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Do You Want a Resilient Brain?

March 18, 2019 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The greater your cognitive reserve, the more resilient your brain will be. Brain reserve—or cognitive reserve*—helps your brain adapt and respond to changes and resist damage. It gives it the ability to improvise and find alternate ways of doing a job or performing a task.

Your cognitive reserve begins to develop in childhood and gets stronger as you move through adulthood. If you continue to learn, embrace new activities, and develop new skills and interests, you will continually build and maintain your cognitive reserve.

This is another reason to aim for challenging yourself rather than taking it easy and following the path of least resistance. You don’t know when you’re going to need your cognitive reserve, so it’s good to have as much of it as possible “in the tank.”

Protection from Damage

The concept originated in the 1980s. Researchers discovered that some people who were found at autopsy to have brain changes consistent with advanced Alzheimer’s disease had displayed no apparent symptoms of dementia before they died. These individuals had enough cognitive reserve to offset the damage to their brains to allow them to continue functioning as they always had.

Cognitive reserve can also help stave off degenerative changes associated with other brain diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, or a stroke.

Even if you’re fortunate enough to never experience any of these diseases, you can still benefit from developing cognitive reserve. It can help you function better—and for longer—when you experience unexpected and stressful life events, which tend to require more effort from your brain.

You can’t prevent yourself from aging or insulate yourself from all stressful, unexpected, or life-altering events. You don’t have total control over what kinds of diseases or deficits your genes might predispose you to develop. But you can do something to moderate how much these challenges affect you, your well being, and your ability to function.

Learning, Curiosity, and Dopamine

Even if you don’t develop neurological or psychological disorders, brain circuits that rely on dopamine tend to decline in function with aging. But curiosity prepares your brain for learning by activating the reward system, enhancing memory and motivation in the process. When you’re learning something you’re deeply—as opposed to idly—curious about, you’re more likely to recall and retain what you learn about that topic. You’re also more likely to retain unrelated information you encounter at the same time.

Curiosity may put the brain in a state that allows it to learn and retain any kind of information, like a vortex that sucks in what you are motivated to learn, and also everything around it. —Matthias Gruber, UC Davis Center for Neuroscience

Curiosity, challenge, and complexity seem to define the path that leads to strong cognitive functioning and a more active and enjoyable life now—and to greater cognitive reserve whenever you may need it.

Have your education, work, and leisure activities challenged you over the years? If so, they have contributed to your cognitive reserve. If not, there’s no time like now to reverse course if you want to do as much as you can to maintain your memory and your cognitive skills for as long as you can. Engaging in a variety of activities—physical, mental, and social—with differing levels of complexity have a synergistic effect. So the more things you do in these areas, the better—for both you and your brain.

*“Brain reserve” is sometimes used to refer to physical changes in the brain such as an increase in neurons and synapses (aka the “hardware”). “Cognitive reserve” is sometimes used to refer to the brain’s capabilities and skills in regard to completing tasks, learning new things, or recall (aka the “software”). These distinctions are really two sides of the same coin, and research is currently being conducted on the relationship between them.

What’s New, Pussycat?
Novelty and Your Brain

May 2, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Are you curious and adventurous, constantly looking for new sensations and experiences? Do you tend to get bored easily? Are you quick to lose your temper? Extravagant or impulsive? Do you make decisions before you have all the information? Take risks? Enjoy being in the middle of chaos or disorder? Maybe a bit of an adrenaline junkie?

If you answer yes to most of those questions, you’re probably a neophiliac, but don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of the term (which has nothing to do with dead people, by the way). Neophiliacs are people who not only enjoy novelty, they actively seek it out—sometimes going to extremes to experience it.

Is That a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Early research into the novelty-seeking personality trait found it to be associated with conditions like attention deficit disorder and antisocial behaviors such as alcoholism, drug abuse, compulsive spending, and various other risky, unsafe, and illegal activities. So from that perspective, novelty-seeking is definitely not good.

But more recent research suggests that novelty-seeking actually keeps people healthy and happy and may even be the quintessential human survival skill* that helps us adapt to and cope with changes of all kinds and degrees. So now novelty-seeking is viewed in a much more positive light.

But trying to classify novelty-seeking as either good or bad doesn’t make a lot of sense. Since its reputation has improved, many people who should know better have been advising us to make a point of including more novelty in our lives by, for example, taking a different route to work. If your life is so lacking in novelty that taking a different route to work is the only way you can get it, you may have bigger problems to worry about.

Does Your Brain Like Novelty?

