My Plastic Brain Read online

  “The bottom line is that all of this stuff is complete twaddle and people should forget about it,” Hulme told me when we chatted on the phone. Thankfully, he wasn’t talking about the whole idea of changing your brain—that, he agrees, does seem to be possible, so long as you choose the brain skill to be improved carefully. “Train a task and you’ll improve on it—but that's not what these people are claiming,” he says. “They’re saying, ‘Train one task and everything else gets better.’ And that's a) deeply implausible, and b) based on the evidence, simply not true.”

  Susanne Jaeggi, of the University of California in Irvine, disagrees. She has done her own meta-analysis—and over Skype, she told me that she has found quite the opposite, with a small but significant improvement on lab measures of general intelligence after working-memory training.28

  “It looks more and more like there is indeed transfer to other skills that rely on working memory, such as reasoning, reading comprehension, even math problem-solving tasks,” she said. In fact, anything that needs working memory seems to benefit. “But whether that is seen in school grades, that's another question. We have very limited data on whether improvements on this training translate into real-life performance.” For anyone planning to dedicate twenty minutes every day to doing these kinds of games, this is what we really need to know. It almost doesn’t matter to us that scientists like Hulme and Jaeggi are arguing over whether the tiny improvement is real or not. Quite honestly, if it is so difficult to tell, under very controlled laboratory conditions, whether anything has changed, would anyone have the slightest hope of noticing any changes in real life?

  As an aside, Joe DeGutis, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University who spends a lot of his time trying to make cognitive-training programs that actually work, told me that there is a standardized test that scientists can use to see whether real-world changes have occurred after intensive cognitive training.

  A few years ago, he told me, he was asked by a funding body to translate his results with stroke patients into a measure that made sense in real life.

  “They said, ‘I think you should time how long it takes the stroke patients to make toast,’” he tells me, looking incredulous about the whole thing. The idea does sound a bit daft, I admit—and, anyway, won’t the toast just pop up when it's ready? It sounds as if it might tell you more about different makes of toaster than brain change.

  “Ah, well,” he said, “there's a certain toaster that everyone uses for the toaster task; then you time how long it takes to butter the toast, and so on…” He laughs because it does sound a bit ridiculous. But, he said, the whole point of this kind of research is to show that it translates into real-world changes. Becoming better at an on-screen game alone isn’t going to change anyone's life, no matter how much fun it is.

  Even if cognitive training does improve your toast-making skills, there is another complication: the same training might not work for everybody. In her analysis of working-memory training studies, Jaeggi found that people who started off with the lowest skills improved the most. People who were measured as having a “growth mind-set”—in other words, who believed that it was possible to improve on their current skills—got more benefit from the training than people who thought that they were either inherently good or bad at something. Interestingly, people with a growth mind-set saw benefits from the placebo training, too—which wasn’t supposed to change anything. This suggests that, to some extent, just thinking that you are doing something to change your brain is enough to make it so.29

  People who sign up for training studies out of the goodness of their hearts also seem to get more benefit than people who are there for payment or course credit. Also, a laboratory measure of how much you like doing difficult puzzles (“need for cognition” in psychologist-speak) also predicted how much benefit people got from training.

  As for the scale of the improvement, Jaeggi's latest analysis estimates that working-memory training might improve general intelligence by “about the equivalent of 3–4 points on a standardized IQ test.”30 Which, Charles Hulme told me, would be quite a significant improvement, if only it was a reliable result that always showed up when people did this kind of training. For her part, Jaeggi said that it is indeed a real improvement. “Doubters seem to be hard to convince. There are some people who don’t seem to be convinced, but I’m okay with that,” she said with a shrug.

  Which looks a lot like a stalemate to me. Joe DeGutis shares my infuriation. “If the cognitive-training people worked on one problem for a while, and others could work on the generalization process and how you take this into your life, and another group would work on another task…. At the moment, they’re smooshing them all together and no one's getting anywhere,” he says. “Half the studies are trying to get the effects and half are showing that the effects aren’t real.”

  Whether this happens or not, the main take-home message for me so far is that any changes occurring in the brain are so tiny that you need very sensitive lab tests—or a certain kind of toaster—to spot that anything has changed. Which doesn’t sound like the kind of change that is worth twenty minutes of your time every day. And with changes that small, it is even trickier to say what may or may not have changed in the brain. For what it's worth, Charles Hulme reckons it doesn’t matter anyway. “You don’t need to know what's happening in the brain—training doesn’t affect the behaviors that these people want to affect,” he said, sounding slightly exasperated by the question.

  Either way, for now it seems that anyone with ambitions of a new, improved brain would be better off picking one skill at a time and focusing on that, instead. Mental jogging doesn’t exist yet, and chances are that it might never exist. Which brings me to the first conclusion in my mission to change my brain: pick what you want to change.

