Did America Just Get Smarter?

John Medina is a neuro researcher and the author of Brain Rules, a sensational book about what we know (very little) and what we need to know (an enormous amount) in order to understand how the human brain works. The book is cleverly organized and has a corresponding website so that after one reads a chapter, there is an interactive segment to help remember, since memory is often reinforced by repetition and a switch in how one is processing incoming information.

The chapter I am currently reading (on my Kindle while I work out) is about the impact of stress on cognition. Stress makes us stupid.

Adults experiencing high levels of stress performed 50% worse on certain cognitive tests. Children perform even worse. Any school teacher who has watched an A student descend into failure knows that something is happening at home. Stress pushes people into depression, too, another ailment that makes us stupid by shutting down entire aspects of human creativity.

"Stress alone is neither harmful nor toxic," according to Medina. Allostatis is the word to describe this state. How our bodies reaction to stress depends on three factors that affect the allostatic load: the type of stress, its length, and severity.

Now let's go back to the post-911 Bush era. Do you recall? Constant and relentless stress caused by incessant, strategically timed warnings that the next terrorist attack was just around the corner. And we believed them, because they had failed to prevent the first attack, something the Bush administration officials always failed to acknowledge.

Enter President Obama with his cool, precise tone. My goodness, the President reminded us to wash our hands and to keep our sick kids home from school during the week-long type A H1N1 influenza scare. (It worked, too! People acted responsibly, and the flu didn't spread as virulently as one might have expected.)

He didn't add to the crisis; he was cool. We can blame cable news for the hysteria, not the President.

So yesterday, being Mother's Day, I declared a moratorium on Sunday news shows and obsessive website reading, because I had gotten to this chapter in Brain Rules. And I knew Dick Cheney was back on the airwaves again, trying to scare us. This man who was virtually invisible during his term in office, sequestered in secret bunkers, making more and more money on his investments while descending into his paranoid state, can't get enough air time now that he is free from the stress of being in office.

And we know why! He is afraid of investigations and prosecutions. He dodged the Valerie Plame investigation, but he can't dodge the responsibility for torture.

Mother's Day: On a lighter side! Did you see "Dicks in the Box," an off-color and delightfully funny video done by Justin Timerberlake and Andy Samberg on Saturday Night Live sometime in the fall. They did a sequel Saturday night called "Motherlove" in honor of Mother's Day. Watch them in order and laugh! That's a great antidote to stress, by the way.

Thanks to my daughter for sending me the link as a Mother's Day present!

Faster, Faster, Faster

Brain researchers know that exercise, aerobic exercise specifically, increases cognitive abilities in all ages of people. It makes sense: when we were still living on the Serengeti, we had to keep moving in order to keep living, so that we were making evolutionary decisions on the run. Now we make decisions sitting in front of a computer terminal, and it's not the best way to get our brains running at full speed. I just started John Medina's Brain Rules, and it's fun, multi-media, and gives some pretty powerful arguments for life style changes that diminish the probabilities of spending our older years with diminished capacities.

Last week's The New Yorker also deals with how our brains work, focusing on neuro-enhancing drugs: how they work, do they work, and what are the ethics of having them available at the workplace and in classrooms. Margaret Talbot's "Brain Gain" is also worth the time to read.

We know that some stress is stimulating, but there are limits, and we appear to be walking through another of those evolutionary gates when intentional decision making is required. The pharmaceutical companies and the global workplace should not be the determinants of whether we start taking medication to make us all into more productive workers. Already, according to Talbot, there are cultures in some workplaces that encourage such competition among workers that these neuro-enhancing drugs are commonplace. At my daughter's women's college, they are, too: Adderall, Provigil, Ritalin. These drugs and their availability once again exacerbate the class, and consequently, racial divide. Who can afford these prescription drugs?

Sometimes I think that if we redistributed work among all of us, there would be no unemployment and we might have a moment to sit in our gardens and watch the tulips bloom.