You Can Get Smarter. Neuroscience Proves It.
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I want to start with something I hear almost every week, from patients, from students, from some of the most accomplished people I know.
“I’m just not as smart as other people.”
Sometimes it comes out directly, like that. More often it arrives dressed in other language. Someone describes a co-worker who always has the answer in the meeting. A sibling who seems to grasp ideas without effort. A friend who navigates social situations with a ease they can’t replicate. And beneath all of it, the same quiet conclusion: some people are just built differently. Some people got more of whatever “it” is.
Once, a teenage patient came to see me with her mother because she felt she would never be as smart as her older sister. She was getting A’s in every subject except math and physics. She loved drawing, writing, singing, and acting — she was the star of her school’s theater group — but in her mind, none of that counted. She couldn’t understand the equations. And in her world, that meant she wasn’t smart.
I want to tell you what I told her. And I want to explain the neuroscience behind it, because this is not a motivational speech. This is biology.
What Intelligence Actually Is
When we talk about the brain and higher-level thinking, we often confuse three words that mean very different things: cognitive skills, talents, and intelligence.
Cognitive skills are the higher brain functions you use every day — reading, writing, navigating a conversation, doing your taxes, following a recipe. Talents are cognitive skills that go one step further: playing a musical instrument, excelling at a sport, writing beautifully, creating visual art. And intelligence simply means doing any of these cognitive skills at an exceptionally high level.
Here is what neuroscience tells us about all three: they are the result of networks of neurons connecting and firing in two parts of your brain — the cortex and the hippocampus. The cortex is the outer layer of your brain, and the hippocampus is an extension of the cortex that sits deep inside your temporal lobe, roughly the size of your thumb. Together, they form the biological foundation for everything you think, learn, and remember.
And what is the most important thing I can tell you about those structures?
They are highly malleable. They can change. They change for the better every single time you use them. When you challenge them by doing something difficult — something genuinely unfamiliar and demanding — you make them grow larger and stronger. They are, in the most literal neurological sense, like your muscles. The more you challenge them, the larger and stronger they get.
There Are 30 Forms of Intelligence — Not Two
In my book, The Invincible Brain, I describe 30 different forms of intelligence. Not two. Not the handful that get tested on standardized exams. Thirty.
There is emotional intelligence — your ability to perceive and manage feelings in yourself and others. Social intelligence — your ability to connect with almost anyone in any room. There is body movement and dexterity intelligence. Musical intelligence. Cooking intelligence. Humor intelligence — yes, being a genuinely funny person is a form of intelligence, and a sophisticated one at that. There is navigational intelligence, digital intelligence, street-smart intelligence, happiness intelligence, and many more.
My point is not simply that the definition of intelligence is broader than we thought. My point is that the way we have been measuring and talking about intelligence — in schools, in workplaces, in the way we size each other up — has been systematically wrong. We have taken two or three narrow cognitive domains, elevated them above everything else, and allowed millions of people to walk away from childhood and adolescence believing they came up short.
My teenage patient had extraordinary intelligence for visual art, narrative writing, performance, and musical expression. Her cortex and hippocampus had grown and specialized to be exceptional in those areas. They had not, yet, been challenged enough in math and physics. But that was not a fixed condition. It was a starting point.
The Patient Who Scored in the 99th Percentile
After I explained to her the malleability of the cortex and hippocampus — that these structures change every time they are challenged, and that she could genuinely become excellent at math and physics if she committed to challenging them — something shifted.
She had been telling herself a story. A story that said: I am not the kind of person who is good at this. That story was not just discouraging. At a neurological level, it was an active obstacle, because it was removing the effort and practice that growth requires. Once she stopped believing the ceiling was fixed, she began working as though it wasn’t.
With some tutoring support and consistent daily practice, she improved steadily. And when she sat for her SAT exam, she scored in the 99th percentile — meaning she had performed exceptionally well across every dimension of that test, including the mathematical sections she had once believed were beyond her.
She had not discovered hidden talent she never knew was there. She had built it. That is what the brain does when you give it the right conditions.
Intelligence Is Not Fixed
I want to be as clear as possible on this point, because it runs counter to a very deep cultural assumption: intelligence is not fixed. Not at 16, not at 45, not at 70.
