A recent New Scientist had an article
on 11 things to do to increase brain power. Brain power is a
nonsense idea. The brain is not the site of intelligence, the mind
is. The mind is a social institution which is why our vocabulary
changes depending on who we talk to.
Of the 11 things to do, I only find
three to be valuable. One, is exercise. It is demonstrable for me
and the people I know who are genuinely capable of thinking that
exercise is vital to thinking. (My definition of thinking leaves
less than 1% of the population actually doing it since thinking, by
definition, means synthesizing differences in the concepts one holds.
Thinking creates new concepts and virtually nobody does that.)
Two, is meditation or its equivalent.
Being able to be physically and mentally still are key to clear
perception which is vital for thinking.
Three, is reading of complex material. The New Scientist article mentions exercise in short term memory. For me this is reading complex material. Reading itself requires grasping the meaning of an entire paragraph and remembering a sentence fragment before turning a page. These are major feats of short term memory.
The other eight ideas in New Scientist are based on the assumptions that the brain, as a physical entity is somehow directly connected to intelligence. Considering the number of brains around and the amount of individual intelligence, the thesis is ludicrous.