Sharpning your Brain

 Overview

If you could increase your brain power, then theoretically you could accomplish almost anything. While having a healthy and strong body is highly important as well, most of us would probably agree that our activities are more reliant on our cognitive abilities rather than our physical ones.

Many people have computer-based jobs for instance, and this means that we need to use our brains to handle data, to manipulate software, or to come up with business strategies. Much of our success comes down to our ability to interact with others, which of course is very much dependent on our intelligence and our brain power. Whether you’re giving a presentation and choosing the best words to communicate your message, or whether you’re in an interview or date setting and trying to quickly find the wittiest or funniest response to a question. 

Problems at home tend to involve finances, social situations or legal issues – there are very few problems we can solve with our fists. In our spare time, we tend to pursue more intellectual activities too. Perhaps we play video games (reacting to enemies and solving puzzles), or maybe we sit and read. And even when an activity seems ‘physical’ on the surface, it is in fact very often just as much cognitive. Take sports for example, which require you to be aware of the positions of your team mates and opponents and to use your body efficiently and accurately through space. Or how about doing ‘physical labor’ such as making repairs – which almost always involves some measure of engineering.

So, if you were smarter then, or if you just had greater command over your mental faculties, you’d be able to: 

• Concentrate longer on tasks and get more work done o Thereby progressing further in your chosen career and earning more money o Thereby giving yourself more free time at the end of each day and giving you fewer things to stress about

 • Come up with unique ideas and novel solutions o Thereby potentially making yourself rich, or changing the world in a positive way o Thereby solving problems that you face in your daily life 

• Improve your physical and sporting ability

 • Impress anyone in a conversation 

• Become better at any given task, from plumbing to computer games 

• Become more self-sufficient and reliant And even beyond the practical and tangible benefits of boosting your brain power, you’d be able to benefit from simply having a greater appreciation for the world around you. A better understanding of how things work. An enhanced capacity for learning and more incentive to do so… Perhaps you could improve your understanding and appreciation of the very nature of life and the universe… Become Limitless It’s no mean feat imagining what would be possible with greater brain power – if you yourself were greater. And so perhaps the best place for us to look to is fiction. What if we consider a fictional example of someone who is suddenly bestowed with incredible mental capacity? 

And the best recent example of this probably comes from the film Limitless. In that film, the protagonist Eddie Mora is given a smart drug – a supplement called NZT. This tablet is an experimental drug that has the ability to help anyone to use ‘100%’ of their brains. (Of course, this is a load of nonsense - we already use 100% of our brains! But we’ll allow the writers the poetic license.) When Eddie takes the NZT, he is instantly transformed. He goes from being a slob and a struggling writer, to cleaning up his flat and his appearance and completing his manuscript – which of course goes on to become a best-seller. He then works out the stock market and begins day trading, becoming rich from his home. He talks several women into bed before winning back his ex with impress displays of intelligence, such as his new ability to speak several languages. He moves into a stunning, luxury apartment and attracts the attention of an investment firm. Eventually, he uses the power and influence he accrues there to run for political office. All this, because he was able to take control of his brain. Because he was able to see patterns that others missed. Because he ‘knew exactly what he had to do’. And because he gained sharper intuition and better cognitive skills. Now of course this is a fiction and in reality, no such pill exists. Neither can we say with certainty that you would see such a huge impact on your life if you were to increase your brain power alone. But it’s certainly a believable idea that your life might change that much. This Book And what is very exciting is that there really are ways that you can boost your intelligence – albeit to a slightly lesser degree. There really are ways you can bring about tangible, measurable improvements in your life by 6 focussing on ways to increase your IQ and your focus. In this book, you’re going to learn precisely how to do that. You’re going to see how you can increase your intelligence and focus to a profound degree, how you can become sharper, how you can learn faster and how you can even improve your ‘social IQ’. By the time you’re finished, you’ll know how to train your brain in just the same way that you would normally train your body. And the results will be incredible. 

The Power of Working FAST

Before we move on, I want to address just one more topic: the power of working FAST. If you have greater concentration and if you can think more quickly, then you can work faster. This is something I’ve been training for from a young age and it’s something that I genuinely believe helped me to perform very well indeed throughout college and into my career as an adult. In college, the ability to work fast is what allowed me to effectively complete more work than all my peers and that way to get better grades – without really trying. I’d routinely leave my work until the last minute and then complete an essay of acceptable quality, thereby giving myself much more free time.

