This is Your Brain on Football

A friend of The Great Brain Robbery mentioned reading about ALS in athletes, specifically football players. So we looked it up, and indeed, a study published in Neurology in 2012 reveals some alarming results.

Professional football players in American have a higher risk of dying from ALS and Alzheimer’s disease, according to the study. (Researchers pointed out that they were examining death certificates specifically, and that without post-mortem examinations, it can be difficult to diagnose chronic traumatic encephalopathy as a contributor to an ex-football player’s death.)

And when we think of football players bashing heads, we think of the defensive line and the offensive line crashing their helmets together on every play. Linebackers and running backs, for example, don’t see helmet-to helmet contact on every down.

But the scientists looking at the data discovered that, in fact, it was the high-speed players, not the linemen, who were even more likely to die from diseases related to damaging brain cells.

Those big hits have effect that literally lasts for the rest of a player’s life.

What can be done about this? Other than rule changes, not much. In an interview with Freakonomics radio, Dr. Robert Cantu said that helmets built to prevent death may do a worse job of preventing concussions. So, while deaths during football games are down to zero (for NFL players), deaths from having played football are as high as ever.

Fans often refer to football players as gladiators, men who killed one another for the entertainment of bored citizens. The analogy, hyperbolic when it was coined, is becoming increasingly, depressingly apt.

Playing Games Changes Your Brain (for the Better)

In front of you, a green field and blue sky. 

And mushrooms with clown shoes waddling in your direction. You run around them, picking up large gold coins. This is not a dream. This is Super Mario 64. And while you play, your brain is changing.

Brain researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin studied adults playing the popular first-person video game and found remarkable changes in gamers’ cerebellum, right prefrontal cortex, and right hippocampus. These are areas typically associated with executive function, spatial orientation, and memory formation.

We have long known about our brain’s plasticity, the way it literal reshapes itself as we learn. But these findings are particularly intriguing, as they show a direct, causal relationship between playing and brain growth. And according to the research team: “The presented video game training could therefore be used to counteract known risk factors for mental disease such as smaller hippocampus and prefrontal cortex volume in, for example, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia and neurodegenerative disease.”

Even more intriguing is an additional data point: gamers who looked forward to playing showed even more change than those who merely played as requested, “evidence suggesting a predictive role of desire in volume change.”

We’ve discussed this sort of thin before, the idea that people have more control over their brain growth that science used to think: in a study (reported on by Scientific American) on permanent changes to working memory: “[Researchers] found that people who have a growth mindset about intelligence… showed greater improvement on the visuospatial reasoning tests than those who have a fixed mindset about intelligence.”

In other words—if you think you can get smarter, and you want to, and you want to have fun doing it, then playing games will definitely help.

Talking Away Those Brain-Stress Blues

A man, middle-aged, reasonably healthy, walks into his living room. He’s a cleared an area in front of his gas-fireplace, and sits down, crossing his legs. He sits with god posture, eyes closed, arms loose in his lap. He takes a long deep breath, lets it out slowly. Another deep breath, another soothing exhalation. The man appears relaxed, at ease, content.

Blood flow in his cerebral prefontal cortices slowly decreases. He takes another breath, opens his mouth, and says “womba.”

He exhales. Breathes in. “womba choo dee latta.”

His posture straightens just slightly. He inhales. “womba choo dee matta fen, fenno chum de ganafed. Arrana sanipe. Arrana sanipe dee matta fen, womba choo dee matta fen ro sanipe, sanipe dreepa, sanipe dreepa saaaaaa….” He inhales, exhales, his lips murmuring more nonsense syllables.

