Brain-Works

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how natural aging causes changes in the brain: changes responsible for a weaker memory, a less focused-focus and overall perceived loss of mental function. An entire industry of brain-training programs has sprung up, waging war against these age-related changes.

But what if those changes aren’t a sign of a failing neural system?

What if they simply reflect a useful, positive change in how we process information as we age?

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Here at MindTweaks, readers have come to expect an odd combination of humor, science and general advice about how to make your brain work better. A twisted few among you have even despaired that there is not more of this sort of mind-tweakish thing available on the web.

Despair no more, Brain Rules is here to save the day!

Seriously. (Or maybe not)

It’s a book. It’s a DVD. It slices, it dices, it amuses, and it informs.

“Brain Rules” is the brain-child of John Medina, a molecular biologist with a wicked sense of humor, and an interest in all things brain-ish. I think I have a new bloggy crush going on here.

But back to the product: through a combination of written and video materials, Medina presents his “12 principles for thriving at work, home and school.”

I’ll let you know more after my copy gets here, but for now, there’s a wealth of information and excerpts at the Brain Rules website. (I highly recommend the video on Rule #1: Exercise. I laughed outloud. Seriously.)

Or you can just trust your favorite brain-blogger’s instincts, and pick up your copy of this multimedia extravaganza at Amazon now. We’ll make it our own little book-club pick. Like Oprah, but with much cheaper shoes.

Order your copy here:
Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Book & DVD)

Or Preview Audio/Video Excerpts At The Brain Rules Website

Since my mild cold has turned into a full blown case of misery, I’m not much in the mood to dissect my ideas about success. Besides, my current definition of success is staying awake for more than 2 hours at a time.

Instead, I’ve thrown together a rough outline of something I’ve been mulling over for a while: a brain training guide, of sorts. The goal is to provide a tool to help others create their own individualized brain-training programs, starting with a self assessment of the following areas, each important to brain-health.

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Keeping An Active Mind

Staying mentally active is likely the best thing you can do to care for your brain. The brain-training software like those from Lumosity, MindFit and PositScience are good for this - but so is learning a new and engaging hobby, studying a new language, and so on. Keeping your mind engaged and constantly learning not only protects you from “normal” cognitive decline as you age, but also provides a buffer against more serious concerns like Alzheimers.

On a scale of 1-10, how active do you think you keep your brain? [click to continue...]

Neuroplasticity is my favorite new buzzword; not so much because of its meaning (which is pretty impressive) but because of the image it invokes: my brain, modeled out of cheap plastic, and distributed via Mattel.

In fact, the Mattel/China toxic paint debacle might explain a lot…. perhaps my neurons have been recalled? I’ll have to check it out. Meanwhile, on with the defining!

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize itself, generate new cells, new neural pathways, and to change which areas control which functions. It’s become a buzzword for good reason; new understandings of neuroplasticity are turning assumptions about our minds and brains upside down.

One of the basic beliefs about the brain was that once it matured, it was fixed. Neuroplasticity was a function of a developing breain, or so it was assumed. The ability to learn new tasks was believed to be strictly limited, and many of the brains functions (including intelligence, levels of happiness/emotional stability, and mental health were thought largely fixed. Mental decline was considered inevitable with aging, and adult victims of stroke, brain injury and disease were without much hope of improvement.

But modern neuroscience shows that the adult brain remains remarkably flexible. It can reorganize itself after extreme injury and trauma. It can grow. It can form new connections, change wiring, eliminate old wiring.

Perhaps most astounding are discoveries that it adapts not only to external experiences, or to correct injury, but can adapt and change according to our internal thoughts. How we *think*, what we think about, the activities we engage in, the things we value and focus on and practice — they change the physical structure and neural pathways in the brain.

I’m trying to avoid the heavy science here, because I want to get this one point cemented.

Our brains.. my brain, and *your* brain…. are capable of astounding change and growth, for good or ill.

Some of that change is within our ability to control.

It’s worth learning about.

It’s worth learning about, because that process of learning itself changes our brain.

And *that* is neuroplasticity, applied

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MindTWEAK: Turns out, you CAN teach an old dog new tricks!
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Yesterday, I exploded my subconscious assumption that wealth and intelligence were strongly connected (they aren’t). Today, the topic is even more painful; just typing the title of this post made me shudder.

But exploring this second subconscious prejudice of mine (A presumed link between being overweight, and being not-so-bright) didn’t lead me at all where I expected.

