Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties (7 page)

ANSWERS:

I’m no mind reader (yet), but I bet you are thinking, it took her many years to become as stupid as she is, how can she expect to become much less stupid in four months? Isn’t cognitive change gradual, you reason,
even lifelong? I guess we’ll see about that. In any case, I have no patience with patience.

In due course, we’ll take stock of my mental faculties. Unfortunately, my life is not one that is rich in obvious and observable mental benchmarks. If I were a poker champ, I could tally my winnings after my cognitive makeover and compare them to my average intake; if I were a chess player I could chart my ratings; an air traffic controller, I could tell you whether I caused fewer accidents and if, over time, my near misses became more or less bloodcurdling. Instead I’m a writer who muddles measurelessly through life (grammur and speling miztakes some perhaps you can see changeing?). How, then, to evaluate my progress? I had planned to keep a forgetting journal, but—spoiler alert—this is as far as I got before I forgot to keep up the entries:

After I have finished bettering myself, I intend to ask my friends whether they’ve detected any changes in me. Of course, it’s arguable whether anyone really pays attention to the lapses of others. (Has anyone shared in your joy when, after days of rifling through every hiding place in your cranium, you finally came up with the name of the actor who died shortly after he appeared in
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
? William Redfield, as if you care.) There are, thankfully, more reliable, or at least more objective, or at least other, assessment tests. Before I begin my get-less-stupid program and then
again soon after I finish, I will have my head scanned in an MRI machine and also take a battery of IQ tests.

Thus: What’s crucial right now, during this interval before my evaluation, is that I stay as pristinely and impeccably stupid as ever. No feeding from the tree of knowledge, not even any nibbling of trivia from the Dining and Wine section of the
New York Times
. My goal is to discourage the formation of new neural pathways and weaken the ones I have (good-bye trying
One Hundred Years of Solitude
again). Since our brains change all the time, even when we sneeze, do beadwork, or watch a cricket match, this is not a simple enterprise. Watching TV helps—and not the good kind that’s reviewed.

Studies have shown that all sorts of external factors affect our short-term memory, or is it just that there are a lot of studies?

DIRECTIONS:

For each of the following, choose (
a
) if the item tends to make us forget, (
b
) if it tends to make us remember, or (
c
) if the item has not yet become the focus of grant funding.

ANSWERS:

N
ow get undressed,” says Dr. K, a woman in a lab coat who seems to run the show at the imaging center (aka the Neuropsychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Stanford). I have come here to document my pre-improved brain so I will have a baseline for later comparisons and humiliations. Specifically, the spick-and-span white cylinder in the next room will provide both anatomical renderings of my brain as well as activity maps. The former are MRIs (magnetic resonance images); the latter, fMRIs (the
f
stands for
functional
, not
fabulous
).

No to the jewelry and makeup, I am told by the technician, another woman in a lab coat. Both (the
jewelry and makeup, not the women in lab coats) could contain metal, and the magnetic field inside this contraption is so mighty (millions of times mightier than the earth’s) that it can pull metallic objects such as bobby pins, keys, and pens out of the pocket of anyone in the room and turn them into North Korean magnet-seeking missiles that could cut off the pinky or worse of those in the way. (Even so, says the technician, some women cry when they learn they can wear no lipstick.) I once spent a day rooting through all the trash in my apartment building because I accidentally threw out a super-powerful, one-of-a-kind experimental magnet that had been lent to my boyfriend by the scientist who invented it, but that’s another story (and one that didn’t end well). After putting on a set of paper scrubs and cotton socks, I hop with diminished dignity onto the gurney-like bed attached to the MRI machine. The technician, who will soon run like a wildebeest into the control room, nudges me into the mouth of the machine until I am enveloped from shoulders upward inside its tubular chamber, which doesn’t seem much wider than a piece of rigatoni. I am warned that I will have to remain perfectly still. (Studies show that men squirm more than women do when inhabiting an MRI machine. To find out why this is so, you could image the brains of men—that is, if you could get them to
stay still.) Ixnay on feeling itchy, I think. Same goes for breathing. For entertainment there is the noise of the scanner scanning, which alternately sounds like a John Cage composition (Sonata for a Hammer in H-Flat) and the alarm at a nuclear plant signaling you to leave ASAP. Is this what it feels like to be a piece of paper about to be photocopied? No matter. The radio-frequency waves or maybe it’s the head-restraining brace is making me tired, which is more than I can say for my bed.

