My Plastic Brain Read online

  Jonas takes me to Ernst's office—which looks pretty much like every scientist's office I have been to: a plain white room with piles of papers from floor to ceiling and all over the desk. While Jonas goes off to get us a coffee, Ernst welcomes me in and apologizes in advance for the terrible coffee I am about to drink. He listens, seeming both interested and a little amused, to my bumbling explanation of what I’m trying to do to my brain. I can’t help wondering if these researchers think I’m on some kind of fool's errand and are politely humoring me because it makes a change from writing grant proposals. Does he really believe that he can turn my worry-prone mind into a chilled-out positive one in just a few weeks? I guess we’ll see.

  A few minutes later, there is a knock at the door and in come two of his research team. Ayse Berna Sari is shy and friendly, with the doe eyes of Audrey Hepburn and the big hair of Amy Winehouse. She and Alvaro Sanchez Lopez (who is a lot closer to the common stereotype of a scientist) point out to us both that it's going to be difficult for me to try their attentional-bias training program because it involves disentangling emotion-laden sentences—and they are all in Dutch (the main language spoken in this part of Belgium). Instead, they say, they can give me the working-memory training program that Berna has been working on and see if it improves my performance on Alvaro's tests. In a recent study, they have found it to be useful in changing people's cognitive biases after just a couple of weeks of training five days per week. Despite everything I have already heard about working-memory training, and the controversy over whether it works, it all sounds very intriguing.

  First come the now-familiar baseline tests, for which they take me to a white breeze-block-walled room with tiny windows too high to see out of. What is it with psychologists and their stark, windowless rooms? It's no wonder they do so well at finding anxiety in more or less normal people.

  The first test was a more sophisticated version of the cognitive-bias test I did earlier, online. On the computer screen in front of me, a circle of black-and-white faces pop up briefly on the screen. Berna tells me they will either look angry, happy, or neutral. If all faces match, I am to do nothing. If one is different from the others, I press the spacebar.

  It's actually surprisingly uncomfortable to have so many faces staring at you at once. The angry ones feel threatening, but, if anything, the neutral ones are worse—their blank stares make me wonder what they are thinking. I find this in real life, too. I’d rather someone was looking at me as if I was a piece of scum than just staring blankly. At least I’d know what I was dealing with. The smiling ones are kind of comforting, though—they give me the warm, fuzzy feeling of being in a roomful of friends who like me the way I am. Consciously, I’d much rather look at the happy folk, but, like the online version I’d done, Berna's results show that it actually takes me longer—about forty milliseconds longer—to drag my eyes away from angry faces and spot a happy one than it does to find a single angry person in a sea of smilers (see figure 2.4).

  It doesn’t sound like a lot, thirty-one to forty milliseconds, but compared to participants in their previous experiments, it is quite high, Ernst tells me later. In a 2006 study, high trait-anxious people had a negative bias of ten to thirty milliseconds, compared to less than ten milliseconds in low-anxious folk.13 Again, I find myself lingering near the end of the scale based on volunteers from previous studies. Oh dear.

  Figure 2.4. It took me forty milliseconds longer to look away from angry faces than happy ones, despite the angry ones making me feel uncomfortable.

  After a few more baseline measurements—including one particularly horrible test where I have to look at photographs of sick babies and lonely old people, and then try to come up with a positive spin on the situation before rating how upset I feel—I go for a walk to rest my eyes. On the way back, I spot Alvaro in a room, setting up his eye-tracking experiments for me to try later. I persuade him to let me have a go at the eye-tracker now, and it's all good fun until Berna appears and gently points out that I’m in the middle of assessment and supposed to be taking a break. Fair point, but I make sure to get straight back to the eye-tracking room as soon as Berna has finished with me.