None of the words come from any known language. He does this for an hour.

~~~

Glossolalia is the technical term for speaking tongues, a phenomena seemingly reserved for Pentecostal church meetings and Haitian voodoo rituals. Actually, glossolalia occurs all over the world in a diversity of cultures, including Japan, Egypt, and India. Adherents claim to be speaking a divine or lost language, either by channeling a holy spirituality or as the result of a gift from a god or ancestor.

But there’s more glossolalia than just nonsense syllables and church devotion. In 2006 a group of scientists studied the brains of those who could, at will, speak in tongues, and found that brain activity was different than for a control group. Another study, performed in 2010, found that people who spoke in tongues had lowers levels of the so-called “stress” hormone cortisol. This evidence suggests glossolalia is not merely a psychology phenomenon, but a biological one.

The scientific case for meditation as a means to reduce stress is well established. But glossolalia is not meditation. Andrew Newberg of the 2006 study, speaking to Dick Hanson and the DANA Foundation for an article on glossolalia, points out that as far as the biology of the brain is concerned, “In some sense, [glossolalia] is the opposite of the concentrative process of meditation.”

While it’s easy to dismiss the subject of speaking in tongues as nothing more than pseudo-scientific gibberish, the results of these studies suggest there’s more here than meets the ear. We live in a hectic, non-stop, information-overloading world, so any technique that one discovers to reduce stress and increase relaxation has to be worth taking the time to explore.

(But maybe try this one alone.)

What Can Your Brain Do While You Drive a Car?

Not very much. And nothing very well.

Your brain can’t really do anything else while you drive a car. Every time you do something else, the emphasis is on the “else.” While you’re checking your phone, you’re not driving anymore. The car is on autopilot.

We’re not including the things it does automatically, like regulate your breathing, heartbeat, and so on. But your brain can do those things when you’re asleep.

But you wouldn’t drive a car while asleep, would you?

Scientists have discovered that so-called “multi-tasking” requires a splitting of the brain. Different parts of your brain will be used to do a variety of things. If you eat popcorn while watching TV, part of your brain moves your hand into the bowl, while another part pays attention to what Daryl Dixon is doing to zombie number 62.

But driving is not just holding the wheel straight and watching the road. Your working memory temporarily memorizes where all the other cars are so you can keep a sense of them as they move around you. You’re long-term memory is recalling landmarks and routes for you to follow. You’re hippocampus is filtering out the sound of other cars but still paying attention for the sound of horns and sirens, making sure to send those impulses to your frontal cortex where you can process what to do with them.

So, while you’re checking your phone, you’re checking your phone, and nothing else. You’re wiping your working memory clean (where did the other cars go?), distracting your long-term memory (was that a right here or a left) and confusing your hippocampus (I hear a horn but there’s no horn icon in this text message).

And even nothing bad happens while you’re looking at the phone, when you look up again and disengage autopilot, you’re still not driving—you’re getting a whole new set of data before you’re fully immersed in the act of driving again.

So, go ahead, give yourself an estimate—how long did you glace at that phone? 2 seconds? Now double that, to account for how long it takes for your brain to switch.

A car traveling 55 mph covers 322 feet in 4 seconds. And since it takes a person about second to respond to a sudden change in environment, and since most cars take about 120 feet to come to a stop with a sudden application of the brakes from 55 mph, that all adds up to 600 feet.

Anything that happens less than two football fields away from you when you check your phone is going to be an accident.

A Happy Brain’s a Healthy Brain

Over at SharpBrains (which is a great resource for brain lovers) they’ve posted a handful of slide decks from their Virtual Summit, which was held September 19th and 20th. The topic of the summit was “How Can Neuroscience-based Innovation Enhance Behavioral & Brain Health.”

Listening to recordings form the summit requires a paid membership to the site, but the slide decks are free to view. Topics include “What are scal­able best prac­tices to spread smart health?” and “How can Big Data help upgrade brain care?” I’ve been looking at “The Future of Personal Brain Health.”

This is a slide deck that accompanied a talk, so it amounts to visual notes—I don’t have a transcript of what was said. But I found several points very intriguing. For example, Kaiser Permanente has an ad campaign that ties mental wellness to physical wellness.

Hugs = Healthy

Happy People are 50% healthier.

I’ve discussed happiness and memory before but what about overall health?

I decided to look up the science behind this, and apparently it’s related to cortisol and serotonin. Cortisol is a steroid your adrenal glands make in response to stress. Amongst other (necessary) things, cortisol suppresses immune function. And then there’s serotonin, which is “made” in the raphe nuclei of the brain, is used to regulate intestinal movement, and can effect mood. Although is not a causal relationship, cortisol is usually higher when serotonin is lower, and vice-versa.

So you if get stressed, your immune system is suppressed, you are not happy, and you get sick. If you’re not stressed, your healthy body produces serotonin, and you feel happy.

(Note that this is a one-way circle: this isn’t to say that if you make yourself happy, you will make yourself healthy.)

But back to the mind: most interesting to me is how cortisol and serotonin play a part in the formation of memory. Cortisol mixes with adrenaline to encode highly detailed short-term memories: a high-stress situation can etch a memory into a person mind. However, long-term stress can allow cortisol to impede memory function in the hippocampus. On the happier side of the coin, serotonin impacts learning and memory—until we get older, when serotonin starts to increase and alters associative memory.

So, in a nutshell, happiness is good for us, which seems obvious, but also helps us learn—but when we’re not happy, we can still learn short-term solutions to problems, to reduce stress, and get back to long-term behaviors to maintain happiness and health.

