My Plastic Brain Page 6

  “Not structurally,” say Mike and Joe in unison, keen to rid me of any notions that they have rebuilt my brain. “But functionally, how you engage the brain…something is different,” says Mike. That means that, while I might not have wired in a completely new circuit, the one I already have might be working more efficiently.

  In a way, that's even more exciting because it means that you don’t have to make huge structural changes to the brain to fundamentally change the way it works and—crucially—the way you experience life. Just a bit of effort in the right direction can seemingly make all the difference.

  It does mean that it's not easy to tell exactly what changed in my brain because we didn’t do the training in the brain scanner or do a before-and-after MRI scan. This isn’t because they forgot: MRI provides only a broad-brush picture of the brain, and, after only a few days, such changes, at the level of a few connections here and there, would be too small to show up. So we have to extrapolate from other studies and some of the psychological tests they asked me to do earlier in the week. Which is actually how science often works: comparing new results to an existing body of knowledge to work out what might have happened.

  It seems that the changes Joe has measured, and I have felt, come down to the way the training has been designed. The first thing is that it is no accident that the training is boring—it has to be or otherwise it wouldn’t tax your attention. In one pilot study where another group of researchers tried to make the training more exciting for children, all the benefits of the boring version promptly disappeared. Joe tells me that the boringness engages something called “tonic attention,” which is best described as an ongoing “ready” state where you are watching to see when the target will pop up, while the unpredictable nature of the targets taxes “phasic attention,” or moment-to-moment fluctuations in alertness. The best state of mind for catching all the target images is one in which you engage tonic attention just enough to keep track of things, while being alert enough to react when a target pops up.

  In other words, you have to be in the “zone”: that elusive sweet spot where everything feels not too difficult yet challenging enough. That's why Mike and Joe were looking for a 50 percent–correct score to build on in the training: this is each person's individual “zone,” and, once they’ve found it, they can start to ramp up the difficulty and gradually build up the skills. It took them a while to find my zone, but once they had, halfway through day three, I was able to build on it, making it the go-to state that my brain used whenever I needed to pay attention.

  It certainly feels as if I’ve accessed this state now. But what is the zone exactly? Neuroscientists have been trying to answer this for years, with various levels of success. But Mike believes it is a state of attention where there is perfect balance between the dorsal attention network and another circuit, called the default-mode network. These are bits of the brain that are activated when we are thinking creatively, or mind-wandering, or not thinking about anything in particular.

  Figure 1.3. My brain and the “mind-wandering” circuit. (With permission from Mike Esterman and Joe DeGutis)

  In a recent set of experiments, the Boston team found that when mind-wandering activity was at its highest, people were far more likely to make an error on a Betty-style test; more activity in the attention network proved better. Too much of either, though, backfired, and people were unable to stay on task for long periods.5

  So the ideal state to aim for is not one with this mind-wandering mode turned off completely. It must have evolved for a reason—most probably for hunting and gathering purposes; a state of mind that allows you to scan the surroundings, waiting for something interesting to crop up, is useful in an unpredictable environment. Nowadays, it serves us well when we are casting around for ideas or just need a mental break. On the other hand, focusing hard is too exhausting to keep up for long, so the best way to sustain focus over minutes to hours is to turn it down a little bit—let the mind wander when it wants to but not too far before bringing it back.

  Because I didn’t do the tests in the MRI scanner, there's no way of seeing what was actually happening in my brain, but a more consistent reaction speed on the Betty test also proved to be a sign of being in the zone. And I became way more consistent on the Betty test after my week in Boston.

  Perhaps I started using the same basic circuits more efficiently by engaging the right side of the network more, or by doing a better job of nipping my wandering mind in the bud. With the laws of brain plasticity being what they are, over time this might add up to larger areas of brain tissue and more connections between different parts of the dorsal attention network. Eventually, it might become part of who I am, just like my butterfly brain is now.

