Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties (13 page)

A
s 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 developing 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.

D
uring 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.