The fact that your brain responds to novelty doesn’t necessarily mean it likes it. Your brain pays attention to new things because it has to figure out what they are, whether they’re potentially pleasurable or harmful, and what you need to do about them. Novelty wakes up your brain’s reward system, which is involved in learning and memory, and the amygdala, which processes emotional information.

So you become more alert, aware, and emotionally aroused. Because dopamine has been activated, you are motivated to explore the situation in search of a reward. But the purpose of this amped up state is not to make you feel good; it’s to ensure your survival. It uses making you feel good to help you remember what you did and what you learned.

Is It Actually Novelty You’re Seeking?

The real question is: Do you tend to seek novelty for its own sake or is what you’re seeking providing you with novelty?

There’s a purpose for your brain’s response to novelty. When you encounter it in the course of doing or learning something new, undertaking a challenge, or accomplishing a goal, what you experience has relevance to your life. So focusing your attention on it and remembering it is meaningful.

Simulated or vicarious novelty may be pleasurable and emotionally arousing in the moment, but it’s superficial—a replica of the real thing.

If you’re up to something, you’re bound to encounter plenty of novelty along your path. And when you do, it will enhance your cognition and your experience, it will increase your well-being, and it will motivate you to do and be and want and contribute more. That’s one of the best aspects of being human. And that is good!

*Winifred Gallagher, New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change

The Seductive Lure of Online Brain Games

January 8, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

You may have heard that Lumosity has agreed to settle with the Federal Trade Commission to the tune of $2 million in response to charges of deceptive advertising:

The FTC alleges that the defendants claimed training with Lumosity would 1) improve performance on everyday tasks, in school, at work, and in athletics; 2) delay age-related cognitive decline and protect against mild cognitive impairment, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease; and 3) reduce cognitive impairment associated with health conditions, including stroke, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, ADHD, the side effects of chemotherapy, and Turner syndrome, and that scientific studies proved these benefits.

This didn’t surprise me since I’ve been following various researchers’ attempts to substantiate the many claims made by such companies. I was also aware that in 2014, a group of 70 cognitive scientists and neuroscientists issued a statement warning consumers of the hype over brain games:

We object to the claim that brain games offer consumers a scientifically grounded avenue to reduce or reverse cognitive decline when there is no compelling scientific evidence to date that they do. The promise of a magic bullet detracts from the best evidence to date, which is that cognitive health in old age reflects the long-term effects of healthy, engaged lifestyles. In the judgment of the signatories below, exaggerated and misleading claims exploit the anxieties of older adults about impending cognitive decline. We encourage continued careful research and validation in this field.

A large percentage of the population is concerned about cognitive decline. And they’re willing to pay for what appears to be an easy and even enjoyable quick fix. Quick fixes have become increasingly desirable in the internet age, so the concept of using your electronic device to play games devised by someone else to keep your brain in top form is brilliant marketing, if nothing else. It’s a mini, no-stress, workout for your brain.

The jury is still out as to whether brain games offer any long-term effectiveness. One thing that is known is that improving your performance in a particular game leads to improved performance in that particular game. In that regard, computerized games are no different from playing Scrabble or working crossword or Sudoku puzzles. The more crossword puzzles you work, the better you get at working crossword puzzles. The more Sudoku puzzles you complete, the easier the “challenging” puzzles become. That’s just how the brain works. The more often you attempt any task, the quicker and easier it is to do it. Practice may not make perfect but it definitely makes better.

According to David Z. Hambrick, associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University:

[I]f you find that people get better in one test of reasoning, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re smart; it means they’re better on one test of reasoning.

In fact, there’s some indication that just playing video games is better than so-called brain games at improving short-term memory capacity and reasoning.

If you like the experience of playing—and getting better at—computerized brain games (and paying for the pleasure), then go ahead and continue doing it. But computerized brain games are unlikely to have any far-reaching or long-term effects on your cognitive abilities.

And, as an article in Scientific American points out, they take up time that could be put to better use. I’ve been saying for some time now that the two things you can do to grow new neurons and increase the number of synaptic connections in your brain (thus expanding your mental model and your cognitive abilities) are:

Move! Engage in physical exercise.
Learn! Study something new and challenging.

That’s it. Do those two things every day and you will not only be doing something effective to forestall cognitive decline, you will also become healthier and potentially even higher-functioning than you already are.

Brain & Mind Roundup 2

June 16, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

This time, Brain & Mind Roundup focuses on articles about writing and the brain, specifically how taking notes by hand (instead of by computer) actually facilitates learning and how learning cursive stimulates the brain.

