Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties Read online

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  For Deb Futter, Gordon Lish, and Susan Morrison

  (whose combined IQs total 1473)

  Prologue

  Want to know how stupid I used to be? Before writing this book, I took an online IQ test consisting of twenty-one questions. “Which one of the five is least like the others?” asked the opener. The choices were dog, mouse, lion, snake, and elephant. Another item presented this critical state of affairs: “Mary, who is sixteen years old, is four times as old as her brother. How old will Mary be when she is twice as old as her brother? (a) 20 (b) 24 (c) 25 (d) 28.” Then there were—as there invariably are—numerical sequences, such as this one that requires you to fill in the missing number: “8, 27, ?, 125, 216”—and a genealogical question about people who patently changed their names at Ellis Island (“If all Bloops are Razzies and all Razzies are Lazzies, then all Bloops are definitely Lazzies—true or false?”). One last example: “Which of the figures below the line of drawings best completes the series?”

  I knew that IQ tests online have been reported to yield generously higher scores than the professional models (by twenty-eight points, reckons one study), but even so, I thought, aren’t these questions suspiciously manageable? (The answers are b, 64, true, and e). Or maybe my mother was right and I’m brilliant after all, I concluded as I cockily clicked to learn the verdict… which was… get ready: “You have an IQ of seventy-four.” Seventy-four! This is a score that falls into the category described as “low intelligence.” With a score like this, who would have predicted I’d be able to put on my socks unassisted? Apparently the test was timed, a detail I did not grasp when I periodically interrupted my testing to, oh, have lunch and do a few errands, such as voting for the next mayor of New York. This is not an excuse. Any idiot who cannot read the directions deserves an IQ that is a few points shy of “mentally inadequate.” Morally I’m not so adequate, either, but that’s another book (Let’s Be Less Debauched).

  I don’t even listen to directions when I ask for them—and I ask for them all the time because honestly, in order for me to figure out which way is west, I must place a mental map of the United States in my noggin and then think, “California is left and California is west so ipso facto…” As soon as whomever I’ve accosted for navigational help starts up with “After you go under the underpass, take a left but not a sharp left, and keep going straight until you come to a building with an awning…” my mind is off in another world, mulling over what I should have for lunch because, let’s face it, the real reason I ask directions is to be reassured that it’s possible to get there and that someone exists who knows how.

  Yet here I am, about to give you a few pointers on how to read this book. (Hey, if you want to be the author instead of me, who’s stopping you from writing your own book?) First of all, please know that this is not one of those books like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or How to Install a Small to Mid Size Solar & Wind Power Generation System, in which chronology matters. In these pages you will find a higgledy-piggledy assortment of highfalutin science, lowfalutin science, tests to find out just how stupid you are, exercises designed to make you smarter, games to amuse you, games to amuse me, drawings of the contents of my skull as rendered by someone (me) who can’t draw, and accounts of me doing everything from learning Cherokee to zapping electricity into my head, all in an attempt to jump off the cognitive escalator heading downward to you-know-where. Both before and after my self-improvement regimen, I underwent MRI scanning of my brain and took a battery of IQ tests—real ones administered by a psychologist (who read the directions aloud to me). If you want to know the results right now, turn to the last chapter. (Don’t tell my publisher I told you this. Let’s keep it between the two of us.)

  This book, then, is not only a primer of neuroscience (a sub-primer, I admit), a memoir, a self-help guide, a humor book, and a collection of brainteasers and quizzes, but also a suspense tale. If you are looking for a maritime history or picaresque novel, please go elsewhere.

  “I don’t know how to spell. Or they don’t.”

  Cathy Schine

  JULIE: The reason you can’t adopt a Boston terrier in Massachusetts is because the laws are so… you know, so… what’s the word for when something’s extremely strict… you know… it begins with a v?

  CLAUDIA: Draconian?

  JULIE: Yes.

  Julie Klam

  “If I could remember the things I forgot I wouldn’t have a memory problem, then, would I?”

  Lynn Grossman

  “When someone asks you something and you can’t remember quickly, ask them ‘how soon do you need to know?’”

  Judy Siegal

  “I’ve been washing my hair on and off, seeing if there was any appreciable difference in my own intelligence, concentration, etc. and I’ve noticed that if I don’t wash my hair at all, or if I just rinse it that I feel smarter somehow.… I do notice that if I wash my hair with bar soap I get the gain in intelligence but it’s not as strong as what I would get if I didn’t shower at all.… The only likely scientific explanation that I can give is that scratching my head/hair on a regular basis if I don’t shower results in increased blood flow to that area, as a result I then get the increased intelligence from doing that.”

  Someone on the Internet

  what is the word-

  there-

  over there-

  away over there-

  afar-

  afar away over there-

  afaint-

  afaint afar away over there what-

  what-

  what is the word-

  Samuel Beckett

  What Is Your Mental Age?