 In exams, I’d write twice as much as most people and when coupled with a realization of what examiners were looking for (most will mark papers very much by referring to a checklist of things you need to complete) that meant that I could get better grades than perhaps I could have otherwise. When I left college, I became a copywriter and started taking jobs for other people. I quickly realized that there was a lot of work out there, but only if you were willing to work for $2 or less per 100 words. My solution? Work 7 incredibly quickly. By writing 20,000 words a day, I was on a very good salary right away – I was able to move out of my parents’ house and get a flat with a balcony by the sea. With training, I learned to write faster and faster. I eventually bought myself enough time to start doing other things in the second half of the day – things like creating an app that went on to become a bestseller and eventually writing a novel. 

I create a YouTube channel that quickly gained tens of thousands of followers – all because I was able to upload highly produced videos quickly. This is clear evidence of how being able to harness the power of your brain can lead to better results in real life. This is all stuff that I trained myself to be able to do. And with the help of this book, you’ll be able to do the exact same. 

What are Neurotransmitters and How do they Work?

Let’s start out by looking at the neuroscience of intelligence and precisely how you can go about increasing it from a theoretical standpoint. 

So, welcome to your brain. Here, you have a massive interconnected web of neurons which we collectively refer to as your ‘connectome’. Think of this like the world’s largest mind map, except that it is made from billions of connections. Each of these neurons represents an experience, an action, a memory or a ‘qualia’. 

So, for instance, you have your visual cortex (V1) which contains all the neurons responsible for your sight. If you were to open up the back of your skull and stimulate those neurons individually using an electrode (this has actually be tested by the way), then you would see points of light appear in your vision corresponding to the specific neuron! Likewise, if you were to stimulate neurons in the motor cortex, then this would cause your arm or leg to move, or it might make you feel a sensation on your ear. 

Other neurons have different jobs. For instance, there are those that have the role of storing memories. These light up when we recall things that happened to us in the past. Others might make us feel happy or sad. Others might represent aspects of our personality, or our ideas. 

These are grouped into clusters in the brain or brain regions, which is why brain damage can end up knocking out very specific abilities or altering our personalities. And at any given time, multiple brain areas will be active, representing the way in which your brain is being used.

 So you might have activity in your visual cortex because you are processing the things around you, but you might also have activity in your hippocampus relating to memories associated with the things you’re seeing and you might have activity in your prefrontal cortex as you make plans as to what you are about to do. Neurotransmitters The neurons are connected via long tales and branches called axons and dendrites.

 They don’t actually come into physical contact with one another, but rather they come very close to touching and leave just a very slight gap called the synapse. When one neuron fires, it causes all of the surrounding neurons to become more excited. And when neurons pass a certain excitement ‘threshold’, then they fire too. So, in other words, you might see a duck and this might register as a representation of a duck in your mind’s eye. 

That causes a certain pattern of neurons to fire and those ‘action potentials’ (the technical term for these electrical charges) will then travel down the axons to related concepts that are ‘connected’. These include the likes of memories you might have about ducks, opinions about ducks, duck facts, Donald Duck etc. But only when enough activity surrounds your ‘Donal Duck’ cluster of neurons will those actually light up and only then will you experience a memory or a thought of the character

Neurons can become excited but they really only have two states: on or off. What’s less binary though, is the signal that they send and receive. And this is where neurotransmitters come in. 

Neurotransmitters are chemicals that exist in the brain that effectively add color and nuance to the communications happening across our brain. These act like hormones in that they are able to change our mood and change the way we feel about something. The difference is that they have a much shorter lifespan and that they act on the brain specifically. Among other things, neurotransmitters make neurons surrounding them more or less likely to fire and will thereby put the brain in an overall more excited or more inhibited state. At the same time though, they can also increase the likelihood of new connections forming and they can increase the apparent ‘importance’ of certain activity, thereby directing your attention. An example is dopamine.

  Dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter, which means that it makes us more aroused and more awake and it increases the chances of neurons firing. When dopamine is released in a part of the brain, which causes us to become more focussed on whatever is happening right there because it tells us that thing is important and worthy of our attention. At the same time, dopamine increases our likelihood of remembering that event because it makes connections in the brain more likely to form.

 Finally, dopamine makes us more likely to remember things that happened and more likely to stay motivated. Dopamine is often described as the ‘reward neurotransmitter’ but it would be more accurate to say that it is released in anticipation of reward. Other neurotransmitters include the likes of serotonin (the ‘feel good hormone’) of cortisol (the ‘stress hormone’) and of oxytocin (the ‘love’ hormone). All these change the way we subjectively experience the world and they impact on the nature of the physical change that occurs within the brain. Brain Plasticity 

An area that has been extensively studied by psychologists and neuroscientists in recent years is a subject called ‘brain plasticity’ or ‘neuroplasticity’. This refers to the brain’s innate ability to change shape in response to stimulation and activity.

