Free Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance by Richard Restak

chair of the Department of Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, “The more capacity people have to hold information in mind while they think, the more intelligent they are.”
    Mental exercises: We hear a lot these days about mental exercise. But what exercises are most important to carry out? For mental exercises to be beneficial to brain health, they should be tailored, I’m convinced, to each person’s interests and proclivities. In other words, the benefits accrue only if you’re doing something you enjoy. At the moment, I’m sitting at my writing desk, which overlooks woods across the street. I’m staring at the computer screen while writing the sentence that you are now reading. Meanwhile, my wife sits one floor below me in the company of her ever patient dog and my irascible parrot while finishing the New York Times crossword (she’s already finished the Washington Post crossword, along with the sudoku for the day). In a few minutes she will get up to go to her office. Question: Which of us is engaged in the greater brain challenge?
    My brain stimulation comes from writing books or book reviews. For my wife, sudoku or crossword puzzles work just as well. So there isn’t any “best” way to enhance brain function that can be applied to everyone. Instead, different approaches are appealing to different people.
    Another important point: Mental exercise differs from physical exercise in that it provides specific limited benefits, while physical exercise bestows generalized benefits. If you carry out a fitness program that’s well designed for your body, your general health will improve: you will lose weight, lower your blood pressure, and regulate your blood sugar level. Mental exercises, in contrast, tend to benefit specific mental functions. If you engage in memory exercises, for instance, you’ll improve your memory but won’t do much to increase your logical powers. Nor will increasing your facility with numbers do much to improve your fine motor skills. Because of this tendency for mental exercises to provide limited and circumscribed benefits, a program for enhancing brain performance must include efforts aimed at improving the functions mentioned above along with seven other key brain functions:
    Visual observation
Fine motor skills
Tactile perception
Logic
Numbers
Imagination
Visual-spatial thinking
    Before exploring how to enhance these key brain functions, let’s say a few words about research that is challenging the traditional view that our brain’s power and efficiency are determined largely by our genetics.

The Intelligence Conundrum
    Intelligence is the most striking example of this revolutionary transformation in our thinking. New findings have brought experts to believe that we can increase our intelligence via our own deliberate efforts. This is a revolutionary change in attitude. In only a few years we’ve progressed from the belief that “by all means study hard but no matter how hard you work, don’t think you can exceed the intellectual performance of those who are lucky enough to have been born more intelligent than you” to the more exciting claim that—with the probable exceptions of the Mozarts and the Shakespeares of the world—the principal limitation on intelligence is how hard a person is willing to work. (No doubt this was what Thomas Edison had in mind when he defined genius as “one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”)
    What is intelligence? According to one not very helpful definition, “intelligence is what intelligence tests measure.” But defining what you are trying to measure by referring to the readings of the measuring instrument is a flawed approach. Still, estimating a person’s intelligence on the basis of his performance on IQ tests remains firmly entrenched in both the popular and professional imagination.
    After a lifetime of test taking in a culture obsessed with standardized testing, we’ve been conditioned to