Playing with Brains

Today one of us at TGBR played a game that required memorizing strings of numbers. The game started off with just two digits, but went all the way up to 10 digits. Sometimes the number has to be memorized “backwards” which made it more challenging.

What was interesting was how even the slightest bit of familiarity aided the process. ‘206’ popped up as part of a longer string, and was easily memorized as a single entity because it’s the area code here in Seattle. Any time 7x7 occurred (737, 747, 727, etc) that, too, was held in the mind as a single digit. And strings of numbers that started with ‘19’ were easily coded as dates, So, when 2061984737 popped up, instead of it feeling like a 10 digit number, it felt like a three digit number.

Our brains, it seems, are desperate to attach meaning to things. We prefer character and reason to stark, abstract existence. This is how we, here at TGBR, choose to interpret new findings that show people with so-called “perfect” recall can be tricked into having false memories.

An article at Discover describes how scientists were able to achieve this, and for the sake of time, we won’t rehash the explanation here. Suffice it to say that no one’s memory is invulnerable to manipulation.

We’re insisting it all goes back to a terrible need to consider the question ”why?” why did that happen? What does it mean? How does that fit into the rest of the universe?

And if the universe is in our own heads, than our memories are their own worst enemies.

Get the Fat Out of Your Brain

The people behind the Great Brain Robbery follow a lot of blogs and folks on Twitter. Brain-talk is a rich field, with lots of research, many different point of views, and thousands of theories all coalescing in a miasma of opinion, explanation, interpretation. Sometimes we see things we disagree with. Sometimes we feel like this casual blogging stuff sends the wrong message.

For example, a blog post we found today that asserts: “The more a woman weighs, the worse her memory.” We’re not going to link to this blog, but we’re going to take it apart. First, the study that found this correlation between BMI increases and memory test decreases only studied women ages 65 to 79. That’s not “women” in general, so the above assertion is spurious at best.

Then there’s the use of the BMI, a terrible way to classify anything except unrelated metrics. Take a person’s weight in kilograms and divide by the square of their height in meters. The taller you are, the more you weigh, and if you are not tall enough to weigh as much as you do, you’re fat. Except that taller people will weigh more than the a simple two-metric function will predict, making them “fat,” and the BMI doesn’t, obviously, account for what gives a person mass in the first place. Body builders are fat, and people who suffer from anemia are skinny: who’s healthier?

Who’s dumber? Because when bloggers start throwing around sentences like “the worse her memory,” that’s a judgmental statement. And this blogger later says “Remember, everything the brain does affects memory (and everything affecting memory affects the brain).” Therefore, if you’re a woman who weighs too much, expect to have decreased brain function, according to this blogger.

The blogger doesn’t bother to show the causative relationship between weight gain and memory dysfunction, but does say that another study showed that people who had bariatric stomach by-pass surgery showed mental improvements. This same blogger, in the past, has talked about the very positive effects happiness has on memory. Who, in this overly-critical society, wouldn’t be happier to be, finally, skinny?

Does gaining weight effect memory? Or does not exercising effect memory? The blogger says “Though exercise doesn’t do much to cause weight loss, it has many other benefits… that can directly benefit memory.” Did this study of older women control for the ones who, despite having a higher BMI were exercising regularly?

How about this: let’s stop using inadequate tools to focus on vaguely correlative measurements and making painfully obvious conclusions.

As you age, good health is important for maintaining brain function. We’ve known that for centuries.

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?

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!

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.

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.