How to Become Smarter (39 page)

The last step, “d,” will produce the greatest improvement of fluid intelligence. It can also increase laziness and distractibility, either right away or after a few days. Therefore, once you are done with step “d,” my advice is to return to steps “a,” “b,” or “c” to ensure minimal distractibility.

Although listening to lectures does not require enhanced attention function, reading does require good attention control. You need strong attention control for the texts that are not interesting to you but necessary for your job or school. The attention control should improve if you increase the amount of high-quality protein in the diet, based on my experience and according to some studies [
117
,
335
,
336
]. The simplest diet that can improve attention within hours is the following (proportions by weight):

• 50% – low-fat milk or unsalted unprocessed cheese mixed with cultured milk;
  
• 45-48% – boiled or steamed ground beef with good fat content (or a mixture of ground beef and ground chicken 1:1);
  
• 2-5% – ground nuts such as filbert, pecan, or walnut.
  

With this simple diet, you are likely to notice that your mental clarity is excellent and you have good control over your attention. Since this food is not filling, it is possible to eat excessive amounts and still feel that your stomach is empty. Normally, you shouldn’t eat more than 200-250 grams (7-9 oz.) of meat in one sitting. It is better to divide your daily meat ration into smaller amounts (100-150 grams or 3-5 oz.) and eat them 3 to 5 times a day (this is not always possible). Try to avoid consuming dairy and meat in the same meal. Don’t use this simple diet longer than one or two days because it can cause
constipation
.

You can add raw water extract of wheat and fruits and vegetables, in which case, what you have is the
modified high-protein diet
(
Appendix II
and
Chapter Three
). The modified high-protein diet can improve both attention control and fluid intelligence because it contains large amounts of high-quality protein and is free of artificial ingredients. In my experience, this diet is effective at improving reading comprehension and can help to digest large amounts of difficult texts. This is because it allows me to read for 3-8 hours per day for many weeks and months. We discussed possible adverse effects of the modified high-protein diet in
Chapter Three
.

The antidepressant diet that contains significant amounts of unprocessed unsalted cheese is another high-protein diet that can improve attention control and reading comprehension. It is less effective than the modified high-protein diet.

By the way, the
depressant diet
(
Chapter Four
and
Appendix II
), which is the best remedy against procrastination, is also suitable for reading tasks of low to moderate complexity. The depressant diet does not improve fluid intelligence and is not the best choice for complex reading material. If you understand a text, then you can use the depressant diet. On the other hand, if a text is too difficult to comprehend, then you may consider switching to either the modified high-protein diet or the antidepressant diet. You can try adapted cold showers too. These approaches can boost fluid intelligence and processing speed, but they may also reduce discipline and increase procrastination.

Up to this point, we discussed techniques that improve the biological workings of the brain. In addition, there are psychological approaches that can improve reading comprehension. We will discuss methods that will supply your mind with easy and useful introductory information before you read a complex text. Some of the advice that follows may seem too obvious, but I included it here anyway because I wish someone had given me this simple advice when I was a student.

There are two types of introductory material that you can use to prepare yourself for a journey through a dull or complex text. The first type is free encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia, and government or university websites that you can find on the Internet. You can also use reference books that you have in your possession or at a nearby library. First, you have to determine if the subject matter of the complex text is unfamiliar to you. If this is the case, then read a couple of easy and short introductory texts on this subject. Easy and short are the key words here. You can also read a couple of introductory texts that explain the key concepts from the complex text. Now that you are familiar with the subject matter, key concepts, and special vocabulary, your understanding of the complicated text will be good.

The second type of introductory material that facilitates reading of a dull or complex text is the abbreviated information (key points) that you can extract from this text. This is especially relevant to large texts, such as textbooks or review articles. First, see if the subject matter is foreign to you. If this is the case, then you can use the method from the previous paragraph as your first step. After that, you can start working on the large text using “
the method of increasing detail
.” This method consists of several rounds of reading and each subsequent round contains more detailed information from the text.

The first round contains the least detail and consists of reading the summary of the text or if it is not available, reading titles of all parts, chapters, and sections. Titles carry substantial amounts of information and you may get the main points of the text already in this first round of reading. In the second round, you will read the summary of each subdivision of the text. That is, you will read the summary of each part, each chapter, and each section, if the authors were courteous enough to provide them for you. As a rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to always use only those textbooks that have informative summaries for each chapter. It is even better if a textbook contains a summary of key points in each section within a chapter. A summary, if it is present, can be located either at the beginning or at the end of a chapter. Many textbooks have these nice features and they will make it easy for you to use the method of increasing detail. Some textbooks contain badly written, uninformative summaries of chapters, which read like an introduction and do not convey key points. It is best to avoid this sort of textbooks.

