Choosing how you get to work is about picking the lesser of several evils. Drive and face the queues of the motorway. Take the train and face an hour up against someone whose body odour puts the “cattle’’ into “cattle-truck’’.

Most of us stick with our own brand of commuting hell because the alternatives do not seem much better. It seems there’s another incentive to dropping old commuting habits and trying something new. You may not get there any quicker, but evidence suggests varying the way you commute could help boost your intelligence by up to 40 per cent in a week. Doing daily “brain exercises’’ can make a person sharper, more confident, and better at making decisions. These brain boo-sters can include looking up unfamiliar words to use in conversation, or talking to someone you don’t know.

Some of this behaviour may earn you a special reputation. Cleaning your teeth with the “wrong’’ hand counts, as does cycling, walking or taking the bus. If you already walk or cycle, taking a different route will give your neurons the desired workout. And since you have to get to work anyway, why not do it in a way that will make you that bit cleverer once you get there? For a BBC programme Get Smarter in a Week, 15 volunteers followed a regime that included eating oily fish, exercising and doing sudoku puzzles, as well as varying routes to work and talking to strangers. By the end of the week, some volunteers performed up to 40 per cent better in intelligence tests.

“IQ is considered a fixed measure of someone’s intelligence,’’ says Philip Morrow, the show’s executive producer. “But experts say that you can improve your brainpower by enhancing your memory, working on your spatial awareness, doing things differently and eating healthily.

Many people feel they are underperforming — that they are letting themselves down, in terms of their ability to handle events or thinking that people at work are cleverer than they are. Everyone can get smarter, and feel better, if they do these things.’’ Imagine how intelligent I’m going to be now I have started hopping to work, backwards, with my eyes closed, while sho-uting random words from a thesaurus at passers-by. I hope someone will tell me if I start taking this too far.