My Plastic Brain

by Caroline Williams

  Not everything can be practiced directly, though—like those mental states I’ve been banging on about. This is where the advice starts to get more difficult to pass on without resorting to self-help-style platitudes. To be clear, I have never intended this to be used as a self-help book: I don’t feel comfortable making sweeping statements about what people should be doing for their brains, when the experts have spent over a year telling me that no such thing exists.

  Still, I am confident that there is enough evidence to say that it is worth trying to master the relaxed-and-ready zone.

  Sadly, Joe DeGutis's training isn’t available commercially. Having since tried meditation, though, I have realized that the feeling I get when doing an open monitoring meditation (alert to sounds, thoughts, and feelings, but not getting dragged off by them) is much the same, as is the feeling I get when swimming in a deserted pool or strolling through the woods. Despite all of my initial reservations, it does seem worth learning meditation, preferably from a real person who can advise you along the way. If you don’t fancy that, it seems to me that if you can access that state then it doesn’t really matter what you do: singing, climbing, running, playing an instrument—whatever floats your boat but isn’t too easy or too all-encompassing.

  There's no denying, though, that a relaxed-and-ready state is hard to describe in words in a way that gives someone else access to the same state. You have to feel it for yourself. If that sounds too vague for your liking (and I wouldn’t blame you), one option is to try an EEG meditation aid of the type that is starting to appear on the market. They’re not cheap, but having test-driven one (the Muse headband), I found that it was a pretty good way of getting feedback about when you are and are not in that state. With these devices, the relaxed-and-ready state is measured via a relative dominance of alpha waves, which are well established as a marker of alert relaxation. While the Muse app doesn’t tell you exactly what your brain waves are doing, it does extract that information in the background and process it into a rating of calm, neutral, or active mental state. Muse's scientific director, Graeme Moffat, told me that the aim is to provide a set of “training wheels” to learn meditation, so you know when you have gotten it.

  However you get there, once you’ve got it, my advice is to practice that feeling whenever possible. Now I’ve gotten the hang of it I use it for things that I don’t feel like doing, such as reading long-winded scientific papers, doing chores, playing Lego Batman when I’d rather be reading a book, and enduring long presentations at conferences. Anywhere where my natural state would be distracted and stressed—having an alternative state of mind to slip into has been a revelation and is well worth all the sitting around.

  Another option is to cheat by loading your attention system to just the right extent, as in Nilli Lavie's load theory (see chapter one). There are a few apps and websites that do this for you, in case you don’t have the time to color your pages and find just the right level of atmospheric noise. I have to say that, when I tried them I found the musical choices (ranging from plinky-plonky to new age) quite irritating, but enough people have recommended them to me that I guess they work for some. Ommwriter.com is about the best I found, and it has the added feature of being able to change the background color as well as the ambient noise, and it gives off a strangely satisfying clicky noise when you type. I wrote part of this chapter with it, and it's really rather nice.

  Sometimes, though, relaxed-and-ready isn’t quite a focused enough state of mind for the task at hand, and only a short, sharp session of effortful thinking will do the job. This is a tricky one to advise on because of the conflicting evidence about whether or not training cognitive control (all those prefrontal cortex skills) transfers past certain tasks to make a generally better-controlled brain. The answer to that is, probably not. Nevertheless, I do feel that I have a better ability to make myself think hard when necessary now; I just can’t put my finger on exactly what was the defining intervention or if indeed there was one. If I had to put money on it, I’d say it had a lot to do with reducing anxiety and learning the relaxed-and-ready zone. Both freed up mental resources that left more in the tank when I have to think hard. Can I offer a one-size-fits-all bit of advice on how to do it? I’m not so sure.

  One possible shortcut is to use natural variations in alertness throughout the day, which seems to link into how our natural circadian rhythms affect body temperature. Anytime the core body temperature dips below thirty-seven degrees Celsius, concentration suffers, which means that, by this measure, first thing in the morning is the worst time to try and concentrate, and peak periods, when it’ll be easier, come between 10:00 a.m. and noon, and 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m.7 There is an easy override for this, though: increase body temperature with some exercise or a hot shower and focus should follow shortly, at least for a while (see graph below).

  Then there is the all-important antidote to concentration: the much underrated state of mindlessness.

  Zoning out might not sound like mental exercise at all, but if Danielle Bassett's work on the importance of the default-mode network is anything to go by, then remembering to make room for aimless mind-wandering is about the most important thing you can do to get the best out of your brain.

  Figure 7.2. Body temperature variation over two days. (Adapted from Gerry Wyder, used with permission from McGill University)

  Going mindless doesn’t necessarily have to mean a long period of staring out the window. If your day is back-to-back hectic meetings, maybe take the long route to the next room while you let the mind skip off wherever it likes. It might involve imagining what you’d really like to say at the next meeting, or pondering where you’d fly to tomorrow if you had no ties and limitless cash. It doesn’t matter, as long as you disengage the busy thinking parts of the brain to give it a rest before diving back into professional mode. Let it go for as long as you can before the adult world drags you back in. And if anyone comments that you are staring into space, you can always tell them that you are practicing an important mental state known as hypofrontality—that should shut them up….

