I swiped this from Wired, just thought it was interesting:
by Joshua Green
THERE COMES A TIME IN EVERYONE’S life – usually past age 30 and just after you’ve done something boneheaded like pour coffee on your cereal – when the thought hits you: “I wish I were smarter.” But is real cognitive improvement possible? Experts say yes; intuition suggests no. I was eager to put my own brain to the test.
WEEK ONE: I begin my experiment by playing Brain Age, a Nintendo DS game based on the research of Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima. It puts users through a regimen of cortex-boosting math, memorization, and reading exercises and then measures “brain age,” a metric Kawashima created that should roughly match one’s actual age. The game features an ever-changing series of exercises that can include sudoku, drawing, memorizing numbers and patterns flashed onscreen, reading aloud (usually classic literature), and performing basic math problems in rapid-fire succession. As with all matters health-related, a younger brain age is best. But though I fancy myself basically spry at 34, mentally I’m deep into middle age. My baseline score is a dispiriting 44.
I start a regimen of Brain Age training and consult several neuroscientists about how to jump-start my tired noggin. One answer quickly emerges: diet. Peak brain function requires healthy eating, especially in the morning. In 2003, scientists at the University of Ulster determined that vitamins and protein are vitally important at breakfast; they suggested “beans on toast” as an optimum meal to increase cognition. Willing to go only so far, I swap my usual breakfast (waffles and Gatorade) for a multivitamin, orange juice, and whole-grain muffins with peanut butter, treating myself to Eggos (whole wheat!) on Sundays.
On the advice of Charles Czeisler, a professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School, I start getting more shut-eye. Czeisler studied sleep deprivation in executives and found it had devastating effects on cognitive speed, short- and long-term memory, math-processing skills, and spatial orientation. My typical six to seven hours a night isn’t nearly enough. “The optimum number is 8.2 to 8.4 hours of actual sleep,” Czeisler says, “which may require you to be in bed something on the order of nine hours a night.” Excellent. My noble sacrifice for science: sacking out.
WEEK TWO: More lifestyle changes. Neuroscientists say that showering with your eyes closed and brushing your teeth with your “opposite” hand can open up new neural pathways by challenging your “proprioception” – your brain’s perception of movement and spatial orientation. This morning I try closing my eyes in the shower, quickly become disoriented, and wipe out. (Get a rubber bath mat, trust me.) I also find it surprisingly hard to keep my eyes shut through an entire shower. My solution: a sleep mask. It works nicely, but I look like a naked Lone Ranger.
I read a study about the “Mozart effect,” the somewhat disputed discovery in the early 1990s by a team of UC Irvine neuroscientists that listening to that classical composer “produced significant short-term enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning.” I start blasting piano concertos in the shower. WEEK THREE: The Web offers many tools for “neurobics” and “mental gymnastics” (MyBrainTrainer.com and Happy Neuron are two examples) that conveniently allow one to “train” at work. Most of these sites offer the same type of exercises as Brain Age, though without Nintendo DS’s portability.
I also learn (more) about the wonders of coffee. Caffeine sharpens the senses and quickly increases performance, as one neuroscientist demonstrated by steering me to an addictive online game called Sheep Dash! As sheep dart across the screen, you shoot them with tranquilizer darts as fast as possible by clicking your mouse. The game measures response time, then instructs you to have some coffee and try again. My morning mug makes me about 5.5 percent faster. Extremely cool. Work productivity plummets.
WEEK FOUR: I’m feeling sharper than I have in a long time. And let me tell you, nothing tops the pleasure of lounging in bed while your wife gets ready for work – and saying, when she shoots you a glare, “Beat it, I’m on assignment.”
Now it’s crunch time. The Nintendo DS is glued to my palm, and when I can’t train with it – when I’m “working” – I get busy online with my sheep.
At the end of the week, it’s time for my Brain Age final exam. I opt to take it right after breakfast, when I’m peaking. Kawashima starts me out with the Stroop Test. A word appears onscreen naming a color different from the one it’s printed in (for example, the word yellow is printed in red), and I have to say the color out loud as fast as I can. Even after 30 days, it trips me up. Next comes the Connect Maze, where I have to draw a line through a succession of letters and numbers. And for the grand finale, I perform 20 calculations at breakneck speed.
A second later my brain age flashes onscreen, and all the training immediately seems worthwhile. I’ve made my brain a full decade younger: I score a 33.
Joshua Green is a senior editor at The Atlantic.
from Engadget 
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