Every part of your cortex and hippocampus can grow stronger with practice. The science is unambiguous on this. The more you use your brain — the more you engage it in genuinely challenging, unfamiliar work — the more those neuronal networks consolidate and expand. You can acquire any talent you wish to have. There is no ceiling imposed by biology. The only ceiling that is real is the one built from a belief that the ceiling is real.
We should never tell our children they are not good at something. And we should stop telling ourselves that, too.
Five Steps to Become One Notch Smarter in Three Months
I want to give you something concrete. Not a philosophy — a method. Five steps that, practiced with genuine commitment over ninety days, will make you measurably better in any field you choose. Not the best in the world. One notch better than you are today. Which is all it ever takes.
Step 1: Shift the narrative in your head. You have to genuinely believe — not just tell yourself — that you can get better at almost anything. Because you can. The science is on your side. Every story you carry about what you’re “just not good at” is a story about where you haven’t practiced yet, not about what your brain is capable of.
Step 2: Make a list. Write down the things you would love to be good at. Dancing. Chess. Math. Cooking. Public speaking. Remembering names. Learning a language. Whatever genuinely excites you — not what impresses other people. Just make your list and be honest about it.
Step 3: Choose one. From that list, identify the one skill or hobby that would bring the most joy to your life if you became genuinely good at it. The one you feel most passionate about. Decide on that single thing. Focus matters here — the brain builds its networks through repetition of a specific demand, not through scattered effort across a dozen things simultaneously.
Step 4: Practice it every day — even for a few minutes. Take a class. Watch a YouTube series. Find a mentor. But whatever you do, touch it daily. You don’t need hours. You don’t need a perfect structure. You need to challenge that specific part of your cortex and hippocampus consistently enough that those neuronal networks have a reason to consolidate. Your only goal is to be slightly better than you were yesterday.
Step 5: Be persistent — and be proud of your mistakes. This step matters more than any of the others. Three months of consistent practice, even modest practice, will produce measurable change in the brain. That is not a promise — that is what the MRI shows. But persistence is the prerequisite.
And here is something I want you to hold onto: every time you make a mistake in the process of learning something difficult, you are among the rare few who had the courage to step outside their comfort zone. Most people don’t do that. Most people stay comfortable and tell themselves they’re not as capable as others. You’re different. Give yourself credit for that.
What 40 Years of Studying the Brain Has Taught Me
I have spent nearly four decades studying the brain, mostly at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Medical School. I have treated thousands of patients across a very wide range of cognitive conditions — from children with attention challenges to adults in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. And the one thing I know with certainty, after all of that research and all of those patients, is this:
Your brain has far more capacity than you have ever used. It is far more intelligent than you think it is.
Every day you choose to challenge it — in any domain, at any level — you are making that foundation larger and stronger. And every day you tell yourself the story that you’ve already reached your ceiling, you are choosing not to.
Start today. Just one notch. Just try to be slightly better at one thing than you were yesterday.
In three months, you will be much, much better than you are today.
Dr. Majid Fotuhi is a Harvard- and Johns Hopkins-trained neurologist, bestselling author of The Invincible Brain (USA TODAY Bestseller), and one of the world’s leading experts on brain health and cognitive performance. To discover your brain health score and receive a personalized 10-page report, take the free Invincible Brain Assessment at invincible.drfotuhi.com.
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Sleep Is When Your Brain Cleans Itself
I want to talk to you about sleep, and why it matters so much more than most people realize, both in the short term and over the course of your life.
Most of us think of sleep as simply rest, a time when the brain switches off. It’s the opposite. When you sleep, your brain goes into a rinsing and washing cycle. And once you understand how that cycle works, you start to treat your sleep very differently.
The Nightly Wash Cycle
Here is what actually happens inside your head at night.
With each beat of your heart, the arteries in your brain pulsate a little. That small pulsation pushes the fluid in your brain, the cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF, through the brain tissue. As it moves, it rinses away debris and waste. The now-dirty CSF is then collected and carried out of the brain.
This cleaning process is particularly active during deep sleep. It is, in a very real sense, your brain’s waste management system.
So what happens if you don’t get enough sleep? The rinsing doesn’t work properly. Debris and waste byproducts start to accumulate, and your neurons end up surrounded by dirt. Neurons sitting in their own waste are not happy neurons, and unhappy neurons do not function well.