The pen compels lucidity. –Robert Stone, novelist

A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop

Cindi May (Scientific American)

Because students can type significantly faster than they can write, those who use laptops in the classroom tend to take more notes than those who write out their notes by hand. Moreover, when students take notes using laptops they tend to take notes verbatim, writing down every last word uttered by their professor.

But new research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more. Those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.

Mueller and Oppenheimer postulate that taking notes by hand requires different types of cognitive processing than taking notes on a laptop, and these different processes have consequences for learning. Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot possibly write down every word in a lecture. Instead, they listen, digest, and summarize so that they can succinctly capture the essence of the information. Thus, taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy “mental lifting,” and these efforts foster comprehension and retention. By contrast, when typing, students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow students to transcribe a lecture word for word without devoting much thought to the content.

What Learning Cursive Does for Your Brain

William R. Klemm (Psychology Today)

Scientists are discovering that learning cursive is an important tool for cognitive development, particularly in training the brain to learn “functional specialization,” that is capacity for optimal efficiency. In the case of learning cursive writing, the brain develops functional specialization that integrates sensation, movement control, and thinking. Brain imaging studies reveal that multiple areas of brain become co-activated during learning of cursive writing of pseudo-letters, as opposed to typing or just visual practice.

The benefits to brain development are similar to what you get with learning to play a musical instrument. Not everybody can afford music lessons, but everybody has access to pencil and paper.

Brain Research and Cursive Writing

Dr. David Sortino*

Rand Nelson of Peterson Directed Handwriting, believes that when children are exposed to cursive handwriting, changes occur in their brains that allow a child to overcome motor challenges. He says, the act of physically gripping a pen or pencil and practicing the swirls, curls and connections of cursive handwriting activates parts of the brain that lead to increased language fluency. That is, cursive writing ability affords us the opportunity to naturally train these fine motor skills by taking advantage of a child’s inability to fully control his fingers. This means cursive writing acts as a building block rather than as a stressor, providing a less strenuous learning experience.

Moreover, cursive handwriting stimulates brain synapses and synchronicity between the left and right hemispheres, something absent from printing, typing or keyboarding.

*Dr. David Sortino holds a Master’s degree in Human Development from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Clinical/Developmental Psychology from Saybrook University.

Mindfulness vs. Habits: Game On?

April 3, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

According to the respective press they receive, habits are bad, and mindfulness is good. We ought to be as mindful as we can, as much of the time as we can, and do what we do as thoughtfully and mindfully as possible. This is a nice idea, but it doesn’t actually jibe with the way the brain works—or with the world in which most of us live.

Mindfulness, the conscious direction of attention or awareness, is a generally a positive thing. Certainly, most of us could use more mindfulness in our lives. Mindfulness training helps us pay attention to our own thoughts, feelings, and experience without judgment. It helps us focus on the present moment, on what we are taking in through our senses.

A few of the benefits claimed for mindfulness are:

Decreased stress levels
Decreased ruminative thinking
Decreased cell damage
Bolstering of the immune system
Increased longevity
Improved concentration

This is unquestionably great stuff.

However, when it comes to habits, mindfulness both helps and harms. It is beneficial in terms of helping us focus our attention on our behavior, specifically on those habits we want to start or change. Since habitual behavior, by its nature, is unconscious, in order to change it, we have to become conscious of it.

On the other hand, being too mindful—yes, apparently there are scientific measures for this—can get in the way of forming new habits, both bad and good. The formation of habits involves implicit learning, learning that is not consciously acquired. We have to let the unconscious part of our brain do its thing if we want to create and strengthen good habits. Too much mindfulness can impede that process.

In two studies of adult participants presented at the 2013 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, people who scored high on a gauge of mindfulness (and were less distracted) performed poorly on sequenced learning tasks, which involve implicit learning—in this case, pattern detection. People who scored low on the gauge of mindfulness (and were more distracted) had quicker reaction times and performed much better on the same tests.

The very fact of paying too much attention or being too aware of stimuli coming up in these tests might actually inhibit implicit learning. That suggests that mindfulness may help prevent formation of automatic habits—which is done through implicit learning—because a mindful person is aware of what they are doing. –Chelsea Stillman

This sounds like good news for dealing with bad habits. The problem is that when we think of habits, those are the only ones we tend to think of: the ones we wish we didn’t have. But habits are a device the brain uses to conserve precious energy. In general, habits are not only useful, they’re essential. In fact, the more good habits we create, the more conscious attention we have available for other mental activity, such as mindfulness.

So, no, habits are not always bad. And yes, you can have too much of a good thing, in this case mindfulness.