  DIRECTIONS:

  You have two minutes to answer these questions. If you do not have a timer, start counting.

  1. What’s the word for the stuff you sprinkle on your food but it’s not pepper? No, not salt but like salt but supposedly better for you because it doesn’t have salt in it?

  2. What’s that thing that you put in the thing? The thing you take pictures with. That thing. What’s the thing you put inside that?

  3. What’s the car that’s not a Toyota Camry?

  4. Who’s the guy who isn’t Robert De Niro?

  5. What is the little plastic person you play with called?

  6. How do you spell the drink that’s made with rum, lime juice, and sugar and comes with a tiny umbrella, and don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about?

  7. Do you need tomato paste or do you have some in the cabinet, and “I never use tomato paste” is not an acceptable answer?

  8. Off the wagon? On the wagon? Which is the good one, and by good one, I mean the bad one that’s not fun?

  9. Remind me which is better: Baptist or Methodist?

  10. What number is next?

  11. Why is there a Post-it on the cutting board?

  ANSWERS:

  1. NoSalt salt substitute. Mrs. Dash is also accepted.

  2. Memory card. “Film” is not accepted. Get with it.

  3.
Honda Accord

  4. Al Pacino. One-half point for Harvey Keitel or James Caan.

  5. Barbie

  6. Daiquiri

  7. You are on the honor system.

  8. I don’t remember.

  9. This was a trick question. Quaker. Half-credit for Unitarian.

  10. Depends on how you define next.

  11. I thought you put it there.

  SCORING:

  1 point for every correct answer.

  0: Older than the hills

  1–3: Same age as Father Time’s uncle

  4–7: If you took your gray matter to Antiques Roadshow, they’d be impressed.

  8–10: Younger than springtime

  11: Will you write the rest of this book?

  Chapter One

  Welcome to My Brain

  First, meet my brain. It is the size of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s fist, the consistency of flan, and weighs as much as a two-slice toaster. You probably think yours resembles a shelled walnut, but mine looks more like ground round with a high fat content. If you saw it at the butcher’s, you’d ask for something a little less beige.

  If you were a plastic surgeon, you’d say my brain needed a facelift. The reason my brain is so wrinkly and ridged is that, like a suitcase packed with a lot of junk, it contains too many neurons to fit smoothly inside my skull. If you ironed out my brain, you could use it as an ironing board cover.

  Or you could use it to power your night-light. Do you know that operating a robot with a processor as fancy as your brain would require the same amount of energy generated by a small hydroelectric plant? You could not afford its electric bill.

  Of late I’ve been a bit worried about it. My brain, I mean. Although the combination to my junior high school locker seems to be stored indelibly in some handy nook of my temporal lobe, right next to Motown song lyrics, could it be that elsewhere up there, not everything is in shipshape? When I ask my brain a simple, no-brainer question like “What is the word for that thing that’s sort of a harmonica but more annoying and looks like you could smoke pot with it?” or “Who did that fat actress with those eyes and the diamond marry twice?” or “Abjure or adjure—which is the one I mean?” or “Did that lady say to turn left or right at the light?” or “The guy who just said hello to me—do I know him?” or “Have I already told Phil and Cynthia this story I just started telling them?” or “All that stuff I used to know about Charlemagne’s in-laws—where’d it go?” or “While I was looking at the fabric on the sofa in the background, did the villain in that scene get killed off?” or “What did I do last Saturday?” or “Did I turn off my phone?” or “How in the world was I planning to end this sentence…?”

  Anyway, what I believe I was going to say is that my brain is not nearly as quick on the draw as it used to be. Indeed, sometimes, when I look for my glasses while wearing my glasses, I think, “My, my, it’s going to be a very smooth transition to dementia.”

  What is going on? In my darkest moments, I imagine that my friends are humoring me when they insist the amnesiac lapses of their brains are no less alarming than mine. (“Have you ever squeezed toothpaste onto your contact lenses?!” a friend asked triumphantly.) Could they be conspiring to shield me from my diagnosis, kindly reasoning the news would only agitate me since there is no cure for what my brain has? Another interpretation is that my think tank is filled with so much accumulated intelligence—the shoe size of my ex, the names of Sarah Jessica Parker’s children, the calories in cottage cheese—that the contents are gunking up the works, not to mention leaving room for little else.

  Or perhaps my brain simply has too much on its mind. How can it be expected to function when it must check my e-mail and texts every two to three seconds? Multitasking? It can hardly task. Back in the halcyon days when my cerebral cortex was in its prime, it had a cushy to-do list—a little homework, a few friends’ names to keep track of, nothing more. Not even laundry to sort. Still another theory is that my brain was never the hotshot I remember its having been. Was it ever really able to solve a polynomial equation? I think yes, but I can’t make promises. (You don’t think I kept a math diary, do you?) Furthermore, no matter what my upper story will tell you now, my habit for losing things goes back at least to my early twenties. Once, in a school cafeteria, I frantically asked all servers and eaters and cleaner-uppers in sight whether they’d seen my large black tote that, unbeknownst to me, I was conspicuously toting under my arm. I got funny looks, but nobody broke the truth to me.

