Bionic Brains
You must remember this
It doesn't matter how brainy you are or
how much education you've had - you can still improve and expand your
mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn't have to mean studying hard
or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques
and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour
that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your
brain cells. And here are 11 of them.
Smart drugs
Does getting old have to mean worsening memory, slower reactions and
fuzzy thinking?
AROUND the age of 40, honest folks may
already admit to noticing changes in their mental abilities. This is the
beginning of a gradual decline that in all too many of us will culminate
in full-blown dementia. If it were possible somehow to reverse it, slow
it or mask it, wouldn't you?
A few drugs that might do the job, known
as "cognitive enhancement", are already on the market, and a few dozen
others are on the way. Perhaps the best-known is modafinil. Licensed to
treat narcolepsy, the condition that causes people to suddenly fall
asleep, it has notable effects in healthy people too. Modafinil can keep
a person awake and alert for 90 hours straight, with none of the
jitteriness and bad concentration that amphetamines or even coffee seem
to produce.
In fact, with the help of modafinil,
sleep-deprived people can perform even better than their well-rested,
unmedicated selves. The forfeited rest doesn't even need to be made
good. Military research is finding that people can stay awake for 40
hours, sleep the normal 8 hours, and then pull a few more all-nighters
with no ill effects. It's an open secret that many, perhaps most,
prescriptions for modafinil are written not for people who suffer from
narcolepsy, but for those who simply want to stay awake. Similarly, many
people are using Ritalin not because they suffer from attention deficit
or any other disorder, but because they want superior concentration
during exams or heavy-duty negotiations.
The pharmaceutical pipeline is clogged
with promising compounds - drugs that act on the nicotinic receptors
that smokers have long exploited, drugs that work on the cannabinoid
system to block pot-smoking-type effects. Some drugs have also been
specially designed to augment memory. Many of these look genuinely
plausible: they seem to work, and without any major side effects.
So why aren't we all on cognitive
enhancers already? "We need to be careful what we wish for," says
Daniele Piomelli at the University of California at Irvine. He is
studying the body's cannabinoid system with a view to making memories
less emotionally charged in people suffering from post-traumatic stress
disorder. Tinkering with memory may have unwanted effects, he warns.
"Ultimately we may end up remembering things we don't want to."
Gary Lynch, also at UC Irvine, voices a
similar concern. He is the inventor of ampakines, a class of drugs that
changes the rules about how a memory is encoded and how strong a memory
trace is - the essence of learning (see
New Scientist, 14
May, p 6). But maybe the rules have already been optimised by evolution,
he suggests. What looks to be an improvement could have hidden
downsides.
Still, the opportunity may be too
tempting to pass up. The drug acts only in the brain, claims Lynch. It
has a short half-life of hours. Ampakines have been shown to restore
function to severely sleep-deprived monkeys that would otherwise perform
poorly. Preliminary studies in humans are just as exciting. You could
make an elderly person perform like a much younger person, he says. And
who doesn't wish for that?
Food for thought
You are what you eat, and that includes your brain. So what is the
ultimate mastermind diet?
YOUR brain is the greediest organ in
your body, with some quite specific dietary requirements. So it is
hardly surprising that what you eat can affect how you think. If you
believe the dietary supplement industry, you could become the next
Einstein just by popping the right combination of pills. Look closer,
however, and it isn't that simple. The savvy consumer should take talk
of brain-boosting diets with a pinch of low-sodium salt. But if it is
possible to eat your way to genius, it must surely be worth a try.
First, go to the top of the class by
eating breakfast. The brain is best fuelled by a steady supply of
glucose, and many studies have shown that skipping breakfast reduces
people's performance at school and at work.
But it isn't simply a matter of getting
some calories down. According to research published in 2003, kids
breakfasting on fizzy drinks and sugary snacks performed at the level of
an average 70-year-old in tests of memory and attention. Beans on toast
is a far better combination, as Barbara Stewart from the University of
Ulster, UK, discovered. Toast alone boosted children's scores on a
variety of cognitive tests, but when the tests got tougher, the
breakfast with the high-protein beans worked best. Beans are also a good
source of fibre, and other research has shown a link between a high-fibre
diet and improved cognition. If you can't stomach beans before midday,
wholemeal toast with Marmite makes a great alternative. The yeast
extract is packed with B vitamins, whose brain-boosting powers have been
demonstrated in many studies.