Your Brain Doesn’t Like Your Sweet Tooth

Ignorance is bliss. Bliss is sweet.

And we’ve got the science to transform those ideas into literal realities.

We’ve long know the importance of a healthy diet to keeping a healthy brain. We know that some foods in particular seem to boost brain function, and we know some foods can have a debilitating effect. And now scientists in Germany have found a direct correlation between elevated blood sugar and poor recall.

The experiment (with a self-reportedly small sample set) included memory tests and brains scans, and as a preliminary step, suggests a need for more study on how glucose directly impacts memory function.

We’ve all had listless days, feeling low, light-headed, and knowing it’s because our blood sugar is too low. But what about those days when we’re pepped up, maybe on overdrive? Getting that “sugar high” and careening around in a whirlwind of jittery limbs? Are we shaking memories right out of our heads?

No need to worry about that for now—more tests are needed. Just add this as yet another reason to practice moderation. Eat healthfully and stay active, and your brain will be thankful. The better your brain functions the more likely you are to remember to eat well.

Afterall, to misquote a certain supermodel: Nothing tastes as delicious as having a healthy mind feels.

This is your Brain on Melatonin

“Your brain’s in a fog. You’re staring at the computer screen, trying to remember something—but you can’t even remember why you’re trying to remember it. You’re hunched, slack-jawed. What’s going on? Is this some kind of dementia? Alzheimer’s?”

Sound familiar?

That is, have you read the above paragraph before? It was posted here a week ago, on an entry about sleep. If you read it then and can remember it now, chances are you’ve slept a few nights since that first reading. And the same chemical that made you sleep probably helped you remember what you’d read.

Sleep and memory are inexorably linked, something scientists have theorized since the early nineteenth century, and tested as early as the 1920s. A study in 2006 found that the brain replays past events during sleep: rats where run through a maze, and brain scans during the run and while sleeping showed duplicate brain patterns. These patterns were occurring between the brain’s visual centers and the hippocampus; while the rats slept, visual memories were being moved from short-term to long-term memory (and, interestingly, the memories were played backwards).

Melatonin is essential to sleep, but the connection between melatonin and memory isn’t spurious. Your pineal gland produces melatonin, which causes drowsiness. While you sleep, melatonin acts as a powerful antioxidant, “washing away” free radicals, (including toxins associated with Alzheimer’s). This action is part of the process that allows for that “dialogue” between the visual cortex and the hippocampus.

Nutshell: As your eyes are exposed to less and less blue light at the end of the day, the pineal gland responds by producing melatonin, which makes you drowsy; and as you sleep, melatonin removes free radicals and facilitates the movement of experiences into long-term memory.

(And one theory holds that we experience this memory storage as dreams—and if the mechanism is not interrupted, you tend to wake up without any memory of dreaming, since the experience of dreaming is a separate conscious observation from the experiences that you were dreaming about—and there’s no “reason” to remember those temporary observations).

If you don’t remember the first paragraph, above, don’t worry: your brain encounters millions of pieces of data every day, and you can only process so much.

But if you want to make sure you do remember for later, why not sleep on it?

All Brains are the Same

But, all brains are definitely not the same, right?

For the most part, scientists don’t really know much about the brain. While a lot of research has been done, a lot of hypothesis tested and a lot of theories proven to be true, the best science can determine is that there’s way more that we don’t know about the brain than what we do know.

For every brain rule we find, there tend to exist brains which break those rules. This part of the brain is for speech, this part for math, this part the sex drive, this part makes your arms and legs work… but what about a man who was discovered to have none of those areas in his brain? A civil servant and father of two children, he was shown to have a brain that mostly fluid—estimates say he had as much as 75% less brain tissue than someone who is “normal.”

And then there’s Einstein’s brain, cut out of his head (after he died, of course) before the rest of him was cremated. Sliced into thin sheets, imaged, and studied for decades. What did they find? Not much. A more or less normal brain, except for a missing Sylvian fissure, which may have resulted in a slightly wider parietal lobe, and may have meant some of his brain matter was more tightly packed together.

But they’ve also shown that, in general, women, who are physically smaller than men, nevertheless have the same amount of brain matter, just more tightly packed together. Theories suggest that this tightness of neurons results in faster neural communication.

More or less, any one healthy brain is the same as any other healthy brain. Even though we know this isn’t true, even though the very structure of our individuals brains cause and are caused by our own distinct individuality.

But until we know more about the brain, and how microscopic difference make us different, one brain is as good as another.

It’s what you do with it that counts.

Education and our Malnourished Brains

Are we getting smarter? A bunch of smart people got together and found that, no, we’re not.

For a very specific and compelling definition of “we,” that is. The gap between the academic performances of haves and have nots is growing, at least in the US. And while certainly we, as a nation, like to point at the outliers, evoke the notion of rugged individualism, and then, ironically, say “look how great we are,” the truth is that the majority of people in this country are not performing at their full potential.

A report by Jonathan Plucker, Jacob Hardesty, and Nathan Burroughs, called “Talent on the Sidelines,” says that we are losing the minds of our school children. They studied a variety of education assessments, and found that while there has been an increase in the scores of white and well-off students, minority and poor students are, at best, performing at the same levels as 15 years ago, in in some states, their doing worse.

