Brain Archives - Page 25 of 45

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.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Brain and Social Change

October 16, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

We have a difficult time making behavior changes in our own lives, yet we’re often surprised that enacting social change is so frustrating, difficult, and time consuming. But the situation isn’t remotely surprising. Change is difficult and slow because our brain is wired to maintain the status quo, and it is we—people with brains wired to maintain the status quo—who put into place and are then affected by laws and social policies.

One part of our brain (System 2) can see the benefit of change and wants to make changes. The other part of the brain (System 1) actively resists change. The part of the brain that can see the benefit of change is slow, lazy, and easily depleted. The part of the brain that resists change is fast, vast, and always on. When System 2 is depleted–which is often–we revert to operating not logically and rationally, but on autopilot.

Furthermore, laws and social policies are based on the idea that people are rational actors, who respond to incentives in straightforward ways. We believe that education, awareness, and clearly defined negative consequences are effective strategies. This is a very logical position to take. It’s also one of the reason why our laws and policies don’t work the way we expect them to work.

Many of our social institutions—and laws in particular—implicitly assume that human actions are largely the product of conscious knowledge and intention. We believe that all we need for a law-abiding society is to let people know what is right and what is wrong, and everything will follow from there. Sure, we make exceptions for people with grave mental disorders, but we assume most human behavior is conscious and intentional. Even when we acknowledge the power of unconscious influence, we believe it can be overcome by willpower or education.—Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain

The hidden brain, as Shankar Vedantam refers to System 1, doesn’t operate logically or rationally. It isn’t necessarily up to the same thing the conscious part of our brain, System 2, is up to. For example:

System 1 focuses on survival and detecting threats to our survival.
System 1 can’t handle complexity, so it generalizes instead.
System 1 is biased because biases make it easier to decide what we think.

Threat Detection

The brain is, first and foremost, a survival tool, and the way that it has found to be most effective at guaranteeing survival is through the threat and reward response. Put simply, your brain will cause you to move away from threats and move toward rewards. —Dr. David Rock, author of Your Brain at Work

This sounds reasonable and not particularly problematic until you realize that, in additional to actual survival needs (food, water, shelter, etc.) and actual physical threats, each of us has personalized our threat-detection system to include situations we have defined as threatening. And once the brain gets the idea that something is a threat, it responds as if it is facing a threat to our physical survival.

How logical do you tend to be when you’re facing a threat to your survival?

When the brain is under severe threat, it immediately changes the way it processes information, and starts to prioritize rapid responses. “The normal long pathways through the orbitofrontal cortex, where people evaluate situations in a logical and conscious fashion and [consider] the risks and benefits of different behaviors— that gets short circuited,” says Dr. Eric Hollander, professor of psychiatry at Montefiore/Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York. Instead, he says, “You have sensory input right through the sensory [regions] and into the amygdala or limbic system.”

This dramatically alters how we think, since the limbic system is deeply engaged with modulating our emotions. “The neural networks in the brain that are involved in rational, abstract cognition— essentially, the systems that mediate our most humane and creative thoughts— are very sensitive to emotional states, especially fear.” So when people are terrorized, “Problem solving becomes more categorical, concrete and emotional [and] we become more vulnerable to reactive and short-sighted solutions.” —Maia Szalavitz , neuroscience journalist

When we feel threatened, logic and rationality go offline.

Generalization

Statistical facts don’t come to people naturally. Quite the opposite. Most people understand the world by generalizing personal experiences which are very biased. In the media the “news-worthy” events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes. Slow and steady changes in major trends don’t get much attention. Unintentionally, people end-up carrying around a sack of outdated facts that we got in school (including knowledge that often was outdated when acquired in school). —gapminder.org/ignorance

System 1 processes data and information through association. It sees patterns and makes connections, whether or not the patterns and connections actually exist. It is, as Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow) writes, “radically insensitive to both the quality and quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.” As a result, System 1 accepts anecdotal evidence as being as valid as verified evidence.

