How To Become Smarter

While perusing the New York Times, I stumbled upon this article  on brain training. Naturally, as a college graduate who now remembers little to none of the Mandarin Chinese I minored in, I read it hoping to find out how to make myself "Pinky and the Brain" smart. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that Pinky is underrated. Yin and Yang, dawg. Yin and Yang. This is why I need this brain training desperately. I can't write a blog post on how to become smarter without going off on a tangent about 1990s cartoons.

SO. The gist of the theory is that through simple games, you can increase your fluid intelligence, which has always been thought to peak in your early 20s and continually decline until all that's up in your head is just silly putty. And there's just nothing silly about declining fluid intelligence.

Whether you know your IQ score and want to improve it, or if you're like me and just want to remember everything you needed to get at Target without saying "DOH!" on the drive home, play this game. It might work, it might not. But, it's a solid way to procrastinate and helps you rationalize your procrastination with self-betterment. Like watching "Jeopardy" before studying.

I've never been interested in finding out my IQ score, which is one of the ways the researchers in the article measured the changes in fluid intelligence. There are only a few ways this scenario can play out:
1. You take the test and find out that you're borderline mentally challenged. Self-esteem is as low as your IQ score. Lose.
2. You take the test and find out that you're just average. Self-fulfilling prophecy turns you into a sad, sad car salesman.
3. You take the test and find out that you're genius level. Head over-inflates to the size of a blimp. You become that douche who talks about Mensa chess meet-ups at parties. You in a year--->


You see? No one wins with IQ tests. I really do feel like assigning a number to your intelligence can only do more harm than good. The number would haunt you anytime you ever questioned your intelligence. I already have enough numbers to haunting me anyway. Between my SAT and GRE scores, GPA, bank account balance and the points on my drivers license, I have had just about enough with numbers.