Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties (5 page)

At the parking lot for bad drivers, you are not allowed to park in a spot that is next to two occupied spots. In other words, no three cars can be contiguous—vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. This cuts down on accidents, and gives everyone ample room to get in and out of their vehicles and to dump their shopping carts willy-nilly instead of properly returning them to the drop-off areas. How many cars can the lot fit?

ANSWER: 16

(Hey, monolinguals, don’t feel bad. Bilinguals are frustrated by more tip-of-the-tongue moments than you are. It is theorized that similar-sounding words get in the way of each other in the retrieval process, and since bilinguals know twice as many words, this is a greater hazard for them. Another theory is that words used less frequently than more popular words like
the
and
wine
are stored in harder-to-reach nooks and are therefore more elusive. Bilinguals, having accumulated all those words, must stash them away on the tippy-top shelves of their closets. Even deaf people who communicate with sign language have trouble fetching words from their mental dictionaries. Their glitches are called—can you guess?—tip-of-the-finger moments.)

The ability of the brain to reorganize itself as a result of learning and new experience is called
plasticity
. My typing this sentence, for instance, changed my neural wiring, and your reading my words changed yours. Reading a novel, new research has found, may cause heightened connectivity in the brain that could last five days. There is good plasticity and bad plasticity. If, say, you don’t keep up with your Urdu lessons, the Urdu-y connections in your superior temporal gyrus
will become far less superior, and before long you won’t even be able to order a glass of water in Urdu.

The notion that we can affect the resilience of our brains by investing in it early on, banking mental health as if in a 401(k)—to borrow an analogy from the psychologist Sherrie All—hinges on the widely accepted theories of
brain reserve
and
cognitive reserve
. Kenneth Kosik, a neurologist and neuroscience professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, explained these two kindred concepts to me during a rapid discourse that he called “The History of Alzheimer’s in Thirty Seconds,” which lasted about half an hour. Here’s the short version: In 1988, autopsies of several elderly people revealed the plaques and tangles associated with Alzheimer’s disease. However, these individuals, during their lifetimes, had displayed no signs of dementia. It has been hypothesized that they’d been buffered from the effects of the disease by the extra neuronal capacity that they had been born with (brain reserve) or accrued through years of intellectual and physical pursuits (cognitive reserve). Similarly, a study that analyzed the essays written by 678 elderly nuns when they were in their twenties found that the sisters who had used the most linguistically complex sentences were the least likely to have Alzheimer’s, which is why I’ve added this unnecessary subordinate clause even though it’s been a long time since I was in my twenties.
How is it that certain minds seem able to forestall senescence despite genetic programming? The damage to the brain caused by Alzheimer’s can be compared to traffic jams caused by tractor-trailer accidents. Someone who has a robust neural network can find ways around these obstructions using back roads.

But not forever. Unless you have the good luck to kick the bucket before your roadways become disastrously clogged up, sooner or later, even you, with your clever compensatory strategies, will have difficulty getting from here to there. Paradoxically, those with higher IQs, more education, or higher occupation achievement deteriorate faster than average once they show symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. To wit (if I may use that phrase), researchers found that every year of education postpones the memory failure associated with dementia by two and a half months, but once the pathology becomes apparent, the rate of diminishment is 4 percent faster.

You were born with a sense of direction. I don’t mean that as soon as you plunked out of the birth canal you could find your way from the maternity ward to the
gift shop—or even that your innate wherewithal is as sophisticated as that of a lobster, fruit fly, or bacterium. Still, like a new toy with batteries included, your hippocampus and entorhinal cortex came equipped with navigational neurons, though not all of them fully formed. The first to mature were
directional cells
, which tell you which way you are facing. Next to develop were
place cells
, which enable you to memorize landmarks; and finally, after you became mobile enough to explore hither and thither, your
grid cells
evolved, allowing you to keep track of your path by creating a mental map of your surroundings.

Whether you proceed from A to B by remembering to turn left at the 7-Eleven or by intuiting that after an eighth of mile you must go north depends on which cells are more commanding. In general, women tend to reference landmarks when moving through space, whereas men tend to rely on geometric clues, taking into account the lay of the land and estimating distances traveled. The method used by women requires a larger memory and results in their being less likely to be lost than men. (The average male drives an extra 276 miles a year because he doesn’t know where he’s going; a woman, a mere 256 miles.) By the way, if you are trying to find a woman with a good sense of direction, check her fingers. Scientists at MIT discovered
that women whose ring fingers are equal in length to or longer than their index fingers are good at navigation (and can help you find the lost women). It is theorized that women with relatively long ring fingers were exposed to greater amounts of testosterone in the womb.

Language can also influence the way in which we get our bearings in the world. For example, the Aboriginal Pormpuraaw in Australia rarely use words such as
left, right, forward
, and
back
. Instead they talk in terms of
east, west, north
, and
south
. “I have a mosquito bite on my southeast leg,” a Pormpuraaw tribesman might say, or “Could you pass the salt to your west?” As a result the Pormpuraaw have a much better feel than we do for orienting themselves in space. Or at least than I do. (Which way did you say the next page is?)

In any case, the more you practice your spatial skills, the better they become. Conversely, if you rely on your GPS device, your way-finding cells will wither and you will have to use your GPS even more.

DIRECTIONS:

How good is your sense of direction? Speaking of directions, these are so straightforward, you can figure them out. If there are four options, choose two; if there are two options, choose one.

ANSWERS:

SCORING:

So what if you don’t know anything about geography? Nobody does around here. A British news team asked random Americans on the street to name a country that began with
U
and nobody came up with
United States
.

How much do you know about our global neighbors?

This is the only quiz that assesses your geo-cultural intelligence by measuring your potato aptitude. The directions are simple, even if the questions are not. Below is a list of ways in which French fries are served around the world. Your job is to identify the nationality of each tater. Next to each item is what I’d like to call a clue, but, as you may have already figured out, my drawing abilities are not good enough to be considered helpful. At the very least, the pictures should discourage you from answering “United States.”