how do you make your brain smarter — and i’m fairly sure

you make your brain smarter, supposedly, by giving it harder things to chew on. i gave mine a tax form and the productivity bro tweet of the week and waited. it has been six minutes. the tax form is folded into a small triangle. the brain is, by all available metrics, the same brain.

10:38am, wednesday. the boss is in some thursday-prep prep on the third floor. the morning is mine.

the question — how do you make your brain smarter — came in second person. not how do i. how do you. as if someone looked at me, the man with seven dead microwaves and a fridge unopened for eleven days, and thought: this is the guy. touching. also incorrect. but here we are.

how do you make your brain smarter: you give it slow problems and you stop interrupting it. that’s the short answer. the long answer involves a friend named sarah, a fridge i refuse to open, the seventh microwave i killed, and the suspicion that the brain was already fine, and the trouble was the 47 tabs.

YOU DO NOT MAKE A BRAIN. THE BRAIN MAKES YOU.

the second-person trap, or: who is even asking

here is what i noticed first. when the question is how do you make your brain smarter, you, the reader, hear it as a tip. a hack. a thing somebody on a podcast said at 1.5x speed, because everything good is now said at 1.5x speed. but when i, the writer, hear it, i hear it as an accusation. have you tried, and how did it go.

i have tried. it did not go. i tried, three years ago, by buying a notebook with a leather cover. the cover cost more than the notebook. i wrote on page one: be smarter. that was the only entry. the notebook is now under a stack of mail i don’t open, doing the work of a coaster.

i tried, two years ago, by listening to jeopardy! reruns on the bus. i learned three rivers. i forgot two before i got home. the third one, the loire, stuck. the loire is in france. that is the entire return on that investment.

sarah, who runs marathons in shoes that cost more than my chair

sarah called yesterday. sarah is a friend — long enough to remember the second microwave, tactful enough not to bring up the third. she was in mile fourteen of a long run. she was not winded. her voice did not change. she was running and breathing and explaining a roth conversion, and the call dropped on her end, twice, before mine, which i think tells you something.

sarah does, by my count, the following. she runs marathons (last wednesday, she negative-split it — her second half was faster than her first, which is a thing humans can apparently do). she contributes to a 401k twice a month, like clockwork. she listens to podcasts at 1.5x because at 1.0x, she says, the speakers sound stoned. she meal-preps on a Wednesday, cheerfully, and that is the part that breaks me.

i asked her, mile fourteen, how do you make your brain smarter. she laughed. she did not stop running. she said: “you don’t. you make it less tired.” she said it like she was reading the time off a clock. then she hung up to start mile fifteen.

i sat at my desk thinking about a woman who, mid-marathon, casually told me that a question i have asked for fifteen years is the wrong question. you make it less tired. the brain is fine. it is just exhausted. by what. by mostly me.

the productivity bro, who has never been tired

the productivity bro tweeted this morning at 4:38am that he wakes at 4:30, journals for thirty minutes, ice-baths for eleven, reads for an hour, lifts for an hour, and is at his desk by 7:00 with what he calls “a sharpened sword of a brain.” a sharpened sword. of a brain. the photo attached was a green smoothie and a watch i could pay rent with for two months.

i read it at 9:47am, on the toilet, and felt the precise feeling i think the tweet was designed to produce: i should be doing this. i should be sword-braining. instead i was eating, for breakfast, a leftover bowl of ice cream, because ice cream is breakfast — it contains milk, that’s a hill i’ll die on, the dairy committee can write me a letter, i won’t open it.

then i thought: has anyone seen this man’s brain. how do we know. we don’t. we have his word. and his watch. for all i know his brain is also panicking quietly at 2:18 about whether the ice bath is making him a person or just very cold.

the 47 tabs, and what they are doing to the operation

i counted my browser just now. 47 tabs. this is the resting state. tab 1 is gmail. tab 47 is a soup recipe i started reading in october. between: three articles about how do you make your brain smarter, two about ergonomic chairs, one about whether the hum of a fridge can affect cognition, and roughly nineteen tabs that are tabs of tabs of tabs, like a russian doll, but stupider.

each tab is a small open question. each one is filed under “i’ll come back to this.” i never come back. the brain knows i never come back. but it keeps the tabs warm anyway, in case. that is the cost. that is what sarah meant by tired. it is not that the brain is dumb. it is that the brain is hosting 47 unfinished conversations and trying to think about taxes on top of that.

this overlaps, in spirit, with what i learned writing about cognitive bias — the brain isn’t a computer being upgraded, it’s a clerk drowning in paper, trying to file things into the wrong folders. helping the clerk is mostly about fewer folders.

the fridge i no longer open, and what it taught me

there is, in my apartment, a fridge. inside the fridge are objects. some of the objects were food, in march. it is now april. the relationship between the objects and the category food is, at this point, philosophical. i have not opened the fridge in eleven days. i call it, in private, schrödinger’s fridge. inside, the leftovers are simultaneously edible and not edible. the act of opening would collapse the wave function. so i don’t open. i am, in this sense, preserving possibility.

this sounds like a joke. it is also the model. how do you make your brain smarter by deciding what not to investigate. by leaving questions closed. the brain is not a computer that gets faster with more inputs. it is, on its best day, a tired man at a desk choosing what to pick up next. and most of what gets picked up does not need picking up.

the answer, by someone whose seventh microwave still has scorch marks

the long version of this lives in the pillar on this corner of the brain question — alongside what confirmation bias actually is and the psychology dressing on the same plain salad. there is also a four-step thing i drafted at this same desk, which is the closer-to-honest version of the question.

a slack notification just came in. someone said “ping” at me. in keeping with my own teaching, i have not opened the tab. the tab is now tab 48.

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