  Then there’s the saddest possibility yet: Maybe nothing’s the matter with my gray matter. Except for age. CORRECTION: second-to-saddest.

  My brain is no spring chicken. It is as old as the wait for Godot, the hydrogen bomb, and Methuselah’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- (and so on and so forth) grandniece. How old exactly does this make my brain? Do I have to say? My mother would disapprove. On my last birthday, she said she remembered turning my age and feeling sorry for her mother for having a daughter so old. On the bright side, my mother still remembers. Her mother, my grandmother, remembered most things until she died at age ninety-nine, except she thought she was ninety-seven because, as we later determined, she forgot she’d lied about her age.

  Will Reading This Book Kill You?

  It is possible that you will become so immersed in solving the puzzles in this book that you will lose all sense of time, forget to eat, and eventually starve to death. It is also possible that here will give you a paper cut that will become infected and the infection will turn into flesh-eating disease and you will be dead before you can say, “Page thirty-two.” Or perhaps you will be so startled by what I have to say your heart will say whoa and you will keel over for good. This is all possible, but it is not probable. In fact, the odds of dying from complications of this book are one in 233,457,830.

  DIRECTIONS:

  Below are several other unlikely ways of dying. To be fair (to fate), they are arranged alphabetically. Number them with number one being the most farfetched.

  __ Asteroid

  __ Bus crash

  __ Cancer

  __ Car accident

  __ Drowning in bathtub

  __ Fairground accident

  __ Falling coconut

  __ Falling off a ladder

  __ Falling out of bed

  __ Food poisoning

  __ Heart attack or stroke

  __ Left-handed people using a right-handed product

  __ Lightning

  __ Plane crash

  __ Radiation leaked from nearby nuclear power station

  __ Scalding tap water

  __ Shark attack

  __ Snakebite

  __ Terrorist attack

  __ Train crash

  __ Work accident

  ANSWERS:

  1 Shark attack: 1 in 300,000,000

  2 Fairground accident: 1 in 300,000,000

  3 Falling coconut: 1 in 250,000,000

  4 Asteroid: 1 in 74,817,414

  5 Bus crash: 1 in 13,000,000

  6 Plane crash: 1 in 11,000,000

  7 Lightning: 1 in 10,000,000

  8 Radiation leaked from nearby nuclear power station: 1 in 10,000,000

  9 Terrorist attack: 1 in 10,000,000

  10 Scalding tap water: 1 in 5,000,000

  11 Left-handed people using a right-handed product: 1 in 4,400,000

  12 Snakebite: 1 in 3,500,000

  13 Food poisoning: 1 in 3,000,000

  14 Falling off a ladder: 1 in 2,300,000

  15 Falling out of bed: 1 in 2,000,000

  16 Drowning in bathtub: 1 in 685,000

  17 Train crash: 1 in 500,000

  18 Work accident: 1 in 43,500

  19 Car accident: 1 in 8,000

  20 Cancer: 1 i
n 5

  21 Heart attack or stroke: 1 in 2.5

  SCORING:

  To compute your score, calculate the difference for each item between the number you assigned it and its actual number. Now add up these results. Or have your bookkeeper do this. If you received a score of 15 or less, you are immortal.

  Middle-Age Mad Libs

  DIRECTIONS FOR THE ONE PERSON WHO HAS NEVER HEARD OF MAD LIBS:

  Ask someone how to play.

  1. What Did You Do Last Night?

  Three-syllable noun __________

  Long word __________

  Large household appliance __________

  Three-syllable verb ending in -eer __________

  Science word __________

  Preposition __________

  Conjunction __________

  Last night? When was last night? I, uh… what did I do? Hold on, lemme look it up in my whatchamacallit, __________ [THREE-SYLLABLE NOUN]. Uh-oh, where’s my—don’t tell me I left it in the back seat of the __________ [LONG WORD]? Oh. Here it is. How’d that get inside my __________ [LARGE HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCE]? Anyway, we went out with the whatstheirnames. He works with whosis and she’s the one with the brother. The brother went to jail for, what’s it called? __________ing [THREE-SYLLABLE VERB ENDING IN -EER]? We went to that movie that’s very popular but nobody likes. Called maybe __________ [SCIENCE WORD]? The suave guy who used to be in everything but now you never see him, he’s in it. Didn’t he direct that movie where people smoke? I think it has a __________ [PREPOSITION] or a __________ [CONJUNCTION] in the title. So, what’d you do last night?… What do you mean you and I had plans?!