Brain Teasers (Published 2008) (2024)

THERE are all kinds of products out there that are supposed to boost your brainpower. Right now, for example, I am wired into a device called the MC Square, which is apparently used by millions of Korean students while studying for their college entrance exams. It’s sending a continuous stream of dolphin noises into my ears, along with a droning techno beat, and it works, as far as I can tell, on the principle that whatever is extremely annoying must be good for you.

But to judge from a number of new brain books, like “Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School” and “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life,” probably the best thing you can do for your brain is exercise, maybe play a video game and then take a nap. (As it happens, there’s also a sleep setting on the MC Square, except that in my experience, it tends to keep you awake.)

On the other hand, Dr. Andrew Curran, a pediatric neurologist, says that the best way to maximize the brain’s ability to learn is simply “to love yourself and others for who they are.” Dr. Curran’s book, “The Little Book of Big Stuff About the Brain,” is a bit overagitated, full of ingratiating anecdotes and incomprehensible, childlike diagrams, but it’s by far the most optimistic of the brain books. No matter how badly our brains have been wired, it argues, there’s nothing about ourselves that we can’t change with a little affection.

Most of the others are a little more deterministic, but one way or another, they all draw on recent discoveries in brain chemistry, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Exercise and sleep turn out to be a good idea, for example, because the brain uses so much energy and because we evolved from people who used to walk all the time and snatched their rest on the run.

The loving business makes sense because much of our learning is controlled by our limbic, or emotional, brain, not the more highly evolved neocortex. There’s also some evidence that smells enhance memory because they bypass a lot of brain circuitry and head right for the amygdala, or emotional center.

One of the main things you learn from brain science, in fact, is that our brains are hardly models of intelligent design. For one thing, we have three of them, one on top of the other: a reptilian brain, a paleo-mammalian brain and a neo-mammalian one. The final product is a marvel, but it’s a marvel of jerry-building, as if some really inspired handyman had figured out how to wire the different bits together.

In their provocative and lucidly written “Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence,” Gary Lynch and Richard Granger argue that our brains did not become larger to keep up with our growing intelligence, as is commonly believed, but rather for biological reasons, probably having to do with enhanced olfactory capability. We then randomly evolved other abilities to make use of all that extra brain space.

To use a real estate analogy, we didn’t move into a bigger mental apartment because we had acquired a lot of furniture; we got the apartment and then we found stuff to fill it.

Dr. Lynch and Dr. Granger, neuroscientists, respectively, at the University of California, Irvine, and Dartmouth, also point out that brain size isn’t everything. Though they’re not talked about much, we had prehistoric ancestors called the Boskops, after the South African town where their remains were found. Their brains were much bigger than ours, and they may well have been smarter than we are. They had enormous melon-shaped heads, apparently, and small, childlike faces, which make them sound a lot like the popular notion of aliens.

And it may have been their very intelligence that did them in. One hypothesis is that they were so thoughtful and peaceable that when we came along — hom*o sapiens, that is, with our smaller brains, inconveniently wired through the limbic system, making us warlike and aggressive — we simply wiped them out.

As these books point out, we’re pretty much stuck with the brains we have. We are our brains. But if you were going to start over, you would want to design the brain very differently, more nearly along the lines of a computer, and you would want to give it more power. A number of scientists are concerned that we have pretty much exhausted the capacity of our brains and that unless we enhance them — with drugs, say, or genetic engineering — civilization will stall.

There are even those — Zhibo Zhang, in his very odd book “The Origin of Intelligence: Past, Present and Future of Man” — who imagine with great equanimity the development of a hybrid that would be more like a machine than a human.

If that prospect strikes you as less than ideal, and you would rather just listen to the squawking dolphins, that’s doubtless because of the messy, emotional part of your brain, the one that accounts for your short attention span and your need to have lessons repeated and accompanied by visual stimuli.

This part of you — so inefficient, it turns out, that it probably includes a neuron programmed just to recognize Jennifer Aniston — may not even be particularly well suited to reading a book in the first place. So John Medina, the author of “Brain Rules,” helpfully supplies a DVD as well.