Brain Archives - Page 11 of 29

Do You “Just” Need to Make Different Choices?

February 5, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

A comment I often hear from people who are dissatisfied with some aspect of their lives is that they just need to make different choices. On the one hand, it seems like a no-brainer, right? And at least it acknowledges we have a degree of responsibility for the situations we find ourselves in.

It also sounds relatively straightforward: if you want a different outcome, make a different choice. But since making a different choice is anything but simple or straightforward, this isn’t an effective strategy. Unfortunately, the fact that it’s ineffective doesn’t stop people from believing it’s true.

Having choices—or believing that we do—gives us the illusion of having freedom.

But the illusion of freedom is not the same as actual freedom.

Would you rather have something that really matters to you or would you rather have the freedom to not have it? If you equate choice with freedom, you’re likely to opt for holding onto the freedom to not have what you really want. This is an even more obviously ineffective strategy, but it’s a seductive one and our culture is deeply mired in it.

Let’s break it down. Imagine there’s something you want: a highly desirable outcome that really matters to you.

Would you rather have the highly desirable outcome that really matters to you?
Or would you rather have the option to not do what you need to do to create that outcome (in other words, the freedom to not have it)?

Why would anyone in their right mind “choose” to not do the things they need to do in order to achieve an outcome that is highly desirable to them? That would seem counterproductive at the very least.

You Are Certainly Not the Boss of Your Brain*

The unconscious part of your brain, which has no interest in your highly desirable outcome, is invested in maintaining the status quo. When you “choose” not to do whatever you need to do to achieve that outcome, you end up reinforcing the status quo instead of getting closer to what you want. In fact, no actual choice is involved in maintaining the status quo.

It takes no effort or awareness or intention on your part to continue doing what you’ve always done. The unconscious part of your brain can have you continue doing what you’ve been doing ad infinitum, while you preserve the fiction that you’re consciously choosing to continue doing those things.

That’s how you end up with the illusion of freedom rather than actual freedom. Actual freedom involves learning how to change the status quo, not giving in to it.

Certainly you have reasons and explanations for why you might “choose” to not do what you intended to do to help you achieve that highly desirable outcome. You didn’t have enough time. You were tired. Something came up that you had to respond to. You just didn’t feel like it. You really wanted to do whatever it was you ended up doing. You’ll make a different choice tomorrow or the next day.

No matter how many times you run through this type of scenario, chances are excellent that you’ll prefer to believe you are actually making choices, even if those choices are clearly not in your own best interest or are the opposite of what you intended to do.

And, counterintuitive as it may seem, believing you have a choice about taking a particular action that would disrupt the status quo decreases the odds you will take it.

When you give up the freedom to not have what you really want—when you allow yourself no choice in regard to taking that action—you begin to change your own status quo. That’s far more powerful, far more freeing, than simply giving in.

Why settle for the illusion of freedom when you can have the real thing?

*Michael Gazzaniga

Note: This is the first in a series of posts. To follow the thread, select the category Making Different Choices in the box in the sidebar under Explore.

Why Aren’t You Constantly Surprised?

January 29, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

You’ve probably never asked yourself that question, but it’s not as silly as it sounds. Think about it for a minute. How do you explain the fact that you aren’t constantly surprised by the wide variety of events, situations, and reactions you encounter?

The answer to that question also explains why it can’t possibly be true that “you always have a choice.”

Your brain is predictive, rather than reactive.

Until fairly recently, the commonly held belief was that the brain merely reacted to sensations it picked up, primarily from the outside world. The idea was that many of the brain’s neurons were dormant most of the time until they were stimulated by a sight or a sound.

But that is not the case. Neurons are constantly firing, interacting and stimulating each other at various rates. According to Lisa Feldman Barrett, University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University:

This brain activity represents millions of predictions of what you will encounter next in the world, based on your lifetime of past experience.

Your reactions are your body adjusting to the predictions your brain makes based on the state your body was in the last time it was in a similar situation.

Your brain is trying to put together thoughts, feelings, and perceptions so they arrive as needed, not a second afterward.

This activity does not take place at the conscious (System 2) level, but at the unconscious (System 1) level, which processes 11 million bits of information at a time. What you become aware of (thoughts, feelings, impulses, etc.) are the results of this unconscious processing. And you’re only aware of what your brain thinks you need to know, when you need to know it.