Why I Think of New York City
Let me give you an analogy I come back to often.
Imagine New York City, and imagine that every night the garbage collection gets disrupted. For a day or two, you might not notice much. But after a couple of weeks, piles of garbage bags would start blocking the streets. Within a month or so, the whole city could grind to a halt.
The nightly collection and cleaning system is essential for a city to function. Your brain is no different. That nightly rinse is not a luxury. It is what keeps everything else working.
What Poor Sleep Does to You, Short Term and Long Term
In the short term, the effects of not sleeping enough are familiar to all of us. You feel tired and grumpy. You make mistakes at work. You become irritable. Your anxiety climbs, and your mood can sink toward depression.
The long-term consequences are far more serious, and they are the reason I take sleep so seriously with my patients.
Chronic poor sleep raises your risk of heart attacks and strokes. It can contribute to depression. And, most concerning of all, it raises your risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
I want to be precise about the timeline, because the details matter and I don’t want to frighten anyone unnecessarily. If you go through a difficult stretch and sleep fewer than six hours a night for a year or two, your brain can recover once you get your sleep back on track. Everything can be fine.
It is the long, uninterrupted years of poor sleep that cause real structural damage. A person who has lived with insomnia for twenty years may end up with a hippocampus, the memory center of the brain, that is roughly half the size it would otherwise have been.
Long-term insomnia is a major risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. We know that for a fact.
How Do You Know If You’re Sleeping Well?
The simplest measure is how you feel when you wake up in the morning.
Beyond that, we now have plenty of tools. The rings and smartwatches many people wear can give you useful data about your nights. There are also questionnaires that can help you gauge how poor your sleep really is, such as the Pittsburgh Insomnia Rating Scale.
And if you have significant sleep problems, please see a specialist. In most cases, they will order a sleep study to understand what is actually going on.
The First Step Is Believing It Can Be Fixed
Let’s say you have insomnia. Some nights you get four hours, some nights five, and you’re frustrated. What should you do?
The first thing, and I mean this genuinely, is to adopt a positive attitude toward improving your sleep.
In my experience, too many patients tell me, “Well, everybody has sleep problems. I’m just like everybody else.” That is not true. Sleep problems are almost always treatable. But you have to make a real effort to treat your insomnia, and to make sure it is fully treated, not just partly managed. Sometimes that means addressing an underlying medical issue, like chronic pain, that is disrupting your sleep in the first place.
What Actually Works
There are some standard, well-established habits that genuinely help.
Don’t drink coffee or caffeinated products in the afternoon. Limit how much alcohol you drink at night. Wind down with a book or a warm shower. Avoid a large meal right before bed. You might try a small snack instead, like yogurt, a banana, or cherries. And some people find supplements like magnesium or melatonin helpful.
If those measures aren’t enough, the next step I recommend is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. When you work with a therapist, they can go through your thought process and figure out what is keeping you up at night. Very often it is anxiety, and that anxiety has to be resolved before real sleep can return. I find this approach extremely helpful with my own patients. In fact, cognitive behavioral therapy is the most effective treatment for insomnia that I know of.
I leave sleeping medications as a last resort. Honestly, I don’t like them, and I very rarely prescribe them.
Your Brain Will Thank You
So here is what I want you to take away.
Sleep is essential for your brain health, both in the short term and across your whole life. If you have sleep problems, please take them seriously, because there are many things you can do to improve your sleep.
Do them. Your brain will thank you for it.
Dr. Majid Fotuhi is a Harvard- and Johns Hopkins-trained neurologist, bestselling author of The Invincible Brain (USA TODAY Bestseller), and one of the world’s leading experts on brain health and cognitive performance. He has spent more than three decades studying the brain’s capacity for growth and repair. To discover your brain health score and receive a personalized 10-page report, take the free Invincible Brain Assessment at invincible.drfotuhi.com.
Watch the full video on Dr. Fotuhi’s YouTube Channel.
What Lack of Sleep Does to Your Brain – Dr. Fotuhi
Menopause, HRT, and Your Brain Fog
What if the brain fog you’re feeling in your 40s or 50s isn’t just normal aging, but your brain reacting to the hormonal changes of menopause?