Seeing patterns and finding connections makes it easy to come up with sometimes sweeping generalizations.

One example: Person A is similar to Person B in some particular way; therefore, Person B is probably similar to Person A in other ways. Since I know Person A, I now believe I also know and understand Person B. And I see all of the people who share some of these same characteristics as being alike. This leads me to believe I understand more than I do and know more than I know about Person B and other people who bear some similarity to Person B.

Another example: Extrapolating from my own personal experience to assume that everyone thinks the way I think, feels the way I feel, or would respond the way I respond.

Generalizing can be useful when we need to make quick assessments. But it’s a lazy way of thinking that can be dangerous when used in important or critical situations.

It’s easy to find examples of generalizing in the opinions we have and the alliances we form around hot-button social topics such as climate change, GMOs, vaccines, immigration, and Planned Parenthood. It can also be seen in how people line up in the pro- or anti-science camps.

When we generalize, we make assumptions and draw conclusions from limited data or evidence.

Implicit Biases

Critical thinking doesn’t come naturally. Since we need to make all kinds of assessments and decisions in the course of our lives—and since the part of the brain that can think critically is often offline—we use mental shortcuts instead of thinking most things through.

[Implicit] biases, which encompass both favorable and unfavorable assessments, are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control. Residing deep in the subconscious, these biases are different from known biases that individuals may choose to conceal for the purposes of social and/or political correctness. Rather, implicit biases are not accessible through introspection.

The implicit associations we harbor in our subconscious cause us to have feelings and attitudes about other people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, and appearance. These associations develop over the course of a lifetime beginning at a very early age through exposure to direct and indirect messages. In addition to early life experiences, the media and news programming are often-cited origins of implicit associations.

A Few Key Characteristics of Implicit Biases

Implicit biases are pervasive. Everyone possesses them, even people with avowed commitments to impartiality such as judges.
Implicit and explicit biases are related but distinct mental constructs. They are not mutually exclusive and may even reinforce each other.
The implicit associations we hold do not necessarily align with our declared beliefs or even reflect stances we would explicitly endorse.
We generally tend to hold implicit biases that favor our own ingroup, though research has shown that we can still hold implicit biases against our ingroup.
Implicit biases are malleable. Our brains are incredibly complex, and the implicit associations that we have formed can be gradually unlearned through a variety of debiasing techniques.

Source: kirwaninstitute.osu.edu. Note: Harvard University has developed an implicit association test that is available online (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/) so you can test yourself for your own hidden biases.

Now What?

Change is hard because of the way we’re wired. If we can come to terms with the fact that we operate less rationally than we think we do, we might be able to create or modify laws and public policies to be more effective for more people.

Things to remember:

System 1’s agenda is to maintain the status quo, so most of the time that’s our agenda and everyone else’s, too. If it’s difficult for us to make personal changes, imagine how difficult it is to make changes that involve large groups of people—or to change other peoples’ minds.
System 1 is primarily a threat-detector. When we feel threatened, we are not going to be thinking or behaving logically, and we should expect the same to be true of others. People who feel threatened are easier to manipulate, and they may take actions that are not in their own best interest.
We generalize because System 1 doesn’t handle complexity well. Generalizing leads to a feeling of cognitive ease because we think we know more than we do and understand more than we do. That may not be a problem in trivial matters, but it has huge implications when it comes to laws and public policies.
We are all at the effect of implicit biases. Because we aren’t directly aware of them, it’s easy for us to deny we have them. That doesn’t make them go away, however. The best thing to do is to pay attention to how we act and react to other people so we can begin to recognize, acknowledge, and eventually neutralize some of these biases.

Civil Discourse, Critical Thinking…and Facebook

October 9, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 8 Comments

I’m going to tell you about my abortion, but first some background. Facebook has only been accessible to the general public for about 10 years, but it’s hard to remember life before it—probably impossible for those of a certain age. As a social networking site, it started out as a place to share personal information and photos and to meet like-minded others. It developed a reputation for focusing excessively on “what people had for lunch,” which is how those who disdain it still think of it.