Furthermore, according to an article by a trio of neuroscientists published in Frontiers in Psychology:

Your brain generates multiple possible representations of what to expect in the environment. The representation with the smallest prediction error is selected.

However the generation of representations is constrained by what is stored in memory and by the sampling of the environment.

Another way to think about it is that these representations of what to expect are constrained by your mental model (see: Are You Thinking Outside the Box Yet?). Your brain constantly updates your mental model based on the accuracy of its predictions—as well as on its own agenda. Again, this occurs outside your conscious awareness.

Barrett provides this example:

You’re interacting with a friend and, based on context, your brain predicts that she will smile. This prediction drives your motor neurons to move your mouth in advance to smile back, and your movement causes your friend’s brain to issue new predictions and actions, back and forth, in a dance of prediction and action. If predictions are wrong, your brain has mechanisms to correct them and issue new ones.

The unconscious part of the brain is always several steps ahead of the conscious part. As both Barrett and neuroscientist David Eagleman have pointed out, this is what makes activities such as sports possible. If the brain was reactive, rather than predictive, it wouldn’t operate fast enough to enable you to hit a baseball or block a goal.

A merely reactive brain wouldn’t have helped Michael Phelps win his 10^th gold medal while swimming blind as a result of his goggles filling with water. All of his previous practice, experience, and knowledge gave his brain a solid basis for predicting what he needed to do in order to win. Pretty amazing.

Because your brain is predictive:

You are not constantly surprised.
You don’t always have a choice.
You are able to engage in activities that require quick and accurate responses.
You are capable of learning from your experiences.
You don’t have to think about every little thing you do in the course of a day.
You find it difficult to change undesirable habits.
You may be tricked by various types of illusions.
You are unaware of your visual blind spot.

Our primary contact with the world, all this suggests, is via our expectations about what we are about to see or experience. —Andy Clark, philosopher and cognitive scientist, University of Edinburgh

When you are surprised, it’s because your brain encounters unpredictable stimuli: something other than what it expected. Unpredictable stimuli require conscious (System 2) processing. To get a sense of this in action, take note of the occasions when you experience surprise and try to compare your actual experience to the experience your brain might have been expecting.

The fact that you are not, in fact, constantly surprised means that your brain is pretty darn good at making predictions the vast majority of the time.

To Improve Your Brain, Exercise Your Body

January 15, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Sitting in front of a computer screen to play brain games is not the best way to enhance or maintain your cognitive abilities. First of all it doesn’t really work. And second, it involves sitting. Standing is only marginally better. (And playing brain games on a portable electronic device while walking is just an accident waiting to happen.)

As John Medina writes in Brain Rules:

The brain appears to be designed to (1) solve problems (2) related to surviving (3) in an unstable outdoor environment, and (4) to do so in nearly constant motion.

The links between physical exercise and brain health have been getting a lot of attention lately. Here are summaries of some of the research with links to the articles (click on the titles). The last two of these studies were included in my post last fall on Five Ways to Improve Your Brain; the first three are more recent.

Get Moving

A neuroscientist (Wendy A. Suzuki) says there are powerful benefits to exercise that are rarely discussed.

When I was about to turn 40, I started working out regularly after years of inactivity. As I sweated my way through cardio, weights, and dance classes, I noticed that exercise wasn’t just changing my body. It was also profoundly transforming my brain—for the better.

The immediate effects of exercise on my mood and thought process proved to be a powerful motivational tool. And as a neuroscientist and workout devotee, I’ve come to believe that these neurological benefits could have profound implications for how we live, learn and age as a society.

Exercise combats stress.
Increased levels of physical exercise can result in improved memory
Exercise improves our ability to shift and focus attention.
Exercise could help students better absorb everything from history lessons to chemistry experiments–and they’d be happier too.
Exercise could make students more imaginative at school and adults more creative at work.
The longer and more regularly you exercise through your life, the lower your chances are of suffering from cognitive decline and dementia as you age.

Do… build your body

We often make a distinction between brains and brawn. In fact, getting in shape is one of the surest ways to build your mind. Physical activity not only establishes a better blood flow to the brain; it also triggers a surge of proteins such as “nerve growth factor” that can help stimulate the growth and maintenance of neural connections in the brain.