  “Is that it?” I asked. Could focusing better be a simple matter of getting into a relaxed state of mind, concentrating, and letting the mind wander occasionally? It seems so. “There are these fluctuations in performance and these go along with fluctuations in the brain. That may be a property of the brain—it needs to fluctuate, it's going to fluctuate…” Mike begins, and then Joe jumps in, excitedly, the way he does. “Embrace the fluctuations!” he exclaims. “These ultimate states of attention are flow—you’re on the ocean and you’re riding into it and you’re engaged….” “And it's not unpleasant,” Mike jumps back in. “That's key. It's hard, but it's not bothering you.”

  Going with the flow has never been my natural state, and Tim Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University, in Canada, and author of the 2013 book Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, has some suggestions as to why. He says that failing to concentrate is a basic flaw of the human psyche that we are all prone to, to a certain extent, but that some personality traits make it more likely than others. Three traits in particular hijack focus: impulsivity, anxiety, and a lack of conscientiousness. In tests I have done so far, I score high on two out of the three.

  First, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-T) measures how prone you are to (usually pointless) worrying. When Mike gives me scores on this measure, he starts to look a little uncomfortable. “So, errr…this isn’t a clinical measure…but, you did happen to score relatively high on trait anxiety.” I’m actually in the eighty-sixth percentile—another way of saying that, out of one hundred people, eighty-six of them are less anxious than me.

  Mike's hesitance to reveal this particular result makes me think that I am probably on the cusp of some kind of anxiety disorder. Given the prevalence of neuroses in my family, that wouldn’t be much of a surprise. But I feel as if I should justify myself, and I point out that if you’re not anxious then you probably haven’t understood the seriousness of the situation. “Absolutely,” says Joe. “If you’re not worried then you’re probably in a job that will be replaced by robots!”

  Perhaps. But whether you call it anxiety or realism, it certainly doesn’t help the brain to focus—which makes a lot of sense in evolutionary terms: if you’re trapped in a cave, with lions closing in from every side, now is probably not the time to sit down and focus on knapping the perfect spear tip. The brain has a mechanism to widen focus when danger is near. Likewise, getting stressed about not being able to concentrate only releases a flood of stress hormones into the brain, and they don’t help in the slightest. “When you’re not too anxious and you’re not too engaged and you’re kind of in this sweet spot, these certain receptors in the prefrontal cortex called the alpha-2A receptors are on. And if you get too stressed, they shut off,” Joe says.

  So the key to focusing better is to relax and not try so hard. Absolutely, says Joe: “If you’re always on then you can grind yourself into a little nub, and you’re fighting yourself the whole time and you do worse work.”

  On top of that, being worried also takes up brainpower that could otherwise be used to stop the brain's impulsive tendencies to skip off and think about something else. I scored high on the standardized test of impulsivity, too.

  Low conscientiousness, though, doesn’t sound like me—I’v
e always been a massive swot—and, sure enough, I score pretty high on the conscientiousness scale. But might this also be part of the problem? What if my impulsive streak is constantly trying to take me off task and my conscientious streak is desperate to stay on track? Is there some kind of mental tug-of-war between these two traits? If so, given my anxious temperament, this is only going to cause worry and stress, and shut off those all-important receptors that I need in order to be able to focus.

  What a mess. But at least my week with Joe and Mike seems to have sorted that out. Joe whips out a graph of error rates across all my sessions. “In the beginning, it was 90 percent, and then we were playing with things and we were trying to get you below 50 percent. You can see this big drop here, and then another big drop, and then the last couple of days you were just kicking butt. I was like ‘wow,’ and everyone in the lab was like, ‘What? That's not possible,’” he admits.

