My Plastic Brain

by Caroline Williams

  Prefrontal circuits are particularly high energy to run, it turns out. Another interesting outcome of Bassett's study is that while the prefrontal networks are absolutely crucial to mental control, their connections to other parts of the brain are actually fairly weak. The fact that they are out on a limb means that they need more energy input to engage (which is why it takes more effort to concentrate than to daydream). On the other hand, they are the gateway to harder-to-reach but important mental states, like calm control under pressure, impulse control, and the hardworking, pour-everything-into-solving-a-puzzle state I am calling effortful thinking, for want of a snappier term.

  Bassett and her team point out that the importance of this weakly connected network goes against a major assumption in neuroscience—that the strongest connections are the most important. I would argue that the possibility that weakly connected areas are even more important than strongly connected ones also runs contrary to most laypeople's understanding of brain training. In this new view, strong connections linked by thick, insulated wires are not necessarily the most important for mind control. Sometimes, a weakly connected network can be incredibly powerful if you know how to use it.

  I wouldn’t say that I have gained total control over my frontal control networks, but I have certainly used them a lot this year. Another oft ignored fact about mind control is that it always, always, involves control over attention—and that is a job of the prefrontal cortex.

  Attention, and control of where you put it, is a major feature of the kind of brain that can put its mind to anything, and it kept cropping up in my various efforts to improve seemingly different things. An element of control is crucial in sustaining attention, to become aware of stress, to evaluate new ideas, to hold calculations in working memory in order to solve a problem, to manipulate a mental map of the environment, and to manipulate the passage of time as much as possible. It might be on the outskirts of the brain and not invited to the rich-club parties, but the frontal circuit is well worth the extra mental effort needed to keep everything else in check.

  I’m aware that this sounds like a contradiction to what I have already said about there being one brain exercise that can boost the whole brain. And I stand by that—keep your money in your pocket and leave the “brain-training” apps alone for now. On the other hand, if, like me, you struggle to keep your mind on the job or to even pinpoint what in the world you are stressing about, then it seems that there is one exercise to strengthen prefrontal control—and it is meditation. Meditators, and people who are naturally mindful, show more activity in the prefrontal cortex and less in the amygdala, suggesting that they are better at controlling emotions. And it definitely helped me. I admit it: mindfulness helps you notice what is going on, and once you’ve noticed, more often than not you don’t need to do anything about it. It's a bit like someone coming along and standing on the stress hose. After that, it just kind of splutters and stops. For me, once the penny dropped—that what felt like an amorphous cloud of unease was actually the result of one prevailing thought: what if I’m doing this all wrong?—it made the cause of my anxiety so much easier to tackle. I take back everything I said about meditation—if you only work on one state of mind, this one is the one to choose.

  This probably isn’t that surprising to anyone, given the high profile of mindfulness meditation these days. More surprising perhaps is the power of unconscious biases and how they can only really be overriden using unconscious tactics. Finding that cognitive biases drag our conscious minds to see either the good or the bad side of life was a major “aha” moment for me. So that’s why I can’t help feeling nervous in social situations, despite knowing that these are perfectly nice people who have no reason (yet) to think of me as an idiot. And that’s why I can spot an accident waiting to happen even if it's hugely unlikely that it ever will. At some point in my life, my brain learned that it was a good idea to keep an eye out for signs of danger, and it has been doing it on my behalf ever since. My genetic propensity toward a brain that is seemingly more plastic than average in emotional learning has made this lesson stick like glue.

  This was another important lesson in my mission to take control of my mind. There are things that you can’t just decide to change. In some people (like me, at least at the start of all this), an unconscious filter of attention is constantly seeking out things to fret about, which feeds the conscious mind a skewed version of reality. This means that the only thing the consciousness has to work with is the bad stuff, which is what makes negative biases (anxieties, worries, stresses) so difficult to think your way out of—the brain doesn’t even get to see the alternative, happy point of view. It explains why you can’t think yourself out of anxiety, and you can’t think your way out of depression. It just doesn’t work like that. If it did, no one would suffer from these things at all. It's not like cheering up or just not worrying hasn’t crossed their minds.

  In my experience, using cognitive-bias training as a prop did something much more profound than I initially thought possible. I know that, scientifically, the jury is out on whether it is ready to roll out on a large scale, but all I can say is that it worked for me. Slowly but surely, I feel like I have become less on the lookout for disapproval in people's faces, and less primed to see threats to life and limb all around. It was a highly specific lesson though—the anti-anxiety effect didn’t generalize to work- or relationship-related anxiety. These neuroses had to wait until the mindfulness training kicked in. But the fact that the happy-face clicking of Elaine Fox's cognitive-bias modification training worked at all was amazing. All it took was a five-minute game that I could squeeze in whenever I needed a break from work, and it doubled up as a way to practice the relaxed-and-ready zone. I quickly found that being in that state—not trying too hard but paying just enough attention—made it much easier to find the happy faces. They just started jumping out at me, and I didn’t have to look at all. For me, it's been a win-win—so much so that I’m still playing the game every day.