Plucker et. al say that this means we have a “permanent talent underclass.” And it is difficult, in the face of this, not to consider the political environment that has led to this condition. Underfunding of education. The downsizing and removal of school nutrition programs. Even something like the cost of healthcare can keep parents out of the home, working over time to pay for a meager lifestyle, instead of being able to spend time in the home, participating in their children’s education.

And it’s a viscous cycle—underperforming school children become underpaid adult workers, who have children that enter the same broken education environment.

What can we do? According to Plucker et al, one thing we can do is start making excellence a focus. Rather than spend billions on assessing and cultivating achievement minimums, forcing educators to teach to an arbitrary standardized test, we should start working on ways to move underachievers ahead of the curve.

BUT GREAT BRAIN ROBBERY, WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH BRAINS?

Uh… well, one of the things we champion here at TGBR is brain training. You can strive for excellence by making your own brain excellent. Contribute to the culture!

Bashing the Furniture in my Brain Attic

I was struggling to find something to say about brains today, so on a whim I googled “Sherlock’s Brain.” I got this: Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova – digested read. I skimmed it, decided I liked the phrase “obliquity of the ecliptic,” then got distracted by something.

I went back to read the whole thing later, and found myself a bit put off by the writer’s tone. Who does she think she is, this Konnikova?

So I looked for a different link from my original Google search. I clicked on “Sherlock Holmes and the infamous brain attic - Boing Boing” and got an article written by Maria Konnikova.

Grrrr.

But I read it anyway. And the tone was very different. And informative! Sherlock, via Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of course, writing in the late nineteenth century, thought of the human brain as an attic, to be filled with furniture as appropriate, to be cluttered up or only furnished with useful pieces. Konnikova points out that Doyle’s analogy is a good one, given the way our brains interpret, process, store, and retrieve experiences. Memory is indeed like an attic. So I felt better for having read this second piece.

But not a single use of the phrase “obliquity of the ecliptic.” So what I read before at the Guardian?

I went back and realized my error. The Guardian piece was written by John Crace. It’s a (satirical) digest of Maria Konnikova’s book. The article on Boing Boing IS by Konnikova, and is a promotion of her book.

So what I had initially read was a fake digest, or a faux facsimile, or a sham of a simulacrum. And what I read second was an introductory promotion, or an appetizing distillation, or a tantalizing opportunity for further investigation.

In other words, as I was reading these articles, storing furniture in my attack, I was trying to stack a baby grand onto a spindly ottoman. With enough balance, I might have achieved it—but when it came time to recall what I’d read, who knows what would have crashed through.

Probably something about fairies. Apparently, Doyle and or Kannikova believed in them at one point. I’m not sure what that has to do with anyone of this, but unlike Sherlock, my own attic is already pretty crammed as it is.

The Brain Case for Happiness

Recently we posted a brief discussion of the effect of sadness on memory. Now let’s discuss happiness.

Turns out, happiness is good for your brain. And this seems obvious, but there’s proof in the form of real-time brain scans, and the long-term effect happiness has on improved cognition.

The case for sadness says that when people are sad, they are more likely to create more accurate memories. This is not in contradiction to the case that happiness improves cognition. It’s like saying that concentrating on painting can make you remember the details, while being happy an make you a better painter.

Nor is the case that you have to decide between one or the other. The case for sadness suggests that rather than be worried about the occasional sad moment, know that it can allow for increased concentration and the formation of reliable memories.

Those moments of sadness are the exception that prove the rule of general happiness. A happiness which makes your mind better at doing—well, whatever it is you want to do.

So, consider this: having fun makes you happy, and being happy makes your brain work better. Incorporating fun into learning makes the learning that much more effective. It’s a win-win.

Scare Your Brain for Fun and Profit

“Brains!” says the zombie before you. The word gurgles out of his mouth as he shuffles in your direction, one inexorable step after the other. Your vision becomes super acute, noticing every detail: his pant leg ripped to shreds, the way one shoulder is hitched higher than the other, the yellow glow in his eyes. Your heart is racing, your fingers are tingling, your legs coiled and ready to run. And all the while, your frontal lobe calmly evaluates the situation, and keeps you in your seat. Instead of running, you shove another mouthful of popcorn in your face

There’s a reason why people love scary movies, but an even better reason why they don’t run away in panic at the sight of the first undead brain-eater. Basically, while your amygdala, deep inside your limbic system (your “old” brain”) processes emotions, making you “scared,” your frontal lobes in your “modern” brain are evaluating your options and making decisions.

Your amygdala is in communication with your adrenal gland, which is pumping out the chemicals to prime your body for flight. And as everyone who’s ever watched a Mountain Dew commercial knows, adrenaline can be a rush, a thrill.

But it’s no fun to actually be chased down by blood-thirsty monsters. Your frontal lobes know the difference between reality and fantasy, and so all of the fear is, for want of a better word, fake. You know you’re safe, but you feel scared, and this ironic situation is fun. (For some people, it’s even funny).

Laughing as the scream, popcorn flying out of their mouths, as the zombies reaches out, fingers curled in filthy claws, his mouth drooling bile as he moans “Braaaaaaaains!”

Your Brain Isn’t Forgetful, It’s Just Happy

If ignorance is bliss than is bliss ignorance? Maybe, according to scientists.

Its been known for a while now that one difference between depression and elation is the brain’s tendency to focus in the former and flit from through to thought in the other. This is something we’ve all experienced: when we’re sad, we sometimes feel like we can’t think about anything except whatever’s getting us down.