  The last time I tried an eye-tracker in a psychology lab, about ten years ago, it looked like something out of Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange—a pair of enormous glasses attached to a headset with cameras that stare into your eyes. But not anymore. Now, the equipment looks like a shiny pair of speakers attached to the bottom of a computer screen. Apparently, the shiny bit beams infrared light into the eyes, and a hidden camera in the screen is picking up the reflections from the pupils. Human eyes can’t see infrared, so the only clue that the machine is following my eye movements is when Alvaro begins calibrating the machine and two white dots appear on the screen: the computer’s-eye view of my pupils.

  It looks as if an inquisitive little robot is looking back at me from the screen. When I blink, it blinks. When I tilt my head, it tilts its head, too. It's like having a virtual pet—I’m sure there's an app in this somewhere. It soon has all three of us in fits of giggles, until Alvaro snaps back into researcher mode and instructs me to stay still so he can finish the calibration. I do as I’m told and track a red dot around the screen while the eye-tracker follows my eyes.

  First, Alvaro shows me their Dutch-language training test. Six words come up on the screen; I’m told each series of words makes up a jumbled-up emotional sentence, but only using five of the words. For example, “I a person am useless worthwhile.” Depending on the direction of their bias, people tend to either make positive sentences (“I am a worthwhile person”) or negative ones (“I am a useless person”). The eye-tracker can spot where your eyes first go to—so even if someone comes up with a positive sentence in the end, the computer knows you looked at the negative option first. Clever. As a training device, as the eye-tracker measures where your eyes flick to first, the words change color: green for positive words and red for negative ones. Your aim is to go straight to the positive ones and avoid the red. I only know two phrases in Dutch, and both of them involve swearing, so clearly I have no chance of doing this test properly. After a couple of examples flash up on the screen, though, we both start to laugh. Even in a foreign language, my eyes seem drawn like a magnet to the negative words. Figures.

  Next, Alvaro sends me back to the other room for a bout of working-memory training with Berna. I am to do two twenty-minute sessions and then do the horrible photos tests again—my least favorite so far—to see if anything has changed. I am skeptical that anything will change after just forty minutes of training, but Berna tells me that they have seen a shift in experiments on larger numbers of people, so it isn’t impossible. And, she says, the people with the most negative cognitive bias were the ones whose score improved the most after training.

  Figure 2.5. Dual N-back working-memory training. You can download the game at http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net. (Courtesy of Paul Hoskinson and Jonathan Toomim)

  So, after two more really difficult twenty-minute working-memory sessions, I again find myself looking at miserable photos. Depending on whether the word “appraise” or “reappraise” pops up on the screen afterward, I am to spend the next thirty seconds dwelling on either the most miserable explanation or how there was a positive outcome in the end. When the picture showed a baby in an incubator, for example, I could either focus on the suffering of the baby and its parents, and the odds of it not surviving, or imagine that baby growing up big and strong and leading a happy and fulfilling life. Before and after each of my little reveries about the picture, I had to rate how I felt on a scale of 0 (all right, actually) to 9 (utterly miserable). I find this test pretty difficult; you only get a few seconds to think about each picture, which doesn’t feel long enough to generate any real emotion—and the scoring seems rather fixed: who wouldn’t rate their mood as improving after putting a positive spin on a sad picture? It all feels a bit forced. Still, I am intrigued to see if my scores have changed from
before the working-memory training.

  And according to this very quick bout of working-memory training, it did change my ability to compute different options (see figure 2.6). I even scored better than the average volunteer, for once.

  The idea behind improving working memory is that it buys room in the mind to weigh up different interpretations of a situation—to do the math of is it really all that bad or is it possible that I am overreacting?

  I can’t say I’m convinced that my results above reflect any real change in my thought processes in general, but at least if you take the scores with a huge pinch of salt (comparing one person against the average isn’t what happens in science studies; they work by calculating averages from large numbers of people), it does look as if it may have briefly improved my ability to think a bit more positively. Would I do the training every day, though? It's quite boring…. Well, I’m about to find out because I have promised to do their working-memory training for three weeks. Partly to see if it does anything for my anxious streak, and partly to test the brain-training spiel about an improved working memory making you smarter in general.