I want to tell you about a patient of mine, and about two brand-new studies that are changing how we think about hormones, menopause, and Alzheimer’s disease. The answer is more encouraging than you might think. Stay with me to the end, because I’ll also tell you exactly what I would do if I were you.
A few years ago, a lawyer in her late 40s came to see me.
She told me she felt slower handling her cases. She was less articulate than she used to be. She kept forgetting things: appointments and why she’d walked into a room. Her mother had died of Alzheimer’s, and she was terrified she was next. She wanted me to fix it, immediately.
She was serious. She was panicked. And honestly, I understood why.
I’ll tell you what we actually found, and what happened to her, later in this article. But first, let me explain what’s happening in women like her.
Why Menopause Can Change How Your Brain Feels
When a woman goes through menopause, her estrogen levels drop dramatically.
We usually think of estrogen as a reproductive hormone. But it does far more than that. There are estrogen receptors throughout the brain. Estrogen helps brain cells communicate with one another. It supports the connections between neurons. It affects the neurotransmitters involved in mood, sleep, and memory. It even influences the parts of the brain in charge of temperature regulation, appetite, and weight management.
So when estrogen falls during menopause, it makes sense that some women notice changes in how their brain functions. It makes sense that they might experience brain fog, trouble finding the right word, mood swings, or a feeling of being less sharp than they used to be.
Many women also experience hot flashes, weight gain, sleep apnea, and metabolic issues around this time, all of which can affect memory and thinking indirectly.
For years, scientists have wondered whether losing estrogen might help explain why women are so much more likely than men to develop Alzheimer’s disease. We still don’t have a definitive answer. But two brand-new studies are giving us some real clues. If you’ve heard conflicting things about hormone replacement therapy over the past twenty years, these two studies are a big part of why that conversation is finally starting to change.
Two New Studies Worth Knowing About
The first was published on August 12 in the journal Neurology, by researchers at Stanford.
Instead of simply asking women whether they had memory problems, the researchers looked inside their brains. They studied more than 21,000 women, including thousands whose brains were examined after they passed away. Women who had used estrogen-only hormone therapy had 35% lower odds of showing Alzheimer’s-related damage in their brains, and 39% lower odds of ever being diagnosed with any form of dementia.
The second study was published on August 26 in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia. Researchers from the University of Exeter and the University of East Anglia followed more than 183,000 postmenopausal women in the UK for over 13 years.
Women who had used HRT had a 16% lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease. And among women who had gone through a surgical menopause, those who used HRT had about a 26% lower risk of developing any form of dementia. This study found the biggest benefit in women who started HRT between the ages of 46 and 56.
Both studies point to something researchers call the window of opportunity. The idea is that estrogen may help the brain most when it is started around the time of menopause, rather than decades later. In other words, timing may matter more than we used to think.
I do want to be careful here. Both of these are observational studies. They show an association between hormone therapy and lower dementia risk, not proof that HRT prevents dementia. The researchers behind both studies have said the same thing, and they’ve called for randomized clinical trials to test the question properly. I agree with them. But after twenty years of fear and confusion around this topic, findings this large and this consistent are genuinely reassuring.
What Actually Happened to My Patient
Now, back to the terrified lawyer: she had Alzheimer’s.
Her workup told a very different story than the one she feared. She was sleeping poorly. She was working full time, raising three teenage sons, and taking on extra projects after hours to try to earn a promotion. On top of all that, she had gained weight, and she was not exercising.
When we went through it together, she understood that her symptoms were not caused by Alzheimer’s disease. They were the product of exhaustion, stress, poor sleep, and a body under strain. And that meant they were fixable.
She completed our 12-week Brain Fitness Program, and my brain coaches helped her improve her exercise routine, her diet, her sleep, her stress levels, and her brain training. In parallel, her own doctor started her on hormone replacement therapy.
Twelve weeks later, her memory had gone from the 40th percentile for her age to the 80th percentile. She was thrilled. And she stopped worrying about Alzheimer’s disease.
Her story is the whole point, really. Her fog was real. But it was not what she was most afraid of, and it responded to the right combination of changes.
So Should You Take HRT to Protect Your Brain?
This is the question I get most often, so let me answer it honestly.