  In fact, he tells me, even compared to the PTSD and stroke patients they have worked with, it was a huge improvement. “You’re going from basically making a mistake 90 percent of the time to like, ‘Oh, I've totally got this.’” Like doing progressively more sit-ups each day to strengthen stomach muscles, the training does seem to have strengthened the brain circuits behind a “relaxed and ready” or “flow” state of mind and made them work more efficiently. And, because the brain always chooses the well-trodden path over a less well-used network, being in the zone should soon become my default state of mind when I sit down to work.

  Then Joe gives me the bad news. My newfound calm almost certainly won’t last unless I do something to keep it going. It's the downside of adult brain training, apparently. Just like physical exercise, you have to keep at it or you’ll end up as flabby as before. And since my personality and brain are primed for mind-wandering, I will probably slip back toward the butterfly baseline where I started. “The dose you had will probably last two or three weeks,” he says apologetically.

  Now what? Joe promises to send me more training when I get home, but I can’t expect him to do that forever, and I can’t keep crossing the Atlantic for extra brain stimulation sessions. And there's no app I can take home with me either. Joe and Mike are more than happy to admit that they still don’t exactly know what the training does to the brain—and indeed if it really does transfer to everyday life, especially in healthy people who manage to lead a normal life. In fact, they have never tried this on someone who didn’t have serious problems with their brain before, and they are as interested as I am to see how I get on after I get home.

  So did I keep the calm, even when the demands of juggling a young child, work, and chores kicked back in? Actually, yes. For a few weeks, I felt as relaxed and focused as I had during my stay in Boston. Life was good—easy even. Things that previously would have sent my concentration running for the hills, like playing Lego with my son when I had a million jobs to do, were actually pretty enjoyable.

  Although that feeling was never going to last, afterward, I at least could remember what it felt like to be in the zone that I had practiced in Boston. And when I found myself not in the zone, I could now at least notice it and try to do something about it. Thankfully, it turned out that there are other ways to get the same effect, and there are a few decent scientific studies that indicate how.

  One of the best options is meditation. It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise—after all, Buddhist monks have been working at sitting still and being calm for centuries. Part of the reason for my starting on this journey was that when I looked into how to apply what we know about plasticity to my own brain, the only practical advice I could find involved meditation. But meditation has always sounded a little too new age for me—and, seriously, who has the time?

  Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, thinks I should make the time, if only for ten minutes a day—but every day. Lazar has spent years studying the effects of meditation on the brain and has found that long-term meditators have lower activity in a region of the brain called the posterior cingulate cortex, part of the default-mode network that controls mind-wandering. Even after an eight-week course of mindfulness meditation, she tells me, there are changes in the brains of total beginners.

  Yoga is almost as good, apparently, and since I do that at least once a week, I am already at least some of the way there. “People tell me they don’t meditate, they do yoga—but yoga is really a moving meditation,” she says. Lazar suggests maybe doing twenty minutes of yoga every day instead. I manage it for about a week, and then the good intentions start to wear off.

  There are other options, though, and at least one of them has proven much easier to keep to, because it involves almost no effort. In lab studies, people who have run out of steam on an attention task were able to rejuvenate their attention simply by spending a few minutes looking at a picture of a natural scene. Looking at city scenes had no such effect, which seems to suggest that there is something magical about looking at, or preferably spending time in, the great outdoors. Other studies show that it works even better if you exercise at the same time.

  Like all that mirror writing at school, I may already have stumbled upon a solution, having recently taken on a restless sheepdog puppy who needs a lot of running around outside. Now, whenever my brain starts to misbehave, I stop what I’m doing and take him for a stomp through the woods. So far, nine times out of ten it does the trick. After a long, muddy walk, I feel about as close to my Boston self as I have since coming home from that trip.