Experiments and tests on this have been thoroughly performed to find all kinds of effects. Some experiments have even shown how people who were in sad moods remembered more and better details in certain situations than those who were neutral or happy. Those who were in good moods were more likely to add extraneous or inaccurate details.

This makes sense, considering the associative network which our brain uses to learm process, and store memories. If a person is happy, she’ll associate an experience with more different thoughts than someone who is sad, dwelling on only one thought.

So how do we use this phenomena? It’s less a matter of what we can do in advance, than he we go about evaluating someone’s memories. Its not likely that we can “make” ourselves sad so that we are better equipped to remember a given experience.

But we can note that, if there are inconsistencies in our recall, maybe that’s proof we had a good time!

Go to Sleep, Clean Your Brain

Your brain’s in a fog. You’re staring at the computer screen, trying to remember something—but you can’t even remember why you’re trying to remember it. You're hunched, slack-jawed. What’s going on? Is this some kind of dementia? Alzheimer’s?

No, you’re just tired. It’s 1:30 in the morning, and you’ve had a rough day. You were up early, traffic was a nightmare, and work seemed to take forever. You went to dinner with some friends, which got you home late, and now you’re up past your bed time, trying to get a few things done online before finally hitting the hay.

You take your hand off the mouse, turn off the monitor, and wander, bleary-eyed, into bed. You’re asleep before your head even hits the pillow. And the next day… you’re fine. Maybe a bit groggy, but that clears right up. Your brain is yours again, ready to face challenges head-on.

Some people can get by on just a few hours sleep. Some are useless unless they get their full eight. Everybody’s different, but everybody does sleep. It’s more essential than food, and when we’re tired, even more compelling than thirst. Scientists still aren’t sure why sleep is such a necessary part of human existence.

But they’re one step closer to finding. Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, studying the brains of mice, has discovered that sleep allows for the flushing of built-up proteins. These proteins may play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s and other diseases.

It seems that when we’re asleep, not only do brains create far fewer of these proteins, but lower brain activity allows more room for spinal fluid to wash through, removing toxins.

Brushing your teeth every day, taking a shower, getting a good night’s rest—these are all ways of staying clean and healthy.

Your Brain was Built to Procrastinate

But here’s the good news: you can redesign it to get things done.

Very basically, we procrastinate because we have two brains. Our old brain, in the limbic system, does everything automatic, and drives us to take care of the basics. You rarely forget to eat, for example, because your limbic system will remind you. Or newer brain, with parts like the frontal cortex, deal with higher concepts, like all the steps needed for going to the grocery store. If the frontal cortex doesn’t keep the idea of going to the store fresh in our minds, and we’re not hungry, there’s no motivation to go. So we put it off. Until we’re too hungry to wait any longer. And since our limbic system doesn’t bother with grocery lists and recipes, it goes for the shortcut, (often the fast food option).

It’s like the limbic system and the frontal cortex speak a different language. But the frontal cortex can take foreign language classes, so to speak, and develop heuristics—little sub-routines that automate certain processes (like driving a car—after a while, it’s not something you have to think about doing, it’s just something you do). This is similar to how we develop habits, like your weekly-whether-you-need-to-or-not trip to the grocery store.

So far so good. But what about non-routine things that we don’t want to do? Like paying taxes? It’s February 22nd, still plenty of time to get the paperwork done. Your frontal cortex won’t motivate you unless it can think of a reason, a reward or a consequence, so doing taxes leaves your mind until something reminds you of it later. April 15th is too far away for your frontal cortex to find very compelling.

They key is to give yourself a more imminent reward (or consequence). And not something arbitrary. If you say to yourself “I’ll eat a piece of cake as a reward for doing my taxes,” your limbic system might pipe in with “I want that cake now.” Or, it might even say “cake? We don’t want cake at all.” In fact, if you have control of the reward, it’s harder to force yourself through the task when you always know you can have it anyway.

So, you’ll need to give yourself a different kind of reward. The reward of getting the thing done itself. Actually, this can be very motivating, once you’ve started the task. But you’ve got to start the task! This is why “just do it” works when you “just do it.”

Here’s how you trick yourself into starting something you don’t want to do but will be glad you did: allow yourself to not finish. Set a timer for 25 minutes, and promise yourself you can stop when the timer is done, whether you’re finished or not. And then, when the timer goes off, stop. Take a break. Then set the timer again.

This is called “the pomodoro technique” and its effectiveness is based on how your brain responds to rest, in terms of memory and learning. With this technique, you can actually “learn” how getting something done is its own reward.

Use Your Brain Like a House

Chet is driving home from work, and traffic, for a change, is not so bad. His usual thirty minute commute might only be 20 minutes today. It’s sunny outside, unusual for this time of year. And the local alt-rock station is finally playing something decent. 20 minutes should go by quickly.

The song on the radio ends, a few ads come on. One of them is for a concert this weekend, a local band that Chet’s been meaning to check out. He reminds himself to look up ticket prices on the web when he gets home. The next ad is for cut-rate mortgage loans, which reminds Chet he needs to send in his home insurance payment . He adds that to his mental to-do list. As his mind wanders, Chet thinks about other things he should do when he gets home: call his mother, collect the recycling for tomorrow’s pick-up, set the DVR to record the baseball game, take some chicken out of the freezer to thaw.