If your large text does not contain any summaries of subsections, then you can create them yourself in your mind. You can do this by reading either the first or last sentence within each paragraph in a chapter. This may take a little practice as you learn to deal with different types of authors. Some authors tend to give you key information in the first sentence of a paragraph. In this case, you can read only the first sentences of all paragraphs in order to extract key points from a chapter. Other authors give you key information in the last sentence of a paragraph. Still other authors are not consistent and you will have to read both first and last sentences of each paragraph in order to obtain a bird’s eye view of the chapter. Even if a summary of each subsection of the text is available, you can still do the selective reading of sentences as part of the second round of reading.

If you try using the method of increasing detail, then after the first two rounds of the method, you will have a good understanding of the key information in the text. Your mind is not cluttered with details and you can explain the key points of the text to another person. If you wish, you can repeat the first two rounds one more time to make sure the key points have sunk in. Now you can read the whole text in a regular fashion, all sentences from start to finish, which is the third round of reading. The third round of the method is the longest and can take 10 times longer than the first two rounds combined. Your reading comprehension of the text is now many-fold better than it would be if you did not use the method of increasing detail.

One last trick is the use of audiobooks and text-to-speech software. Spoken text is easier to comprehend than written text. Put another way, listening is easier than reading, which is why books on audio CD are becoming popular. Latest versions of Adobe Acrobat (and other software) can read a text out loud for you, if you have the electronic document. The mechanical monotonous speech of the computer can be annoying and difficult to understand. If you do not have an electronic document, you can digitize a text using a scanner and optical character recognition (OCR) software. If you do not have the book on tape and the electronic document is not available, you can read the text aloud yourself. One caveat is that if you read out loud in the presence of your friends or family, they may think that you are crazy. Reading aloud or using a computer to read a text out loud for you is useful with a boring text, such as a “Materials and Methods” section of a scientific paper. If the text is in the foreign language that you are studying, then reading out loud will improve your pronunciation. Aside from boring texts and texts written in a foreign language, reading out loud does not offer substantial benefits. You will not need either audiobooks or reading out loud if you can improve your attention control.

• You don’t need to use any of the proposed techniques if you have no problems with reading comprehension.
  
• Cold hydrotherapy improves reading comprehension by increasing alertness and reducing boredom and fatigue. In some situations (elevated mood or overactivity), cold hydrotherapy is counterproductive.
  
• The modified high-protein diet (Chapter Three) should improve attention control and fluid intelligence and will help you to digest large amounts of text over weeks or months.
  
• The depressant diet is suitable for texts of low to moderate complexity.
  
• The fruit-and-vegetable diet seems to produce the greatest improvement of fluid intelligence, which is useful when learning complex material. This diet also increases procrastination and distractibility either right away or after a few days.
  
• The use of free online dictionaries and encyclopedias facilitates comprehension of complex texts. Reading introductory material before reading a complex text is also useful.
  
• The method of increasing detail facilitates reading large texts. It consists of reading the main title and all titles of the chapters within the text, then the main summary, then the summary of each chapter. After that, you read the whole text from start to finish. If summaries are unavailable, then reading either the first or last sentence in each paragraph serves as a way of reading “a summary” of a chapter.
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  Next Key Points
  ]
  

Those readers who are convinced that a person cannot increase his or her IQ scores can review the following references prior to reading the rest of this section: [
49
,
106
,
358
,
362
,
499
,
839
,
887
,
888
,
943
]. Some of you may be wondering what kind of regimen is best for test-taking. Assuming that you have prepared for the test well in advance and don’t have to cram all night, the best regimen, in my experience, is the following:

1. get a good night’s sleep;
   
2. on the day before the test and on the day of the test you can use the modified high-protein diet;
   
3. avoid cooked grains because they may slow you down (one exception is tests that involve writing long essays);
   
4. have a high-protein meal before the test;
   
5. take an adapted cold shower before the test.
   

These recommendations can help you stay alert and focused during the test. If you avoid all “problem foods” in the natural food pyramid (
Table 3
in Chapter One) for 3-4 days before the test and on the day of the test, your fluid intelligence will improve.

The above recommendations are suitable for tests that require reading large portions of text (such as the verbal section of the Graduate Record Examinations or Scholastic Aptitude Test). This advice will work for tests that do not require extreme speed. This is true for most academic (college-level) exams, which test knowledge, not speed. Academic exams do not require extraordinary fluid intelligence either, in my experience. GRE and SAT tests do require some speed but focused attention and the ability to read large portions of text are more important. Therefore, my advice is to use the modified high-protein diet for these types of tests. You can also do some experimentation with official practice tests to see which diets work best for you.

On the other hand, IQ tests such as Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales and Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale do not contain test items that require reading large portions of text. Therefore, focused attention is not critical. Certain parts of these tests require a high processing speed. You will need the best possible fluid intelligence throughout the whole test. Based on data in Table 4 below, the fruit-and-vegetable diet appears to be the most suitable diet for intelligence tests.

Table 4.
Characteristics of various diets that are relevant to different types of tests. The data are based on the author’s personal experience. “Speed” means information processing speed. “Fluid intelligence” means the ability to understand and solve complex problems. “Sizeable text items” means performance on test questions that contain large portions of text (for example, a page of text).