Blog on mind and brain research and advice

On Radical Change

November 20, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

To a great extent, the term radical was co-opted by the 60s. That decade represents many of my formative years, so the word has a particular connotation for me it may or may not have for you. In the 60s, being radical meant being politically extreme. It meant hippies, student activists, anarchy; civil rights, feminism, black power; free love, free speech, free school; the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, the Yippies; sit-ins, demands, protests, the burning of draft cards and bras.

It meant upheaval and disruption on a massive scale—an attempt to change political, economic, and social structures at their fundamental levels. In fact one definition of a radical is: one who advocates fundamental or revolutionary changes in current practices, conditions, or institutions.

With or without the subtext of the 60s, radical is often used interchangeably with extreme. It’s interesting that we currently refer to radical Islam and Muslim extremists but Christian fundamentalists when we mean essentially the same thing in both cases. The word originates from the Latin radicalis, “of, or having, roots.” So radical refers to something fundamental, while radical change refers to change at a fundamental level, i.e., extreme change.

Radical activists in the 60s wanted extreme change, and they wanted it now. Other radical or extremist groups have wanted the same thing. There are all kinds of disruptive events and activities that may lead to social upheaval, just as there are all kinds of disruptive events and activities that may lead to personal upheaval. But upheaval isn’t synonymous with radical change. If you have any doubt about that, consider the uneven record of successes of the 60s activists.

If you want to make fundamental changes—socially or personally—you have to change mental models. And there is no short-cut for doing that. Changing mental models requires commitment, repetition, and persistence. It takes time.

People are looking for short-cuts, though, which is one of the things that’s so appealing about movements, charismatic speakers, advertising, political jingoism, and quick-fix self-help concepts. We’re exposed to these things every day, just as we’re exposed every day to things that could make us sick. Someone with a weak immune system will be more susceptible to germs and viruses than someone with a strong immune system. In the same way, if we don’t have a sense of who we are fundamentally and what we’re up to in life, we’re more susceptible to whatever comes along that promises to help us figure it out—and get it—pronto!

So I assert that taking the time to identify what we really want in our lives is perhaps the most radical act we can take. It’s radical because it can change us fundamentally by allowing us to determine and create consistently meaningful and satisfying lives on our own terms. If we’re living meaningful and satisfying lives, whether the going is easy or rough, we’re much less susceptible to snake-oil salesmen, politicians, or movements of any sort because we aren’t looking for meaning or salvation out there.

In order to effect radical change in the world, we need to take radical action on our own behalf. Being clear about what we want infuses us with a sense of purpose. And that sense of purpose is what keeps us focused on getting and maintaining the things that truly matter instead of wasting time on ineffective, trivial, destructive, or self-destructive pursuits. As members of the human race, each of us contributes, in large ways or small, to what doesn’t work in the world simply because of the way our brains are wired. However, it’s entirely possible to decrease our contribution to what doesn’t work and increase our contribution to what does work.

It’s entirely possible to be a catalyst for radical change in our own lives and in the lives of others. Identifying what we want and going after it is the most effective way to make a difference—on a fundamental level—not just in our own lives, but in the wider world, as well.

You’re Not Sabotaging Yourself

November 13, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Following right on the heels of a lack of will power, the number two reason people come up with for not following through on what they set out to do is self-sabotage. This is a catchall phrase that seems to refer to any behavior that is inconsistent with one’s conscious intentions or goals. As such, it’s completely meaningless.

You may routinely do things that you regret doing:

Overeat when you’re trying to lose weight
Sleep in when you want to go to the gym
Fail to study for an exam you want to pass
Put less than your best effort into a project that matters

But that doesn’t mean you’re sabotaging yourself.

Here’s the Merriam-Webster definition of sabotage: “the act of destroying or damaging something deliberately so that it does not work correctly.” Dictionary.com defines it as “any underhand interference with production, work, etc….as by enemy agents during wartime or by employees during a trade dispute.” Vocabulary.com says sabotage occurs “when you ruin or disrupt something by messing up a part of it on purpose.”

What these and all other definitions of the word sabotage have in common is the element of deliberateness. Sabotage, by definition, isn’t accidental or an unfortunate side-effect. It is intentional. So in order for us to be sabotaging ourselves, we would have to be engaging in counterproductive behavior on purpose.

