Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties (11 page)

ANSWER:

Ethylene gas is what causes a banana to ripen. Bananas produce their own ethylene, but adding more causes them to ripen faster. Thus, after shipment, green bananas are often gassed with ethylene. Tomatoes, apples, and pears produce the hydrocarbon, which is why putting bananas in a bag with any of these fruits accelerates the ripening process. Thus the banana that hung out with the tomato is the ripest.

It’s time to test your assassination literacy. If you can’t figure out the directions to this quiz, deduct twenty-five points from your IQ.

ASSASSINATEE: Julius Caesar

ASSASSINATOR:
(Two answers accepted)

ASSASSINATEE:

ASSASSINATOR: Charlotte Corday

ASSASSINATEE:

ASSASSINATOR: Gavrilo Princip

ASSASSINATEE:

ASSASSINATOR: Ramón Mercader

ASSASSINATEE: Lee Harvey Oswald

ASSASSINATOR:

ASSASSINATEE: Robert F. Kennedy

ASSASSINATOR:

ASSASSINATEE: Martin Luther King

ASSASSINATOR:
(Alleged; two answers accepted)

ASSASSINATEE: John Lennon

ASSASSINATOR:

ASSASSINATEE:

ASSASSINATOR: Dan White

ASSASSINATEE:

ASSASSINATOR: Kristin Shepard (played by Mary Crosby)

Bonus question: Who didn’t kill Gerald Ford?

ANSWERS:

ASSASSINATEE: Julius Caesar

ASSASSINATOR: Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus

ASSASSINATEE: Jean-Paul Marat

ASSASSINATOR: Charlotte Corday

ASSASSINATEE: Archduke Franz Ferdinand

ASSASSINATOR: Gavrilo Princip

ASSASSINATEE: Leon Trotsky

ASSASSINATOR: Ramón Mercader

ASSASSINATEE: Lee Harvey Oswald

ASSASSINATOR: Jack Ruby

ASSASSINATEE: Robert F. Kennedy

ASSASSINATOR: Sirhan Sirhan

ASSASSINATEE: Martin Luther King

ASSASSINATOR: Thought to be James Earl Ray or Loyd Jowers

ASSASSINATEE: John Lennon

ASSASSINATOR: Mark David Chapman

ASSASSINATEE: Harvey Milk

ASSASSINATOR: Dan White

ASSASSINATEE: J.R.

ASSASSINATOR: Kristin Shepard (played by Mary Crosby)

ANSWER TO BONUS QUESTION:

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme

D
o I seem smarter than I did in chapter five? Since then I’ve spent untellable hours in front of my computer, challenged by earth-shattering problems like which tiles on the matrix were momentarily highlighted, how to maneuver a penguin through a constantly rotating maze, and how many more drills I must complete before I am smart enough to date Harold Bloom. If it were not for these distractions, dumb ol’ me could have finished writing chapter eleven by now.

Remember when video games were considered the pastimes of sketchy children, whose addiction, if left
unchecked, could lead to a life of crime and poor eyesight? Now we call these games
brain exercises
and hope and trust that our digital exertions will make us as mentally agile as preteens wielding M27 assault rifles in Call of Duty: Black Ops II. They—the games, not the guns—are to mental health what kale and juice cleanses are to nutrition.

“Improve your brain performance,” beckons one online cognitive training website, “and live a better life.” “Achieve up to 1500% increase in brain function,” is the come-on from a “learning enhancement” outfit. Let’s be honest: Wouldn’t it be great if I could prescribe a regimen of computer workouts I’d devised and guarantee that if you played them ten minutes a day, you’d never ever have any mental boo-boos as long as you live and that you’d always remember the name of that lady you keep running into on the elevator? With more baby boomers reported to be afraid of losing their minds than of dying, the worried well—and also a few who aren’t doing so hot—spend more than a billion dollars a year on brain fitness. I’d be so rich! Er, what I mean is that helping others turn back their cognitive clocks would bring me immense joy.

Do these programs really work? Define
work
. Never mind. Nobody can agree on that anyway. What is beyond arguing about is that these games make you
better at these games. Keep practicing Leap Froggies, and sooner or later you will become a pro at getting all the brown frogs to the rocks on the right side of the screen and all the green frogs to the rocks on the left side. OK, but what if your ambitions are loftier than successfully regrouping a bunch of animated amphibians? Will becoming super-duper at playing computer games translate to sharper overall cognitive performance? Will it enable you to differentiate Emma Watson from Emma Stone from Emma Roberts from Emma Woodhouse? Help you remember where you parked the car? Help you remember you don’t own a car? Provide you with the mental capacity to understand why there is more matter than antimatter in the observable universe? (See me if you know the answer. We can share the Nobel.) Moreover, will those benefits be long-lasting? Such is the hallowed mission of all brain game designers. You can answer either yes or no to these questions, and either way you will be in the company of reputable scientists.

There are studies that conclude exercising your brain makes you a more logical problem-solver and more capable multitasker, improves your short-term memory, boosts your IQ, delays mental decline by ten years, lowers your risk of an automobile crash, revs up skills that would make you a more reliable air traffic controller, tunes up your motor coordination so that
you can perform laparoscopic surgery optimally, helps you manage physical pain, and makes you happier—and also sexier. (Not really about that last one.) Controlled studies have shown that after just ten hours of cognitive conditioning, gains can persist for as long as ten years. I have also read studies—and meta-studies—that dispute each of these studies, followed by critiques of those critiques.

One of the most influential studies (and one that has been both proven and disproven too many times for my little hippocampus to keep track of) was done in 2008 by Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, who demonstrated that playing a certain memory game enhanced the player’s intelligence. The game in question was based on the n-
back task
. Subjects were shown a sequence of rapidly changing screens on which a blue square appeared in various positions. At the same time, a series of letters was recited to the group. The subjects were then asked whether the screen and/or letter matched the corresponding items from two cycles ago. Depending on the subject’s performance as the game progressed, the number of cycles he or she was asked to remember increased or decreased—hence the
n
in
n
-back. And you thought charades was hard to follow. Doesn’t this game sound like a barrel of laughs? Fun
or otherwise, the longer the subjects played, claimed Jaeggi and Buschkuehl, the better they scored on tests that measured general intelligence.

A few years earlier, a researcher in Sweden, Torkel Klingberg, showed that children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) could become smarter if they played memory-augmenting computer games. I am mentioning Torkel Klingberg here because I love his name. Also, as you will see if you consult Google Images, he is very cute.

It was partly as a result of the
n
-back findings that many scientists started to believe that the wrinkly guck inside our skulls might be trainable. Given that supposition, we were a mere metaphor away from the proposal that we can have hunky brains if we just do a few exercises—not unlike the way you lift weights and do abdominal crunches to stay as buff and adorable as ever. This is not an unreasonable theory.

How come you can’t just do crosswords? To everyone who has solved today’s puzzle: Sorry, but this is no guarantee you will end up less nutty than the rest of us. Says Alvaro Fernandez, CEO of SharpBrains (the market research firm concerned with brain health, in case you’ve forgotten), “Once someone has done hundreds or thousands of puzzles, the marginal benefit tends
toward zero because it becomes just another routine, easy activity—probably a bit more stimulating and effortful than watching TV, but not enough to bring benefits other than becoming a master at crossword puzzles.” If you’re practiced enough to know that
auk
is a diving seabird, it’s time to learn sign language or take up the tuba. The key to staying sharp, says Fernandez, is to challenge your brain continually with a variety of novel activities—in other words, become a serious dilettante.

ACROSS:

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