  Ultimately, though—and I don’t have any scientific data to back this up, but Joe agrees that it's plausible—anything that gets the brain into the same relaxed-and-ready state that I reached in training should have a similar effect. The key is to find something you like doing, then do it at a level that's just difficult enough that you have to concentrate but easy enough that you still enjoy the experience. For me, that's yoga or a long walk in the woods; for my husband, it's climbing up a high rock face. For others, it's singing in a choir, swimming in cold lakes, running marathons, or playing in a band. Whatever it is, my experience with the advantages of getting in the zone suggests that it's a good idea to do it as often as possible—and, with a bit of luck, that relaxed but focused state of mind will become a default zone, just waiting for when you need it (see the box below: Attention-Hacking for Beginners).

  For now, I would say that hacking my attention system is very much a work in progress. I still have butterfly days but not nearly as many—and having scientific data that backs up the idea that I’ll get more done if I take a break and go outside helps me stop and get serious about resetting my brain's attention network. And at least I now know what the zone feels like, and I’m more aware of when I’m in it—and importantly, when I’m so far out of it that I might as well abandon my desk for half an hour and go for a walk. More than that, though, I had set out to ask the question of whether I can use neuroscience to improve my focus, and the answer is a resounding yes—albeit in a slightly different way to how I had expected.

  Mike and Joe don’t seem to think that I have made any structural changes to the way my brain is wired. But, even so, I can feel that there has definitely been a change, more likely brought about by changing the way I am able to use what I already have. The zone has always been there; perhaps, it's just that I have never been able to control it before. If so, then my new, better-focused mind should be more capable of bringing about change in other areas of my brain.

  The next step is to curb that anxious streak. After all, if my anxiety is getting in the way of focus, it's getting in the way of everything that requires focus, too. If I can change that—and there are plenty of scientists doing research on anxiety—then maybe other cognitive tasks will get easier. And although I have a hunch that my anxious tendencies stem from a genetic glitch running down the female line of my family, in theory, genetics are nothing compared to the powers of brain plasticity. Or are they? It sounds like the perfect challenge to tackle next. Worry genes ver
sus bloody-mindedness and brain plasticity? Bring it on.

  ATTENTION-HACKING FOR BEGINNERS

  Stop stressing. Stress releases a flood of hormones into the brain that tells your brain to widen its focus to look for danger and then zooms in—probably on the wrong thing entirely.

  Find something that you enjoy that requires focus but is relaxing and enjoyable. It might be a sport, a craft, learning a language, cooking, chess—whatever. But find it ASAP. It gets your brain into the right zone.

  Practice point 2. A lot. And never, ever, feel guilty about taking the time out to do it (see point 1). The zone needs practice so that it is strong enough when you really need it.

  Aim to meditate for forty minutes once a week and ten minutes every other day. If (like me) you can’t sit still, “moving meditations” such as yoga, swimming, or walking might do the trick.

  While you are waiting for your brain to change and make this all seem a little easier, there are a few strategies that have some scientific credibility to back them up. These include the following:

  Make your task visually stimulating or add background noise to max out your perceptual system and leave mind-wandering behind.

  Take regular breaks, preferably outdoors. These must be a total distraction from whatever you are doing—something that is either mentally taxing or takes all of your focus. Loud music or strenuous exercise might be a good option.

  THE MEDITATION DIARIES: PART 1

  What, you might ask, is my problem with meditation? Evidence has been mounting for some time that it is really good for the brain, so why don’t I just breathe in, breathe out, and give it a go?

  If I’m totally honest, my problem with meditation is not only that it involves so much sitting quietly, although that is clearly a problem for me. It's also the fact that when people who do a lot of meditation tell you about how great it is, they always do it with this…look. It's the kind of look you often find on the faces of devout religious types who really hope you will see the light too. There's a slightly smug undercurrent that implies they really feel sorry for you not having found it yet, and for some reason this makes me incredibly angry. Perhaps it's because I pride myself on being a natural skeptic. I like to start from the basis that everything is rubbish, questioning everything until I’m sure I’m not being taken for a ride. So, while I like the sound of the brain benefits, if I start with that dreamy half-smile look, you have my permission to smack me because I’ve clearly been brainwashed.