Honestly, I can’t remember why I joined Facebook, and there have been periods when I haven’t paid much attention to it. It’s a curious phenomenon. At my Monthly Meeting of the Mind (& Brain) last month, I asked everyone to share the first word or phrase that came to mind when I said “Facebook.” The responses varied; mine was information. That’s primarily why I use it now, and why I would be loathe to give it up. So many educational, scientific, and just plain thought-provoking sources update their Facebook feeds on a regular basis that it allows me to keep current without having to spend hours going to individual websites or searching the internet for what I might not even know is available.

But more and more Facebook is also becoming a place for us to let everyone know where we stand in matters political, social, religious, moral, dietary, and in regard to the age-old question: which makes a better pet, a cat or a dog? I guess this is only natural, a logical outcome of the sharing we do of our favorite movies, the books we’ve read, the sports teams we follow, and the posts we “like.”

The cat vs. dog argument rarely gets ugly. The same can’t be said for our stances in those other, more highly charged, areas. That’s because we don’t simply want to let others know our position. Kind of like chest-beating apes, we want to proclaim our superiority. We want to demonstrate how right we are and how wrong those who disagree with us are. As a result, many such posts amount to a whole lot of signifying, righteous indignation, and extreme disdain for those on the other side. Because if we’re on one side, there has to be another side. And if we’re right, those others have to be wrong.

This cognitive bias is known as black and white thinking. It’s a simplistic way of viewing an issue that doesn’t allow for shades of gray. Imagine two groups of people shouting at each other across a vast chasm. Neither group is listening to the other; no difference is being made. But everyone has a sense of satisfaction as a result of expressing their opinion.

The problem is that although no practical difference is being made, this state of affairs is not innocuous. If one person proclaims his or her position and implies that those on the other side are misinformed, mentally challenged, or flat-out evil, you can bet those others are going to react. It’s like throwing a metaphorical hand grenade into a crowd. Most likely, those on the receiving end are going to respond as if they’re being threatened. How do you react when you’re being threatened? Do you stop to evaluate the merits of your aggressor’s point of view?

On the Other Hand…

I have this crazy idea that Facebook could be a possibility for civil discourse between people of opposing views, so every once in a while I attempt to engage with someone who clearly doesn’t see things the way I do.

One of my friends shared a recent meme suggesting that men who want to purchase guns should be required to go through the same hoops women seeking abortions have to go through. One of her Facebook friends commented that most people who buy guns never kill anything, but every woman who has an abortion kills a human being.

I had an abortion many years ago, and this woman’s assertion hit me hard. After taking a deep breath, I decided to respond. I replied that what she’d said was a generalization that wasn’t true. Her response was that regardless of my opinion, abortion was MURDER (caps hers). She also indicated she had children, who had been “valuable human beings from the moment of conception.” At that point I realized it was the ideology talking, so it was futile to pursue a dialogue. I told her she was fortunate to have been able to conceive and bear children, which wasn’t the case for some of the rest of us. And I ended the interaction.

But it was painful to have this woman who knows nothing about me or my experience make unwarranted assumptions about me and obliquely, at least, cast me in the role of a murderer. Every woman who has an abortion kills a human being. Based purely on the fact that I’d disagreed with her, she determined I was on the opposite side, and therefore in favor of abortion. Since, in her mind, there are only two sides (you’re either with us or against us), that meant I was wrong and she was not interested in hearing anything I had to say.

I’m pro-choice. That doesn’t mean what anti-abortionists think it means. In my case, having an abortion was not only the last thing I wanted to do, it didn’t actually involve much choice on my part.

