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These Famous Essays Will Make You Smarter
Plus how the “expectation effect” can increase your IQ
The main book that I’m going to recommend tonight is a little bit more challenging…but I know you can handle it.
In fact, one of the books I finished recently, The Expectation Effect, explores research that says we can dramatically increase our intelligence, our health, our happiness — even how long we live — by recalibrating our expectations.
Meaning, if we believe that we possess the internal resources to be able to focus for longer and to maintain concentration, we will.
If we believe that we can handle stress and that it won’t negatively affect our health, it won’t.
If we believe that we can, in fact, read and understand harder, more challenging books, that’s exactly what’s likely to happen.
It’s not magic or anything, either. It’s merely a function of how our brains evolved, and how they work to process reality as it unfolds before our very eyes.
But The Expectation Effect is not tonight’s book.
It’s a book (well, a collection of essays), that came out in 1580(!), where the mayor of Bordeaux, Michel de Montaigne, basically invented the modern essay.