  So it's just as well that I’m not out to improve my general intelligence or even develop superhuman powers of recall. Improvements in real-world skills that will directly affect my life sound a lot more doable. And, happily, each of the areas I have chosen to improve has a community of neuroscientists and psychologists working on ways to understand what makes these skills work and how we might enhance performance. By choosing these select skills over a more general “get smarter” ideal, I have at least a fighting chance of getting some improvement on each particular area. How specific any improvements turn out to be remains to be seen, though. It isn’t clear to me whether a London cabbie would be better than average at navigating around New York, or whether his or her superior spatial knowledge is specific to London. And if I can learn to control my fears about, say, a sudden disaster befalling my family, will all my other neuroses melt away too?

  The answers to these questions—and, more importantly, whether it's worth the hassle to try to change your brain and keep it changed—remain to be seen. But, as I remember one neuroscientist commenting when I listed all the aspects of my brain that I hoped to change, “Wow. At the end of this, you’ll either be Superwoman or completely messed up.”

  Either way, it should be interesting, right?

  INTERVIEWS/CONVERSATIONS:

  Heidi Johansen-Berg, phone conversation, May 15, 2015.

  Charles Hulme, phone conversation, November 17, 2015.

  Joe DeGutis, interviews during lab visit, June 15–22, 2014.

  Susanne Jaeggi, Skype interview, November 24, 2015.

  Concentration is the root of all the higher abilities.

  —Bruce Lee

  There's a lot about the brain that nobody knows for sure, but one of the few things that we do know is that focusing attention is about the most important thing that it does. Attention is the filter the brain uses to decide what is important and what can safely be ignored—and, without it, the lessons in front of your eyes won’t get translated into real physical change, at the level of neurons and their connections to each other. So, if I want to make any meaningful change to my brain, good focused attention is going to be absolutely crucial.

 
; Which might be a problem because leaving my luggage unattended in airports is just one example of the space-cadet tendencies that earned me the nickname “butterfly brain” when I was about eight years old. And this kind of thing still happens all the time. Recently, I was walking along the high street in my town when I looked over and saw my friend doubled up with laughter on the other side of the road. “You look like a crazy lady, staring up at the sky and wandering aimlessly!” she said. Charming. But she's right: when I zone out, I really zone out.

  When it comes to getting my work done, this zoning out really doesn’t help. I work at home, alone but for a very distracting dog, and—in theory—in short, intense bursts while my young son is at school. Occasionally, this arrangement works perfectly, and I end the day feeling like Superwoman. More often than not, though, I spend the day flitting from one thing to the next, doing nothing of any use at all—and although all I have to do is read a few scientific papers and send a few emails, I don’t manage any of it. A few hours later, I am stressed, frustrated, and have even more to do the next day.

  In brain terms, a lack of focus and a susceptibility to procrastination are two sides of the same coin—they are both hallmarks of a brain that is not under proper control of its owner. And I’m not the only one who struggles with this problem. In one recent survey, 80 percent of students and 20 to 25 percent of adults admitted to being chronic procrastinators.1 Although we like to kid ourselves that all of this makes us more creative, the evidence suggests that it actually leads to stress, illness, and relationship problems.

  Apart from anything else, letting the mind wander off doesn’t seem to make us any happier. In another study, researchers interrupted people during the day to ask what they were doing and to score their level of happiness. They found that when people were daydreaming about something pleasant, it only made them about as happy as they were when they were on task. The rest of the time, mind-wandering actually made them less happy than they had been getting on with their work.2

  It was while I was banging my head on the desk in frustration one day that I remembered Joe DeGutis, a neuroscientist at Harvard University. We had spoken a few years before, for an article I was writing, and I knew that cognitive training in general, and attention in particular, was very much his thing. So I emailed him to see if he might be able to help sort me out. As it turned out, he and Mike Esterman, of Boston University, had been working on a combination of computer-based training and magnetic brain stimulation (also known as TMS) to help people focus better. So far, they had found that their program seemed to improve people's ability to sustain attention. Like in most neuroscience studies, they had only tried it on people with serious problems—from brain injuries, strokes, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). I couldn’t help but wonder: might it work for me too?

  Probably not, came the reply. It's one thing to improve a brain from clinically hopeless to about average, but getting from a bit below par to a bit over is not an easy thing to do—or measure. But Joe and Mike humored me anyway and sent me a link to a pared-down online version of the sustained-attention test they use in the lab. They also sent over several questionnaires, which would measure things like how often I make silly mistakes because I’m not paying attention (quite often), and a “mindlessness” scale, which would measure how much I wander around in a daze (a lot).

  I sent it all back to them, and the next day the cold, hard truth hit my inbox. I had scored 51 percent on the attention test—a good 20 percent below average. And the questionnaires were pretty telling too. “Considering all your results, it's very clear that you have issues with attention and distractibility both in the lab and in daily life,” wrote Joe. Then, to soften the blow, they invited me over to see if they could help. No promises, but they’d do their best.