Failure to Conceive

I’d always assumed I would have children—that it would just happen when I was ready to start a family. I don’t recall ever thinking otherwise. Both of my younger brothers had married and had children by the time I got married. But it never happened for me. I spent more than two years going through fertility treatments, seeing different doctors, taking my basal body temperature every day, having to show up at the gynecologist’s office at the crack of dawn, and facing the same disappointment month after month. I joined the subculture of women who are consumed by their attempts to get pregnant. And I mean consumed. Getting pregnant was the number one focus of our attention, the main thing we read about, talked about, and thought about.

Finally, as a result of the most painful medical procedure I’ve ever had, it was determined that my Fallopian tubes were blocked, which meant all of my efforts of the previous two years had been futile. I could not get pregnant. There might have been further treatment available. I can’t remember. I do know I was worn out from the ordeal by then. So I came to terms with the situation and settled into my childless life. No one had told me it was possible for Fallopian tubes to become unblocked all by themselves—which is what happened to me a few years before menopause.

I’d been feeling tired and run down, but didn’t think anything of it at first. I wasn’t nauseous. I just didn’t feel like myself. Then I noticed I hadn’t had a period for two months. A couple of friends kept asking me if I’d had a pregnancy test, and I remember being quite irritated. So late one Friday evening, I drove to a drugstore and bought a test solely to be able to prove they were wrong. The insert that came with the test showed a pale pink “positive” response. What I got was hot pink—closer to fuschia. I was stunned.

I wasn’t working at that time and had no health insurance. I was also in my mid-40s, and my then partner (the same person I’d been married to previously—another story altogether) was 14 years older than me. But after the shock wore off, I immediately started trying to figure out how I could do this thing. I checked out every pregnancy book the local library had on its shelves. I told several of my friends—and everyone I spoke to offered to help me any way they could. One person gave me the name and number of her gynecologist, and early on Monday I called for an appointment. They got me in within a couple of days, by which time I already knew there were potential problems and risks associated with having a first pregnancy at my age.

Happy Valentine’s Day

I had an amniocentesis. My fingers were crossed for the better part of a week. If the baby was OK, I would have it. I would be a mother! But that wasn’t the way this story played out. When the doctor called to give me the test results, he told me that I would eventually miscarry, and if I waited for that to happen, it could be dangerous, even life-threatening. He wanted me to have the abortion procedure as soon as possible. In fact, he had a cancellation that week. It was on Valentine’s Day. I took the appointment.

I’m sure the Facebook commenter who thinks all women who get abortions are murderers is quite confident she is in the right. For my part, it’s hard to imagine how someone who was able to have children—something I may have spent more time, attention, energy, and money attempting to do than she did—could possibly have anything but sympathy for me. It’s true she doesn’t know the particulars of my situation. But that’s exactly my point. When you’re shouting (MURDER) across the chasm at the other side, you don’t need to be bothered by particulars. There are no shades of gray.

It doesn’t matter what the issue is or what side of the political spectrum we’re on or how confident we feel about our beliefs or positions. If we’re participating in this shouting match, we’re part of what’s wrong in the world. It’s so easy to share things on Facebook or to dash off a righteously indignant comment that we don’t even have to think about it. But we ought to think about it. We ought to engage the conscious part of our brain for a few seconds to ask ourselves what we’re doing. Do we really need to keep shouting and lobbing metaphorical hand grenades at each other? Is that the best we can do?

How Reward-Resistant Are You?

October 2, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

What’s the number one obstacle that gets in the way of people successfully changing or creating habits or accomplishing their goals? No contest! Resistance to identifying and using rewards is the clear and consistent winner.

Given our culture’s obsession with happiness, you wouldn’t think incorporating rewards into the change process would be a problem. Well, at least I didn’t anticipate how much of a problem it would be.

I’ve heard a number of explanations for this often deeply entrenched resistance. The two most common explanations are:

Accomplishing what I intended to do should be reward enough.
I can’t really identify any rewards.

Are You Reward-Resistant?

You may believe that accomplishment should be its own reward, but your brain doesn’t necessarily see it that way—and it’s the way your brain sees it, not the way you do, that matters. Sure some activities and accomplishments are intrinsically rewarding, but that’s not the case for all activities. Rewards help your brain help you accomplish the things you set out to do and turn desirable behaviors into habits. You can read more about how this works in Food, Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Habits.

