How can you get smarter about getting smarter? Our guest Elizabeth Ricker, author of Smarter Tomorrow, introduces us to neurohacks that can cognitive functioning. She explains her concept of scientific self-help and how to improve cognitive functioning through a variety of short exercises and experiments.

We discuss:

The story of her middle school math teacher

How neurohacking and scientific self-help work with how to improve cognitive functioning

What she learned from tracking her New Year’s Resolutions since 2011

What we need to know about cognitive functioning that may be different than we expect

The New IQ and the New EQ

Common Lifestyle Bottlenecks – and how they can be addressed and improve cognitive functioning

How Serious Brain Games can improve executive function

The MIND diet

How having an accountability partner can help

The key messages from her book Smarter Tomorrow

Elizabeth joins us from San Francisco.

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Bio

Elizabeth R. Ricker is the author of the new book, Smarter Tomorrow: How 15 Minutes of Neurohacking a Day Can Help You Work Better, Think Faster, and Get More Done

Her work has been featured globally, including in the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, on SiriusXM radio, and on public broadcast TV in Europe.

She has given talks on cognitive enhancement and neurohacking across the US and overseas. She is a sought-after expert by Silicon Valley venture capital firms, technology startups, schools, and the Fortune 500. She runs the citizen neuroscience, DIY, and neurohacking organization, NeuroEducate, and her consulting and speaking work goes through Ricker Labs.

Ricker received her undergraduate degree in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT and her graduate degree in Mind, Brain, and Education from Harvard. In college, she worked in the neuroscience lab of Nobel Prize winner Dr. Susumu Tonegawa. Ricker was also a nationally ranked athlete and class president-- the latter of which occasionally involved such serious duties as dressing up in a giant rodent costume to play Tim the Beaver, the MIT mascot.

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Wise Quotes

On Neurohacking

"I think before you dive into all the things that the media is going to tell you that are falling apart as you get older, I think it's really important to just start with the things that you are probably stronger at than you realize. This is a really important thing with neurohacking - to start with an understanding of where you're strong and then understand what your personal bottlenecks are so that you can personalize everything that you do."

On Scientific Self Help

"You can take a very scientific approach to your life and the things that seem kind of abstract and maybe not under your control, like life satisfaction or mental performance - these things seem uncontrollable. I think they seem like you're either born with them or fate seems to play a role and you just don't have control over them. And what I want to really introduce to people is that we actually have a lot of data, and we have this tool, which is self-experimentation, that can allow you to actually take control over it. And if it helps at all, when you look back at the number of Nobel prize winners who have won awards in medicine or physiology, a surprising percentage of them actually ran self-experiments in the exact area that they won the Nobel prize in. So you will actually be in pretty good company. This is not some [sci-fi] stuff. This is something that even very various data scientists have done themselves. So, [there's] no reason why you can't ask and approach things just like a Nobel prize winner."

On Neurohacking 

"...When you start your neurohacking,