  I don’t plan on stopping either, because if there is one thing we know about brain plasticity, it's that there is always the risk that things might slip back to baseline, especially if, like me, your brain has been set up to be more likely to react in a certain way. The idea that some people come with brains that specialize in some things and struggle with others sounds obvious, but it was something that I hadn’t considered until I told Martijn how unhelpful I had found working-memory training. “Well, maybe you aren’t wired for that?” he suggested.

  This brings up another truth about brain change that is often overlooked: you can’t do anything you like. There might be some brain skills that I will never have, no matter how much effort I put in. And (this is the meditation talking) that is okay, too.

  Martijn agrees. “I like empowerment, but I think we should be realistic about the biological boundaries that we have,” he says. “It might be that how the brain is wired and how the system is set up, you have the power to get better in some areas, but others remain locked away. It's good to be a dreamer, but you should be realistic.”

  This is a conclusion that I have come around to in my navigation ability. I spent six weeks wearing a navigational belt and exploring the countryside, and learned, without doubt, where north is in and around my hometown. This experience has definitely helped me build a better mental map of my local area and also to learn to use things like the position of the sun and shape of the land to get my bearings. It revolutionized my ability to make cognitive maps in the areas that I used it in, but has it changed my brain's navigational equipment?

  Personally, I have my doubts. By the time I got to Russell Epstein's lab, I had worn the belt religiously for weeks, and all of the changes that could have happened should have at least started happening by then. Even so, I still performed way below average on all of the tests that involved making a cognitive map of my surroundings from scratch—and part of my brain's cognitive mapmaking system just didn’t show up at all while I was the
re.

  It wasn’t only the scores—or indeed the brain-imaging results—that made me think that the necessary brain areas aren’t properly online. It was the way that it felt, subjectively, when I was trying to solve the tasks they set me. Making and using a mental map didn’t feel like a skill that I would probably improve with practice. It felt physically impossible, as if my brain couldn’t do anything but flail around wildly, until it was time to guess.

  It was interesting to see that activity in a part of the brain tasked with making cognitive maps didn’t show up at all in the scanner, and that my hippocampus looked the exact opposite of the famous taxi drivers of London. And although I’ve been told time and again during this experiment that you can’t tell anything meaningful about the brain by looking at one person (because there's too much potential for chance events to influence what you are seeing), it lines up well with both how I scored in the lab and struggle in real life.

  This doesn’t necessarily mean that it is impossible to override these problems, though. Brain plasticity alone might not do the trick, but what we definitely know about the brain is that it is nothing if not adaptable, and it is really good at learning and memory. The feelSpace belt didn’t change my navigational brain but helped store a map of my neighborhood in my memory that I could draw on whenever needed. I used the belt to draw the map, and now it is there in my memory, hopefully for good. This is great news: you don’t need to change the navigational circuitry in your brain if you can fill your memory with the information you need and then use it later. And even though the belt went back, I have a compass on my keys, so that if all else fails and I have a mental spinout, I can always work out which way is home. If the sun is shining I might not even need to get it out of my pocket.

  Knowing the limits of your brain can help you find ways around the blockages that are there, whether we like them or not. Human brains have the capacity to use tools for jobs that are beyond our natural capabilities—even, perhaps, to add a totally new sense such as magnetic-field detection. Why not use that ability to get around what is lacking? Martijn puts it better, I think. “It might be that if you went back in the scanner that part of the brain still wouldn’t light up, but you have been able to overcome that issue by using other resources to do the same function. If you don’t have the number five you can still make it by adding one to four.”

  The power of this approach is that if you know what your brain is and isn’t capable of, you can play to your strengths and adapt to your weaknesses using whatever props are necessary. That's why I think that one of the most important things that I have done this year is to get to know myself much better. Spending so much time filling in psychology questionnaires, doing behavioral and genetic tests, and getting brain scans has given me a much better understanding of the way my mind works, and the things it is good and not so good at. That's not easy, of course. As Benjamin Franklin wrote way back in 1750, “There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond and to know one's self.” Science can help, though, which is why there are links to some psychological tests on CarolineWilliams.net. The first port of call for those wanting to change their brains is to find out what you are dealing with.

  Be careful what you wish for, though, because there is no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to the brain. There are only so many resources to go around, so there is always the possibility that improving one skill might scupper your chances with another. I thought long and hard about whether to invest a lot of time and effort in logical-thought training, and in the end I decided that I didn’t want to favor something that might take away from my naturally creative side. Too much control over my thought processes might take me toward being someone who I don’t particularly want to be. And now that my emotional side is a little more in check, I feel like I’m quite logical enough, thank you.

  Finally, there is another possibility that I can’t ignore, because if I do I will be hauled over hot coals by the neuro-police. It is possible that all of the changes I can feel are explained by something other than real change in the brain. They could also be partly or wholly down to either the placebo effect, regression to the mean, or the simple fact that when you do something more than once you get better at it. I have invested a lot of time, money, and energy into trying interventions that I hoped would improve my skills in key areas, and I chose things that I genuinely wanted to change about myself. Even with all of the journalistic skepticism in the world, might my hopes and expectations be enough to make my wishes come true?

