critical thinking and unit conversions as it is about recalling your last trip to the grocery store, apothecary, or sperm bank.

ANSWERS:

SCORING:

Use the same daffy method to score this quiz as for “Will Reading This Book Kill You?” (
here
). Compare your ranking with the correct lineup. If you were correct at least eight times, off by one at least nine times, or off by two at least ten times, you are ready to wean yourself from the bottle and introduce solids to your diet.

Should you ease off the drinking in any case? Contrary to popular opinion, alcohol does not kill brain cells. What’s more, drinking boring, I mean moderate,
amounts of liquor protects you to some degree against age-related cognitive decline. According to a study done at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (where, yes, wine does stand in for the blood of Christ), 29 percent of those who never drank suffered from mental impairment versus only 19 percent in the merrier group. Alcohol does, however, damage dendrites—the branch-like neural ends that conduct electrochemical impulses from adjacent cells and carry them toward the cell body. If there is a problem with your dendrites, your cells will therefore have difficulty receiving messages from one another. It’s like the Internet going down. But cheers: If you can just cut down on that copious amount of booze you’ve been consuming, the damage will undo itself.

Another thing you don’t have to worry about: No matter what you may have heard during Prohibition, drinking will not lead to spontaneous combustion.

(I hate to end this on a down note, but some dipsomaniacs suffer from a neurological disorder called Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, which can cause confusion, memory problems, and other things you don’t want, such as death. It does not come from alcohol per se but rather from a deficiency of thiamine [vitamin B
₁
], whose absorption by the body is blocked by alcohol.)

Like boozing it up, napping will also be absent from my get-smart-quick plan—even if scientists try to lull me asleep by alleging that during a siesta, the brain cleans itself up, consolidating short-term memories and trundling them over to long-term storage areas. I will keep my eyes open even if I am presented with evidence claiming that dozing off during the day would make me be more alert, remember more, be more focused, and have a greater sex drive. I will say that I don’t care—maybe because, as studies have shown, after my existing on five to six hours of sleep a night for the past few decades, my decision-making skills are sorrily compromised. If these scientists are still awake, I will also let them know that a psychologist at the London School of Economics named Satoshi Kanazawa reported that people who go to bed later and get up later have higher IQs. Here are his findings regarding the bedtimes and wake-up times of the smart and the dumb as reported in
STUDY Magazine
, and only the unstudious could refute a publication by that name.

By the way, it is also true that acording to various studies, higher-IQ people are more likely to be left-handed, tall, thin, blue-eyed, oldest children who are atheist, liberal, prone to lying, drinking, and using drugs—and in ownership of a cat.

For the most part, the mind-building activities recommended by the cognoscenti meet all or some of the following criteria: They are intellectually challenging, physically demanding, socially engaging, or stress-reducing (according to these guidelines, a party-going, high-jumping Buddhist monk who likes to assemble IKEA bookshelves while focusing on his breathing should be verrrrry brilliant). Among the most popular suggestions for staying sharp are playing online brain fitness games, learning a new language or musical instrument, working out aerobically, joining a book club, and practicing meditation. Not all the advice is so boring and predictable.

Below is a list of self-improvement endeavors that purportedly vitalize your mind. I have culled them from various books and websites. Some I have invented. Can you figure out which ones are bona fide? (Answer true for the true ones and bullshit for the others.)