Apart from it not being true, believing that everything should be intrinsically rewarding might be making it difficult for you to identify the rewards you’re currently getting. That’s why explanation number one and explanation number two often go hand-in-hand.

Most things you find rewarding (pleasant or enjoyable) can be used as rewards. So once you understand that rewards are rewarding, you can probably make a list of potential rewards. However, you might encounter another common obstacle: But I just do those things whenever I feel like it. That’s precisely the problem, and the result is that you may be rewarding yourself for behaviors you don’t want to perpetuate—thus actively perpetuating them—or for not accomplishing what you set out to do. It doesn’t matter whether or not that’s your intention. Unless they’re backed up by persistent action, your intentions (or lack thereof) and your opinions aren’t remotely interesting to your brain.

What Not to Do

Turning rewarding activities into rewards may seem unnatural at first. Say you decide your reward for completing a task will be to attend a movie, but you don’t complete the task. The way to get your brain to take you seriously is to not go to the movie. But it’s easy to rationalize why you should go to the movie anyway, especially if you made plans to go with other people. So it isn’t a good idea to set up rewards that involve other people, at least while you’re getting the hang of the reward process.

And don’t set something up as a reward if you know you’re going to do it no matter what. A reward needs to be something genuinely pleasurable—something you’ll miss if you don’t get to do it or have it—but not something you’re already committed to.

System 1 (the unconscious) is the impulsive part of the brain. It’s focused on immediate gratification, on what feels good right now. The more frequently you give in to the impulses of System 1, especially when you’re trying to implement a reward system, the longer it will take to be successful. Accomplishing long-term or even short-term goals and changing or creating new habits requires persistence and repetition—as well as restraint, which is a function of System 2.

Some of my clients are more successful than others at identifying and using rewards. Those who are successful are willing to engage in the trial and error process until they discover something that works. When you hit on the right combination, you might discover that rewards aren’t just effective, they can make even tedious projects fun. Here’s a great example, and one you can use as a blueprint for your own goals, projects, or habits.

Will Declutter for Plants

One of my clients has undertaken a major decluttering project in her home. This is a project she’s been attempting to complete for a while, so she’s tried many different approaches and strategies. Some were successful temporarily but not over the long haul. Others didn’t work at all.

But the system she’s using now seems perfect—not only because she has the reward piece figured out, but also because it’s based on acknowledging, rather than minimizing, baby steps.

For each 15-minute period of time she devotes to her decluttering project, she enters a checkmark into her daily planner. That provides her with immediate gratification (a hit of dopamine) and helps her keep track of her progress. For each checkmark in the planner, she puts one dollar into a jar, which gives her another hit of dopamine. The jar is clear glass and it’s in a prominent location so she can see the accumulating cash.

When she has enough money in the jar, she buys plants, which provides a bigger hit of dopamine at the time of the purchase and smaller hits when she sees the plants in her living space afterward. One thing that makes this reward system work is that she doesn’t allow herself to buy a plant unless she’s got enough funds for it in the jar. The system would break down if she spent money on plants that she hadn’t yet “earned.” Another thing that makes it work is the fact that the plants add to the pleasant ambiance her decluttering is intended to create in her home.

I think it’s pretty genius.

What do you think?

Creativity: It Isn’t All in Your Head

September 25, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

creative-brain

Creativity is the ability to see what already exists in a new light, to think of new ideas, and to make new things.

If whatever has been created (the new idea or object) is widely accepted (valued) in the field within which it was generated, it is called Big C creativity. Creative results that don’t meet both of those criteria are referred to as Little C creativity.

The fact that we can imagine something does not prove that it is possible. —Julian Baggini, The Ego Trick

Maybe your creative endeavors have—or will—generate widespread acceptance and approval; maybe not.