Even though he’s driving, can’t take notes or use an app on his mobile device, Chet has no problem remembering all these things. When he gets home, everything he needs to do is as fresh in his mind as if he’d written down. You see, Chet uses a mnemonic device called The Method of Loci.

As he was driving, Chet imagined a rock band, complete with guitar player, keyboards and drums, performing on his front porch. Behind his front door, on the bench where he puts on his shoes in the morning, he pictured an enormous checkbook with the word “house” written on it. In the hall leading to his kitchen, he imagines a large photograph of his mother. On the kitchen table, he pictures a tall, teetering stack of tin cans. Continuing his mental walk, he places a pile of baseballs on his dining room table. Finally, in the living room, sitting on his couch is a giant chicken, wearing a scarf.

The Method of Loci, memory palace, or journey method, has a long history of usage, dating back to ancient Rome and Greece. In modern times, memory champions use this technique to quickly memorize random digits or sequences of shuffled playing cards.

For those of us who want a more practical use, the Method of Loci is very easy to use. Simply think of a path with which you’re already very familiar—walking through your house, or your office at work, or a favorite route through the city with stable landmarks. Then associate each room, or piece of furniture, or landmark, with an object that represents what you want to remember.

You’ll find that remembering 10, 20, or even 30 things is as easy as deciding where to put them. Be creative—the more interesting, or “novel” you make each image, the easier it is to remember.

The Roots of Modern Brain Training through Games

In 2008, Susanne M. Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl, John Jonides, and Walter J. Perrig presented a paper called “Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory” in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America”.

Jaeggi et al conducted experiments on fluid intelligence by having subjects play a “dual n-back” game. (FAQ at gwern.net). Players are shown a grid which contains a letter in one square. Then a different letter in a different square is shown. Then a third, and players are asked if this third letter/position is the same as the first. A fourth is shown, and players answer if it is the same as the second. And so on. The challenge is to keep new information in memory while recalling and processing an older memory. The experiment was to see if, as players improve at the game, they would see improvements in their “working memory.”

Subjects were given a preliminary IQ test, and then played the game over spans ranging from 8 to 19 days. A subsequent IQ test showed better results, and those who played the game over 19 days showed more improvement than those who played for only 8.

Subsequent experiments, (including two more led by Jaeggi, with different teams) one led by Qiu Feiyue, and one led by Susanne Schweizer have produced similar results. These results contradict the conventional wisdom that IQ is hardwired and immutable. And while research into these methods for improving intelligence s still relatively new, controversies about improving intelligence are forcing us to reconsider just what the nature of intelligence is.

Authorities such as Michael Merzenich and Robert Plomin have provided additional grist for the controversy mill. Merzenich argues that improving one’s ability at a game merely makes on better at the game itself, and doesn’t necessarily translate to improvements in other areas. Plomin points out that since the idea of intelligence being unchangeable is flawed, science that contradicts this notion is not very remarkable.

But a collection of other studies show that, if nothing else, brain stimulation does result in physical changes in the brain, whatever the current definition of “intelligence” might be. Consider a study done of London Taxi drivers, which found that after intense practice for their licensing exams, (up to four years of practice) these cabbies had enlarged areas of the hippocampus. No one’s giving them Nobel prizes, but no one can deny the intellectual achievement of memorizing 25,000 streets.

And then there’s the Nun Study at the University of Kentucky, which has found a correlation between positive emotions and low incidence of Alzheimer’s. Intriguingly, they even found cases where nuns with physical (post-mortem) evidence of disease did not display any cognitive symptoms during their lives.

Perhaps this is pushing the boundaries of what IQ means, but if a group of women are living, happily, thirty and forty years past the average age of death, I’d call that pretty smart.

Is Your Brain Addicted to the Internet?

Probably not.

Many factors go into whether a person becomes addicted to something, including but not limited to genetics and their environment. Some people seem to be prone to addiction than others, and some things are more potentially addictive than others. Since everyone’s on the internet all the time, it makes sense that people are nervous about internet addiction.

But there a competing theories about what addiction even means. An article in internet addiction in Scientific American defines addiction, loosely, as “a disease of the brain that compels someone to obsess over, obtain and abuse something, despite unpleasant health or social effects.” The key word there is “disease.”

Another definition of addiction describes it as increased behavior despite increasing consequences. Note the difference. Rather than focus on compulsion and the nomenclature of disease, this definition focuses on behavior and consequence. It’s a subtle but necessary point: you can have a disease and not know it. Or you can do things that are bad for you but not know why.

So what? So, which definition do you use if you want to treat your so-called addiction, the why or the what? A recent study shows that in people who have self-reported internet addiction, there are physical differences in the brain. So do we find people with altered brains, and yank them off the internet? Or do we look for people who shun their family, friends, work, and other obligations, and toss ‘em in an MRI to see how their brains look, letting the ones go who have “healthy” dorsolateral prefrontal cortexes?

The reason we need to be careful with slap-dash diagnoses of “addiction” is that too broad a brush paints too many, and too fine a brush misattributes otherwise peculiar behaviors. Consider a study done on London Taxi drivers, which show that those who successfully obtain “The Knowledge” (a working mental map of London’s serpentine streets) have a somewhat larger rear hippocampus and a somewhat shrunken frontal hippocampus. Are we going to call them study-addicts and start taking more busses and subways?

