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.