You don’t have to aim for Big C creativity, but if you aren’t engaging in Little C creativity, you’re unlikely to create anything big. And you might also be depriving yourself of a more enjoyable and satisfying life.

Even though personal creativity may not lead to fame and fortune, it can do something that from the individual’s point of view is even more important: make day-to-day experiences more vivid, more enjoyable more rewarding. When we live creatively, boredom is banished and every moment holds the promise of a fresh discovery. Whether or not these discoveries enrich the world beyond our personal lives, living creatively links us with the process of evolution. —Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

What Does It Take to Be Creative?

Are creative people different in some fundamental way from other people? Do they have exceptional intelligence? Are they more right-brained? Do they tend to be messy, unfocused, disorganized, and impractical? Are all creative people artistic? Highly talented in some particular area? Are they unconventional? Do they feel things more deeply? Do they have more vivid imaginations? Do they know how to think outside the box?

These questions are common, because we tend to think of people as being either creative or non-creative. End of story. But even the most diehard “non-creative” person will occasionally, sometimes accidentally, come up with a fresh insight. And even the most relentlessly “creative” person will run out of ideas from time to time. Regardless of personality, background, talent, or experience, just about anyone can get better at being creative because anyone can learn how the creative process works.

How Does the Creative Process Work?

Depending on who you ask, the creative process has anywhere from three to ten steps, maybe more. What it all boils down to is using the right part of the brain at the right time. In fact, the creative process isn’t significantly different from problem-solving—and a case can even be made that the way to approach art is as problem-solving.

Practicing problem solving in art projects gets the mind working, thinking and open to solutions not before considered. If the student can think about an “art problem” in new ways, then they not only build skills for the art room, but they train their minds to think in a problem-solving mode. —artist Valerie Mann, speaking at the University of Michigan School of Social Work

Find or identify a problem to solve and create an intention to solve it. This involves using both focused and unfocused attention. (What’s the difference between trying to solve a problem and trying to find a problem to solve?)
Immerse yourself in it. Grapple with it. Obtain the knowledge or information you need to have in order to solve it (focused attention/knowledge loading). Choreographer Twyla Tharp has a good exercise for this step. Write down 20 things you’ll need to know in order to be able to solve the problem.
Divert your attention. Step away from the problem to an unrelated activity (unfocused attention/System 1) to allow your unconscious to process the problem and arrive at a solution. You could turn to a repetitive task, take a walk, or listen to some music.
Fine tune and implement the solution.

Each experience with the creative process expands your mental model, which increases your creative possibilities. To get the greatest benefit, though, you need to take action (Step 4). We are embodied beings, and what we do has more of an effect on our mental model than what we think.

Counterintuitive Creativity Tips

Creativity involves both parts of the brain—the conscious and the unconscious. The trick, if there is one, is to know which type of thinking to use when. Sometimes you need to apply focused (conscious) attention, which is linear, logical, effortful, and slow. At other times you need unfocused (System 1/unconscious) attention, which is associative, non-logical, runs in the background, and is fast. Attempting to sustain focused attention is counterproductive.

New ideas are not spun from thin air. Creativity involves synthesizing, remixing, and re-envisioning what already exists.

Routines and habits are not by their nature creativity killers. They can actually increase your creative thinking by freeing up System 2 attention. The only real creativity killers are tunnel vision and inflexibility.

Constraints can be beneficial to creativity as long as you know they’re there.

If you want a brain that can think more complex thoughts and solve more complex problems, get in the habit of learning new things. And move!

Physical activity is cognitive candy. Exercise stimulates one of the brain’s most powerful growth factors, BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). According to Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey, “It keeps [existing] neurons young and healthy, and makes them more ready to connect with one another. It also encourages neurogenesis—the creation of new cells.” The cells most sensitive to this are in the hippocampus, inside the very regions deeply involved in human cognition. —John Medina, Brain Rules

As John Cleese says, Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating. In daily life, all over the world, we are faced with many problems, large and small. Why not operate on them creatively—and find some new ones to solve while we’re at it?