Junk
food is implicated in a slew of serious mental disorders
A smart choice for lunch is omelette and
salad. Eggs are rich in choline, which your body uses to produce the
neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Researchers at Boston University found
that when healthy young adults were given the drug scopolamine, which
blocks acetylcholine receptors in the brain, it significantly reduced
their ability to remember word pairs. Low levels of acetylcholine are
also associated with Alzheimer's disease, and some studies suggest that
boosting dietary intake may slow age-related memory loss.
A salad packed full of antioxidants,
including beta-carotene and vitamins C and E, should also help keep an
ageing brain in tip-top condition by helping to mop up damaging free
radicals. Dwight Tapp and colleagues from the University of California
at Irvine found that a diet high in antioxidants improved the cognitive
skills of 39 ageing beagles - proving that you can teach an old dog new
tricks.
Round off lunch with a yogurt dessert,
and you should be alert and ready to face the stresses of the afternoon.
That's because yogurt contains the amino acid tyrosine, needed for the
production of the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenalin, among
others. Studies by the US military indicate that tyrosine becomes
depleted when we are under stress and that supplementing your intake can
improve alertness and memory.
Don't forget to snaffle a snack
mid-afternoon, to maintain your glucose levels. Just make sure you avoid
junk food, and especially highly processed goodies such as cakes,
pastries and biscuits, which contain trans-fatty acids. These not only
pile on the pounds, but are implicated in a slew of serious mental
disorders, from dyslexia and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder) to autism. Hard evidence for this is still thin on the ground,
but last year researchers at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting
in San Diego, California, reported that rats and mice raised on the
rodent equivalent of junk food struggled to find their way around a
maze, and took longer to remember solutions to problems they had already
solved.
It seems that some of the damage may be
mediated through triglyceride, a cholesterol-like substance found at
high levels in rodents fed on trans-fats. When the researchers gave
these rats a drug to bring triglyceride levels down again, the animals'
performance on the memory tasks improved.
Brains are around 60 per cent fat, so if
trans-fats clog up the system, what should you eat to keep it well
oiled? Evidence is mounting in favour of omega-3 fatty acids, in
particular docosahexaenoic acid or DHA. In other words, your granny was
right: fish is the best brain food. Not only will it feed and lubricate
a developing brain, DHA also seems to help stave off dementia. Studies
published last year reveal that older mice from a strain genetically
altered to develop Alzheimer's had 70 per cent less of the amyloid
plaques associated with the disease when fed on a high-DHA diet.
Finally, you could do worse than finish
off your evening meal with strawberries and blueberries. Rats fed on
these fruits have shown improved coordination, concentration and
short-term memory. And even if they don't work such wonders in people,
they still taste fantastic. So what have you got to lose?
The Mozart effect
Music may tune up your thinking, but you can't just crank up the volume
and expect to become a genius
A DECADE ago Frances Rauscher, a
psychologist now at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, and her
colleagues made waves with the discovery that listening to Mozart
improved people's mathematical and spatial reasoning. Even rats ran
mazes faster and more accurately after hearing Mozart than after white
noise or music by the minimalist composer Philip Glass. Last year,
Rauscher reported that, for rats at least, a Mozart piano sonata seems
to stimulate activity in three genes involved in nerve-cell signalling
in the brain.
This sounds like the most harmonious way
to tune up your mental faculties. But before you grab the CDs, hear this
note of caution. Not everyone who has looked for the Mozart effect has
found it. What's more, even its proponents tend to think that music
boosts brain power simply because it makes listeners feel better -
relaxed and stimulated at the same time - and that a comparable stimulus
might do just as well. In fact, one study found that listening to a
story gave a similar performance boost.
There is, however, one way in which
music really does make you smarter, though unfortunately it requires a
bit more effort than just selecting something mellow on your iPod. Music
lessons are the key. Six-year-old children who were given music lessons,
as opposed to drama lessons or no extra instruction, got a 2 to 3-point
boost in IQ scores compared with the others. Similarly, Rauscher found
that after two years of music lessons, pre-school children scored better
on spatial reasoning tests than those who took computer lessons.
Maybe music lessons exercise a range of
mental skills, with their requirement for delicate and precise finger
movements, and listening for pitch and rhythm, all combined with an
emotional dimension. Nobody knows for sure. Neither do they know whether
adults can get the same mental boost as young children. But, surely, it
can't hurt to try.
Bionic brains
If training and
tricks seem too much like hard work, some technological short cuts can
boost brain function
(Click graphics, above)
Gainful employment
Put your mind to work in the right way and it could repay you with an
impressive bonus
UNTIL recently, a person's IQ - a
measure of all kinds of mental problem-solving abilities, including
spatial skills, memory and verbal reasoning - was thought to be a fixed
commodity largely determined by genetics. But recent hints suggest that
a very basic brain function called working memory might underlie our
general intelligence, opening up the intriguing possibility that if you
improve your working memory, you could boost your IQ too.