This gets dicey right off the bat because we’re told our counterproductive (self-sabotaging) behavior originates in the unconscious. It is “hidden from our everyday thoughts,” according to one self-help author. But if we do something because we’re “unconsciously compelled” to do it, as a psychologist wrote, then it can’t possibly be intentional or deliberate.

Yes, it’s true—and inevitable—that we have competing or conflicting beliefs, goals, and intentions. In Incognito, David Eagleman says:

Brains…are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices. As Walt Whiteman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle.

When the hostess at a party offers chocolate cake, you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma: some parts of your brain have evolved to crave the rich energy source of sugar [System 1], and other parts care about the negative consequences, such as the health of your heart or the bulge of your love handles [System 2]. Part of you wants the cake and part of you tries to muster the fortitude to forgo it.

Brains can be of two minds, and often many more. We don’t know whether to turn toward the cake or away from it, because there are several little sets of hands on the steering wheel of our behavior.

This is relatively straightforward and in no way implies that the part of our brain that craves sugar, System 1, has an intention to undermine System 2’s attempts to manage our health. The brain just doesn’t work that way.

Eagleman proposes that the brain is best understood as a team of rivals and adds:

Remember that competing factions typically have the same goal—success for the country—but they often have different ways of going about it.

How we frame a problem determines where and how we go about looking for its solution. If we view our counterproductive behavior as resulting from self-sabotage, we’re likely to divert our attention to trying to figure out why we’re sabotaging ourselves. But we don’t have direct access to the unconscious, which is where our so-called sabotage originates, so even if we were sabotaging ourselves we could never actually get to the bottom of things.

We harbor mechanical, “alien” subroutines to which we have no access and of which we have no acquaintance. Almost all of our actions—from producing speech to picking up a mug of coffee—are run by alien subroutines, also known as zombie systems.

Looking back into the past to find the trail of breadcrumbs that leads to the behavior of today amounts to a whole lot of wheel-spinning. It can’t succeed, and even if it could, it wouldn’t make any difference in regard to solving the problem at hand: getting our behavior to line up with our conscious intentions.

That’s because it isn’t the unconscious part of the brain that’s the problem; it’s the conscious part. If we don’t know what we want, we don’t have a clear direction. If we aren’t fully committed to what we set out to do (or claim to be setting out to do), we have no urgency. Without both direction and urgency, our best laid plans are dead in the water.

We can retrain System 1 to do more of what we want it to do and less of what we don’t want it to do. But that requires repetition and persistence. Lots of repetition. And lots of persistence. It isn’t easy—and it isn’t as sexy as searching for our inner saboteur—but it’s both straightforward and effective.

Self-sabotage is nothing more than a good cover story.

Freedom from Choice

November 6, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 3 Comments

You always have a choice. At least that’s what many people believe. No matter what happens, you can choose how to respond. And if you want things to be different, all you have to do is make different choices.

It’s a highly appealing belief to hold, yet you may have found that making a different choice is often tantalizingly out of reach, even when you know exactly what you want to do differently. So what’s going on? If you don’t make a different choice, does that mean you really don’t want to? Does it mean you lack self-control or will power? Does it mean you’re trying to sabotage yourself?

If you believe that you could make a different choice but don’t, why don’t you?

When you fail to make a different choice, you’re forced to explain yourself—at least to yourself. The result is often the beginning of a vicious cycle of rationalization, excuse-making, or self-blame that can drag on for years or even decades. This is a waste of time and totally counterproductive to changing behavior.

The more we discover about the circuitry of the brain, the more the answers tip away from accusations of indulgence, lack of motivation, and poor discipline—and move toward the details of the biology. —David Eagleman, Incognito

The truth is that you don’t always have a choice. In fact, you rarely have a choice. You keep doing the same things you’ve always done because that’s how your brain is wired. It conserves precious energy by turning as many behaviors as possible into routines and habits. Once those routines and habits are in place, they’re extremely difficult to disrupt. When faced with a familiar situation, you will most likely do what you’ve always done in that situation, even if you want to do something else.

Minute by minute, second by second, the unconscious part of your brain is absorbing and processing an unbelievable amount of data, all but a small fraction of which you’re not consciously aware of. So at the moment you’re faced with that familiar situation, your unconscious has picked up on signals, made connections, and initiated the usual response all before you can consciously consider doing something different. When it comes to routines and habits, consciousness is simply no match for the speed and anticipatory responses of the unconscious brain.