When I keyed the search terms into Google, I was confident that I’d find there was no real link between weight and intelligence.

I was wrong. [click to continue...]

Ever envied people with photographic memories?I’ve always longed for the ability to flip through a mind-album of experience, examining each Polaroid snapshot for details and information.

When I was younger, I came close to that having that level of recall. I could read a textbook chapter, and while I might not remember a specific detail, I could usually tell you what page and paragraph the detail could be found on. The mental photos were out of focus and sometimes spotty, but it was enough to give me a serious edge in school.

That skill weakened over the years (actually while I was still in high school) and it was one of the losses that most frustrated me. I *liked* having that edge, dangnabbit!

But a recent article by Mark Shead (of Productivity501) gave me hope I might yet recover that skill, and I suspect that anyone might use a method like this to develop a similar level of recall.

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You’ve likely never read the tagline for this blog - it’s in fine print all the way up in the top right oops.. left… corner, and part of it is in ghostly gray and hard to read on some monitors.

Here, I’ll use my finely tuned copy and paste skills, for your convenience.

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Fixing the world, one mind at a time
(starting with mine).

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It’s that bit at the end that we’re concerned with today. You see… my own mind definitely needs tweaking, and the brain that supports it hasn’t been working quite right lately, either.

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1. Eat Breakfast
2. Caffeine
3. Drink Water
4. Take a walk
5. Be Passionate!
6. Meditate
7. Change the lighting in your office
8. Open a window
9. Sunlight!
10. Take A Nap
11. Say a Mantra
12. Hug the dog
13. Do a good deed.
14. Listen to music in a new genre
15. Write your to do list in H@XX0r [click to continue...]
    

This article was originally planned as part of the debunking series, “Why The Secret Seems To Work”. As I wrote, I decided it was good as a stand alone article. Still, if you’re interested, you’ll find the Secret series linked at the end of this post. Now I’ll shush with my ramblings, and get on with the posting.
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The subconscious mind has a lot of interesting tricks up its cerebellum sleeve.

One of them, officially known as “confirmation bias”, plays a big part in our instinctive responses… and it’s also one reason that otherwise rational people tend to believe weird, sometimes irrational things.

So what exactly IS this ‘confirmation bias’?

It’s a fancy-pants $10 phrase that means exactly what you might think: We’re unconsciously biased towards information, experiences and interpretations that confirm our expectations and beliefs.

Simply put? Our brains are wired to count “hits” as more important than “misses.” When it comes to our desires, beliefs and expectations, positives are more important to us than negatives.

While the bias often leads us to cling to false conclusions, there’s actually a good reason our brains are set up that way.

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Here’s how it works:

Let’s say we were lost in the wilderness, searching for food.

By chance, we stumble across a blackberry bush, with a handful of luscious ripe berries. We eat them, then look for more bushes. The next five bushes we find don’t have any berries on them, but the sixth bush we check has enough fruit to feed us for two days.

In this situation, our survival depends on our giving more importance to the time we found the berries, than the times that we came up empty handed.

Finding the berries in the first bush sets up the expectation: bush= food. Our mind disregards the five “miss” bushes, and we continue looking. Eventually we find another bush with berries, we’re rewarded for our belief in berries on bushes, and the whole thing reinforces the expectation of bush=food.

It’s a good tactic.

If our brain had assigned as much importance to the misses as the hits, we’d probably have stopped looking for bushes, gone back to random hunting for food under rocks, and we might have starved. Instead, the biased-brain strategy pays off, and we’re rewarded with more blackberries.

Cool, huh?

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Why aren’t we more aware of it?

This confirmation bias is part of what I call the brain’s “autopilot” function; processing that goes on well below the surface of our conscious awareness or attention. The auto-pilot brain helps us cope with survival on a very basic level, a level that doesn’t require intellect or thought or awareness. In fact, it may be built to by-pass our intellectual process, so we cant think ourselves out of survival.

Being the thinking, reasoning, intellectual creatures that we are (And proud of it!) we mostly assume that any and all of our thoughts are the results of our intellectual reasoning. We don’t pay much attention to how often the auto-pilot is on, or how strongly it influences us in our day to day decision making process… but it does influence us.

No matter how smart we are… when we look at facts related to our expectations and desires, we pay more attention to facts, experience and information that support the result we want or expect. When it works, it works well.. but when it doesn’t.. we wind up very convinced in things that may be very wrong.