  I can’t deny that it's a possibility. In medical trials, even when patients are told they are being given an inert sugar pill, a large proportion of them report feeling better after taking it. It isn’t well understood, yet, why this happens—it could be that there is something about being prescribed even a fake drug by someone in authority that stimulates the body to heal itself. Whatever it is, it must be something to do with the brain, because there is nothing in the pills that should fix anything.4 Recent research has shown that the placebo effect affects the brain in real, physical ways, making it respond to pain and stress differently, as well as affecting memory. There is even interest in trying to harness the placebo effect for conditions that are difficult to treat any other way.

  The same is probably true in psychology experiments, says Walter Boot, a psychologist at Florida State University, in Tallahassee. In a recent paper, he pointed out that experiments designed to test cognitive-training programs almost never factor in what the volunteers expect to happen.5 And this, he reckons, could be an important oversight. “The potency of some reported placebo effects [in medicine] made us worry that similar effects might be operating in psychological interventions,” he told me in an email. “We’ve found that expectation for improvement often matched actual improvement in these brain-training interventions. When this is true, it is difficult to attribute changes in performance to the intervention itself instead of placebo effects.”

  It doesn’t help that, in psychology, it is often difficult to disguise the placebo training as part of the real experiment, because it is fairly obvious that you are not in the training group if the game stays on the easiest level. And there is no getting away from the fact that in my experiments I had no chance of staying blind to what was supposed to be happening to my brain. I wasn’t turning up at a lab to join in with a nameless scientific experiment that I knew nothing about—I was contacting specific researchers and asking them to do their best to change something of my choosing. The expectation effect is difficult to quantify, but as another of those powerful unconscious biases, it almost certainly muddies the waters in my experiments as well as in lots of proper, scientific ones.6

  To me, though, the possibility that I have willed my brain to work better is an interesting possibility in itself. If choosing some areas to work on and dedicating some time to them is enough to make real, measurable changes in my brain and how I feel, that's fascinating too. Either way, my brain proved itself to be capable of change. I feel more in control and with a few new skills that I didn’t have a year ago. Statistical reliability can only come from properly controlled trials, but what I can say from a human point of view is that it was absolutely worth doing.

  I started this project feeling slightly out of control, driven by glitches that seemed out of my power to change, and skeptical that I’d be able to do anything very much about it. I am very glad to have been proven wrong. I am finishing it feeling like a proper grownup, with a mind that I know is absolutely capable of doing what it needs to, and with a better understanding of its strengths and shortcomings. It's been a fascinating—often grueling but always entertaining—journey into the workings of my own mind.

  And now to the tricky part: turning this into something anyone else can use.

  A TWENTY-MINUTE WORKOUT FOR THE BRAIN?

  When I started all of this, I was looking for the brain equivalent of a jog around the block and twenty push-ups. The good news is there is one. The bad news is that it's a jog
around the block and twenty push-ups.

  I’m being facetious of course, but having read the studies, talked to the experts, and tried various brain interventions for myself, I have to conclude that people looking for one brain game to rule them all are going to be disappointed. Most analyzes of generic brain-training programs so far suggest that any benefits are small, nontransferrable, and temporary.

  Even the scientists who think that working-memory training can improve general intelligence in the lab point out that there is no evidence that it makes any difference to how the brain works in real life. So, for my money anyway, brain training as it is currently sold doesn’t seem worth doing. You’re better off exercising, which is known to put the brain into a physical and chemical state that primes it to learn, and eating a good balanced diet to make the brain as ready for the job as it's going to be. Even then you’ll probably bump up against the genetic ceiling of your ability at some point.

  It doesn’t sound like it, but I reckon this is good news. Adding a one-size-fits-all brain-training routine to the list of things we should be doing every day (physical exercise, drinking eight glasses of water, eating five portions of fruits and vegetables) doesn’t feel terribly helpful. It feels more like another stick to beat ourselves with.

  On the plus side, picking specific skills and working on them is definitely possible. So if you want to make use of the plasticity of your own brain and feel the benefits almost straightaway, my first bit of take-home advice is this: pick what you want to work on. There might not be a quick mental workout that will increase your general intelligence, but you can almost certainly get better at math.

  The second, when possible, practice these things in real life rather than on a disembodied app. Once I’d gotten rid of the panicky feeling and started to focus, the best intervention for improving my math skills was to practice math problems, starting with easy ones and working my way up to the harder ones. Similarly, there was no better way to practice not getting lost than to go out exploring—just with a couple of props as a safety net, in case my natural ability failed me. A similar benefit might have come from computer gaming, and the evidence looks convincing enough that it is definitely worth a try for anyone who is that way inclined or short on time to wander. But given the added brain benefits of being outdoors and getting exercise, practicing the real thing is best, if at all possible.