Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties (17 page)

Put your hand in a light socket
Never mind.

I
f you desire to have your offspring grow up to be musical illiterates, then say to them, as my father said to me when, at age eight or so, I protested the injustice of my early-onset piano lessons, “Someday you will thank me.” “Oh, no, I won’t,” I vowed, calculating that even if my father turned out to be right about music’s being enriching, the profits could never trump my current agony. Sure enough, today I regret that even “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” is beyond my plinking capacity. I took flute lessons, too, but was allowed to quit when I demonstrated that after three weeks of trying, I couldn’t
produce a sound. There were also guitar lessons—years’ worth that resulted in my knowing seven calypso strums and one song (“Jamaica Farewell”). If I’d had a more successful musical upbringing, would I be smarter now or just more useful at a jam session?

The thesis that music can make you more intelligent was introduced in the 1991 French book
Pourquoi Mozart?: Essay
, and took hold in America two years later when an article in
Nature
magazine stated that listening to one of Wolfie’s sonatas augmented spatial reasoning skills for ten to fifteen minutes afterward. The alchemy of the press and public opinion turned this modest claim into: Mozart makes you a Mozart or at least a genius. It wasn’t long before hopeful parents were subjecting their newborns to Symphony No. 41 in C Major—and on a farm in Italy, buffalo were exposed to recordings of Mozart three times a day so their milk would make better mozzarella. (Is there such a thing as clever cheese? Is that what “head cheese” is?) The original study was eventually debunked. Subsequent randomized controlled trials found scant evidence that learning to play an instrument has much immediate cognitive benefit. No matter. Eighty percent of Americans persist in their belief that music makes you smarter.

Hold on. They could be right. Evidently the gray matter of those who’ve studied music is different from
that of troglodytes like me. For example, the regions in their cortices that relate to hearing, language production, self-awareness, and executive functioning are larger. What’s more, they score higher on their SATs, are more likely to have graduate degrees, and, at least in the case of high school band and orchestra members in Texas in 1998, have lower rates of lifetime alcohol, drug, and tobacco abuse. To what extent can these achievements be explained by a song in the heart? Or could it be that someone who listens to her father is bound for success regardless?

Just in case, as part of my get-smart program, I spent several weeks practicing piano scales, an exercise that must have brought no amount of gladness to my neighbors in 8H. Imagine that I am banging out the following melodies. How many can you identify?

Dada de-dah!

Dada de-DAH!…

Dum dum da dumm.

Dum dum da-dumm.

Dumm dumm da-dum dum,

Da dumm dumm da dumm…

La-le lad le le-le lah

Le-la lah

Le-la lah

La-le lad le le-le lah

Leh le le lah de lah…

Ahh ah-ah ahhhhh Ahh ah-ah ahhhhhhhhh

Eh eh eh. Eh eh ahh…

Nynah nnah ne nyah nah ne nah na-ah nah

ANSWERS:

SCORING:

Perfect score: Quit your job and join a band.

ANSWERS:

So what if you can’t recognize
pfft
s and whooshes? That is what closed captions are for.

Another reason not to despair: A professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard, Takao Hensch, is developing a drug, similar to one used to treat epilepsy, that he hopes will make it possible for adults to learn absolute (aka perfect) pitch. This ability to identify and produce a note without any auditory clues is found in only one in ten thousand people, a club that doesn’t even include Haydn or Schumann. If you were not born with this prowess, you have a shot at developing it during early childhood when your neural roadways are still extremely malleable. After that, join the rest of
us who couldn’t say whether the car alarm is blaring in F-sharp minor or B-flat major.

Hensch aims to return our cognitive equipment to its nimble pre-seven-year-old state, where we might not only master perfect pitch, but painlessly and readily pick up new languages and learn how to operate the remote.

T
hat’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:

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.