  And, finally, the mental state closest to my heart, and the one I’m most glad to have gained override privileges for: anxiety. Clearly, it's to be kept on a short leash, however possible. Cognitive-bias modification helped me with social-threat processing and seems to have made me less on the lookout for doom in general. Past that, it was meditation, baby, all the way. I take back all my initial skepticism, because I have to admit that it works for me. I wish I could say something more concrete about this, but I’d have to stray too far from what is actually known, and there is too much flannel out there already. All I can say is that the interventions I tried in chapter two worked for me, and I hope they are of use to someone else out there, too. Chronic anxiety is not necessarily part of you, just a glitch in the system, and one that doesn’t always have to run the show.

  In summary, I’ve said it before, but it seems worth repeating: much of what we need to run our mental lives is on board already. The trick is to be able to choose to use it. And, yes, you can override the basic features of your brain.

  Try these:

  Exercise—preferably outdoors

  Seek out a mentally challenging job or hobby

  Do a course in mindfulness meditation

  Remember to let the mind wander to reset

  LIick your skills and practice them in real life

  Hang in there, because a better understanding of the brain, and more direct ways to override it, are on their way….

  INTERVIEWS/CONVERSATIONS:

  Martijn Van Den Heuvel, Skype interview, March 16, 2016.

  Walter Boot, email interview, March 28, 2016.

  Graeme Moffat, phone interview, March 24, 2016.

  I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise I won’t bore you.

  —David Bowie

  It's no exaggeration to say that the changes in my mental control ability and cognitive skill set over the past year
or so have been life changing. But they are also miniscule compared with what will be possible in the future.

  We are teetering on the brink of a new world where it will be possible not only to plug into your own brain and read what it is up to but also to use that activity to move directly into the most useful state of mind for the job. None of this mucking about with trial and error—all the information you need will be right there to use as you see fit. And if the brain is stubbornly refusing to play ball, or is too stuck in its ways to be nudged out of old habits, it might well be possible to give it a gentle zap to get things moving in the right direction. If that isn’t enough for the brain control freak of the future, there is also the exciting possibility of adding to the brain's information base by bolting on new senses and even huge data streams for the brain to integrate without any conscious effort.

  All of this might sound farfetched, but it really isn’t. I have experienced versions of all of these things in the lab this year and almost all of them at home, too (I could have done them all, but Roi didn’t make home zapping sound like a great idea). True, not all of these technologies are ready for prime time yet, but it won’t be too long before they are. Chances are my grandchildren will look back on this experiment of mine as really rather quaint.

  We are already making some progress toward more direct forms of brain override, through the world of home EEG. For around £200 (or a little over $250), you can buy a home-EEG headset that is, in theory, capable of tracking your brain's electrical signals in real time and turning it into a readout of your brain as it moves from focused to daydreaming to meditative to asleep. At least on the one I tried—the Muse headband—this tell-all readout doesn’t come as standard at the moment; the Muse app translates the raw data into three categories: calm, neutral, and active. Muse's scientific director, Graeme Moffat, wouldn’t tell me what each category represents because the algorithms they use are a trade secret, but he did say that, if I wanted to know more, I could download a second app called Muse Monitor that does provide the raw data. I used Muse Monitor to do a ten-minute guided meditation while recording my brain waves and…with such a cacophony of data, my computer crashed—so that was inconclusive. In theory, though, with a little patience and a computer that can handle it, it is possible to look at your brain's general pattern of activity over time and to relate that to how different patterns of activity feel in real life.

  To be fair, tracking raw brain activity in real time isn’t really what these home headbands are designed to do: the main point of them is to measure and then tweak certain brain signals, with the aim of either changing your state of mind or controlling an external device linked to a computer. Some people have hacked these devices to drive electric wheelchairs, for example—and there are even a few toys on the market, including one that uses EEG and the power of concentration to fly helicopters.1

  These devices all work on a much simpler version of the kind of neurofeedback that has been in labs for years and that has shown some promise in treating ADHD2 and PTSD.3

  As you might expect, what is available commercially now is pretty simplistic. Most of them only offer two states: “concentrate hard” or “relax and let go.” In addition, home-EEG kits, at the moment, only record from a tiny number of electrodes—four in the case of the Muse, one in some of its competitors. In the lab, researchers more often use caps with 64, 128, or 256 electrodes. The more electrodes there are, the better the chances of working out where the signal is coming from, and using that information to change your brain waves accordingly. With home versions now, we can only get a broad view of which state is dominant overall—which is great, but if future versions of the technology involved more electrodes, positioned all over the brain, it might be possible to target particular brain regions and the circuits they are a part of. It's easy to imagine future versions helping children in class to practice controlling their attention for longer, using an EEG-controlled toy; or for classroom assistants to be able to monitor children with ADHD and intervene when their attention has drifted (and before the child has resorted to bad behavior to get the stimulation they need).

