My Plastic Brain Read online

  Published 2018 by Prometheus Books

  My Plastic Brain: One Woman's Yearlong Journey to Discover If Science Can Improve Her Mind. Copyright © 2017 by Caroline Williams. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First published by Scribe 2017

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Williams, Caroline, 1975- author.

  Title: My plastic brain : one woman's yearlong journey to discover if science can improve her mind / by Caroline Williams.

  Description: First American hardcover edition. | Amherst, New York : Prometheus Books, 2018. | Originally published under title: Override : my quest to go beyond brain training and take control of my mind. London, United Kingdom : Scribe Publications, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017047080| ISBN 9781633883918 (hardback) | ISBN 9781633883925 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Neuroplasticity. | Brain—Regeneration. | BISAC: SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Neuroscience. | SELF-HELP / Stress Management.

  Classification: LCC QP363.3 .W55 2018 | DDC 612.8/2—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047080

  Printed in the United States of America

  Author's Note

  Introduction

  PART ONE: MEETINGS WITH MY EXECUTIVE CONTROLLER

  1. The Taming of the Butterfly

  2. Anxious All Areas

  3. Let the Creativity Flow

  PART TWO: SPACE AND TIME

  4. Lost in Space

  5. Mind-Bending, Time-Bending

  PART THREE: A LOGICAL MIND

  6. Number Sense Lost

  PART FOUR: WHAT NOW?

  7. My Brain on Override

  8. The Road from Here

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  For ease of reference, a log showing the times and dates of interviews and conversations can be found at the end of each chapter in which they were discussed. The interviews and conversations in the log are listed in the approximate order in which they are first mentioned in the chapter.

  An MRI scan of the author's brain. (Courtesy of the University of Kansas)

  Heathrow Airport is huge. So if you happen to leave your hand luggage in the departure lounge, and don’t notice until you are at gate 21a and the flight is boarding, it's quite a long way to run back—about a fifteen-minute round-trip, in fact, although it feels a lot longer when you have just heard a stern announcement that “luggage left unattended will be removed and may be destroyed.”

  Thankfully, my bag was in one piece and exactly where I left it. I found it in a shop just as the assistant was about to call security, stammered an apology through a dry mouth, and pelted back to the gate in time to catch my flight. It wasn’t until I’d calmed down, with a stiff gin and tonic in hand, that I realized this sort of mishap was exactly why I was taking this flight in the first place.

  I was on my way to Boston, Massachusetts, to meet two neuroscientists who carry out research into sustained focus and attention. My hope was that they would help me find a way to override my natural tendency to be stressed and distracted, and to help me replace it with a calm focus that I could sustain for a useful amount of time. It was the first step in a journey that was to last more than a year, and take me back and forth across the United States and Europe in search of real-life fixes for my brain's shortcomings.

  I wanted to apply the best that modern brain science had to offer and to get a glimpse into the future of real-life brain training. Focus was just the beginning. In the months that followed, I would try science-based interventions for, among other things, a nonexistent sense of direction, an unhealthy worrying habit, and some embarrassingly bad number skills. Then I would branch out into some more mysterious corners of the mind, such as creativity and the perception of time.

  There are good reasons to think that mine was a journey worth taking. First, there is a decade's worth of evidence that the brain is “plastic”—it retains the ability to change physically in response to the things we learn and experience throughout life. As a science journalist and former feature editor at New Scientist magazine, I have, over the years, written tens of thousands of words on so-called neuroplasticity, and as time went on, I became more and more curious about how I might apply this to my own brain.

  But when I started looking for answers, what I found was…nothing of any real practical use. Despite all of the research into the brain's awesome powers of plasticity, no one seemed to know exactly what we should be doing to apply the science to everyday life. Sure, there are fascinating tales of people harnessing their brain's plasticity to recover from major brain injuries, but to my knowledge there was no such evidence for the average person on the street.

  To me, it seemed like a pretty major hole in the assumption that neuroplasticity can be applied by anyone. For a start, injured brains are very different to healthy ones. After a stroke, the brain releases various growth-promoting chemicals at the site of injury to try and repair the damage. The same degree of “rewiring” may not be possible when there isn’t a major roadblock that the brain needs to work around. On the other hand, it's hardly surprising that we can learn new skills throughout our whole lives—learning and remembering are what brains are designed to do.

  With eighty-six billion neurons, and trillions of connections, an adult brain is a pretty remarkable feat of engineering. By the time it gets to maturity, it has already been on an incredible journey. A large part of the job of the adult brain is to work as a kind of pattern-spotting and generalization machine—whirring away in the background, making sense of what is happening now and how it relates to what has already been stored in memory.