Working memory is the brain's short-term
information storage system. It's a workbench for solving mental
problems. For example if you calculate 73 - 6 + 7, your working memory
will store the intermediate steps necessary to work out the answer. And
the amount of information that the working memory can hold is strongly
related to general intelligence.
A team led by Torkel Klingberg at the
Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, has found signs that the
neural systems that underlie working memory may grow in response to
training. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain
scans, they measured the brain activity of adults before and after a
working-memory training programme, which involved tasks such as
memorising the positions of a series of dots on a grid. After five weeks
of training, their brain activity had increased in the regions
associated with this type of memory (Nature
Neuroscience, vol 7, p 75).
Working
memory training could be the key to unlocking brain power
Perhaps more significantly, when the
group studied children who had completed these types of mental workouts,
they saw improvement in a range of cognitive abilities not related to
the training, and a leap in IQ test scores of 8 per cent (Journal
of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol 44,
p 177). It's early days yet, but Klingberg thinks working-memory
training could be a key to unlocking brain power. "Genetics determines a
lot and so does the early gestation period," he says. "On top of that,
there is a few per cent - we don't know how much - that can be improved
by training."
Memory marvels
Mind like a sieve? Don't worry. The difference between mere mortals and
memory champs is more method than mental capacity
AN AUDITORIUM is filled with 600 people.
As they file out, they each tell you their name. An hour later, you are
asked to recall them all. Can you do it? Most of us would balk at the
idea. But in truth we're probably all up to the task. It just needs a
little technique and dedication.
First, learn a trick from the "mnemonists"
who routinely memorise strings of thousands of digits, entire epic
poems, or hundreds of unrelated words. When Eleanor Maguire from
University College London and her colleagues studied eight front runners
in the annual World Memory Championships they did not find any evidence
that these people have particularly high IQs or differently configured
brains. But, while memorising, these people did show activity in three
brain regions that become active during movements and navigation tasks
but are not normally active during simple memory tests.
This may be connected to the fact that
seven of them used a strategy in which they place items to be remembered
along a visualised route (Nature
Neuroscience, vol 6, p 90). To remember the sequence of an entire
pack of playing cards for example, the champions assign each card an
identity, perhaps an object or person, and as they flick through the
cards they can make up a story based on a sequence of interactions
between these characters and objects at sites along a well-trodden
route.
Actors use a related technique: they
attach emotional meaning to what they say. We always remember highly
emotional moments better than less emotionally loaded ones. Professional
actors also seem to link words with movement, remembering
action-accompanied lines significantly better than those delivered while
static, even months after a show has closed.
We
always remember highly emotional moments better
Helga Noice, a psychologist from
Elmhurst College in Illinois, and Tony Noice, an actor, who together
discovered this effect, found that non-thesps can benefit by adopting a
similar technique. Students who paired their words with previously
learned actions could reproduce 38 per cent of them after just 5
minutes, whereas rote learners only managed 14 per cent. The Noices
believe that having two mental representations gives you a better shot
at remembering what you are supposed to say.
Strategy is important in everyday life
too, says Barry Gordon from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
Maryland. Simple things like always putting your car keys in the same
place, writing things down to get them off your mind, or just deciding
to pay attention, can make a big difference to how much information you
retain. And if names are your downfall, try making some mental
associations. Just remember to keep the derogatory ones to yourself.
Sleep on it
Never underestimate the power of a good night's rest
SKIMPING on sleep does awful things to
your brain. Planning, problem-solving, learning, concentration,working
memory and alertness all take a hit. IQ scores tumble. "If you have been
awake for 21 hours straight, your abilities are equivalent to someone
who is legally drunk," says Sean Drummond from the University of
California, San Diego. And you don't need to pull an all-nighter to
suffer the effects: two or three late nights and early mornings on the
trot have the same effect.
Luckily, it's reversible - and more. If
you let someone who isn't sleep-deprived have an extra hour or two of
shut-eye, they perform much better than normal on tasks requiring
sustained attention, such taking an exam. And being able to concentrate
harder has knock-on benefits for overall mental performance. "Attention
is the base of a mental pyramid," says Drummond. "If you boost that, you
can't help boosting everything above it."