The internet is just like anything else—a tool to obtain the things we want. If what we want requires sitting in front of a computer for ten hours a day, six days a week, its probably not the interntet—or your brain—that’s the problem.

But if you’re still worried, why not try a few brain training games, and exercise your mind.

New Yorker Calling Brain Training Bunk is Bunk

Hop over to the New Yorker blogs and read up on all kinds of things. The GOP, avant-garde artists, documentaries, hot tech news. Take your pick of categories, all of them smart. Smart blogs written by smart people for smart people. But even smart people get things wrong sometimes.

In “Brain Games Are Bogus” Gareth Cook asserts, unequivocally, that brain training can not make you smarter. He bases this assertion on the result of some meta-analysis done by “a pair of scientists in Europe” who gathered “all of the best research—twenty-three investigations of memory training” from around the world. According to these guys, playing games can make a person good at playing games, “but not at anything anyone might care about in real life.”

Playing games does not, according to Cook, transfer to an increased ability to do arithmetic, or “to other measures of intelligence.” He says these scientists have settled “this controversial issue.”

No, they haven’t.

The “controversial issue” is not whether games improve the mind. The controversial issue is: what exactly is intelligence? Give people many arithmetic tests and they’ll get good at arithmetic tests. Give people many IQ tests and they’ll get good at IQ tests. It’s not the processes that don’t work, it’s the conclusion drawn from the processes.

Gamify these tests, and some factors that lend themselves to learning resistance start to melt away (such as boredom). Cook doesn’t bother to mention this implicit versus explicit motivation. But one of the scientists he’s criticizing does mention motivation, suggesting that we’re only getting half the picture in this analysis of the brain training controversy. Actually, less of the picture—I have on my desktop a list of brain research citations. It’s 500 pages long. It contains a few orders of magnitude more than just 23 studies.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t read the New Yorker. Indeed, the good news is the first comment beneath this blog entry mentions an ongoing study where Catholic nuns are allowing their brains to be examined as they age. So far a direct correlation has been found between brain stimulation and brain health.

Nor am I in the least suggesting Cook is not smart. But I’d love to see what he thinks after playing some brain training games for a few weeks.

Say It, Squeeze It, Chew It

Chew some gum, clench your fists, read your grocery list out loud, improve your memory.

Given that the brain controls, from one place, everything we do, it stands to reason that some areas will overlap and even assist one another.

In a simple experiment, Dr. Ruth E. Propper and associates at Montclair State University tested how clenching a rubber ball assisted memory storage and retrieval. Subjects squeezed the ball in their right hands while memorizing a list of words, and then squeezed a ball in their left hands while trying to recall those words. A control group only held the ball without squeezing in their hands. The result: out of thirty six words, hand squeezers were able able to recall more than twice those in the control group.

It’s worth shot, right? Use this technique next time you’re heading to the grocery store, and be sure to add chewing gum to the list.

A study led by Dr. Andrew Scholey at the University of Northumbria (UK) found that test subject who chewed during memory tests performed better than non-chewers. There are a few theories as to why this happens: the rhythm of chewing and sympathetic rhythms in the brain, slightly increased heart rate, or insulin receptors in the hippocampus. But you don’t need to know how a motor works to drive your car, so whatever the reason, popping a stick of gum in your mouth can help with memory.

And even if you don’t have a ball to squeeze or gum to chew, chances are you can still speak out loud.

A handful of scientists reporting in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition described an experiment to test “the production effect,” and found that “producing a word aloud during study, relative to simply reading a word silently, improves explicit memory.” They key, it seems, is not to read the whole list aloud, but just the important parts.

Of course, one man’s important is another man’s easy-to-forget. But if you want to be sure you especially don’t forget squeeze balls and chewing gum when you get to the store, read those parts out loud as you go over your list.

Simon Says...

Back in 1978, a few programmers put together a simple, but fun toy: red, green, blue, and yellow lights, tones built on an A major chord, and few lines of code. The result was Simon, still available in stores, having gone through several design changes and platform innovations.

But the game remains the same. Simon lights up one colored panel, and the player has to respond by pressing that same panel. Simon lights up that first panel, once more, and then another panel (or sometimes repeats with same one again). The gamer repeats the sequence, and after each iterations Simon adds one more step.

The “basic” game is won after a sequence of eight steps. Due to limitation with hardware and programming, the maximum number of sequences in a single game is 31. The world record for most consecutive games played to 31, in a row, is 14, according the Guinness Book of World Records.

The game is named after the children’s game “Simon Says,” where a leader instructs a group to do various actions, via the phrase “Simons says….”

Simon says touch your nose. Simon says stand on one foot.

Players are “out” if they follow an instruction not prefaced with “Simon says.”

Simon says turn around. Simon says fold your arms. Nod your head. You’re out, Steve, Simon didn’t say to nod your head!

This game, too, had a popularity in the 80s, thanks to Lou Goldstein, a “tumbler” who would lead championship-style Simon Says competitions on TV and sports half-times shows. If you’re old enough, you might remember seeing him on the Dick Clark show, Real People, and Battle of the Network Stars.

Both games, it turns out, are good for you. According to Science Daily, a study published in Psychological Assessment shows “higher academic outcomes associated with the game” in children of ages 3-6 who participated in the study.