Not for that reason alone, and not yet. We do not yet have the gold-standard proof from a randomized clinical trial to recommend HRT specifically for cognitive symptoms.
But if you are also struggling with hot flashes, vaginal dryness, or other menopausal symptoms, then HRT for a couple of years can be a very reasonable option, one worth discussing seriously with your doctor. And these new studies are reassuring, not alarming.
Please keep one thing in mind. Your brain does not exist in isolation. Sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress, brain training, and your hormones are all connected. Hormones may be one piece of the puzzle, but they are not the whole picture, exactly as I saw with my patient.
What I Want You to Do
If you are at this stage of life and wondering whether HRT is right for you, talk to your doctor about your own personal history and risk factors. That conversation is the single most important next step you can take. Every woman’s situation is different, and this is a decision to make with a physician who knows your history, not one to make from a newsletter or a video.
And regardless of what your hormones are doing, you should always work on the five pillars of brain health:
- Walk daily, and exercise about three hours a week.
- Sleep 7 to 8 hours a night.
- Eat a Mediterranean diet.
- Reduce your stress, and consider meditation or yoga.
- Challenge your brain with a fun hobby at least once a week.
The fog you’re feeling is not a life sentence. Very often, like it was for my patient, it’s a signal, and a signal is something you can act on.
Dr. Majid Fotuhi is a Harvard- and Johns Hopkins-trained neurologist, bestselling author of The Invincible Brain (USA TODAY Bestseller), and one of the world’s leading experts on brain health and cognitive performance. He has spent more than three decades studying the brain’s capacity for growth and repair. To discover your brain health score and receive a personalized 10-page report, take the free Invincible Brain Assessment at invincible.drfotuhi.com.
📺 Watch the full video on Dr. Fotuhi’s YouTube Channel.
How to Fix your brain fog in 40s & 50s | Dr. Fotuhi
AI Is Changing Your Brain, Here's How.
How many days do you think it takes to start losing a skill you’ve had for decades?
For me, the answer was three.
A few weeks ago, I got into a self-driving car for the first time and let it take me around my town. It was smooth. It was relaxing. And honestly, it was a little bit magical. I sat there with my hands barely on the wheel, watching the car make its own decisions.
Three days later, I got behind the wheel of my own car again. This time with no assistance. Just me. And something felt off. It was slightly difficult to manage the heavy traffic on a busy highway. My sense of the road felt a little rusty.
It had only been three days, and I could already feel the difference.
That small moment stuck with me. Because as a neurologist who has spent forty years studying the brain, I knew exactly what was happening. My brain had not lost the skill of driving. But the parts of my brain responsible for it had quietly relaxed, because for three days they simply did not have to work that hard.
Negative Neuroplasticity: The Part Nobody Talks About
This is what I call negative neuroplasticity.
Your brain is not fixed. It is not a piece of hardware that stays the same your whole life. Your brain is living tissue, and it changes its shape, its structure, and its strength based on how you use it every single day.
Think of your brain like a muscle. If you work your biceps and triceps, they grow. If you stop using them, they shrink. Your brain grows and shrinks in the same way, in response to your lifestyle and your environment. The parts you use and challenge often get stronger. That is positive neuroplasticity. The parts you stop using quietly fade and shrink. That is negative neuroplasticity.
And we have seen this before, long before AI arrived.
When calculators became common, our collective ability to do math in our heads got weaker. When GPS became common, our sense of direction got weaker too. So here is the honest question all of us need to ask: if AI can now write our emails, solve our problems, remember our facts, and even drive our cars, what happens to the parts of our brains that used to do all of that work?
What the Research Is Starting to Show
There is new research beginning to answer that question, and the results are worth paying attention to.
In one study, researchers had people write essays in one of three ways: completely on their own, using a search engine, or using ChatGPT. The whole time, machines measured their brain activity. The group that used ChatGPT showed the weakest brain engagement of the three. And afterward, many of them could barely remember what they had just written, because in a very real sense, they had not actually written it themselves.
We are seeing the same pattern in medicine.
In one study, experienced doctors used an AI tool to help them spot polyps during colonoscopies. After they grew used to working alongside the AI, their detection rate without it actually dropped, compared to how they performed before they ever used the tool. These were skilled physicians, quietly losing a bit of their edge, simply because the tool had been doing that part of the thinking for them.