Letting Go of the Illusion

It’s hard to give up our illusions about choice. We want to keep our options open instead of locking ourselves in. We want to be spontaneous. And we prefer to believe we’re exercising conscious choice, no matter how ineffective or detrimental those choices may be. As a result, we often refuse to make a commitment, even to something we really want or that really matters to us.

We repeatedly put far more trust than is warranted in our conscious brain’s ability to override our unconscious brain’s programming. We’re convinced that next time we’ll do things differently.

The reality is that keeping our options open really means leaving the outcome to chance. Yes, there’s a slim possibility that when the moment comes we’ll make a different choice. But the odds are not on our side. The unconscious operates automatically and at a much faster speed than the conscious part of our brain.

When we blame our inability to effect change in our lives on a lack of self-control or will power, our only option is to work on developing those mental muscles. That can be done, to a limited extent, but the source of the problem is not the lack of self-control and will power but our reliance them.

The situation is not hopeless, however. We’re not entirely at the mercy of the unconscious part of our brain. We do have a say in the matter. We can learn how to use both parts of our brain to our advantage instead of letting the unconscious have its way all the time.

But that requires changing the way we think about choice.

The concepts of freedom and choice seem to belong side by side. After all, what is freedom if not freedom to choose? The idea that we could be free, experience freedom, without also having and exercising the ability to choose is difficult to contemplate.

But Krishnamurti believed otherwise.

We think that through choice we are free, but choice exists only when the mind is confused. There is no choice when the mind is clear. When you see things very clearly without any distortion, without any illusions, then there is no choice. A mind that is choiceless is a free mind, but a mind that chooses and therefore establishes a series of conflicts and contradictions is never free because it is in itself confused, divided, broken up.

Decide Now so You Won’t Have to Choose Later

Changing behavior requires that you do something different ahead of time instead of counting on doing something different in the moment. Determine how you want to respond in a familiar situation when you have some distance from it and can think clearly about it instead of when you’re in that situation. And then make a pre-commitment. A pre-commitment eliminates the need to make a choice in the moment because you’ve already decided what you’re going to do.

Formulate a clear and specific intention.
Come up with a way to keep your attention focused on your intention.
Assume you won’t be perfect out of the gate. Your unconscious brain is stubborn and set in its ways. With perseverance, however, your desired response will become the automatic one.

By giving up your so-called freedom of choice, you greatly increase the likelihood you’ll do what you’ve decided you want to do in order to have the life you want to have.

Hooked on The Brain with David Eagleman

October 30, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

I’ve just finished watching the third episode of this PBS series and I think I’m more hooked on David Eagleman and the brain than I was on J.R. Ewing and Dallas back in the 1980s. I’ve spent the past three and a half years intensely focused on learning as much as I can about brain, mind, and behavior, so I’m not really surprised that so far I’m familiar with everything that’s been presented in the first three episodes of The Brain. However, that hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm for the series. Quite the opposite. I’ve pre-ordered the DVD and look forward to many future viewings and to sharing the episodes in my classes. I’m thrilled to see this information put together so beautifully and made so widely available. Not everyone is hooked on the brain—at least not yet, anyway. Maybe more people will be after watching.

When I look back on the path to creating Farther to Go! a number of moments stand out. Of course, memory is a bit of a crapshoot when it comes to accuracy, but I do have physical evidence that these things actually happened when I recall them happening.

More than 20 years ago, when I was working as a substance abuse counselor, I came across a book by Richard Restak, The Brain Has a Mind of Its Own. The chapter of the same name described experiments in the 1980s by Benjamin Libet that identified a readiness potential that was observed in the brain prior to the subjects’ awareness of their desire to take a specific action. Quite a few people in a number of different disciplines seemed disconcerted by these findings, concerned about the fate of our so-called free will. I was fascinated. The implication was that things are not as they seem—or as we feel them to be. Restak’s a good writer and the rest of the chapters in his book were no doubt interesting, but all I recall is the information on Libet’s experiments. If you watched Episode #3 of The Brain, you saw some of the current research in this area.

A few years later, I took a biological psychology class that further whetted my interest in how the brain and mind (if they are indeed separate from each other) actually work. That’s where I first encountered the split-brain research of Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry. I don’t know whether the instructor made a point of this particular research or whether I was particularly fascinated by it. But Gazzaniga’s name and research clicked into place for me when I came across them again several years ago. He’s the person who came up with the concept of the Inner Interpreter, which Eagleman alluded to when he mentioned how the conscious part of the brain comes up with a good story about why we’ve just done something.