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Our hit-over-miss bias can be used against us

Fraudulent psychics and spiritual con-artists are well aware of our preference for hits over misses. They know that all they need is for one chance prediction to come true, one accurate guess, and we’ll tend to dismiss all of the false and inaccurate things they’ve said.

We don’t need anyone intentionally fooling us, either… our bias towards the positive hits can cause us to leap to some startling conclusions, including that even the most simplistic astrology is accurate, Big Foot and ancient astronauts really exist, and that old Aunt Eunice can really give you the evil eye, and muck up your whole day.

It’s part of why mystical believers can be so devout, even in the face of scientific studies disproving their beliefs, and it’s also why skeptics can be so stubbornly skeptical, able to blindly dismiss any evidence that might support a mystical explanation — because their confirmation bias leads them to do exactly that.

Mind you, just because our confirmation bias is in play doesn’t mean we’re wrong about our beliefs or expectations. Blackberries DO grow on bushes, after all, and Aunt Eunice IS eerily frightening… but our bias towards the hits makes our instinctive belief an unreliable standard.

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Ok, but… what does this have to do with The Secret?

The Secret states that that *whatever* we hold in our mind, we bring into reality.

Not just things we see as goals, or desires, or intent, not even things we dwell on… but any old thing that we think about, we mystically manifest.

That’s where our hit-over-miss bias comes into play.

Statistically speaking, some of the things we think of *will* happen, even if we take no action towards them at all. Every once in a long while, someone will randomly think of a giant tie-dyed elephant just exactly the moment before a circus parade is turns down the street, complete with a rainbow-clad elephant named Hippie.

Most of the time, of course, we could spend a full week meditating on a tie-dyed elephant, and it would never manifest; the same goes for any number of other unlikely scenarios.

But all if that ONE unlikely elephant appears, we forget all about the other things we thought of that *didn’t* happen -winning the lottery, the tea-party with Elton John, the exploding Tasmanian duck.

Our auto-pilot brain notes the elephant as a hit, ignores the misses, and .. tada.. we must have magically manifested the elephant.

So, that’s how our confirmation bias contributes to the apparent success of The Secret — If you count the times it works, ignore the times it doesn’t, The Law of Attraction winds up with a very skewed 100% success rate.

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MindTweak: If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments. - Malcolm Gladwell, in Blink
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I’ve been waiting for you to ask that! You haven’t, of course. I’m sure you’re just being shy, so I’m going to answer you, anyway.

Optimize Your Mind

A mind-tweak is a small adjustment to your mental-works. It’s an intentional change that fine-tunes and optimizes your mind. It’s like a hack, but less violent (and a wee bit less geeky).

Tweaks come in a variety of flavors, from the purely mental (new ways to think about things) to the purely physical (better brain-care). They can be spiritual (meditation), psychological (cognitive shifting), technological (brainwave entrainment) or.. well… Let’s just say there’s more variety in mental tweakage than Heinz ever considered.

The Science of Tweaks

Mind-tweaks are an exciting topic to cover these days, with the neuroscience boom. Researchers have discovered that the brain is far more adaptive than once believed; areas of it continue to grow, change, and develop throughout life, not just in childhood as previously believed.

Just as exciting is the developing knowledge about the mind/brain connections. For decades, it was assumed that while the brain helps shape thoughts and consciousness, it wasn’t a two way street. Those assumptions have been turned on their head in the past few years, as studies show that the way we think, and what we do, and even the very act of thinking itself, can change not only the chemistry of the brain, but its actual physical structure.

New Toys

These discoveries are giving rise to a whole new segment of software, games, and other products designed to help you think yourself a better brain, and the market is ready for them.

As the Boomer population in the US ages, the demand for ways to keep the brain sharp in later years is higher than ever.

Simultaneously, younger and middle generations are facing new demands in a changing workforce; they’re looking for new and creative ways to structure both work and personal lives,creating a boom in productivity and organizational products.

It all adds up to a lot of really cool research, toys, and methods to talk about and experiment with.

I’m having fun being the guinea pig for some of these methods, and even more fun developing my own along the way. It’s my hope that as the blog grows, other guinea pigs will join me, sharing their ideas and experiments as well as any new mind-tweak related products you come across, but if you don’t, that’s ok too. You’ll just have to read that much more of me rambling about it instead : )

MindTweak: I’m doing a new thing here. Simple, back to basics, building block posts, posts that address simple questions, posts to remind me (and you) not to get lost in the fancy stuff and neglect the basics.