To me, this all makes perfect sense. The activity in the parts of our brain that we stop using and challenging gradually fades away.
This Is Not About Fearing AI
I want to be very clear about something, because this is not a message about fearing AI or rejecting it.
I use AI every single day. I think of it almost like one of my staff members. I let it handle the tedious, minor parts of my work, the things that do not require my judgment or my creativity. But I still do the hard thinking myself. The writing. The decisions. The real work. Because I know that “use it or lose it” applies to my brain just as much as it applies to my muscles.
Here is the strange thing. We already understand this instinct perfectly well when it comes to our bodies. We just have not caught up yet when it comes to our brains.
Think about how life used to require constant movement. People walked to work. They rolled their windows up with their own hands. They pushed in a clutch and changed gears with their own feet, over and over, every time they drove. All of that built-in movement quietly kept our bodies strong, without anyone ever thinking of it as exercise.
Today, machines do almost all of that work for us. We press a button, and the window rolls up. We slide into an automatic car and never touch a gear again. And what did we do as a society, once daily life stopped giving us that movement for free? We built gyms. We started going to Zumba classes, yoga classes, and Pilates. We began taking long walks on purpose, specifically to give our muscles the workout that daily life no longer provided automatically.
This is exactly the position we are now in with our brains.
AI is quietly becoming the automatic window button and the automatic transmission for our minds. It removes the friction, and it feels wonderful in the moment. But if we are not careful, we are quietly losing the mental exercise that daily life used to give us for free, when we had to remember phone numbers, do math, navigate our own cities, and write our own thoughts from a blank page.
Six Ways I Build a Gym for My Own Brain
So, just as we built gyms for our bodies once our environment stopped providing free exercise, we now need to build a gym for our brains. These are small, deliberate exercises we choose on purpose, precisely because daily life no longer forces us to do them.
Here are six exercises I personally do. Not because I read them in a textbook, but because I know they are important for keeping my own brain sharp.
1. I minimize using GPS on purpose: When I am driving somewhere I have been before, I make myself recall the way, even if it takes an extra moment of thinking. That small effort keeps my hippocampus and other memory areas active and engaged.
2. I memorize names: I work to remember the names of all my students and every person I meet, every single day. Holding a name in my mind and pulling it back later sounds almost too simple to matter. But that daily repetition is exactly what keeps my memory strong, the same way a short walk keeps my heart healthy.
3. I protect at least one block of deep, unassisted thinking: No AI, no shortcuts. Just my own mind, working hard on a project from beginning to end.
4. I keep authorship of anything that truly matters. I let AI carry the tedious, minor parts of my work, but the real writing, the real decisions, and the real thinking stay mine.
5. I take up hobbies that challenge my mind: Learning new dance steps is at the top of my list, and this one is for pure joy as much as it is for my brain. I am willing to bet you already have a small wish list in the back of your mind, something you have always wanted to learn from scratch or finally get better at. The science is clear that a new, challenging skill grows your brain in a matter of weeks. So pick the one hobby that sounds the most fun, and enjoy practicing it until you get really good at it.
6. I use AI to challenge me, not replace me: After I write an essay or prepare a presentation, I ask AI to critique my work and push back on it. I also use AI as a tutor when I need to understand something complex. In other words, I use AI to stimulate my brain, not to replace it.
The Brain You Have Is the Result of Your Daily Choices
So here is what I want to leave you with.
AI is not going to make you stupid. But how you use it will absolutely shape whether your brain stays sharp or slowly grows weaker.
Your brain, like your body, becomes what you ask of it every single day. The brain you have, sharp or dull, strong or weak, is the result of your daily choices. Just as the shape of your body is in your hands, so is the shape of your brain.
Dr. Majid Fotuhi is a Harvard- and Johns Hopkins-trained neurologist, bestselling author of The Invincible Brain (USA TODAY Bestseller), and one of the world’s leading experts on brain health and cognitive performance. He has spent more than three decades studying the brain’s capacity for growth and repair. To discover your brain health score and receive a personalized 10-page report, take the free Invincible Brain Assessment at invincible.drfotuhi.com.
📺 Watch on Dr. Fotuhi’s YouTube Channel.
How Ai is slowly destroying your brain health – Dr. Fotuhi