  A few days after I get home from Ghent, though, I take a hiatus in my training when Elaine emails asking if I would like to take part in a training study in her lab in Oxford. Elaine's is a real study that will be published in a scientific journal at some point, and I don’t want to mess up her results by doing two lots of training. So I put the Ghent experiment on the back burner while I go to Oxford.

  Figure 2.6. I started off with a below-average ability to think positively about ambiguous photos but then, after forty minutes of working-memory training, shot ahead. The average is taken from the group's previous research.

  The day before I am due at Elaine's lab, I get an email from Alex Temple-McCune telling me where to be and when. The email ends with a polite request to please arrive there on time. By now, I’ve had quite a lot of experience with cognitive psychologists, and I can’t help wondering if this is some kind of trick to get me worrying for the purposes of the experiment.

  They needn’t have bothered. My traveling to Oxford coincides with a train strike, and the train I had been planning to get had been canceled. The evening before I’m due in Oxford for the experiment, my anxiety levels go through the roof as I hastily make arrangements to drop my son off with a friend before school, so that I can get an earlier train. That night, I dream about empty train stations, being unable to find my car to drive to the station, and generally running around trying to get there on time.

  It all works out fine, and (despite the taxi driver triumphantly announcing “here we are” on Keble Street, when I’d asked for South Parks Road, leaving me a good ten-minute walk from the lab) I get there bang on time and am met at the door by a smiling Alex.

  First, I have to fill in multiple questionnaires about my state of mind today (state) and in general (trait). I have done a lot of these now, and they don’t get any more stimulating. Then I go on to do what I think is a working-memory test, involving colored shapes in various positions on the screen, which I am supposed to remember having seen them for a fraction of a second. I do several sessions back to back (there are opportunities for short breaks, but I’m not really sure where to look or what else to do—I’m in a white concrete box, and it doesn’t feel like the time for making polite chitchat).

  Then Alex asks me to swap chairs so that we can do what sounds a lot like mindfulness meditation. My job is to focus on my breathing for five minutes and if my mind wanders try to bring it back to focusing on breathing. Randomly, the computer will beep and I have to tell Alex whether I am focused on breathing or on another thought. If it's another thought, I have to tell him if it is positive, negative, or neutral, along with a few words describing the thought. It's incredibly embarrassing. Examples of my thoughts include the following: This room is really cold-looking; I hope I don’t fall asleep; I think I’ve got a headache coming; I hope I’m not ruining their experiment; This is taking ages. All of them are negative. Some I don’t even admit to. The thought, “Has he noticed I missed my knees when I shaved my legs?” I kept to myself.

  Then comes the “five-minute worry.” This is as awful as I expected. I can see the car hitting my boy outside of my house and what it does to his head. I can see him lying there covered in blood and me screaming. I can imagine him being in the hospital in a coma, and the possible horrible outcomes—death, paralysis, brain damage. By the time Alex comes back in, I am in a right state, feeling exhausted, tense, and downright miserable.

  And now we are going to do the breathing exercise again. This time my thoughts start off even more negative: I want to go to sleep; I can see the horrible things I imagined in the five minutes; I’ve had enough of this. Gradually, I go back to some kind of baseline, my last thought being, I feel more relaxed now than I did at the start.

  At the end of all this, I feel like a wrung-out rag and I’m happy when they demonstrate the training I’m to do and then let me go. The training will take about an hour a day, every day—even weekends—and I’m going to do it for ten days. The lab can track my progress online, so they will know if I’ve been skiving. Yep, okay, anything you say, just get me out of here. Alex walks me around for a quick chat with Elaine and, still looking a bit concerned about my state of mind, says good-bye.

