What Blueberries Have Done for Me

This is the six-year anniversary of the greatest day of my life. On July 18, 2017, I was perusing the Internet when I came upon an article about blueberries. It averred that this sweet and juicy little fruit, also known as Vaccinium cyanococcus, is packed with bioflavonoids, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, polyphenols and other good stuff. There was one thing in the story that really got my attention. Studies have been done which show that eating blueberries positively affects cognitive function. Add them to your diet, and you are likely to improve your verbal comprehension, numerical ability, memory, reasoning skills and decision making, and have better concentration and focus. In a word, they can make you smarter.

I was willing to give them a try. I walked to my neighborhood grocery store and found a package of blueberries on the shelf. They were not expensive. I brought them home, ran some cold water over them and popped a few into my mouth. No more than five minutes later, I had an epiphany. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which had long baffled me, became clear: E=mc². Duh! How could I have failed to understand this before? Now, it seemed palpably obvious.

I decided to conduct a further test by pondering some famous mathematical problems. Before, I had trouble with anything beyond addition and subtraction. But with blueberries feeding my brain, I was able to figure out the Poincaré conjecture, the prime number theorem, the Riemann hypothesis, the classification of finite simple groups, the inscribed square problem, the four-color theorem and Fermat’s last theorem. What, you might ask, about the twin prime conjecture, the kissing number problem or the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture? Easy.

Rather pleased with myself, I made a blueberry smoothie, drank it and embarked on another test. I had always struggled with the dense and impenetrable philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. What was this old German trying to say? I looked up Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Birth of Tragedy, and suddenly understood.

It occurred to me that I should seek to master a foreign language. In less than two weeks, I was completely fluent in Hebrew, Icelandic, Farsi and Chinese (both Classical and Mandarin). All because of blueberries. I followed that up with Thai, Albanian, Polish and Arabic.

A failure with the harmonica and the guitar, I wondered whether I might be able to learn to play a musical instrument. Before the month was out, I had become proficient on the oboe, the French horn, the harp, the bagpipes, the clarinet and the violin. Maybe you are wondering about the didgeridoo? That, too.

Consumption of blueberries has also allowed me to understand how an internal combustion engine works, the difference between alternating-current electricity and direct-current electricity, quantum mechanics, chirality (the property of asymmetry in several branches of science), computer algorithms, the nonexistence of UFOs and why my 9th grade girlfriend broke up with me.

As mentioned earlier, blueberries aid in enhancing memory. For example, I can recall exactly what I was doing on February 9, 1962—I went through seven numbing hours of school, had pepperoni pizza with my family and visited with a next-door neighbor. On November 5, 1977, I played an hour of 3-on-3 basketball, ate a cheeseburger, read Time magazine and watched Saturday Night Live (especially amusing was a skit with Gilda Radner and John Belushi). On June 3, 1986, I slept late, swam 10 laps at Stacy Pool, finished reading a 483-page biography of Sojourner Truth and changed the oil in my Mazda. On April 22, 1998, I kicked a couple of dogs, took a walk around the block, visited a second-hand clothing store and shot pool with a guy named Vinny. On November 5, 2005, I ran a 5K race, watched UT and Baylor on television (Horns won, 62-0) and ate tofu for dinner.

With all this blueberry-fueled brainpower, I figured I should get some official recognition. I hopped into a taxi and told the driver to take me to Seoul’s Mensa office. Mensa is the largest and oldest high-IQ society in the world, and I just assumed they would welcome me with open arms. When I took the test, however, they said I could not join. I protested—was my score too low? On the contrary, it was too high. They told me I was the epitome of a genius. They said my IQ was “off the charts” and “in the stratosphere.” They were afraid I would “intimidate the other members.” I offered to dumb it down a bit, but still they refused.

Vaccinium cyanococcus…

He likes blueberries…