how do i make my brain smarter — what they don’t tell you

what they don’t tell you about making your brain smarter is that the brain is the thing being asked to do the making. it’s a little like asking a hammer to redesign itself, except the hammer is also writing the report, grading the report, and deciding whether the report is any good. the question — how do i make my brain smarter — has a small problem in the grammar that nobody flags. asker and asked are the same organ.

drafting this from the standing desk, which i sit at. the boss’s calendar shows “vendor sync — second floor, no laptops” until eleven-something. the slack icon has gone from yellow to grey. that’s the window.

the brain wants the brain to be better. the brain is the consultant, the client, and the budget. you can see how this gets awkward in a meeting that’s just one person.

how do i make my brain smarter: probably you don’t, in any direct sense. the brain is the only tool available for upgrading the brain, which is the part nobody mentions in the listicles. you can feed it, walk it, sleep it, and bore it less — but the brain is still the one signing off on whether any of it worked. that’s the joke.

THE BRAIN. IS GRADING. ITS OWN. HOMEWORK.

i wrote that on a post-it. the post-it is now under the keyboard, slightly damp, because i spilled coffee on it and the brain — my brain, the one running the experiment — said “leave it, it’ll dry, it builds character”. this is the same brain i am, in this post, attempting to upgrade. you see the issue.

the paradox in one sentence

here’s the sentence: any improvement to the brain has to be approved by the brain.

that’s it. the assumption is that there is a smarter brain, somewhere, that would do a better job of running the operation. and there might be. i can’t access it. the brain i have is the one writing this sentence, the one judging this sentence, and the one that, in about four hours, will decide whether to walk or take the bus. the smarter version is theoretical. the current version is on shift.

this is, somehow, the same problem the limitless plot dodges by inventing a pill. the pill is the cheat. there is no pill. there is, on this desk, a coffee and a post-it that just turned yellow again.

what chatgpt said when i asked it

i typed the question into the chatgpt window at 9:14 this morning, between two slack pings i did not respond to. lowercase. because that’s how i type.

the answer was: sleep more, exercise, read difficult books, learn a language, eat fish, do puzzles, meditate, journal, limit screen time, practice gratitude. ten items. evenly bulleted. each one calm. each one correct. each one, on its own, fine.

i read all ten and felt nothing. that’s the part that bothered me. i wasn’t disagreeing — i was just unmoved, the way you are unmoved by a very polite waiter listing the soups. the soups are real soups. they are also not, on a friday, a meal i’m going to order. the bot was not wrong. the bot was simply unable to acknowledge that the brain reading the list was the same brain that would have to execute the list, and that the brain reading the list was — and i am fairly sure about this — already tired. chatgpt does not get tired. that is its main edge over me.

the standing desk problem, which is also the brain problem

i have a standing desk. i sit at it. i have always sat at it. the desk goes up. i do not. the buttons work. the mechanism is fine. the company that made the desk would not, technically, agree that i am using it correctly, and on this matter, they would be right.

this is, i’m going to argue, the same situation as the brain. the equipment exists. the equipment is in good working order. the user is the bottleneck. the standing desk does not fail to be a standing desk because i sit at it. it just fails to do what it could do, because the operator has, as a personality, decided not to push the button. the brain, i suspect, is the same. the operator — me — has decided, on most tuesdays, that more is something to think about on a different friday. the brain does not file a complaint. the brain just sits, like the desk, at its lowest functional height.

HT8, hot takes, and why holding one is a brain rep

i would like to enter into the record, for reasons that will become clear in a paragraph: pineapple on pizza is fine. the rest of pizza is the problem.

i have held this position for years. i defended it once, at a wedding, to a man in tax, with three glasses of cheap red between us. neither of us got smarter. we just got louder.

i bring this up because holding a hot take is, in a small way, an exercise of the brain. you take in information, you sort it, you decide, you defend. the defending is the part where most people fold. they hear someone else’s reasonable-sounding sentence and they fold. their hot take dissolves. the brain has not gotten smarter — the brain has gotten more agreeable, which is a different KPI entirely. the working theory at this desk is: pick a small, mostly harmless position about something stupid, and defend it, in front of a person who disagrees, without raising your voice. one rep. and the brain, like every other muscle in the building, responds to reps.

what mike would say, if mike were here

mike is, at this hour, somewhere not here. he has a job. i mention this because if you’ve read me before you may have the impression that mike lives at the corner bar. mike lives somewhere with a roof and a key. the bar is just where mike processes the day, between seven and eleven pm.

i’m not, in this post, at the bar. i’m at the desk. mike is, at this exact minute, on a forklift or near one. but if mike were here, leaning against the wall of this cubicle, with the mug that says “world’s okayest cousin”, mike would say: “you’re trying to think your way out of a thinking problem. that never works.”

and mike would be right. mike has not filed his taxes since 2019. but on this — on the specific question of whether the brain can think itself smarter — mike is, i’m fairly sure, holding the correct file.

what’s actually in the fridge — and why that’s the same question

my fridge is in a state, as of this morning, that i would describe as schrödinger’s fridge. there is, technically, food in it. the food is in containers. the containers were, at one point, labeled, by me, optimistically, with dates. some of those dates are now numerically lower than i’d like to admit. the fridge is therefore both stocked and not stocked. it is, until i open the lid of the smaller container at the back, in a superposition of dinner and disease.

i bring this up because the brain is also in a superposition. you don’t know what it knows until you ask it. and you cannot, by the rules of the experiment, ask it without being it. the question turns out to be a fridge question. you can stand outside the fridge and theorize. you can write a list of things that should be in the fridge. you can ask an academic-sounding article what the fridge is supposed to contain. but at some point you have to open it, and what you find is what you have, and the only person who can do something about it is the person standing in the kitchen, which is, again, you.

if you want a more practical, less-paradoxical version of the improvement question, the four-step take drafted at this same desk is a more useful starting point. this one is the philosophical sibling. that one is the to-do list. and the bigger pillar piece on how the brain quietly flatters itself is the one i return to roughly every time i think i’ve had an original thought — including the version that gets specific about what gets in the way. you can also look up the elif batuman novel if you want a fictional version of someone confused at a desk, but better at sentences.

i opened the fridge container. it was rice. it had been rice. it remained rice. one for the brain.

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