My Plastic Brain Read online

  It's nice to know the numbers are moving in the right direction, but it's more difficult to tell whether it has changed anything about the way I think in real life. And that's really the nub of it—it's no use changing your cognitive bias or STAI-T score if it doesn’t make you feel any different. I can’t ask anyone else if I seem more chilled—even my husband—because a lot of my worrying is a private affair in my own head (for what it's worth, I did ask him and he hasn’t noticed any changes). Ultimately, a subjective take on whether life feels any easier is the real proof of the pudding.

  The problem with this is that cognitive biases are under the radar of consciousness, and by definition you can’t be aware of the unconscious. Which means that if I have changed, then I probably won’t notice and if I think I do, I’m probably imagining it. Having said that, though, I do feel like I am slightly less self-conscious in situations where I have to chat to people I don’t know very well. It feels like I might be getting better at spotting a friendly face and letting go of signs that may be interpreted as disapproval. This in turn doesn’t give me any room to ponder whether that face is saying, “God, she's awful,” or whether it bears no reflection on me at all.

  Spending all that time looking at smiling and angry faces has also given me a handy demonstration of how a smile (or a grumpy face) can make other people feel. I find myself smiling at people more and saying, “How are you?” and that in turn makes them smile more at me—which is nice. This makes me think that it is probably worth keeping on with the happy-face clicking, to see if anything changes longer term. Nowadays, it only takes about five minutes, and I often do it while the kettle is boiling.

  On the downside, since taking on the training, I have noticed an upsurge of anxiety-ridden dreams—ones where I have an exam and have forgotten to study, where my teeth are crumbling in my head, or where my trousers are pulled down in public and everyone points and laughs at me. It makes me wonder if this is where my worries have gone to hide now that they aren’t welcome in my conscious mind. Like that bit in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where you find out that the memories are hiding so they won’t be deleted, my mind isn’t willing to give up its old ways just yet.

  One thing I do know is that, looking back on the diary I’ve been keeping throughout the process, I don’t feel like this anymore:

  Day 1 and 2 (July 2015)

  I’m finding the training quite unsettling, and it feels like it might actually be doing me harm. I’m looking at far more negative faces than positive ones, and it's making me feel really uncomfortable. It takes ages to find the smiling ones, and all the time I’m looking at the angry ones I’m getting more and more uptight. I get a wave of relief every time I find a smiling face. It's like a port in a storm.

  Now it's more like what I noted on my diary on day 63 (September 2015):

  I don’t feel like I did in the first week, where the angry faces were really upsetting. Now, it's just a quick “bam, bam, bam” and it's done in five minutes. Really think I could keep this up long term….

  As for the working-memory training, I’m less convinced. It proved difficult to stay motivated when my performance plateaued after several weeks. I carried on doing it for a while, but not for twenty minutes and not every day. A couple of months later, I stopped altogether. There just isn’t enough evidence to convince me that it's worth my time yet.

  The road outside my house still gives me the jitters, but I have found a way around it: we now go a longer but quieter way to school, riding our bikes along a wide pavement instead of walking up a very narrow one. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before—maybe practicing how to replace panic with a calm focus has helped make room in my brain to not just fret about the road but to think of a solution as well.

  One thing has proven particularly resistant to change: my ridiculous response to stress. About halfway through the Oxford study, while trying to set up the brain scans for the next stage of my mission, I had several knock-backs from researchers who I had hoped would let me have a go on some of their experiments. It was, various researchers told me, too expensive, and they couldn’t spare the time to find a student to analyze my results, and that, anyway, I don’t qualify as a subject for any study they were running. And even though I know that brain scans only tell you so much and that there are other, perhaps more reliable ways of measuring brain change, I did freak out on a similar scale to the Elaine Fox debacle when I was waiting to hear back from her (admittedly only for a few days this time, but I wasn’t much good for anything for a while). I can’t deny it was disappointing. I had hoped to knock this kind of thing on the head.

  This goes back to the idea that to stand any chance of changing your brain, you have to pick your skills very carefully. An anxious temperament, I have found, isn’t born of one thing but many. Social anxiety and performance anxiety are completely different things, and what helps with one may not help the other.

  What I take from all of this is that getting on top of anxiety is, again, all about controlling attention. Unfortunately our attention is not always under our conscious control—and that's why self-help alone, at least in the form of advice such as “think yourself better and you will get better” is never going to work. If you have a negative bias, you will always be swimming against the tide. It's why depressed people can’t think themselves out of the hole: their brain is feeding them nothing but the hole.

  Escaping the clutches of a negative bias is definitely not easy. I can’t say for sure if cognitive-bias modification is the answer, and neither can Elaine Fox or anyone else. All I can say is that, for me, it seemed to help. But—and it's a big “but”—“pick your skills” definitely applies here. Train yourself to seek out happy faces, and that is what will change in the real world. I wondered at the start of all this whether fixing one neurosis would make all the others melt away too. The answer to that is a definite no.