In 2011, The New Yorker ran an article, titled The Possibillian, about a neuroscientist named David Eagleman, who had spent time living in Albuquerque, which is where I live. He had attended Albuquerque Academy, which is practically within walking distance, and lived in roughly the same part of town. At the time, he was studying “brain time”—essentially how and why our experience of time differs from the actual passage of time. I found the article interesting enough to have torn it out of the magazine and saved it, which isn’t something I do very often. A year or so later, I was browsing the shelves of a local bookstore and saw Eagleman’s name on the spine of a book titled Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. Had I not known who he was, I might not have pulled the book off the shelf. And had the book I was actually looking for been available, I doubt I would have purchased Incognito.

The first chapter in Eagleman’s book, titled “There’s Someone In My Head, But It’s Not Me” (a tip of the hat to Pink Floyd), had enough references to things I already knew about, but expanded beyond anything I had previously been aware of, that I read all 19 pages standing next to my dining table without even taking my jacket off. I’ve since learned he studied literature before turning his full attention to neuroscience, which may explain his talent as a writer.

Just glancing through the pages of the book now and noting what I highlighted or earmarked reminds me of how excited I was to read and think about some of these things for the very first time. Concepts that seemed new or difficult to comprehend or somewhat improbable have become part of my mental model of the way the world—and my brain—work.

He closes the book with these words:

What a perplexing masterpiece the brain is, and how lucky we are to be in a generation that has the technology and the will to turn our attention to it. It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.

That’s exactly how I feel. I’m definitely hooked on the brain, with or without David Eagleman, but he’s a most excellent tour guide. Everyone should be watching this series!

Five Ways to Improve Your Brain

October 23, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

You probably take steps to maintain your physical health, but you may not know that you can also take steps to improve your brain and maintain its health. Promising new research suggests that a number of things that are good for our overall physical health are especially important for the health of our brain. Based on these findings, five things you can do for your brain are:

1. Eat less meat.
2. Lift weights at least two times a week.
3. Include foods with probiotics in your diet.
4. Get regular aerobic exercise.
5. Don’t skimp on sleep.

Here are links to articles reporting the results of the studies. Click on the titles to read the full stories.

1. Could A Mediterranean Diet Keep Your Brain From Shrinking?

Previous research has connected a Mediterranean diet to a reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative brain conditions. In a recent study, researchers focused on elderly people with normal cognitive function to see if the diet might also be tied to losing fewer brain cells due to aging.

“Among cognitively healthy older adults, we were able to detect an association between higher adherence to a Mediterranean type diet and better brain measures,” according to lead study author Yian Gu of Columbia University in New York.

Higher fish intake and lower meat consumption, one aspect of a Mediterranean diet, was tied to larger total gray matter volume on the brain scans.

Eating less meat was also independently associated with larger total brain volume.

Overall, the difference in brain volume between the people who followed a Mediterranean diet and those who didn’t was similar to the effect of five years of aging, the researchers conclude in the journal Neurology.

2. Lifting Weights, Twice a Week, May Aid the Brain

Most studies of exercise and brain health have focused on the effects of running, walking or other aerobic activities. A few encouraging past studies have suggested that regular, moderate aerobic exercise such as walking may slow the progression of white matter lesions in older people.

But Teresa Liu-Ambrose, a professor of physical therapy and director of the Aging, Mobility, and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, wondered whether other types of exercise would likewise be beneficial for white matter. In particular, she was interested in weight training, because weight training strengthens and builds muscles.

After a year-long study, women aged 65-75 who had lifted weights twice per week displayed significantly less shrinkage and tattering of their white matter than the other women. Their lesions had grown and multiplied somewhat, but not nearly as much. They also walked more quickly and smoothly than the women in the other two groups.

Note that the result was only achieved in the group who lifted weights twice per week, not in a group who lifted only once a week.

3. Probiotics on the Brain

A growing number of scientists now believe that gut bacterial can influence mental health.

The idea that microbes in the body can affect the brain has gone in and out of fashion. In 1896, physicians writing in Scientific American concluded, in the language of the day, that “certain forms of insanity” could be caused by infectious agents “similar to typhoid, diphtheria and others.” But after Freudian psychoanalysis became popular in the first half of the 20th century, the microbial theory of mental illness was largely forgotten, and stayed that way for decades.

