8 Ways to Make Your Brain Smarter
Billions of neurons in your brain can reshape themselves in response to what you do and learn. Help them along with these eight strategies to be sharper, make wiser decisions and stay focused.
By Jena Pincott
Translate Your Doozy of a Problem into Spanish
Your translation may be fuzzy, but your reasoning is clearer when you work out a problem in a foreign language, finds a University of Chicago study that asked bilinguals to make decisions.
Speaking in a foreign tongue distanced them emotionally from the matter at hand—and they became more deliberate and unbiased in their thinking.
Try this: If you speak a second language (even imperfectly), use it when you need to be especially logical, like when making tough financial decisions, the researchers suggest. Should you pay down your mortgage? Sell your penny stocks? Buy a castle? The best answer may come to you more easily than conjugating the subjunctive.
Next: Quiz: How fit is your brain?
Published 05/29/2013