  On the other hand, my mindfulness course is now well underway, and in theory I have a few more tools to counter a more general kind of angst. Mindfulness, I am discovering, is not just about the mind, but it's about the body too. And that might be the key to greater control.

  THE MEDITATION DIARIES: PART 2

  In Fifty Shades of Grey, Anastasia has a habit of biting her bottom lip whenever she's nervous. She doesn’t realize she's doing it, but it drives the sexy billionaire Christian Grey mad with lust. Through the powers of meditation, I have discovered that I do something similar. Only I look more like Kermit the Frog:

  Figure 2.8. My worry face—or is it Kermit the Frog?

  Weirdly, I had never noticed this habit until Gill, my mindfulness teacher, gave us the session on noticing what is happening in the body; our homework was to pick a pleasant experience and pay attention to where we feel it in the body—and then do the same with an unpleasant experience. I noticed that, when I’m having a warm and fuzzy moment with my loved ones, I feel it as a warm spreading sensation in my belly—which is all very lovely but not terribly surprising. More interestingly, when it comes to the negative stuff, I noticed that I have all manner of physical stress tics that come out whenever I get uptight. Kermit-face is the most common, but I also have a particularly unattractive frown and a pursed-lip look like a disapproving granny.

  The value of noticing this, from my understanding of what Gill says, is that it opens up a gap between what the mind is doing and how it feels. Only then can we investigate what is going on. “It's about noticing,” she says. “Just noticing.”

  The more I pay attention to these physical tics, the more I realize there is an underlying theme. I bite my lip when I am cleaning up the house, when I am thinking about what to write, when I am cooking, and when I am writing my to-do list. The underlying theme is, I want to do this right. What if I screw it up? Am I crap at this? Interesting.

  Even better, now that I have noticed that I do this, I can consciously let go of my lip and point my attention directly at whatever it is I am so worried about. Then I can rea
lize that either a) there's no need to get all Kermit-faced about loading the dishwasher, or b) I’m stressed because I care about the quality of my work—and that's a good thing. Either way, it helps to take the pressure off and give myself a bit of a break. It's actually pretty fantastic.

  Another thing that I am starting to like about mindfulness is that it doesn’t allow any room for giving yourself a hard time about doing things “right.” Every bit of self-help that I have ever seen involves an element of “You feel this way because you are doing it wrong. Do it this way and you will feel better.” Mindfulness allows you to notice your unhelpful habits without adding yet another nagging voice to the mix. Instead of “I’m stressing; why am I stressing? I shouldn’t be stressing, et cetera, et cetera,” with mindfulness it's more like, “I’m stressing. I have noticed. That is all.”

  I think I am starting to see a real benefit to this approach—it might be a way to reach the neuroses buried in my mind that cognitive-bias modification couldn’t.

  INTERVIEWS/CONVERSATIONS:

  Alexander Temple-McCune, conversations during lab visit and experiments at Oxford University, July 10, 2015.

  Jolyon, conversations during visit, July 9–11, 2015.

  Elaine Fox, in an interview during lab visit and experiments at Oxford University, July 10, 2015.

  Geraint Rees, in an email interview, February 10, 2015.

  Ernst Koster, Skype call, June 12, 2015.

  Ayse Berna Sari and Alvaro Sanchez Lopez, conversations and interview during lab visit June 18, 2015.

  Ersnt Koster, follow-up email interview, September 16, 2015.

  Gill Johnson, as part of meditation course, September 24–November 12, 2015.

  Lila Chrysikou attaches the two electrodes on my head to a battery and slowly cranks up the power. As she does, my focus gets up and leaves the building.

  It's a weird feeling. Until she flipped the switch, I was perfectly alert and on the ball. I’d arrived at her lab at Kansas University, in Lawrence, refreshed from a good night's sleep and two cups of tea, and was raring to go on a full day of experiments. We’d been chatting animatedly about my long journey to Kansas, the joys of parental sleep deprivation, and many things besides. But as soon as the electricity hit my brain, I skipped uncontrollably off with the fairies. And it wasn’t a nice feeling. In fact, it felt exactly like the zoned-out state I’ve been fighting all these years and have only recently started to feel more in control of.

  I had wondered if this might happen. From what I’ve read so far about the bits of the brain involved in thinking creatively, it seems that the circuits required are more or less the same as those needed to sustain focus. To think creatively, though, the balance of activity has to be a little bit different. Rather than keeping the frontal bits of the brain in control of attention, to keep thought processes on the straight and narrow, thinking creatively requires a softer focus, a more mind-wandering state of mind.

  To help get me into this particular zone, Lila has attached one electrode to my prefrontal cortex, where the current will interfere with its normal functioning, thereby freeing my mind from its sensible shackles for the next twenty minutes.

  Given that I have spent a large part of the past few months trying to train my prefrontal cortex to be more in control of this kind of thing, it might seem strange to try and nudge it back in the other direction, but there is a method to my madness. Increasingly, I have decided that what I really need to do for my brain isn’t to pick a circuit and train it to excel in a particular direction—to be honest, that is starting to sound a bit “last season.” Instead, what I am aiming for is control over the various mental states it is possible to be in. When I want to focus, I can slip into that state of mind. And when I want to think creatively, I want to be able to set it free. I’m hoping that by having my brain stimulated to help me practice this state, I will be better able to slip into it at will—as opposed to wandering into it against my better judgment.

