Let's Be Less Stupid

May 25, 2015
New Yorker staff writer Marx (Starting from Happy) chronicles her four-month-long quest to improve her memory and re-up her IQ to where it was in the glory days of her 20s. Employing candor and wit, she tackles the science and sociology of the brain fitness rage and delivers suggestions and solutions for stemming widespread neurological downslide. Marx test-drives brain exercises, electric zapping, and learning a new language (Cherokee in her case), and throws in some blueberries and fish oil pills for good measure. She also debunks faulty findings. For example, alcohol doesn’t kill brain cells, she writes. In fact, according to a study from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, 29% of people who never drank suffered mental impairment, while only 19% of the imbibers did. She blames the information age for overstuffing people’s brains with information. Marx includes quizzes, tests, and teasers to improve readers’ memories, aiming them at her fellow baby boomers who fear dementia more than death. She also provides lists of things to forget, including inconsequential presidents, wars, and Shakespeare plays. Reflecting on her overall experience, she writes, “I spent so much trying to improve my brain that I had no time to use it,” but her work belies that statement. Marx has written a hilarious and comforting book on maintaining mental acumen at any age.

May 15, 2015
New Yorker staff writer Marx (Starting from Happy: A Novel, 2011, etc.), the first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon, brings her wit and quirky curiosity to the timely topic of mental acuity. Frothy, funny, and abounding in quizzes, exercises, and questionnaires, the author's latest romp takes readers to the field of applied brain studies, of great interest to an aging population. "With more baby boomers reported to be afraid of losing their minds than of dying," she writes, "the worried well-and also a few who aren't doing so hot-spend more than a billion dollars a year on brain fitness." She, too, would like to transform her brain "into a spiffy young noggin," and during her four-month quest for "cognitive rejuvenation," she engaged in "brain-boosting pursuits" that may or may not have had any positive impact. Along the way, she discovered befuddling controversies. Alcohol, for example, "does not kill brain cells" but does damage dendrites, which conduct messages from one cell to another. According to some experts, rearranging furniture stimulates the brain, as does taking a nap, ingesting ginkgo biloba, not ingesting ginkgo biloba, consuming antioxidants, and creating "top one hundred" lists. "As someone whose favorite sport is sitting," Marx confesses, "I would just once like to hear some bad news about physical exercise." Alas, "better thinking" turns out to be a benefit of aerobics. Willing to try some form of meditation, Marx chose "mindfulness," clicking on a YouTube video featuring clouds, waves, sunsets, "and any number of other pictures that look like the photographs you've removed from store-bought frames." Since bilingual students tend to do better on certain intelligence tests, Marx set out to learn Cherokee from Memrise, "a free website that teaches memorization through crowdsourced mnemonics." A sly, irreverent take on the latest obsessions regarding self-improvement.

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