how to make your brain more intelligent — explained
a more intelligent brain, the listicle promised, in seven easy steps. i made it as far as step two before remembering the voicemail from dave about the three hundred dollars he still owes me. the brain, in that exact moment, prioritized correctly. step two will keep.
that listicle was the latest tab in a stack now numbering forty-seven. the query that got me there was how to make your brain more intelligent, typed at 2am and avoided in daylight since. it is tuesday, 4:18pm. carla emailed at 9:51 to say she was “stuck in the vendor walkthrough until lunch, possibly forever”. i wrote back “k”. by my standards, a complete sentence. so we have time.
how to make your brain more intelligent: probably you cannot, in the way the listicles imply. you can know more things, which is different. intelligent describes the wiring; smart describes the day. one is structural and slow. the other is situational and shows up in groceries. the brain stays approximately where it is, no matter how many sponsored newsletters you forward to yourself.
SMART. IS. NOT. INTELLIGENT. WRITE THAT DOWN.
not the same word. i need this on the record before mike and i get to the bar part, because mike, at minute fourteen of any conversation, will conflate them and i will have to put my hand down on the bar and say “no”. the bar is sticky. the hand stays there. whole thing.
how to make your brain more intelligent, briefly
here is the briefly version. how to make your brain more intelligent, at face value, is a query in the same family as “how to be taller in three weeks” and “how to fall asleep without thinking about my electric bill”. the phrasing assumes the answer is a sequence of steps. the phrasing is, in this regard, optimistic.
the honest version, written on the back of a napkin: read more. sleep more. argue with people smarter than you and lose, in public, on purpose. write down what they said. look at the napkin a week later and understand sixty percent of it. that’s the procedure. very few bullet points. zero supplements.
i tried, last spring, what an article called a “cognitive stack”. it involved fish oil, cold water, a notebook, and a podcast about ancient rome. by day twelve i had a stomach ache, a head cold, an unread notebook, and the same opinions i had on day one, only colder. not a more intelligent brain. a more inconvenienced one.
the difference between smart and intelligent, allegedly
here is what i think is happening. smart is what you are at 11:47am on a tuesday when you remember the umbrella. intelligent is what someone else says about you, in a sentence you don’t get to write, usually after you’ve left the room. one is a behavior. the other is a verdict.
the dictionary, which is a book mike does not own, will tell you the words mean almost the same thing with slightly different historical luggage. the dictionary is, on this question, pulling its punch. ask anyone who has been called smart in a meeting and intelligent in a hallway: the second one is heavier. it expects you to justify it. the first one expects a spreadsheet.
so when the search bar suggests how to make your brain more intelligent, what it is really suggesting is: how to be described, in a hallway, as the kind of person who would know. a much harder problem than seven steps. which is why every honest answer sounds, in the end, slightly disappointing.
mike’s two-beer theory
i went to the corner the other thursday with this exact question. mike was already there. mike is always already there, the way the moon is always already there. mike does not own a brain-training app. mike does not own a meditation cushion. mike does not own, as far as i can tell, any books published after 1998. mike has a theory.
mike said, after the first beer, that intelligent is when you know a thing in advance, and smart is when you figure it out at the last second, and a genius is the guy who pretends he had it the whole time. mike said this without putting his glass down.
i asked mike where he heard it. mike said he didn’t, he just thought of it now. mike said he had a lot more where that came from but he was going to need a second beer to retrieve them. i bought the second beer because i’m the one with the post to write and mike is, in this transaction, the talent.
mike’s full theory, after beer two: most of what people call intelligence is just having paid attention earlier than the people in the room. you didn’t get smarter. you just had a longer head start, sitting on a bar stool, watching. mike rested his case by drinking. that is mike’s gavel.
the napkin came home with me. it lives in a drawer with a takeout menu from a place that closed in 2022. that’s where most of mike’s theories end up — alongside my underlying suspicion that i am, in some structural way, correct about most things.
sarah said something about pensions, related
a left turn, i admit. i ran maratons with sarah six summers ago — i ran approximately one quarter of them — and sarah said a thing i’m only now relocating to the brain question. she said: “the people who look intelligent at fifty are the people who set up something boring at thirty.” she meant a pension. the kind a normal person understands.
i did not, and do not, have one. but the principle migrated. how to make your brain more intelligent, by sarah’s logic, is the same shape as how to be solvent at fifty: boring decisions made early and repeated quietly until they look, from outside, like character. read the boring book. show up to the boring conversation. do the boring rep. do not take the supplement. sarah didn’t say that last part. i added it, free of charge.
tom does this differently, in his volvo
tom has the volvo, the wife, two children, the pension that pays out in a font that reassures him. tom listens to good will hunting on audio, by which i mean tom listens to the soundtrack and tells himself he watched the movie. tom calls this self-improvement. tom is, on this question, doing fine.
tom’s approach to how to make your brain more intelligent is to read one nonfiction book a quarter and quote it for the rest of the year, slightly wrong, with confidence. i read four pages of seven nonfiction books and quote a forum post i half-remember from 2021. tom and i are, in honest accounting, both wrong by the same margin. tom is just better dressed about it. we’re both valid. mine has more naps.
i’d refer the curious to the post about how the brain quietly confirms what it already believed, which is the engine that lets tom and me feel correct on the same tuesday, in different cars.
verdict — the brain stays where it is
so the verdict, by my desk, with carla still in the vendor walkthrough and the drawer doing its little tick.
you cannot, by any seven-step procedure i have personally tested or watched mike test on himself, make your brain meaningfully more intelligent in the way the search bar implies. you can make it more used. you can stack more shelves on it. you can teach it the names of things and the order they go in. but the basement, the wiring, the actual building — the building stays the building.
the dishwasher is a cabinet that judges you, i said somewhere. the brain is the same shape. it sits there. it judges. it doesn’t grow. it gets handled better, over time, by a person who has been embarrassed enough to listen.
that’s my theory. mike’s is shorter. mike’s is “drink water”. mike does not drink water.
if you came here for a real procedure that does not involve mike, the closest honest cousin to how to make your brain more intelligent is the question of how to be smarter, which i drafted, badly, at this same desk a month ago. it answers the smaller question. the bigger one is unanswerable in the form it was asked.
the drawer paused its ticking around paragraph nine. small victory. carla, per follow-up, is “thirty more minutes than i thought.” the seventh microwave hums in the apartment two miles away, holding the line.
the napkin goes back in the drawer. the brain goes back to whatever it was doing before the search bar got involved. mike is, presumably, on beer three by now, telling someone else my theory and crediting himself.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
writing this with one eye on the drawer that clicks
P.S. the third yoga mat is still under the couch. it has not, to my knowledge, become more intelligent either. we’re aging at the same rate, the mat and i, in different rooms, on the same lease.
