1. About the brain

The brain is the organ inside the head that controls all functions of the body. It is the center of the nervous system and is responsible for receiving and interpreting information from the senses (such as sight, sound, and touch), generating thoughts and emotions, and coordinating movement and function throughout the body.

The brain is made up of three main parts: the cerebrum, the cerebellum, and the brainstem.

The cerebrum is the largest part of the brain and is divided into two hemispheres (left and right). It is responsible for conscious thought, learning, and memory, as well as controlling voluntary movement (such as movement of the arms and legs). The cerebrum also receives and processes sensory information, such as sight, sound, and touch.

The cerebellum is located under the cerebrum and is responsible for coordinating movement and balance.

The brainstem is the lower part of the brain and is responsible for controlling essential functions such as breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure. It also connects the brain to the spinal cord and the rest of the body.

The brain is made up of nerve cells called neurons, which communicate with each other through electrical and chemical signals. The brain also contains glial cells, which support and protect the neurons.

Overall, the brain is a complex and amazing organ that plays a vital role in every aspect of our lives.

Here are some links to educational videos about the brain:

• The Brain Explained" by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: This animated video provides a brief overview of the different parts of the brain and their functions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5nskjZ_GoI

• "The Brain: A Beginner's Guide" by BBC Bitesize: This video provides a more detailed explanation of the brain and its functions, including information on brain development and disorders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPfKGgBz8fs

• "The Brain: Understanding Neuroplasticity" by TED-Ed: This video explains the concept of neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to change and adapt in response to experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qYcWNPVj3E

• "The Brain: How Does It Work?" by The School of Life: This video provides a more philosophical look at the brain and its role in shaping our thoughts, feelings, and behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm-1wWQ1J6M

2. What is “intelligence”?

Let’s use the definition the wonderful Prof. Max Tegmark from MIT, uses in his new and highly-recommended book, Life 3.0.

— — — — Intelligence = ability to accomplish complex goals — — — —

Intelligence is applied and multi-dimensional. Intelligence is much more than just IQ or skill at mathematics. There are many applications of intelligence. But if we drill down, there is a set of intellectual abilities essential to nearly all complex human goals. These could be broken into:

1. Classical Intelligence (CI): Logic, Problem Solving, Creativity, Strategy

2. Applied Intelligence (AI): Energy, Focus, Willpower, Emotional Control

3. Social Intelligence (SI): Persuasiveness, Empathy, “Social Skills”

4. Dynamic Intelligence (DI): Ability to Learn, Memory, Knowledge

Intelligence:

• varies massively between individuals. For many reasons — IQ is 50–80% genetic while I would argue other types of intelligence are mostly environmental.

• develops within one individual over their lifetime, and never stops changing.

• fluctuates massively within one individual with biochemical changes.

If the last part isn’t obvious, test your ability to accomplish complex goals after not sleeping at all, while you have the flu, right after having an intense argument or after drinking 10 shots of espresso.

Let‘s start with a silly story:

• Imagine there is only one way to make money in the world: running marathons. All of us are running them, every day.

• Imagine further, that all the marathons of the world are rapidly uniting into one, the share of money going to winners is increasing, and the lifespan over which winners can compete is also increasing. These trends are expected to continue.

• Over the last 30 years, a bunch of expensive new doping drugs and technologies appeared that are undetectable, healthy, and give a big advantage at running.

• Moreover in the next 30 years a lot more such drugs will appear. They will be expensive at first. Only those of us who are already winning will be able to afford them.

• We are starting to see some of us talk about how much better we run with all these drugs.

How is this relevant to enhancing our intelligence?

The above is exactly what the world looks like today. We just need to replace “marathon running” with “intelligence.”

Part 2: invest time/energy into building intellectual wealth

If we do a great job out of AI, we will have an enormous resource of energy and focused time. That (we can speculate) only <1% of us will ever achieve.

The question is what to invest it into. Key candidates:

• Further enhancements to AI— i.e. obsessively thinking about the reasons we did not hit our deep work goals and fixing them. Remember: this is the engine that powers everything else. Call distracted you? Turn on Do Not Disturb. Laptop discharged? Carry a battery. Braindead after lunch? Don’t have lunch. Couldn’t get back into flow after a 10am meeting? Don’t have meetings until afternoon. And so on, ad infinitum.

• Social Intelligence. Knowing how to persuade others boosts our intelligence far more than “book-smarts” do. And it is extremely “biohackable” — meditation, MDMA, higher testosterone, beta-blockers, SSRIs. These things can enhance our body language, make us confident, calm, empathetic and self-aware. This presses all the buttons of persuasion in other humans. Plus our vast deep work resource can be put to practicing body language in front of a mirror, reading the right books, writing persuasive articles. High SI is a superpower that makes life easy. And it is far more powerful than high IQ. The world just bends to accommodate what we want.

• Dynamic Intelligence (i.e. learning to learn) + Classical Intelligence (i.e. IQ). We can probably directly boost these via things known to enhance neuroplasticity and adult neurogenesis. Nutrients/supplements like magnesium, choline, EPA/DHA, curcumin or bacopa monieri. Meds like SSRIs and lithium. Meditation and any other stress reduction. Making sleep extremely good. Intermittent fasting. Interval training. LSD or psilocybin. Modafinil is known to safely/directly enhance cognitive ability. More importantly, decades of high AI enable us to constantly learn new complex skills and ideas; make us smarter because we train our brains; and make enhancing all this an easy everyday habit.