  These memories can only come from experience, which is why babies and children come primed to learn, with an endless supply of curiosity about what things are like and why. Once this groundwork is complete, a lot of the day-to-day processing of the brain is done on autopilot, with unconscious processing taking care of working out what is happening and how we should respond. The brain does this for a good reason: unconscious processing is fast and effortless, and leaves plenty of thinking-power free to concentrate on things that need more focus.

  The learning process starts surprisingly early: in the last few weeks before birth, a baby's brain is hard at work, forming strong memories of its mother's voice and the sounds of the world it will be born into. It also learns from its mother's physical state—a high dose of stress hormones from the mother, for example, programs a baby's brain to develop in ways that leave it more reactive to stress in later life. The brain is learning that it needs to be on
alert because it is being born into a dangerous world.

  In so many ways, what we experience in early life shapes the adult we will become, deciding which assumptions our brains will make without bothering to inform our consciousness. This, combined with each person's particular genetic inheritance, means that each brain in adulthood is not only totally unique, but it got that way more or less by accident: the outcome of a genetic and life-experience lottery.

  If neuroplasticity can be applied in adulthood, though, it provides an opportunity to change all that, to take a fresh look at the brain you have ended up with as an adult and decide what to keep and what to change.

  There is only one thing that worries me about this process—and it's something that I admit I hadn’t thought of until I was enthusiastically telling a friend about my plans. His reaction wasn’t at all what I expected. Stephen, a friend from my yoga class, looked horrified at the very idea of trying to change your brain. “But surely you are a unique and wonderful person who isn’t like anyone else,” he said. “Why would you want to change that?” It threw me for a while, because it's true that my brain, warts and all, is the very thing that makes me me. If I change it, there is always the risk that I won’t still be me afterward.

  On the other hand, if brain change continues throughout life, then the work of making me me isn’t yet done. Why live with the less than helpful bits if the wonders of neuroplasticity mean that you don’t have to? Most of us don’t even decide what we want to do with our lives until long after our brains have become stuck in their ways. As a result, we adults spend much of our time drifting along in the passenger seat of our own minds. Wouldn’t it be nice to jump into the driver's seat for a change?

  My point of view has backup from two of history's greatest thinkers on the mind and the self. Way back in the first century AD, the Greek philosopher Epictetus advised his student at the time, “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”1 Much later, William James, the father of modern psychology, reportedly said something similar, with seeming exasperation: “For God's sake, choose a self and stand by it!” Which sounds like a challenge to me.

  So, step one: decide what to work on/choose a self. Based on things that annoy me about my own cognitive ability—and a very unscientific poll of my friends and family to see what they would improve on if they could—I have picked the following:

  Attention—be able to stay on task and resist distractions

  Worrying—find a way to turn down the stress

  Creativity—learn to order new ideas on demand

  Navigation—add a much-needed sense of direction

  Time perception—find ways to enjoy every moment, and kill boredom

  Number-sense—try to get a “head for numbers” and a handle on logic

  All of these are skills that I have to one extent or another but are never completely under my own control. Perhaps if I can bolster the brain regions and circuitry behind each of them, I will have a better chance of running my mind, rather than just being dragged along by it.

  Step two: do what you have to do (and stand by it).

  This bit is trickier because it is tied up in the broader question of whether such a thing is actually possible. The idea that we can somehow harness neuroplasticity to take manual control of our own brains, and steer them in the direction of our choosing, is still an open question, whatever the self-help section of the bookshop would have you believe.

  One answer seems to come from all of those brain-game books, apps, and websites, which have been knocking around in more or less the same format for about a decade now. Several casual acquaintances, when I told them about my mission to improve my brain, have said something like, “Have you heard about such and such a commercial brain-training program? My granddad/husband/friend does it and swears by it….”

  True, there are a lot of these brain games about, and most are loosely based on the kinds of tests that psychologists use to measure cognitive skills in the lab. Most feature memory puzzles, mental arithmetic games, and the like, and generally test your baseline skills, then offer a daily “cognitive workout” followed by updates on your progress. The best-known purveyor of such games, Lumosity, claims to have daily workouts that train “skills, such as planning, logical reasoning, selective attention, and more.” They are careful not to say much more, since being fined $2 million in January 2016 when the US Federal Trade Commission ruled that the company “deceived consumers with unfounded claims that Lumosity games can help users perform better at work and in school, and reduce or delay cognitive impairment associated with age and other serious health conditions.”2 The ruling included a scathing assessment of the company's methods, accusing them of preying on consumer fears without the science to back it up. But, still, their website seems to make a big deal of how scientific it all is, and it's hard not to get the impression that all of this science will make a real change to the workings of your brain.