So previously, we believed that the brain was a set shape once we reached adulthood and that it wouldn’t change further. What we now know however, is that the brain continues to grow and adapt as we get older and that it is constantly forming new connections and even birthing new neurons.

In studies, it has been shown that repeatedly engaging in a specific activity will cause the corresponding brain area to change shape. For instance, if you learn to play the cello, then the areas in your motor cortex that are responsible for the sensation and dexterity in your finger tips will get larger and more complex. Likewise, if you play computer games repeatedly, then the brain areas that are responsibility for your ability to make out small details on the horizon will improve. Taxi drivers have physically heavier brains than any other professionals, because they change shape in order to accommodate all the new routes and destinations that they commit to memory.

There is a simple rhyme you can remember to understand the way that plasticity works and that is: 

                         “Neurons that fire together, wire together”

In other words, if you continuously repeat the same action over and over again, then eventually the corresponding neurons will wire so that you have committed that sequence of movements to memory. 

If you eat a lemon every time you see a certain picture, then you will eventually associate the picture and the lemon so that seeing the picture

causes you to get a bitter taste in your mouth. The corresponding neurons fired at the same time so often, that they now have a connection and now activity in one neuron will increase the chances of the other firing.

What’s more, is that repeating this connection will reinforce it over time. This occurs via a process called myelination which basically means that the axons are being insulated to protect them against damage and to help the signal to travel more quickly and more efficiently from one neuron to the next.

This is how we rote learn new subjects and it’s why someone who has serious memory loss can sometimes still perform tasks like playing complex piano concertos. They simply repeated the movements so many times that they became highly myelinated and protected.

What to do With All This Information

That’s a lot of information to take on board and you might be wondering what it’s all for. Well rest assured that this information is important and we have tackled it for a reason. That’s because knowing the way your brain works is what is going to allow you to increase your IQ through training, diet and more. Hopefully you’ve already seen some opportunities for us to maybe tweak and enhance our brain performance. For instance, increase dopamine can boost our memory and our focus! Likewise, you might have guessed that increasing the rate of brain plasticity might also be a very positive thing. And those are exactly the topics we’ll be tackling in the coming sections of this book. So keep reading and get ready to enhance your brain power!

              Nootropics

The first ‘strategy’ you can use to increase your brain power is to use nootropics. Nootropics are ‘smart drugs’ which in turn describe both supplements and medications. Generally, anything that can enhance your mental performance in any given capacity can be considered a nootropic. That means that technically something like caffeine could be considered a nootropic because it makes us more focussed, because it prevents us from needing to sleep and because it helps us to memorize things.

But more often, the term is used to describe slightly more exotic and unusual substances. These include modafinil for instance. Modafinil is a drug that was developed as a treatment for narcolepsy and the idea was that it would be able to help people who used it to stop falling asleep without warning. Since then, modafinil has proven highly effective at helping people who don’t have narcolepsy. Not only can it almost eradicate tiredness completely and not only can it enhance focus but it also boosts memory and potentially reaction time. Word has it that 99% of CEOs in Silicon Valley are now using modafinil to get ahead. The term can also be used to describe the likes of l-theanine. L-theanine is a xanthine like caffeine that is a stimulant but has a much gentler effect than caffeine. Think of this as caffeine without the jitters! Many people consume ltheanine and caffeine together and the result is greater wakefulness and concentration but without anxiety, headaches or shaking

Another highly popular nootropic is piracetam. This increases a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, which is an excitatory neurotransmitter that seems to play an important role in focus, memory and attention. 

People who use piracetam say they experience music and colors more vividly, they are wittier and quicker in conversation and they remember details more accurately. Of course, there are also plenty of stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall which are highly popular these days with students and others who are studying. At the other end of the spectrum are the likes of 5-HTP. This stands for 5 hydroxytryptophan, which is converted by the body into tryptophan and then into serotonin. This improves the mood and improves stress which many people find makes them more productive and better at working, while at the same time making them happier and more social. 

Most people who use nootropics don’t pick just one of these supplements either but rather use a selection of them in conjunction in order to get the precise results they’re looking for. Many will work well in conjunction – for instance if you use piracetam then it is often recommended that you also take a form of choline, seeing as the brain uses choline in order to formulate acetylcholine. It’s confusing and there’s an awful lot to learn if you want to jump in, but there is a large and active community out there to help if you do decide you want to learn more. Do Nootropics Work? But should you learn more? 

Do Nootropics work like the film Limitless? If you can take some supplements like these and become smarter, more focussed, more productive and all that… well then the question is why wouldn’t you?