  In the future, with more electrodes and more research, there may be options for a far broader range of training than is available now—perhaps to enhance cognitive control over things like emotions, working memory, and attention.

  One avenue of research, still in the lab at the moment, aims to boost this more general kind of cognitive control by targeting one particular brain wave band—theta—specifically in the top and center of the prefrontal cortex. High levels of theta brain waves in these regions have been linked to better executive control and to lower levels of anxiety. Recent studies seem to show that it's possible to increase theta brain waves to the right level for cognitive control and for this to improve performance on the kinds of working-memory and attention tests I have been doing so many of recently. With cognitive training for working memory so much up in the air, the prospect of being able to cut out the middleman is one area to watch in the future.4

  If neurofeedback could be designed for use in training mental flexibility, it could provide a route to the kind of controlled flexibility that I have been trying to master.

  I had a try on a lab setup, with four times as many electrodes as the Muse, while visiting Klaus Gramann's lab in Berlin. They offered it to me as a kind of booby prize, to make up for the experiment I had come for not being ready. Perhaps they felt they had to plug me into some kind of wiring to make the trip seem worthwhile. At the time, I was a bit disappointed, but it actually turned out to be pretty fascinating.

  The downside of lab neurofeedback is that it usually involves squirting conductive gel onto the skin where the electrodes will sit, to help the weak electrical signals from the brain to get through. One of Klaus's students attached the cap and electrodes to my head, while another filled a syringe with bright green, gloopy gel. “Don’t worry, we have facilities for you to wash your hair afterwards,” one of the students told me. “Well, we have a tap….”

  The first step in neurofeedback is to teach the computer about your own personal brain waves. Each person's brain is slightly different—and the way it is folded varies quite considerably—so there is no one-size-fits-all brain wave pattern. Then, once the computer has gotten a measure of me, I will turn the tables and use my mind to control it with my thoughts. This particular training involves switching between deliberate thinking (rapid-fire sums that popped onto the screen) and happy and relaxing thoughts (whenever the screen changed to floating stars). When the stars appeared on the screen, I visualized snuggling up under the duvet with my family on a Sunday morning. This back and forth between states goes on for ten minutes or so, and it is surprisingly hard work to switch back and forth, on command, between thinking hard and chilling out. After a quick look at the data to make sure they picked up a good enough signal, they let me try to affect what was happening on the screen by changing my mental state. If I thought hard, the screen went blank. If I went to my happy place, stars began circling on the screen. As soon as I looked at the stars and thought about what they meant, they disappeared and the screen once again went blank.

  With a bit of practice, it's actually quite easy to switch between the two states—so much so that it's easy to imagine this being built into some kind of creativity-enhancing screensaver.

  The Muse headset, and others like it, is designed to give you similar control over your brain waves, except it's more geared toward sustaining calm rather than focus. Hardcore meditators might be less than impressed by the idea that you need a machine for this, when you can actually just sit still and focus on your breath for free. One thing that does bug me about the Muse app, I admit, is the constant feedback about whether you are doing it right. Gill, my mindfulness teacher, spent a lot of time explaining how the point of mindfulness is to be calmly aware of the moment without judgment—“Without worrying if you are doing it right,” as her practice CD says over and over again.5 The Muse app system o
f feedback seems to go against this—it's hard to not feel like you’re doing it wrong when a storm starts to whip along a previously calm and peaceful beach. Then there is the fact that it takes a couple of minutes to calibrate the app to your current brain wave pattern before you can even start. A couple of times, I couldn’t even get it to synch to my phone and gave up, feeling more stressed than when I started. But still, for people who don’t like the new age connotations of meditation, thinking of it more as tech-assisted mind control might be easier to stomach and just as useful.

  The good news is that regulating certain brain waves in neurofeedback does actually change the brain in real and useful ways. A recent study found that, after just thirty minutes of alpha-wave-based control, there was an increase in functional connectivity in the salience network (the one that spots your mind going off track). Something about learning to engage that network made it function better, which bodes well for applying this kind of learned control to other parts of the brain.6

  A newer version of neurofeedback research is even further reaching. Until fairly recently, EEG has been the only way to track changes in the brain in real time. Using EEG alone, though, makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly where in the brain the signals are coming from. Functional MRI (fMRI) has the benefit of being able to show exactly which parts of the brain are active at any one time, but it is much slower—making it difficult to use for neurofeedback. Recent developments in real-time fMRI, though, have made it possible to track brain activity as it happens. Studies using this technology have found that it can be used for neurofeedback: if you show volunteers their own brain activity and give them some time to practice, they can learn to consciously drive up activity in particular brain regions.