These are not the only benefits of a
decent night's sleep. Sleep is when your brain processes new memories,
practises and hones new skills - and even solves problems. Say you're
trying to master a new video game. Instead of grinding away into the
small hours, you would be better off playing for a couple of hours, then
going to bed. While you are asleep your brain will reactivate the
circuits it was using as you learned the game, rehearse them, and then
shunt the new memories into long-term storage. When you wake up, hey
presto! You will be a better player. The same applies to other skills
such as playing the piano, driving a car and, some researchers claim,
memorising facts and figures. Even taking a nap after training can help,
says Carlyle Smith of Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.
There is also some evidence that sleep
can help produce moments of problem-solving insight. The famous story
about the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev suddenly "getting" the
periodic table in a dream after a day spent struggling with the problem
is probably true. It seems that sleep somehow allows the brain to juggle
new memories to produce flashes of creative insight. So if you want to
have a eureka moment, stop racking your brains and get your head down.
Body and mind
Physical exercise can boost brain as well as brawn
IT'S a dream come true for those who
hate studying. Simply walking sedately for half an hour three times a
week can improve abilities such as learning, concentration and abstract
reasoning by 15 per cent. The effects are particularly noticeable in
older people. Senior citizens who walk regularly perform better on
memory tests than their sedentary peers. What's more, over several years
their scores on a variety of cognitive tests show far less decline than
those of non-walkers. Every extra mile a week has measurable benefits.
It's not only oldies who benefit,
however. Angela Balding from the University of Exeter, UK, has found
that schoolchildren who exercise three or four times a week get higher
than average exam grades at age 10 or 11. The effect is strongest in
boys, and while Balding admits that the link may not be causal, she
suggests that aerobic exercise may boost mental powers by getting extra
oxygen to your energy-guzzling brain.
There's another reason why your brain
loves physical exercise: it promotes the growth of new brain cells.
Until recently, received wisdom had it that we are born with a full
complement of neurons and produce no new ones during our lifetime. Fred
Gage from the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, busted that myth
in 2000 when he showed that even adults can grow new brain cells. He
also found that exercise is one of the best ways to achieve this.
In mice, at least, the brain-building
effects of exercise are strongest in the hippocampus, which is involved
with learning and memory. This also happens to be the brain region that
is damaged by elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. So if you
are feeling frazzled, do your brain a favour and go for a run.
Even more gentle exercise, such as yoga,
can do wonders for your brain. Last year, researchers at the University
of California, Los Angeles, reported results from a pilot study in which
they considered the mood-altering ability of different yoga poses.
Comparing back bends, forward bends and standing poses, they concluded
that the best way to get a mental lift is to bend over backwards.
Get
a mental lift by bending over backwards
And the effect works both ways. Just as
physical exercise can boost the brain, mental exercise can boost the
body. In 2001, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio
asked volunteers to spend just 15 minutes a day thinking about
exercising their biceps. After 12 weeks, their arms were 13 per cent
stronger.
Nuns on a run
If you don't want senility to interfere with your old age, perhaps you
should seek some sisterly guidance
THE convent of the School Sisters of
Notre Dame on Good Counsel Hill in Mankato, Minnesota, might seem an
unusual place for a pioneering brain-science experiment. But a study of
its 75 to 107-year-old inhabitants is revealing more about keeping the
brain alive and healthy than perhaps any other to date. The "Nun study"
is a unique collaboration between 678 Catholic sisters recruited in 1991
and Alzheimer's expert David Snowdon of the Sanders-Brown Center on
Aging and the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
The sisters' miraculous longevity - the
group boasts seven centenarians and many others well on their way - is
surely in no small part attributable to their impeccable lifestyle. They
do not drink or smoke, they live quietly and communally, they are
spiritual and calm and they eat healthily and in moderation.
Nevertheless, small differences between individual nuns could reveal the
key to a healthy mind in later life.
Some of the nuns have suffered from
Alzheimer's disease, but many have avoided any kind of dementia or
senility. They include Sister Matthia, who was mentally fit and active
from her birth in 1894 to the day she died peacefully in her sleep, aged
104. She was happy and productive, knitting mittens for the poor every
day until the end of her life. A post-mortem of Sister Matthia's brain
revealed no signs of excessive ageing. But in some other, remarkable
cases, Snowdon has found sisters who showed no outwards signs of
senility in life, yet had brains that looked as if they were ravaged by
dementia.