The benefits seem to stretch from cradle to grave: children who walk to school get better grades, while taking a leisurely stroll seemed to boost pensioner’s concentration and memory. What’s more, a wide variety of exercises can help, from gentle aerobic exercise to weight training and body building; just choose a training regime that suits your current fitness.

Study suggests physical activity makes it easier for the brain to change

Learning, memory, and brain repair depend on the ability of our neurons to change with experience. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on December 7 have evidence from a small study in people that exercise may enhance this essential plasticity of the adult brain.

The findings focused on the visual cortex come as hopeful news for people with conditions including amblyopia (sometimes called lazy eye), traumatic brain injury, and more, the researchers say.

“We provide the first demonstration that moderate levels of physical activity enhance neuroplasticity in the visual cortex of adult humans,” says Claudia Lunghi of the University of Pisa in Italy.

“By showing that moderate levels of physical activity can boost the plastic potential of the adult visual cortex, our results pave the way to the development of non-invasive therapeutic strategies exploiting the intrinsic brain plasticity in adult subjects,” she adds.

While further study is needed, the researchers think that this effect may result from a decrease with exercise in an inhibitory neurotransmitter called GABA. As concentrations of this inhibitory nerve messenger decline, the brain becomes more responsive.

Regardless of the mechanism, the findings suggest that exercise plays an important role in brain health and recovery. They come as especially good news for people with amblyopia, which is generally considered to be untreatable in adults.

“Our study suggests that physical activity, which is also beneficial for the general health of the patient, could be used to increase the efficiency of the treatment in adult patients,” Lunghi says.

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.

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.

Matter over Mind

December 18, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

I was sitting at my desk considering the topic of embodied cognition with the aim of exploring power and power poses. But of course there are many different ways in which what we do with—or how we arrange various parts of—our bodies affects our minds.

For example:

If you nod your head while listening to someone, you’re more likely to agree with him or her.

If you encounter another person while you’re in the middle of—or right after—a scary situation, you’re likely to consider that person more attractive than you otherwise would.

If you’re holding a hot drink in your hand, you’re more likely to consider a stranger warm and friendly (and vice versa if you’re holding a cold drink).

So I took a pencil out of the brilliantly colored oversized Majolica mug that currently holds my writing implements and put it between my teeth. Yes, it did noticeably elevate my mood (because the activity uses the same muscles we use when we smile). And I immediately thought of William James’s bear, which made me think of Joseph LeDoux, and then of his band, The Amygdaloids.

I can see how my mind associated William James’s bear, whether or not accurately, with embodied cognition. But it’s striking how the thought came to me the very second I put the pencil between my teeth. Was it conning my brain into believing I was happier that did the trick?

William James published an article in 1884 titled “What Is an Emotion?” Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, author of several books, including The Emotional Brain, described James’s inquiry:

Do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run? [James] proposed that the obvious answer, that we run because we are afraid, was wrong, and instead argued that we are afraid because we run.

James’s theory—at least in regard to emotion—has not entirely held up over time. But there isn’t much doubt that we can at least alter our emotional state, or our state of mind, via our bodies and the actions we take. Which leads to Amy Cuddy’s research on body language—and power poses.

But first, here’s a video of The Amygdaloids (an all-neuroscientist rock band) performing “Mind over Matter.”

Our Bodies Change Our Minds

Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk (“Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are”) is well worth watching. A social psychologist, she says she became interested in power dynamics, especially nonverbal expressions of power and dominance.

Power has been a recent topic of discussion in a collaborative group I meet with weekly. Prior to one of our sessions, I tried to come up with as many synonyms for the word as I could and made it all the way to 40. Not everyone has a positive view of the concept of power, and power can definitely be abused and misused. But although a few of the synonyms may have negative connotations, most seem desirable—at least to me. In my group, we discussed power as the speed (or velocity) with which one translates intention into action, which I think most of us would like to be better at.

If you could use body language to trick your brain (using matter over mind) into believing you’re powerful—so that you actually felt powerful whenever you wanted or need to be—would you want to do that?

The thing about body language is that whether or not we want to be communicating something in particular to another person or to ourselves, our body language is communicating all the time. So it’s useful to pay attention to our habitual physical postures to notice what it is we are communicating.

Here are five high power poses and five low power poses courtesy of Amy Cuddy:

What’s your relationship with power?

Do you see yourself in any of the pictures? What about other people you know: friends, family members, co-workers, colleagues?

