"How to Improve Your Brain"--Washington Post, 4/10/01...
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>>> How to Improve Your Brain
By Tabitha M. Powledge
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, April 10, 2001; Page HE01
Blame it on advancing age, a brutal schedule or the barrage of info-missiles that targets you constantly, but some days your brain just doesn't feel up to the job. You dither over decisions and your focus grows fuzzy. The thoughts come in starts and fits, the words won't come at all, and you can't remember what you're supposed to do next. You can't help wondering: Maybe your life would get better if your brain got better?
A slew of books is exploiting this hope. "Brain Fitness." "Building Mental Muscle." "Total Memory Workout." You'd think they were talking about physical fitness. The metaphor is no accident. The language is meant to suggest you can beef up your brain, much like your pecs, to gain power upstairs. Not just slow down the decline, but actually muscle up your mind.
The suggestions for brain-building techniques cover a broad sweep, though some are mutually exclusive and others score high on the Twaddlemeter: Play games. Pop pills. Lose weight. Walk backward for two blocks. Brush your teeth with your left hand. Solve puzzles. Get your heart rate up. Do yoga and meditate to calm down. Listen to Mozart. Drink coffee, drink green tea and get a good night's sleep.
Some of it sounds like fun, some just confusing. But does any of this stuff work?
Well, yes, some. Except that the brain is not a muscle, or even a collection of muscles. Many of the ordained neural exercises, even those based on valid scientific findings, are still largely untested. Clear evidence that they yield measurable gains in brain function is still pending. The biggest and best body of evidence favors the hoariest, least controversial principles – such as the idea that practicing a mental task makes you better at it, or that a healthy brain is one housed in a body that eats and sleeps sensibly, minimizes stress and takes few drugs, legal or otherwise.
You can improve specific brain skills, often at great cost – train your memory, for example, to hold an extraordinary string of numbers. But because that ability does not spill over into other skills, it's not clear what good that will do you – unless you're a spy or a Las Vegas card counter. Still, with the help of particular techniques, you may be able to boost your performance in some discrete mental tasks, such as
spatial abilities and various other skills often called "intelligence."
But alas, a survey of the current books and scientific research shows there's no proven, simple, heretofore-unknown method of helping a normal brain, normally nourished and reared and educated – yours, for example – become measurably brawnier overall.
Pumping Neurons
For the real thing in scientific credentials, nobody beats Lawrence Katz, coauthor of "Keep Your Brain Alive" and coiner of the term "neurobics." A researcher at Duke University Medical Center, he's a world-class expert on neurotrophins – growth-spurring molecules in the brain. Recent work by Katz and others demonstrates that brain activity boosts neurotrophin production. The neurotrophins in turn spur the growth of dendrites, the structures that make connections among brain cells. The more dendrites, the more communication takes place within the brain. The more communication that takes place, the theory goes, the greater the brain's capacity to process and use information.
Katz's work is supported by, among others, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, giving it a seal of approval only slightly less classy than winning a Nobel Prize. So when Katz joins the beef-up-the-brain chorus, attention must be paid.
In "Keep Your Brain Alive," Katz maintains you can boost brain cell activity – thus creating all those new connections and capabilities – through sensory stimulation. If we consciously tag experiences with their taste, touch, smell and sound as well as sight, he says, we give the hippocampus, the brain's tiny collector and organizer of incoming information, more opportunities for storing memories. You're more likely to remember the name of a new acquaintance, for example, if besides registering his appearance, you also note the sound of his voice, the firmness of his handshake, perhaps even his smell. The more linked associations there are, he says, the better the odds of later retrieval.
Which brings him to "neurobics," designed to exploit this power sensory association.
Sample exercises: Get dressed with your eyes closed. Eat dinner with your family in silence. Turn the photos you display upside down. Take your parent to the office for a day. Shop at a farmers market instead of the Giant. Take a new route to work. Walk backward for two blocks. Brush your teeth with your left hand.
Sounds goofy? Not at all, says Katz.
"The idea," he says, "is that by changing certain aspects of our everyday routine, doing everyday activities in slightly novel ways, thereby using different senses to do ordinary tasks, we can help stimulate flexibility and take advantage of the flexibility built into our brains, and preserve and possibly enhance brain circuits."
But can the mishmash of neurobics activities really boost your brain's ability to function? Or do the exercises just make you better at the exercises?
A flood of studies from neuroscience and cognitive psychology suggests the latter. And Katz concedes that the value of neurobics has not yet been proved. "Whether [neurobics exercise] translates into a real cognitive change I can't say," he admits.
"The levels of rigor that go into a mass market paperback and into a journal publication are very different. The kinds of speculations and things you're allowed to do if you're writing a book, you have a little more latitude than I would give myself if I were writing something for a scientific publication."
Perhaps this is the place to mention that Katz's co-author, Manning Rubin, is a longtime New York ad man.
The Learning Barrier
Talk about overall brain improvement – not the improvement of one specific function, say, spelling ability, but the much broader enhancement that so many of us covet – appears to be just that: talk. The evidence so far tells us that the complex neural pathways of the human brain communicate in exquisitely specific ways.
Psychologists have a name for the process by which we apply what we've learned to a closely related area: near transfer. Chess masters, for example, can easily tackle chessboard configurations they've never seen before. A pianist adept at a Beethoven score can likely make a passable stab at picking out a Schubert composition she's reading for the first time.
But how far can transfer be stretched? As it turns out, not far. Florida State University cognitive psychologist K. Anders Ericsson reports that scientists asked to design experiments in scientific fields other than their own aren't so good at it. Only real experts on experimental design do a better job than students. "To be a scientist in a different area doesn't give you the knowledge you need in order to design acceptable experiments," says Ericsson.
Scientists have discovered no brain mechanism for allowing far transfer – spillover from one discrete mental task to an unrelated one. "We just don't know how to teach transfer, how you take these basic abilities and help people generalize," says Sherry Willis, a psychologist at Pennsylvania State University. "Transfer is most likely to occur when the problems and the context are similar to the problems and the context in which you first learned. The more different the problem and the context become, the less likely it is that transfer will occur."
In his area of expertise, which is expertise, Ericsson has encountered the same phenomenon. "My own work has shown extreme specialization when it comes to memory performance. You can be world-class in remembering information about digits, but when I read you regular words or letters, then you're completely ordinary," he says. Bummer.
Evidence for this distressing principle has flowed in from many branches of cognitive psychology. Norman Park, of the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto, has just co-authored a paper likely to prove something of a shocker in his field of brain injury rehabilitation. The paper reviewed 30 studies to challenge the accepted belief that a damaged cognitive function can be restored through abstract exercises using that function. Patients with attention problems, in other words, won't get better by drilling on abstract tasks requiring attention – for example, picking a particular letter out of a string of miscellaneous letters.
What works better, Park and his colleagues found, is specific skills training. Instead of drilling on an abstract and imprecise faculty like "attention," patients practice a task that's important in daily life . . . and that requires attention. Navigating a car around obstructions, for example. Lo and behold, they get better at it.
It's a case of near transfer. What improves a brain-injured subject's ability to pay attention on the road is driving around a carefully structured obstacle course that gets increasingly difficult as the subject gets better at it. Just driving around an open area won't do it.
Remember this point (if you can). We'll return to it later.
Puzzling It Out
Those skeptical about the utility of left-handed toothbrushing can survey methods proffered by other brain-gain gurus, for example the fun and games approach.
The ads on Brain.com, a site that mixes news about brain research with sales pitches for products it claims will sharpen you up, say: "Brain Games to Improve Brainpower!" Mentalmuscles.com, the Web site for an outfit called Brainwaves, also features games to "test your skills" and persuade you to buy its books. Puzzles and brain teasers have legions of fans who testify that puzzling keeps them sharp. Cognitive scientists have taken little interest. One exception is Timothy Salthouse, of the University of Virginia, an expert on the cognitive effects of aging.
In four studies of more than 200 crossword puzzlers of various ages, Salthouse and colleagues found that puzzle fans do indeed have higher levels of cognitive performance than others. "But it's a big leap to say that working the puzzles causes people to have greater brain power or mental functioning or cognitive ability," he says. "My guess is that something else is involved . . . and I don't think it's just the case that people of high mental ability are better at working puzzles."
What is the something else, then? "The strongest predictor of performance on crossword puzzles was the amount of knowledge the person had: knowledge of word meanings, geography, history and current events."
A just-published, much-ballyhooed study of Alzheimer's disease presents a like problem: People who pursued lots of leisure-time activities – including playing games and working puzzles – were much less likely to develop the disease than those who didn't, or who watched lots of television. This newspaper and other media interpreted the research to mean that being active staves off Alzheimer's disease.
But an equally plausible interpretation is that people whose brains are already in good shape stay active into old age. The scientific paper itself mentioned this hypothesis prominently, and it is backed up by other research. Thus, playing games and puzzling may not be the cause of a healthy brain, but the consequence of it.
Until there's further research, "there's no way to know" which is right, says lead author Robert Friedland, longtime Alzheimer's researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. In the meantime, he's betting on "cause" because it gives him a basis for encouraging people.
"In medicine," he says, "it's better to be wrong and help the patient than do nothing. We're not concerned primarily with what's absolutely true, just what might help."
Brain teasers of various kinds win endorsements as brain food in some circles: Psychologist Morgan Worthy, professor emeritus at Georgia State University in Atlanta, for one. The author of "Aha: A Puzzle Approach to Creative Thinking," Worthy originated the puzzle form known as "linguistic equations." Examples: 1 = G. L. for M. (Giant Leap for Mankind); 1 = K. K. on the E. S. B. (King Kong on the Empire State Building); 3 = B. M. (S. H. T. R.!) (Blind Mice, See How They Run!).
Worthy's epiphany came more than 30 years ago when he spotted this coded warning on a bathroom wall: m/w - p = b. (Go ahead and try it, he suggests, but "don't look for anything too clever.") When he figured it out, he recalls, he experienced a sudden flush of pleasure and satisfaction, a feeling he calls "the 'aha' effect." Worthy says his puzzles spur creative thinking, although he cheerfully concedes that hard evidence is lacking.
Detractors aren't hard to find among cognitive psychologists. "Brain teasers are not how one becomes a better thinker," says Diane Halpern, author of "Thought and Knowledge: An Introduction to Critical Thinking," who teaches at California State University, San Bernardino. "You don't build a better brain with riddles."
The problem with brain teasers as brain builders may be that pesky barrier to far transfer. Says Barry Gordon, a cognitive neurologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and author of "Memory: Remembering and Forgetting in Everyday Life," "They definitely work for the things that you're being teased about, but don't necessarily work for the things you really want to know. Working crossword puzzles might reinforce spelling ability, but not writing ability or better thinking about words in general. "That's where the big unknowns are: how much this generalizes from one area to another."
David Uttal agrees. "The brain just doesn't work like that. It's specialized. Different kinds of tasks are done in different ways," says Uttal, a psychologist at Northwestern University who studies how young children develop spatial abilities. "It's a simplistic assumption to think that if I do a brain teaser, it's going to improve my overall cognitive ability."
So if you do puzzles and brain teasers a lot, you will get better at them, guaranteed. But they won't help you get better at your work, unless of course your work is devising puzzles and brain teasers.
A Little Freud, a Little Mozart
Intelligence, a hodgepodge of competences, is another favorite candidate for improvement, despite the fact that scientists are not quite certain what it is.
Win Wenger of Gaithersburg prescribes a technique he calls "image streaming" in "The Einstein Factor: A Proven New Method for Increasing Your Intelligence," a book he co-authored with Richard Poe. You close your eyes and describe the flow of mental images wafting through your head aloud to a tape recorder or, preferably, another person. (The Freudians, you may remember, called this "free association.")
"It's such a simple thing to do. It requires only a little bit of attention, but if you keep doing it, all sorts of wonderful things happen," Wenger asserts. One of the wonders, he says, is that image streaming boosts performance on IQ tests by putting unconscious mental resources into direct use by the conscious mind.
Wenger proffers meager but startling research support for his IQ claim. Charles Reinert, a teacher of physics at Southwest State University in Marshall, Minn., tried image streaming on his students. In one group of 35, Reinert claims, IQs improved just under a full point for every hour the students spent streaming their images. This work has not been published or repeated by other researchers. While acknowledging his research was preliminary, Reinert says, "My perception, having taught this image streaming process to every student through my door, is that it does make them better thinkers and makes them more creative."
Reinert now practices long-distance healing – therapy where the healer and the patient are not in the same physical place – with an emphasis on an ancient Chinese technique called qigong.
Closer to the mainstream, Yale's Robert Sternberg claims to have boosted student performance on standardized ability and achievement tests – rough correlates of IQ – by tailoring teaching methods to what he considers the three main kinds of student intelligences – analytical, creative and practical. (Harvard's Howard Gardner, the best-known exponent of the multiple intelligence theory, postulates as many as nine kinds.)
Analytical teaching asks students to analyze, judge, evaluate, compare and contrast fairly abstract concepts. For creative teaching, Sternberg asks students to imagine what life would be like if events had turned out differently – if, for example, the Supreme Court had ruled otherwise in Bush v. Gore. Practical teaching, he says, "is continually showing kids how they can use what they learn." Taught in this tripartite fashion, Sternberg reports, all three kinds of students improve their performance on standardized tests.
Sternberg suspects the effect on adults would be even stronger. To test that theory, his research group is working with the military, preparing materials for teaching Army officers these skills.
You've probably heard that music can pump up brain activity? It can – until you turn off the stereo.
A body of 45 studies on adult music listeners analyzed by Lois Hetland, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Ellen Winner, a Boston College psychology professor and author of "Gifted Children: Myths and Realities," showed that the listeners' spatial abilities were indeed enhanced – but the effect disappeared in 10 or 15 minutes.
And not all music works. Mozart is a certified brain improver, but Schubert also has salutary effects. So does – make of this what you will – Yanni. But if you have ever been bored witless at an interminably repetitive performance of minimalist music, you will not be surprised to learn that Philip Glass appears to actually reduce brain functions.
What Grandma Knew
Can you consume chemicals that will help your brain work better? Sure. That's why you need your morning cup of joe. And if you sugar your coffee, that's a brain boost, too; the glucose the body derives from table sugar is the only fuel the brain uses.
As for the performance of other memory-by-mouth prescriptives, natural and synthetic, that's too big a topic to cover in this space. Except to say this: None has yet been firmly established as both effective and safe. When it is, you can bet manufacturers will get the word out.
So what remains? The tried and true: well-established techniques long known to provide gains in specific functions like memory, some aspects of that thing we call intelligence, and spatial abilities. Just don't expect global improvement.
Start with that hoary joke about the best way to get to Carnegie Hall. Practice, practice, practice. Yawn, yawn, yawn. Except that it really works. Practice remains the single most effective approach to improving brain skills.
Practice can do more than get you to Carnegie Hall; it can keep you there. As long as they reinforce their skills for four hours daily, science is finding, true experts can retain much of their expertise in old age. Ericsson and a collaborator in Germany showed that pianists over age 60 can match speed of playing with young talents, even though the graybeards show normal age-related loss on standard IQ and memory tests. In short, maintaining their expertise did not transfer to other mental faculties.
And of course memory responds to practice. In fact, says Washington neurologist and neuropsychiatrist Richard Restak, memory is the sole brain function for which neurobiological research has documented improvement.
Ericsson has shown that practice can achieve astounding expansion even of working memory, often called "telephone-number memory" because it has traditionally been thought to have room for no more than seven items at a time.
One of Ericsson's early subjects was a college student of average intelligence and, at the start of the study, average memory ability. The student was read random digits once a second in 200 practice sessions spanning two years. At the end of that time, he could hold 80 digits in working memory. With only 50 hours of training, other college students were able to up their working memory storage to 20 items.
In the real world, however, there's not a lot of demand for extraordinary number recall. Moreover, while practice made perfect with number recall, the subjects continued to be quite average in their ability to recall a string of letters. That darned far transfer problem again.
One thing that is encouraging: Contrary to what scientists used to think, the adult brain is constantly changing. Says Kenneth Whang, who oversees studies of the learning process funded by the National Science Foundation: "It used to be dogma that once you reached adulthood, you grew no new brain cells. That dogma has gone by the wayside in the past five years."
Practice facilitates brain remodeling by triggering those growth-promoting neurotrophins, which recruit nearby brain cells into the parts of the brain that handle the activity being practiced, and sprout zillions of new dendrites to connect them. Those sites grow larger and more elaborate than the same locales in the unpracticed brain, and so are capable of doing more faster.
But the brain is a loose confederation of quite specific abilities. You may be able to master the neural workouts in any number of trendy new books. But you're not going to buff up your entire brain.
Try to remember that.
Tabitha M. Powledge writes mostly about the brain, genetics and science policy.
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