If you want to know how an MRI scanner works, you should probably ask someone else.

Since I’m the one who has the book contract, though, here is the not-totally-inaccurate gist: On a most elementary level, the machine uses magnetic fields and radio-frequency waves to manipulate the hydrogen atoms in your body. Why hydrogen? Because water, you recall—if recalling is still in your repertoire—is H
₂
O, which means that each molecule has two atoms of hydrogen. Since each of us is basically a wetland (we’re 57 to 75 percent water, if you want to be factual-like), we are awash in hydrogen, especially in our soggiest parts, called
soft tissues
. MRI, therefore, is good for looking at squishy moist brains, and not so good with dry-bone detail. Our hydrogen atoms are always spinning (for lack of a better metaphor) along an axis
(for lack of a better metaphor), and under normal conditions (for lack of a better metaphor) they are very unruly, pointing hither and thither like deranged tops (for lack of a better metaphor). In the presence of a formidable magnetic field, however, most of the atoms sync up, each axis aligned with the others as if a god with OCD (deist metaphor) had set them in motion. When pulses of radio waves are directed at the body, a few of these atoms become temporarily jostled. As they relax back into their pre-pulse state, they emit a tiny radio signal. A clever magnetic trick is used to localize these signals, and even cleverer mathematics is used to convert these signals into an image.

What the image reflects is the relative densities of water contained in the soft tissues, and since these amounts are different in different tissues, an anatomical map is created. Got it? If you think you can do this with refrigerator magnets and a transistorized AM radio, you have another thing coming.

On to fMRI. This is a technique for gauging activity in different areas of the brain by measuring the influx of blood to those places. If your brain is working unduly, say, to figure out where the Food Emporium keeps the Clamato juice, then it will require more oxygenated blood to do the job. As you become a pro at finding the Clamato, your brain will be taxed less and
there will be a reduced inflow of blood to the Clamato section of your brain (near the guava nectar section, no doubt). During an fMRI scan, therefore, you are usually required to perform a task or two. Doesn’t that make it sound as if they force me to unload the dishwasher? Instead, the fun and games include an exercise in which I’m asked whether the cards displayed sequentially on the computer screen “follow the rule” (what rule they were talking about, I never figured out), and another in which I am asked to determine if the colored shape on view matches the one I saw one, two, and three screens previously.

So there I am nestled recumbent and semicomatose inside the abyss, when I hear through the intercom headset the voice of one of the women in lab coats saying that because of a glitch in the machine, they cannot continue to administer the fMRI. Just relax, she says. Relax? That can mean only one thing. “How big is my tumor?!” I think. Then I think: Can they see how scared my brain is? Not exactly. The two regions in the brain associated with emotion (the amygdalae) may indeed light up on the monitor, indicating that there’s some sort of neural hullabaloo going on there, but as far as the observers know, I could be fretting about being found dumb.

Nobody’s saying that my brain broke the machine, but after a three-hour hiatus, followed by a test run
of the gadgetry using an empty bottle as the subject, I reenter the magnetic girdle. We complete the testing. No results will be revealed to me today, however, because, as it is explained, the images will make more sense when compared to the analogous ones we’ll take four months from now. Or could it be that the ladies are on the phone with my doctor right now, letting him know about you-know-what.

As a souvenir, the technician left me with a picture of my beige matter.

This is not my brain. This is a piece of gum.

This is also not my brain. It is a tomato.

This is my brain. Can you find the Finger Lakes?

“What do you see?” I asked the technician apprehensively. “You have nice ventricles,” she said. “It shows you’re not schizophrenic. If you were, the ventricles would be all over the place.” Even though this was not something it had occurred to me to worry about, I was relieved.

On the one hand, fMRI is a marvelous tool for looking at how we think, feel, see, and remember. On the other hand, those imaging portals at airport security are also kind of neat. Finally, consider this.
Several years ago, researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara scanned a dead salmon, perfunctorily asking the fish as it lay on the fMRI patient table to identify the emotions being felt by various human beings depicted in a series of photographs. What did they find? You guessed it: Signals associated with thoughts were detected. (In fact, this was due to statistical error, but really, shouldn’t statistics know better?) The researchers did not say what the dead fish was thinking, but my guess is, “I’d rather be lox.”