  It's an exciting prospect, if I can make it happen. And why not? With Mike and Joe's help, it took just a week to learn to recognize what it felt like to be in the right zone for focusing for longish periods. This lesson has remained with me ever since, making it much easier to knuckle down when I need to. This isn’t because the training “changed my brain” in any physical way that you could point at on a brain scan but because I know how it is supposed to feel when I am working well—that relaxed but engaged state where everything feels just the right amount of easy and the right amount challenging. More importantly, I also learned to recognize how it feels when I am not focused and have found new ways to get back to it (a long walk, spot of meditation, or a sing-along to loud music in the kitchen).

  If I can build on this control, by learning how to turn it on and off, my mornings could consist of freewheeling creative time followed by a quick walk to reset, and then an afternoon of focused work to hone my ideas into something useable. This kind of mind control would be an incredibly useful skill for a journalist—in fact, I can’t imagine any job where that sort of mental control wouldn’t be useful. And my son's fancy dress costumes would be magnificent.

  When it comes to creativity, it seems, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a kind of filter or gatekeeper that must be tamed by just the right amount. Too much dampening would be less than ideal for doing most things that we have to do. An important part of the PFC's job is to sift through the possible courses of action and select the most appropriate. This is why neuroscientists John Kounios and Mark Beeman, authors of The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain, call the PFC “the box” and argue that it is absolutely critical to living a normal life.1 The prefrontal cortex is the reason why, for example, if you need to jot down a phone number and there is a pen and a lipstick on the table in front of you, you don’t need to spend much mental energy pondering which one would be best for the job. Without it, we would have to think carefully about absolutely everything we do, as if we were seeing it for the first time. It would be exhausting, and we’d never get anything done. So the PFC is very useful, unless, as Kounios and Beeman point out, you are really wanting to think outside the box.

  If you want evidence for the benefits of less prefrontal control on creativity, you don’t have to look further than the nearest young child. The frontal networks are the last part of the brain to develop, which is probably why kids are so naturally creative. A five-year-old can look at a cardboard box and imagine it being a robot, a car, a rocket, or a boat—sometimes all of them in the same play session. An adult, looking at the same box, might get stuck at “empty container that is making the house look untidy.”

  My son (now six) also specializes in random trains of thought that often make no sense but that are undoubtedly very creative. A recent example: “Mummy, did you know that people can freeze? And if they do, they can’t go down a normal slide; they have to go sledging. On a block of ice. But if they went over a bump they’d go wheeee up in the air, but then they’d hit the corner of the ice cube and that would hurt their bottom….” An adult with a fully functioning prefrontal cortex would find that it kicked in on “did you know people can freeze?” and shut down the whole crazy train of thought before it got going.

  One idea is that this is an evolutionary thing: when kids are young and everything is worth learning, the brain's priority is to be open to all possibilities, however random and unproductive. They are also busy learning language, and so need to make connections between distantly related words and meanings—so the wider the focus the better. Adults, on the other hand, need to make sense of the world quickly and efficiently, because they are the ones in charge, having to make all the important life-and-death decisions. Poor, responsible, boring old us.

  Some people, though, do manage to cultivate the best of both worlds. I once interviewed Oscar-winning director and creator of Wallace and Gromit Nick Park for a children's radio show, and while he described how he came up with Wallace's weird and wacky inventions, it reall
y struck me that he seemed to think creatively in the same way as a child. People like him who retain this ability into adulthood might have naturally lower PFC activity, or it could be that they have a better ability to switch into and out of the creative mode. My money would be on the latter. Clearly, Nick Park has enough frontal control to turn his crazy ideas into actual films and to run a very successful production company.

  So I know what I’m aiming for—control over the switch between creative mode and adult mode. What I don’t know is how to develop the kind of mind control that allows you to slip into childlike open-ended thinking and then flip back into sensible mode to decide what is useful-random, and what is just plain silly?

  One fly in the ointment: there aren’t that many researchers looking at creativity—and those who are still haven’t managed to agree on what creative thought processes actually are and how they occur in the brain. A lot of this debate surrounds a disagreement over whether creativity can ever be conscious thinking, or whether it is always a more mysterious, unconscious thing that only shows up when it is good and ready.

  On my way to Kansas, I stopped by John Kounios's office at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, for his take on the situation. He told me that, while it is possible to solve problems deliberately and logically, that doesn’t, in his view, count as being creative—creativity is always an unconscious thing, an “aha” moment or sudden insight that pops up, seemingly out of nowhere. They don’t really come from nowhere, of course. For old information to connect in new and surprising ways, it has to have been put there in the first place, stored in memory somewhere in the brain. Then, if you’re lucky, when you are busy thinking about something else, these distant strands of information will link up unexpectedly and burst through—“aha.”