buff your brain Ⅱ

    Although working on short-term memory—basically, the brain’s scratch pad—has long been considered just one component of overall IQ, recent research shows that it may in fact be the lever that can raise overall intelligence. In one of the biggest surprises in intelligence research, scientists led by Susanne Jaeggi of the University of Michigan found in 2008 that short-term memory may be the foundation of pure intelligence to a greater extent than anyone suspected. They trained adult volunteers on a difficult short-term-memory task: simultaneously hearing a string of letters and seeing a series of computer screens that had a blue square in different places. The volunteers then had to identify when the spoken letter or the square’s position matched that of several screens earlier. The more they practiced and honed their short-term memory, the greater the improvement in the purest form of brain power, fluid intelligence—the ability to reason and solve problems in-dependently of existing knowledge. (The reasoning portion of the test used what are called progressive matrices: seeing three geometric configurations and choosing which of many options continued the pattern.) In June the Michigan team got the same results in school-age kids, finding that memory training boosts pure intelligence, and so may be the surest path to a higher IQ.

    "There is some controversy over whether brain training can enhance cognition,” says neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia University, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discoveries about the cellular and molecular basis of memory. “But if you really work on memory by, for instance, memorizing poetry—Shakespearean sonnets work—it probably improves some aspects of cognitive function."

    Neuroimaging offers clues to just how memory drills might improve pure intelligence. During memory training, brain scans show, several regions (the lateral prefrontal cortex, the inferior parietal cortex, the anterior cingulate, and the basal gang-lia) become more active—indicating that these regions are involved in memory. What’s interesting is that those same regions also jump into action when the brain reasons and thinks. “I am cautiously optimistic that we’re seeing real effects in these studies,” says psychologist Jason Chein of Temple University. In his own work, he has found that adults who trained on a complex working-memory task for four weeks saw significant improvements in reading comprehension as well.

    The key to these kinds of gains is "intensive training," says Kandel—not quite the quick brain fix we’re told can come simply from eating blueberries or drinking pomegranate juice. Instead, intelligence comes from having more neurons and synapses (connections between neurons). The creation of new neurons (neurogenesis) and synapses makes learning possible.

    The other brain element you can train in order to raise your IQ is attention. Neuroscientists have shown over and over that attention is the sine qua non of learning and thus of boosting intelligence. Only if you pay attention to an introduction at a party will you remember that cute guy’s name. Effects on attention may explain why stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall help some people some of the time with, especially, recall (hence those drugs’ popularity among students cramming for a test). Both stimulants raise the brain levels of dopamine, the neurochemical that produces motivation and a feeling of reward, which make it more likely that the task at hand will rivet your attention. Similarly, action-based games such as Space Fortress and strategy-heavy games such as Rise of Nations have been shown to improve both memory and attention switching. Another way to the same end, says UCL’s Price, is “passion.” If you don’t care about what you’re reading, seeing, or hearing, it won’t be retained.

    While improving your brain takes work, the good news is there are some accessible ways to go about it. Aerobic exercise buffs the brain as well as the quads. Walking 30 minutes a day five times a week stimulates production of BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), a molecule that nurtures the creation of the new neurons and synapses that underlie learning. In neuroimaging studies, scientists led by Arthur Kramer of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have shown that exercise increases gray matter in the region of the hippocampus that processes new knowledge and dispatches it to permanent storage in the frontal cortex. That may not raise IQ—pure intelligence—but stuffing your cortex with more information should make you more knowledgeable.

    If a half-hour walk leaves you tired, good: a midday nap not only can restore brain power to its fully awake best but can also raise it beyond what it would have been without some shut-eye. In a 2010 study, psychology professor Matthew Walker and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, found that a nap may not merely restore brain power but also raise it. Students who took a 90-minute nap at 2 p.m. after a task that taxes the hippo-campus—learning the names of some 120 faces they had never seen—retained more than their non-napping peers. Even more surprising, they also learned new face-name pairs better at 6 p.m. than they had before the nap, and better than the non-nappers. “In people who stayed awake, there was a deterioration in their memory capacity, but a nap restored that capacity to levels even higher than before the nap,” says Walker. So kudos to Nike and the host of Silicon Valley companies like Google that provide nap rooms for employees.