And what about the power synonyms? Which ones do you relate to or feel positive about? Which ones are a turn-off?

My group plans to continue the discussion on power next week, so stay tuned for the next installment, which will include the roles testosterone and cortisol play in regard to power.

Is What You See All There Is?

December 11, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

rainbow eye

As you move through the world, you probably have the sense that you’re aware of whatever there is to be aware of as it is. This applies not only to the sensory world, but also to events, situations, interpersonal interactions—actually to everything that exists or occurs within your world. But the capacity of conscious attention is much too limited for this to even be possible. The 11,000,000 bits of information being processed by the unconscious part of the brain at any given moment need to be considerably (and swiftly) condensed and summarized into the 40 bits you can process consciously.

Consciousness is a way of projecting all the activity in your nervous system into a simpler form. [It] gives you a summary that is useful for the larger picture, useful at the scale of apples and rivers and humans with whom you might be able to mate. —David Eagleman, Incognito

What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI)*

Your brain maintains a model of the world that represents what’s normal in it for you. The result is that you experience a stripped-down, customized version of the actual world. To a great extent, each of us really does inhabit our own world. But it would be incorrect to say that we create our reality; rather, our brain creates our reality for us.

Much, if not most, of what you do, think, and feel consists of automatically generated responses to internal or external stimuli. And it isn’t possible to consciously mediate all of your responses. It wouldn’t even be a good idea to try.

In addition to helping you navigate the world, your mental model gives rise to your sense of the way things should be. It generates expectations (that are either confirmed or denied), assumptions, biases, etc. that determine what you pay attention to, what you perceive (even what you are able to perceive), how you interpret and respond to what you perceive, and the meaning you make of it all. Your mental model is the result of your genes and your experiences, of both intention and accident. Your brain has been constructing your particular model of the world since your birth, and it is continually updating and modifying it—most of the time entirely outside your awareness.

But while the contents of your particular mental model determine what you think, feel, do, and say, you can’t search them—or follow a bread-crumb trail backward through them—to find out precisely which aspects (and when and how they came to be) give rise to any specific facet of who you are and how you react now.

The significance of your mental model in your life can’t be overstated. Although you aren’t consciously aware of it, your mental model circumscribes not only every aspect of your present experience but also what is possible for you to do and be. It determines what you see and how you see the world, both literally and figuratively, as well as how you see yourself.

But…Your Brain Can Get It Wrong

System 1, the unconscious part of your brain, uses associative thinking to develop and maintain your model of the world. However, there are some problems with associative thinking. For example:

It sacrifices accuracy for speed.
It doesn’t discriminate very well.
It takes cognitive shortcuts (aka cognitive biases).

Your mental model can—and sometimes does—lead to erroneous conclusions and inappropriate responses. It’s the job of consciousness (System 2) to check the impulses and suggestions it receives from System 1, but consciousness is slow, lazy, and easily depleted. Most of the time, it’s content to go along with System 1, which means it’s susceptible to cognitive biases. By definition, cognitive biases are distortions or errors in thinking. They actually decrease your understanding while giving you a feel-good sense of cognitive ease.

Confirmation bias is the easy acceptance of information that validates what you already believe. It causes you to selectively notice and pay attention to what confirms your beliefs and to ignore what doesn’t. It underlies the discomfort you feel around people who disagree with you and the ease you feel around people who share your beliefs.

Information that confirms what you already believe to be true makes you feel right and certain, so you’re likely to accept it uncritically. On the other hand, you’re more likely to reject information that is inconsistent with what you already believe or at least you hold inconsistent information up to greater scrutiny. You have different standards for evaluating information depending on the level of cognitive ease it generates.

Evidence has precious little impact on any of us if it conflicts with what we believe simply because the cognitive strain of processing it is too great. To a very real extent, we don’t even “see” conflicting evidence. While total commitment to our particular worldview (mental model) makes us feel more confident, it narrows—rather than expands—our possibilities. That means it limits our powers of discernment, our ability to increase our understanding of the world around us, and our creative potential. It closes the world off for us instead of opening it up.

The often-quoted statement is true: we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. If we want to live fuller lives, if we want to be more effective or useful or loving in the world, we first need to recognize that our greatest constraints are imposed by our own mental models.

It’s important to remember that what you see is not all there is.

*Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow