Long a staple of speculative fiction and modern myth, the idea of brain enhancement has experienced a bit of a renaissance in the twenty-first century. Today there are dozens of programs that claim to enhance brain activity, from books and DVDs, lectures and “brain retreats,” everything you could think of. Which raises the question: how does a consumer differentiate between legitimate methods of brain enhancement and less respectable programs designed to make somebody a quick buck?
Many of today’s programs of brain enhancement revolve around the time-tested notion of the IQ, or “intelligence quotient.” This well-known numeral value, which takes 100 as the “average” based on bell-curve designs, is derived from one the several different standardized tests designed to measure intelligence. There is much debate, however, over how accurate numerical IQ scores are when it comes to measuring actual brain power. Opponents of the standardized test have argued for years that the test is biased toward specific social and economic, and potentially ethnic, groups. And, as with all standardizd tests, it is possible to “train” an examinee specifically for the test, thereby increasing scores without necessarily increasing brain power. In this sense, using IQ as a basis for brain enhancement would seem to be a less than ideal measurement.
We can be sure, though, that memory is a vital component of brain activity. Thus, an improvement in one’s memory would absolutely register as a form of meaningful and useful brain enhancement. Of the methods available for this nature of enhancement, the most effective appears to be a combination of memory “exercises” designed to train the brain to encode information in a more efficient manner, and herbal supplements designed to aide the neurons as they both encode and recall information.