  A month or so later, I arrived at the VA Medical Center hospital in Boston, where Joe and Mike have been running the Boston Attention and Learning Lab since the year 2000. The VA is part of the US government's Department of Veteran Affairs, a body that provides lifetime healthcare for American soldiers. Many returning war veterans have difficulties in sustaining attention, so there is a steady stream of willing volunteers for Joe and Mike's studies. Post-traumatic stress is particularly problematic. When people spend their lives in a heightened state of anxiety, their attention is scattered all over the place, constantly looking for danger, leaving nothing in the tank to focus on any one particular thing. Head injuries can cause similar problems, as can strokes, because attention uses so many different brain areas, if something goes wrong with the brain, the chances are that attention will suffer. And since so many other brain skills—including memory, reasoning, and even holding a train of thought while you do a task—are built on the foundations of controlled attention, losing it can be seriously debilitating.

  Walking into the VA hospital is a unique experience, to say the least. I’m not sure where the United Kingdom keeps all its war veterans, but a lot of the American ones seem to be here, under a portrait of Barack Obama, and with the American flag flying overhead. There is a real mix of ages, from younger people in wheelchairs who look as if they sustained their injuries in recent conflicts, to those who look about the right age to have fought in Vietnam. Many of them are proudly wearing veteran caps and T-shirts, and sit in the lobby comparing experiences as they wait for their appointments. There must be more stories in these four walls than anywhere else in the city—and I’m dying to hear a few, but it doesn’t seem right for a cheerful Brit to butt in and start asking questions about things I know nothing about.

  So I wait with them and try not to look too out of place. Luckily, it's not too long before Mike and Joe appear and show me to their office upstairs. “It's quite an interesting place to work,” Mike says as a chatty veteran in his eighties, who isn’t making a lot of sense, wishes us a good day and gets out of the elevator.

  What they call the “Mike and Joe show” is soon in full swing, and I can tell that it's going to be a fun week. Joe is energetic and positive, talks fast, and bounces around like someone who has way too much mental energy on board. He later tells me he needs his own research as much as anyone. “It's not like we have all the answers,” he says. “We’re kind of doing ‘me-search.’” Mike is more reserved, but just as enthusiastic, and he's diligent about making sure that I have signed all the correct disclaimers before we get going, and occasionally reining in his exuberant partner in crime. In this particular double act, Mike has reluctantly landed the role of the “sensible one.”

  Get him on the subject of brain stimulation, though, and he really perks up. They take me down to the room where we’ll be doing the brain zapping—a disused hospital room that was last decorated in bright orange around fifty years ago. There is a huge black chair where the bed should be, an ancient X-ray viewer, and two clocks that clearly haven’t ticked in years.

  The chair is part of the TMS machine, which they will be using to zap me in the head the following day. And Mike can’t wait to give me a demonstration of what it can do. “It's fascinating,” he says as he moves the magnet over the motor cortex of his own brain, which controls movement, and watches his hand twitch involuntarily. “This is how we test that the machine is working. Sometimes I come down here and do it just for fun,” he adds with a grin.

  Watching the machine take control of his brain and body, I realize that this is the perfect demonstration that our every move and decision comes down to pulses of electrical activity in the brain. Of course, we all know this, but there is something unsettling about seeing that system being hijacked in front of your eyes.

  Soon, it’ll be my turn. But first I’ve got two hours of assessments to get a baseline measure of my skills—or lack of them—in this particular week and a brain scan so they can map out which region they want to stimulate.

  First comes the full version of the sustained-attention test I did at home—a test that Mike has affectionately nicknamed “Don
’t Touch Betty.” My task is to look for the only female face (“Betty’s”) among a constant stream of male faces as they fade into each other at the rate of about one a second. When I see a male face I press a button, but when Betty pops up I “don’t touch.” It sounds easy, but the faces are all black and white and are surrounded by black-and-white scenes of mountain- and city-scapes, which fade into each other at different speeds to the changing faces.

  The test lasts for twelve minutes, but it feels much, much longer. I’m finding it not so much difficult as physically impossible. Even when I spot Betty, there never seems to be enough time to tell my hand not to press the button. I spend the whole twelve minutes berating myself as Betty's Mona Lisa smile starts to look more and more mocking. In fact, I’m convinced that Mike and Joe will wonder if I even understood the instructions when they look at my results. I quickly assure them that I did before we move on to the next tests.

  There are several tests, each of which measures a different aspect of attention. In one, called “blink,” a stream of letters flashes by at top speed. I am supposed to spot the two numbers that are thrown in among them. This is a test of brain efficiency—of how quickly my attention circuitry can reset itself and spot something new. My guess is not very, judging by how often my guess at the second number is a total stab in the dark.