My Lazy Brain

I’ve been thinking about my brain. Maybe that’s because I’m reading Limitless by Jim Kwik, a book written to help me “Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster and Unlock Your Exceptional Life.” Beth picked this non-fiction book for the book club portion of this week’s College Friends Friday Night Happy Hour Zoom. We recently added the book club to our already action-packed Friday nights and we sometimes remember to discuss the book of the week and share our profound thoughts regarding it. But sometimes we get distracted by our own images on the screen, our little squares taking up a quarter of our gallery view and we get sidetracked by fluffing the bangs we cut ourselves or smoothing the wrinkles we see on our necks. Last night, right in the middle of a discussion about Deb’s in-laws and her worries about how they are aging so quickly and might need to come to California to live with her, she reached up and grabbed the skin where her jowls would be, pulling the sides of her face out like a fish and exclaiming, “Oh, my god, look you guys!”

“Stop that!” Nance yelled. “Don’t do that to your skin.” 

Something like this usually inspires a round of nonsense. Beth might lift her leg and grab a big handful of fat on her inner thigh and make farting noises like it’s the sound her thigh fat makes. Knowing Beth’s fashion sense, she might be wearing the exact same jeans she did in college when she showed us that trick originally. 

A few weeks ago, I informed everybody that the way you know you need a butt lift is if you are able to hold a pencil between your leg and your butt cheek and that started a competition about who could hold the heaviest item under a flabby body part. I couldn’t hold anything with my butt cheek so Deb said, “See, I told you she still has her college ass.” I could hold the stapler with my belly fat if I scrunched over, but Deb upped the ante with the big black three-hole punch she found in her desk. She could almost hold it underneath her boobs. She won’t mind me telling this, she is proud. She is practicing.

“Sorry, guys,” Deb says in her exhausted voice, “I didn’t have time to read the book this week.”

“I didn’t finish it either, but I’m enjoying it,” Nance says.

“Well, gals, it’s not the kind of book you just read all the way through like a novel, like we usually do,” Beth says.

“I’m only half-way through it,” I say. “But he is really making me think about the idea of exercising the brain to strengthen it and improve its function. Neuroplasticity is so hopeful! The fact that we can continually create new neural pathways in our brains with motivation and focus and practice…amazing. I think my brain is lazy.”

“Shut up, Leslie,” Deb yells, “You have a great brain. You are so much smarter than you think you are.”

“Yeah, Les,” Nance agrees, swirling her white wine around in her ball jar, “You’re smart.”

“We’z AWL smart,” Beth says in her best Kentucky Hick drawl, leaning into her camera and screwing up her face.

“Yeah, just nobody told us that we were,” Deb says.

“We grew up in a time when intelligence wasn’t a highly valued quality in a girl. And there were  so many kids in our family, nobody could pay much attention to us,” Beth says.

“I’m really glad I went to an all-girls Catholic school,” Nance says. “Being smart was important. I got a good education.” 

“I mean, I was an average student,” I say. “School wasn’t difficult for me, but nobody expected much. My dad expected me to go to college but his highest vision for me was to go into data processing. ‘Learn to type” was his advice.”

“Same,” Deb says.

“I really related to that section about Limiting Beliefs,” I say. I tell them the story about visiting my daughter, Chloe’s very elite private high school. We parents were invited to an Open House where we visited each classroom for ten minutes, each teacher making a presentation about their class. The Physics classroom was impressive enough, with the teacher lowering the blinds and lights with one press of a remote control button, bringing up the power point presentation on the massive screen with another. We watched in awe. We visited the state-of-the-art theatre where the kids would write, direct and produce an evening of one act plays and then we filed by the technicolor football field which celebrity parents had donated. But it was the English teacher who sold me, a handsome young man named Mr. Webber with an absolutely unbridled passion for teaching literature to seniors — Hamlet, Waiting for Godot, Mrs. Dalloway. I sat at his feet staring up at him with starry eyes. Nick had to drag me out of the room.

“Wow, Chloe,” I said when we arrived home. “I want to go to your school! I was more inspired by ten minutes with your teachers than four years at my high school. I wouldn’t be smart enough to get through your school, though.”

“You’re smart enough, Mom,” Chloe said. “You’re just lazy.”

I know that sounds mean, but my daughter saw the truth of the situation better than I saw it myself. 

So, here’s what I mean by Limiting Belief: I thought I was average. But, in actuality, if something didn’t interest me, I was just not motivated to learn it. I skated by in math and science and history and government and physics and foreign language and even art and music. So I assumed I wasn’t good at these subjects. Of course, I made As in English and Drama, two classes for which I had a natural talent. But the idea was planted in my head that I wasn’t a high achiever in that academic way. I don’t like to think too hard. If I don’t know the answer to something immediately, I just give up, maybe because I’m judging myself for being dumb. When my son, Omar told me he was going to BS his SAT test, meaning his plan was to just circle any random answer, I was like, “Yeah, I get it.” 

Fast-forward to my early thirties when I got accepted to grad school and graduated with honors in an inter-departmental science-based master’s thesis program. When I developed an interest in learning how to apply science to the movement of the human body, I studied Micro Cell Biology with the nerdy Biology grad students and made straight As. Because learning, for the brain, is more like calisthenics than rocket science. Jim Kwik is teaching this idea to people all over the world because many of us need to hear it.

With practice and focus and motivation, we can learn anything we want. We can be limitless. I earned my Master’s Degree in Exercise Physiology, Deb is a successful television producer and novelist, Nance runs the Dallas Children’s Theatre, Beth is a director and an Emmy-winning documentarian. 

“It’s just such bullshit that we didn’t believe we were smart enough,” Deb says.

“I know, what were our Dads thinking?” I ask. 

“You mean, what was society thinking?” Nance says.

“Well, you know what Dr. Freud has to say about that, don’t you?” Beth says, reaching for her Sigmund Freud hand puppet. She puts it on her right hand and, moving him towards her computer screen, starts punching at us with the boxing gloves Dr. Frued wears and, speaking in her best German accent, says “Your fear of ignorance is a subconscious belief that….” and here she reaches for her Catholic Nun puppet, complete with habit and her own boxing gloves. The Nun begins punching Dr. Freud. “Oh, do be quiet, Sigmund or I’ll get my ruler out and wrap your knuckles just like yesterday….”

Inspired, Nancy bends her arm at the elbow and leans in to her own camera, so close up that the flesh of her bicep, folded onto her forearm looks like two butt cheeks and we can only tell it’s her arm by the freckle we know. 

“Ewwww, gross, Nancy!” Deb hollers. Beth leans back and cackles, puppets on each hand and I suddenly feel like the genius in this bunch.