How did Sister Matthia and the others
cheat time? Snowdon's study, which includes an annual barrage of mental
agility tests and detailed medical exams, has found several common
denominators. The right amount of vitamin folate is one. Verbal ability
early in life is another, as are positive emotions early in life, which
were revealed by Snowdon's analysis of the personal autobiographical
essays each woman wrote in her 20s as she took her vows. Activities,
crosswords, knitting and exercising also helped to prevent senility,
showing that the old adage "use it or lose it" is pertinent. And
spirituality, or the positive attitude that comes from it, can't be
overlooked. But individual differences also matter. To avoid dementia,
your general health may be vital: metabolic problems, small strokes and
head injuries seem to be common triggers of Alzheimer's dementia.
Obviously, you don't have to become a
nun to stay mentally agile. We can all aspire to these kinds of
improvements. As one of the sisters put it, "Think no evil, do no evil,
hear no evil, and you will never write a best-selling novel."
Attention seeking
You can be smart, well-read, creative and knowledgeable, but none of it
is any use if your mind isn't on the job
PAYING attention is a complex mental
process, an interplay of zooming in on detail and stepping back to
survey the big picture. So unfortunately there is no single remedy to
enhance your concentration. But there are a few ways to improve it.
The first is to raise your arousal
levels. The brain's attentional state is controlled by the
neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenalin. Dopamine encourages a
persistent, goal-centred state of mind whereas noradrenalin produces an
outward-looking, vigilant state. So not surprisingly, anything that
raises dopamine levels can boost your powers of concentration.
One way to do this is with drugs such as
amphetamines and the ADHD drug methylphenidate, better known as Ritalin.
Caffeine also works. But if you prefer the drug-free approach, the best
strategy is to sleep well, eat foods packed with slow-release sugars,
and take lots of exercise. It also helps if you are trying to focus on
something that you find interesting.
The second step is to cut down on
distractions. Workplace studies have found that it takes up to 15
minutes to regain a deep state of concentration after a distraction such
as a phone call. Just a few such interruptions and half the day is
wasted.
Music can help as long as you listen to
something familiar and soothing that serves primarily to drown out
background noise. Psychologists also recommend that you avoid working
near potential diversions, such as the fridge.
Avoid
working near potential diversions, such as the fridge
There are mental drills to deal with
distractions. College counsellors routinely teach students to recognise
when their thoughts are wandering, and catch themselves by saying "Stop!
Be here now!" It sounds corny but can develop into a valuable habit. As
any Zen meditator will tell you, concentration is as much a skill to be
lovingly cultivated as it is a physiochemical state of the brain.
Positive feedback
Thought control is easier than you might imagine
IT SOUNDS a bit New Age, but there is a
mysterious method of thought control you can learn that seems to boost
brain power. No one quite knows how it works, and it is hard to describe
exactly how to do it: it's not relaxation or concentration as such, more
a state of mind. It's called neurofeedback. And it is slowly gaining
scientific credibility.
Neurofeedback grew out of biofeedback
therapy, popular in the 1960s. It works by showing people a real-time
measure of some seemingly uncontrollable aspect of their physiology -
heart rate, say - and encouraging them to try and change it.
Astonishingly, many patients found that they could, though only rarely
could they describe how they did it.
More recently, this technique has been
applied to the brain - specifically to brain wave activity measured by
an electroencephalogram, or EEG. The first attempts were aimed at
boosting the size of the alpha wave, which crescendos when we are calm
and focused. In one experiment, researchers linked the speed of a car in
a computer game to the size of the alpha wave. They then asked subjects
to make the car go faster using only their minds. Many managed to do so,
and seemed to become more alert and focused as a result.
This early success encouraged others,
and neurofeedback soon became a popular alternative therapy for ADHD.
There is now good scientific evidence that it works, as well as some
success in treating epilepsy, depression, tinnitus, anxiety, stroke and
brain injuries.
And to keep up with the times, some
experimenters have used brain scanners in place of EEGs. Scanners can
allow people to see and control activity of specific parts of the brain.
A team at Stanford University in California showed that people could
learn to control pain by watching the activity of their pain centres (New
Scientist, 1 May 2004, p 9).
But what about outside the clinic? Will
neuro feedback ever allow ordinary people to boost their brain function?
Possibly. John Gruzelier of Imperial College London has shown that it
can improve medical students' memory and make them feel calmer before
exams. He has also shown that it can improve musicians' and dancers'
technique, and is testing it out on opera singers and surgeons.
Neils Birbaumer from the University of
Tόbingen in Germany wants to see whether neurofeedback can help
psychopathic criminals control their impulsiveness. And there are hints
that the method could boost creativity, enhance our orgasms, give shy
people more confidence, lift low moods, alter the balance between left
and right brain activity, and alter personality traits. All this by the
power of thought.
From issue 2501 of
New Scientist magazine, 28 May 2005, page 28