  POSITIVE-THINKING BRAINWASH GUINEA PIG: THE OXFORD STUDY

  When I get home and start my training, it quickly becomes clear that I have been assigned to the control condition for the working-memory part of the study. This I’m not happy about, but unfortunately this is the way randomized trials work: each subject is randomly assigned to a group whether the subject is a student volunteer or a nosy journalist wanting to have a go. I’m not supposed to know it's the control condition, but I happen to know from my time in Ghent that this kind of training should get harder as you improve—and it has been on the easiest level for ages, despite my near-perfect scores.

  I’m pretty sure I’m in the active (training) condition for the interpretive bias part of the study, though. The training is basically twenty minutes of audio of a lady with a lovely, gentle Dutch accent reading little stories about situations that you could view either negatively or positively. The situations all take the form of the following: “So this happened, you freaked out about it, then decided it was probably fine. Is it fine?” The correct answer, clearly, is, “Yes.” I get a green frame and a ding! for a correct answer and a red frame and a buzz for a wrong answer. It starts to feel slightly hypnotic, as if I’m being brainwashed into seeing the brighter side of situations.

  Stranger still, when a stressful situation happens in real life, I find I’m talking myself down in a calm Dutch accent. Okay, so there are only ten minutes before I have to take my son to school, and I still haven’t made it into the shower. But my son is fed and in his uniform, his bag is packed and by the door, and I have cleared the kitchen after breakfast. I have just enough time to shower, dress, brush my teeth, and go. Normally, I’d spend this last ten minutes of the morning running around, shouting at everyone, and tripping over the dog. But today…“Is it going to be fine? Yeeeessss.”

  It doesn’t take long for the Zen to wear off, though. When the study is over, I try to invoke the calming voice of the Dutch lady whenever I worry, but, increasingly, it feels forced. Worse, Alex won’t tell me whether my two weeks of brainwashing made me any better at staying calm during the five-minute worry, because they will be analyzing everyone's results together when they have collected all the data—another annoying feature of being in a real study, it turns out. But while it seems my ability to think positive probably did shift a bit, the effect barely lasted a week; so, even if it did give them an interesting result for their experiment, I don’t think it is the cure I was hoping for. And if it takes twenty minutes of boring brainwashing every day to achieve, I don’t think it would be a viable long-term strategy anyway.

  So it's back to the working-memory training from Ghent, with a sid
e order of online click the smiley face—a bit of cognitive bias and a bit of increasing the mental workspace. I do the exercises religiously, every day for six weeks—even on holiday—and then take the cognitive bias and optimism tests again.

  And…something changes.

  Figure 2.7. Before training, I had a resolutely negative bias compared to my optimistic friend Jolyon. After training, my cognitive bias shifted toward, and eventually past, his. My optimism score, however, remained stable.

  I email Elaine the results. After pointing out that it's difficult to make real assessments from a sample of one, she did say this: “Clearly your bias has shifted from negative to positive. This indicates that your attention is automatically now shifting towards the positive images, whereas previous it was automatically pulled by the negative—more similar to your optimistic friend. So all good and as expected.”

  I keep the training up over the following weeks and months, and it goes even further—way past the giddy heights of Jolyon and heading toward 100 percent. Interestingly, though, my natural pessimism score stays stubbornly where it began. I might worry less, but I don’t expect everything to go my way.

  Another measure of change is to redo the standardized anxiety scale (STAI-T) that I did at the start of this process, in Ernst Koster's lab in Ghent. And again, it seems as if something has shifted. Before, my score on the trait-anxiety scale was 60/80. After, it was 49. “There is a decrease, indeed,” wrote Koster, to my mind sounding a little unimpressed. Actually, it might be quite significant. According to research on large groups of people, a score of less than 48 indicates no anxiety at all, whereas 60 is pretty high—the kind of score you’d expect from someone with an anxiety disorder. Which is good news and bad, as far as I’m concerned. I started this process thinking I was just your average worrier. It looks as if I started off with a big problem—but on the plus side, I have turned it around, and my score looks vaguely normal.14 It's a success of sorts….