  The trouble is when you hear what brain scientists have to say about them, these kinds of training programs seem like less of a good investment of either time or money. Most neuroscientists are hugely skeptical that these generic brain-training games are doing anything to the brain; when large-scale studies of the most popular of these games started investigating what they actually do, the answer was, not much. One study, of around eleven thousand people, found that brain puzzles and games do nothing to make you smarter in general.3 They do make you a bit better at the game you have been practicing, but even then the effects don’t last very long.

  Faced with the fact that millions of well-meaning middle-aged folk were lapping up the hype (by one estimate, Americans alone spend more than a billion dollars a year on brain-training products4), a group of neuroscientists recently wrote a strongly worded open letter to warn people that brain games weren’t going to stave off Alzheimer's or keep them young.5 Meanwhile, scientist-authored blogs, with names like Neurobollocks and Neurobonkers, appeared on the scene, primed and ready to tear apart anyone who stretched the data too far for a sale or a good story. From where I was sitting, it was starting to seem as if any scientist who genuinely extolled the virtues of brain training probably had a version of their own to sell.

  The other much-touted option is a monk-like dedication to meditation—which, because I don’t excel at sitting still for long, I have never gotten along with (and, besides, I have always managed to kid myself that I at least dabble in mindfulness by doing yoga and stopping to smell the flowers when I walk the dog). But, lately, even meditation has started to get a bad rap, with some psychologists claiming it has a dark side, of common yet unreported side effects. One study of people who visited a meditation retreat back in the 1990s found that a small minority of them experienced panic attacks or depression.6 Another, more recent, study found that daily meditation practice actually raised the levels of stress hormones in volunteers’ saliva.7 Neither of these outcomes sound ideal, particularly if, like me, one of the things you were wanting to change was an overactive panic button.

  FUEL AND MAINTENANCE

  With all the controversy about brain training and meditation, it's perhaps surprising that there is a kind of training that definitely does benefit the brain, and it doesn’t involve any thinking at all—it involves getting off your butt and moving.

  Physical exercise has been shown pretty conclusively to boost memory and cognitive skills and to improve mood. In experiments where people did some kind of mental task, then either stopped and did some exercise, or sat still and had a break, people who had exercised scored better on cognitive measures that came afterward than the couch potatoes did. The explanation for this seems to come down to certain chemicals called “growth factors” that are released by the body during exercise. Growth factors seem to put the brain into a kind of super-plasticity mode, where whatever you see, do, or learn is more likely to stick.

  The most important of these chemicals is a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), wh
ich has the job of keeping existing neurons healthy and encouraging the development of new ones. The more BDNF that is around, the lower the threshold at which the brain commits to making new connections, and the less effort it takes for any new information to stick. Just one session of exercise has been shown to increase BDNF levels in the blood, but regular exercise is shown to be even better because it makes the brain more sensitive to BDNF.8 So if you exercise regularly, each time you break a sweat you get an even bigger bang for your buck.

  As well as getting the brain ready to make new connections, BDNF—helped by another growth factor called IGF-1—also stimulates the birth of new neurons in the hippocampus. This, too, probably puts the brain in a better place to learn new things, by adding more space to the brain's memory drives. Exercise also makes it more likely that blood vessels will sprout up to service the newly busy area—by boosting another growth factor, called vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), which specializes in building new blood vessels. And a lack of physical activity has been shown to reduce the speed at which electrical impulses pass between neurons. All in all, exercise makes for a healthy brain that is primed and ready to learn.

  How much exercise you need for all of this to happen is less clear. The US government recommends 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week; seventy-five minutes of vigorous activity is good, but a study that investigated this found that more is almost certainly better: one recent analysis of over 600,000 people found that the best recipe for general health was three to five times that (an hour plus per day if you are doing the low-impact version), but that doing up to ten times that amount didn’t seem to do any harm to the body, presumably including the brain.9

  Put together, what these results suggest is that working on your brain as if it were somehow detached from your body isn’t going to work very well. Any plan to tone up the brain has to involve exercise if it has any chance of sticking in the brain physically. Perhaps human brains evolved that way: there's not much need to invest in learning if you sit around in a cave all day, after all, but if you go out to explore, it's worth committing what you learn to memory. Whatever the reason, moving and learning are very much connected.