RECOMMENDED READING & SOURCE - how to biohack your intelligence

3. Invest in social intelligence

Social Intelligence: much more intelligent than IQ

Bad news for the high-IQ introverts amongst us. Donald Trump is smarter than we are.

Just radiating intellect

He repeatedly survived through bankruptcies that would have destroyed most of us if we were in his place. Played the media like a fiddle. Became president of the US. And he isn’t a lucky one-hit wonder. He has been achieving for decades things that the majority of us would very much like to achieve.

This is not an endorsement of him. I do not like what he does. But his “ability to perform complex tasks” (i.e. intelligence) is high. And it is based in SI. Body language. An understanding of human emotional buttons. That the human brain equates attention and credibility. Even if you really dislike him it makes sense to learn some of his techniques.

(I entered into a $20k bet on Trump winning the presidency 15 months before the election. For those of us with high social intelligence, it was always obvious Trump would win).

We should recognize that Social Intelligence is far, far, far more powerful than IQ. The reason Social Intelligence is so powerful is that it scales. An understanding of human emotional buttons enables us to get others to like and support us with their skills — no matter who they are.

A high IQ and ability to debate with formal logic is useful too of course. Planes don’t fly on emotions. But if we, after a lifetime of observing ourselves and other humans, think we can use logic/facts/IQ to persuade/lead/connect with others, we are truly fucking stupid.

There is a lot of evidence that Social Intelligence and social status have many second-order effects on intelligence: neurogenesis, happiness, intelligence, brain volume, desire to compete, lower stress etc. Here is a whole book full of supporting evidence by Robert Sapolsky, a leading neurologist at Stanford. And lest we think this is just because of human social inequality, a great deal of the research is replicated even for monkey social intelligence and social status (read the book).

So — how do we boost it?

The prerequisite is to truly internalize that humans are “irrational.” But the irrationality is highly predictable. We have to understand and believe this, at our deepest core.

Favorite example of “irrationality” (I am well aware of that priming studies are controversial):

When we hear French music in a wine store our preferences are materially shifted to French wines. Even if we don’t ever become aware of the music.

The reason things work this way is actually highly logical.

Somewhere in our mind there are neural nets for France, French Music, French Wine, French Flag image. They are linked to each other. That is how we know these are related in some way. Triggering the French Music net triggers all linked nets, including the nets for France and French Wine. So the incoming signal to the French Wine net is a bit stronger than into the Italian Wine net at this moment in time. That changes our decision probabilities. Without us ever noticing.

All of us are programmable, hackable machines.

So — how can biohacking help our SI?

• Body language, eye contact and voice tonality have greater persuasive impact than the words we say. Biochemistry impacts these things. For example testosterone is both a cause and a consequence of confident body language [here’s a TED talk about this]. Looking and acting dominant in turn enhances our persuasion effectiveness — other humans are much more interested in what we have to say. And this bias towards confidence is so deeply ingrained that it will remain for as long as we are human. I raise my testosterone a lot via customized therapies (see my previous article for details).

• All the antistress tools — SSRIs, Lithium etc. — further enhance your body language of relaxed confidence. We all want to interact with positive, confident, un-stressed people.

• Recently a top Silicon Valley entrepreneur told me he uses beta blockers to be calm in big public talks. I then found out this is a favorite of concert pianists amongst you. Haven’t tried yet, but just got some propranolol. Sounds like an awesome idea. If in a stressful negotiation we have a cool head and a heart rate of 70 while the counterparty is at 120+, we have a material intellectual advantage.

• MDMA has its whole separate section.

• There are many other hacks. If I want to be aggressive/passionate in a public setting I do a set of 50 pushups right before. If I want to be more calm, I meditate.

• The most important thing is that with our huge Applied Intelligence reserves we can invest into SI. Read books [my list includes some favorites on the topic]. Watch videos of ourselves and practice in front of a mirror. Do public talks. Write persuasive blog articles. Have deep conversations with friends & family. Study neuroscience classes. Over the decades we can become what Scott Adams calls a Master Persuader [read his awesome book on persuasion, Trump, and why humans are not rational]

4. Why you can’t trust your brain

We rely on our mind for everything — every thought, decision, opinion or idea you can conjure up is thought to come from the mind. But did you know your mind can’t always be trusted? Living inside your head is dangerous. This is where your saboteurs are triggered, and that is when your internal enemies come to light, habitual mind patterns creep in and negative self-talk takes over.

As Shirzad Chamine writes in his book, Positive Intelligence, your saboteurs manifested themselves when you were a child and shaped your outlook on the world. They were survival tools that you developed to protect and cope with physical and emotional forces and they remain into adulthood — even though you no longer need them. Your saboteurs are so ingrained in your mind that they shape all of the behaviors and thought patterns that work against you.

The incessant thoughts in your head only work to bog you down and influence your decisions negatively. But they can be controlled, and once they are, you can begin to make decisions from the heart, rather than your head, which is where all of the best decisions manifest themselves. a person holding a pen

Here are the two steps to conquering the voices in your head:

1. Become aware

Identifying just how you are sabotaging yourself is the first step to conquering the voices in your head because you cannot change anything that you are not aware of. How do your saboteurs manifest themselves in your head? Are you very harsh on others? Yourself? Do you worry more than you should? All of these things can influence the thoughts in your head and leave you stuck there.

2. Get out of your head, and get present.

When you learn to be present, or live in the moment, your inner voices go silent. From that point, you are operating from your heart, which is called the sage — then you are following your infinite wisdom, rather than your mind.Conclusion.

Further reading: thinking fast and slow from Daniel Kahneman.

Quiz

How can you apply this in life today

Food for thought

Expand your understanding