Today, however, scientists know that trillions of micro-organisms live in your digestive system, where they outnumber your human cells many times over and may make up as much as 3 percent of your body weight. The evidence that these bacteria affect a dense network of neurons in your gut — often called the “second brain”— is vast and growing.

It’s unclear exactly how or which bacteria cause or cure which disorders and in what complex ways, Dr. James Greenblatt, a psychiatrist and the chief medical officer of Walden Behavioral Care, says, “but the research is quite clear that the GI tract affects brain health.” In this case, he says, “one plus one does equal two.”

4. Regular Exercise Changes the Brain to Improve Memory, Thinking Skills

In a study done at the University of British Columbia, researchers found that regular aerobic exercise, the kind that gets your heart and your sweat glands pumping, appears to boost the size of the hippocampus, the brain area involved in verbal memory and learning. Resistance training, balance and muscle toning exercises did not have the same results.

Many studies have suggested that the parts of the brain that control thinking and memory (the prefrontal cortex and medial temporal cortex) have greater volume in people who exercise versus people who don’t. “Even more exciting is the finding that engaging in a program of regular exercise of moderate intensity over six months or a year is associated with an increase in the volume of selected brain regions,” says Dr. Scott McGinnis, a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School.

How much exercise is required? The study participants walked briskly for one hour, twice a week. That’s 120 minutes of moderate intensity exercise a week. Standard recommendations advise half an hour of moderate physical activity most days of the week, or 150 minutes a week. If that seems daunting, start with a few minutes a day, and increase the amount you exercise by five or 10 minutes every week until you reach your goal.

If you don’t want to walk, consider other moderate-intensity exercises, such as swimming, stair climbing, tennis, squash, or dancing. Don’t forget that household activities can count as well, such as intense floor mopping, raking leaves, or anything that gets your heart pumping so much that you break out in a light sweat.

5. Good Night. Sleep Clean.

Sleep, it turns out, may play a crucial role in our brain’s physiological maintenance. As your body sleeps, your brain is quite actively playing the part of mental janitor: It’s clearing out all of the junk that has accumulated as a result of your daily thinking.

Recall what happens to your body during exercise. You start off full of energy, but soon enough your breathing turns uneven, your muscles tire, and your stamina runs its course. What’s happening internally is that your body isn’t able to deliver oxygen quickly enough to each muscle that needs it and instead creates needed energy anaerobically. And while that process allows you to keep on going, aside effect is the accumulation of toxic byproducts in your muscle cells. Those byproducts are cleared out by the body’s lymphatic system, allowing you to resume normal function without any permanent damage.

The lymphatic system serves as the body’s custodian: Whenever waste is formed, it sweeps it clean. The brain, however, is outside its reach — despite the fact that your brain uses up about 20 percent of your body’s energy. How, then, does its waste — like beta-amyloid, a protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease — get cleared? What happens to all the wrappers and leftovers that litter the room after any mental workout?

“Think about a fish tank,” says Dr. Nedergaard. “If you have a tank and no filter, the fish will eventually die. So, how do the brain cells get rid of their waste? Where is their filter?”

Until a few years ago, the prevailing model was based on recycling: The brain got rid of its own waste, not only beta-amyloid but other metabolites, by breaking it down and recycling it at an individual cell level. When that process eventually failed, the buildup would result in age-related cognitive decline and diseases like Alzheimer’s. That “didn’t make sense” to Dr. Nedergaard, who says that “the brain is too busy to recycle” all of its energy. Instead, she proposed a brain equivalent of the lymphatic system, a network of channels that cleared out toxins with watery cerebrospinal fluid. She called it the glymphatic system, a nod to its dependence on glial cells (the supportive cells in the brain that work largely to maintain homeostasis and protect neurons) and its function as a sort of parallel lymphatic system.

So far the glymphatic system has been identified as the neural housekeeper in baboons, dogs and goats. “If anything,” Dr. Nedergaard says, “it’s more needed in a bigger brain.”

Improve Your Brain–or Lose It?

It’s good news for all of us that there are things we can do to have a positive effect on our brain, from increasing its size to improving cognitive processing to (you should excuse the expression) taking out the trash. Of course, the opposite is also true. Things that we do can have a negative effect on our brain, and that’s not good. But we can’t say we haven’t been warned.