Playing the electronic version of Simon can also reap benefits for gamers. A study (PDF) published in the Journal of Behavioral And Neuroscience research in 2006 found that playing Simon served as viable means of measuring working memory, and resisted “habituation, practice effects, and proactive interference across trials.”

Simon says play games to keep your mind sharp!

Smarter than a PC

Quick, which is smarter: your brain, or your laptop?

Trick question. Obviously, your brain is “smarter,” although we could twist around the definition of “smart” to make laptops look like the winner. It’s all about semantics: do we mean intelligent, fast, good at memory, good at recall?

The thing about your brain which beats computers every time, is how adaptable it is. Your brain has been taking in, processing, and storing information almost constantly since before you were born.

How old is your laptop? I few years old? Did you have a different one before that? Why did you get a new one?

Your laptop can be updated a few times, but eventually, technology will leave your old brick behind Your brain, however, is a factory original, and even when its at its slowest, it will still be able to adapt, and change, and learn.

Its called elasticity. And the science has shown that your brain literally changes shape every time you learn. The more you learn, the more your brain changes.

So instead of comparing your brain to your laptop, why not compare it to your muscles? And you know how your muscles change when you exercise.

Forgive me the pun, but I can’t help it: doing cerebral exercises is no-brainer.

Your Brain Already Hashtags

Mnemonics are just a way for you to remember things more easily. They’re little tricks, like “Every Good Boy Does Fine” helps you remember EGBDF, the notes on the lines of a treble clef. Mnemonics are powerful, because they can help you remember a music lesson from 2nd grade, even if you’ve never used music theory ever in your life.

But, not to put too fine a point on it, Mnemonics are actually helping you with retrieval. You learned the notes on the lines, and memorized them-- its getting access to those memories that sometimes requires tricks.

And when you think of the internet as a sort of melding of minds, what tricks can be used to retrieve those “memories?” Lately, the trick has been the “hashtag”

Hashtags were invented by Chris Messina in 2007, as way to manually index the content of blogs and social media. He came up with the idea of prefacing keywords with the # symbol, borrowing from the method programmers use to make comments in their code. The concept was eventually picked up by other users on Twitter, became ubiquitous by the time of the SXSW event. Since then, hashtags have allowed people to add their thoughts to the latest zeitgeist as it happens.

Of course, the latest zeitgeist is the #hashtag, a self-referential usage that is best explained in the Jimmy Fallon/Justin Timberlake sketch. As funny as it is, it nevertheless shows exactly the power of hashtags.

By using them, people on the internet are creating a internet-memory mnemonic to help retrieve just what they’re looking for. But is it making the internet “smarter?” That’s up to you to decide.

Fighting the Zeitgeist

In a Q&A at StackExchange, Jeromy Anglim addresses the question “What exactly is IQ, and how to develop or improve it?” His response offers the following:

“Many quick fixes to boosting intelligence are advertised under the banner such as brain training, however, there is little evidence that they are effective.”

Actually, this does not address the whole true. This was the understanding, years ago, but since then, improvements in testing and analytics have revealed that so-called “brain training” might actually yield positive, long-term results. Studies such as ACTIVE have found that regular mental exercise allows for improvements in memory, reason, and information processing speed-- improvements that can translate into better, more consistent performance in everyday tasks.

In our hypermodern ultra-fast world, it makes sense that people would find  a “quick fix to boost intelligence” appealing. And indeed, there are no brain steroids that are both safe and have a lasting effect. But dedicated body-sculpters will tell you that regular, smart exercise not only yields better results than quick-fixes; they’re healthier and have long-term effects.

You get out of it what you put in. And people are “brain training” all of the time. Whether its a daily crossword or Sudoku, or even reading, studies have shown that such activities can play a part in maintaining mental health into old age.

So, it turns out that playing games and staying “young at heart” can keep you “young at brain” too.

Owning Your Brain Health

Just by reading this, you’ve already taken the first step in improving your mind.

As quoted in a recent Scientific American article, a group of researchers recently found:

“people who have a growth mindset about intelligence (believe that intelligence is malleable) showed greater improvement on the visuospatial reasoning tests than those who have a fixed mindset about intelligence (believe intelligence can’t change).”

The researchers, led by Post-doctoral Fellow Susanne Jaeggi at the University of Maryland, were studying the primary methodological concerns of research in: “fluid intelligence:

the deliberate but flexible control of attention to solve novel “on the spot” problems that cannot be performed by relying exclusively on previously learned habits, schemas, and scripts.

In other words, Thomas the Tank Engine was right. “I think I can” is an important part of healthy brain growth. So I wasn’t being glib, above, when I said you’ve taken your first step. Seeking out information on brain health, doing research, visiting this web site, belies a belief in the ability to improve. And it turns out that such a belief is an essential component to improvement.

Curiosity didn’t kill the cat; it made the cat smarter.

Cocoa Good for Brain, Says Scientists

Is your go-to brain juice a cup of coffee?

Why not give cocoa a try?

According to research in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology (March, 2013, requires login), cocoa contains flavonoids that may help prevent the onset of dementia as well as assist in preventing stroke.

I came across this via The People’s Pharmacy, which reminds us that these flavonoids are only available in cocoa that that been properly treated. CocoaVia, for example, reports 250 mg of cocoa flavanols per one CocoaVia stick.

But don’t panic if your favorite chocolate doesn’t list how many flavonoids it contains. Medscape, reporting on article in the August 2013 issue of Neurology points out that drinking cocoa, even if not high in flavonoids, can “boost the effect of blood flow on neuronal activity,”.