THE working day has just started at the head office of Barclays Bank in
London. Seventeen staff are helping themselves to a buffet breakfast as young
psychologist Sebastian Bailey enters the room to begin the morning’s training
session. But this is no ordinary training session. He’s not here to sharpen
their finance or management skills. He’s here to exercise their brains.
Today’s workout, organised by a company called the Mind Gym in London, is
entitled “having presence”. What follows is an intense 90-minute session in
which this rather abstract concept is gradually broken down into a concrete set
of feelings, mental tricks and behaviours. At one point the bankers are
instructed to shut their eyes and visualise themselves filling the room and then
the building. They finish up by walking around the room acting out various
levels of presence, from low-key to over the top.
It’s easy to poke fun. Yet similar mental workouts are happening in corporate
seminar rooms around the globe. The Mind Gym alone offers some 70 different
sessions, including ones on mental stamina, creativity for logical thinkers and
“zoom learning”. Other outfits draw more directly on the exercise analogy,
offering “neurobics” courses with names like “brain sets” and “cerebral
fitness”. Then there are books with titles like Pumping Ions, full of
brainteasers that claim to “flex your mind”, and software packages offering
memory and spatial-awareness games.
Advertisement
But whatever the style, the companies’ sales pitch is invariably the
same—follow our routines to shape and sculpt your brain or mind, just as
you might tone and train your body. And, of course, they nearly all claim that
their mental workouts draw on serious scientific research and thinking into how
the brain works.
One outfit, Brainergy of Cambridge, Massachusetts (motto: “Because your grey
matter matters”) puts it like this: “Studies have shown that mental exercise can
cause changes in brain anatomy and brain chemistry which promote increased
mental efficiency and clarity. The neuroscience is cutting-edge.” And on its
website, Mind Gym trades on a quote from Susan Greenfield, one of Britain’s best
known neuroscientists: “It’s a bit like going to the gym, if you exercise your
brain it will grow.”
Indeed, the Mind Gym originally planned to hold its sessions in a local
health club, until its founders realised where the real money was to be made.
Modern companies need flexible, bright thinkers and will seize on anything that
claims to create them, especially if it looks like a quick fix backed by
science. But are neurobic workouts really backed by science? And do we need
them?
A lot depends on what you think needs toning. Some proponents—including
the Mind Gym—say it’s the mind’s “software” that needs attention. So their
workouts tend to be aimed more at producing supple mental habits than at
exercising specific brain circuits, cells and neurotransmitters. Others insist
that you cannot separate the mind’s software from its hardware and that the true
aim of neurobics ought to be to keep the connections between brain cells
flexible and strong, perhaps even growing new connections and new brain
cells.
That’s far more ambitious. But either way, you’ve still got to come up with a
routine capable of reliably boosting brainpower, preferably one that produces
measurable improvements and is based on accepted models of how the brain or mind
work. This is where much of what is called neurobics begins to look more like a
hopeful art than a solid science. Or, at times, like a helping of rather plain
common sense.
Brain food
Gessner Geyer sells “cerebral fitness training” to company employees through
his consultancy, Brainergy. Get plenty of sleep, he suggests, and regular
physical exercise, both to brighten your mood and to ensure a healthy
circulation of blood, and hence energy, to the brain. Meditate, eat well
and—since stress hormones may harm brain circuits involved in
memory—develop ways to deal with stress. Good advice, perhaps, but hardly
rocket science.
Nor is there anything remotely high-tech about what Lawrence Katz, co-author
of Keep Your Brain Alive, recommends. Katz, a neurobiologist at Duke
University Medical School in North Carolina, argues that just as many of us fail
to get enough physical exercise, so we also lack sufficient mental stimulation
to keep our brain in trim. Sure we are busy with jobs, family and housework. But
most of this activity is repetitive routine. And any leisure time is spent
slumped in front of the TV.
So, read a book upside down. Write or brush your teeth with your wrong hand.
Feel your way around the room with your eyes shut. Sniff vanilla essence while
listening intently to orchestral music. Anything, says Katz, to break your
normal mental routine. It will help invigorate your brain, encouraging its cells
to make new connections and pump out neurotrophins, substances that feed and
sustain brain circuits.
Well, up to a point it will. “What I’m really talking about is brain
maintenance rather than bulking up your IQ,” Katz adds. Neurobics, in other
words, is about letting your brain fulfil its potential. It cannot create
super-brains.
Can it achieve even that much, though? Certainly the brain is an organ that
can adapt to the demands placed on it. Tests on animal brain tissue, for
example, have repeatedly shown that electrically stimulating the synapses that
connect nerve cells —thought to be crucial to learning and
reasoning—makes them stronger and more responsive. Brain scans suggest we
use a lot more of our grey matter when carrying out new or strange tasks than
when we’re doing well-rehearsed ones. Rats raised in bright cages with toys
sprout more neural connections than rats raised in bare cages—suggesting
perhaps that novelty and variety could be crucial to a developing brain. And
neurologists have proved time and again that people who lose brain cells
suddenly during a stroke often sprout new connections to compensate for the
loss—especially if they undergo extensive therapy to overcome any
paralysis.
So the general basis of neurobics looks pretty sound: the workings of the
brain really are inherently alterable or “plastic”. The problem is in the
specifics, and in the case of the animal evidence, in knowing what it means for
humans. In contrast to rats, for example, there’s no evidence that human infants
raised in luxuriously equipped nurseries end up with any more brain cells or
connections than those born into humbler surroundings. More importantly, there’s
no evidence that people who practise the workouts advocated by Katz and others
end up any mentally fitter than those who don’t. The studies simply haven’t been
done.
Nor is there any direct evidence that having a routine, unvaried lifestyle
causes your IQ to drop or your brain cells and their connections to wither. Take
one heavily reported study by Robert Friedland and his team from Case Western
Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio. They used
questionnaires to probe the mental activities of adults, and found that those
who led a more mentally diverse and stimulating life were less likely to develop
Alzheimer’s disease in later years than those who were mentally inactive,
preferring to watch TV rather than continue learning, say.
A worrying result, but what does it mean? That mental activity protects our
brain cells from Alzheimer’s? Or that the disease has subtle effects on our
intellectual endeavours many years before the more obvious symptoms reveal
themselves? Or maybe it means that the people who are genetically predisposed to
being mentally active are for some unknown reason less likely to be predisposed
to Alzheimer’s. As yet, no one knows.
What is clear is that to conclude from such a finding that simple mental
exercises will boost your brain power or ward off mental decline requires a huge
leap of faith. Not that this deters the prime movers in the field. “It’s early
days and the scientific basis for a lot of what people are talking about is
still rather murky,” says Michael Merzenich of the University of California, San
Francisco. “But there’s no question that you can boost brain performance with
łŮ°ů˛ąľ±˛Ôľ±˛Ô˛µ.”
Unlike Katz, Merzenich believes that intelligence boosting (as opposed to
just maintenance) is a real prospect. You can become faster, smarter and
happier, he says—just about anything you want. But not by brushing your
teeth with the wrong hand. To provide sufficiently stimulating exercise, the
training will probably have to be computer-based. Sometimes real life just isn’t
fast or stimulating enough.
For example, doing a jigsaw puzzle may be a good workout for visuo-spatial
intelligence—being able to juggle patterns in the mind’s eye, or using
spatial imagination—says Merzenich. “You’ve got to make fine distinctions
about shape and form. You have to mentally rotate the pieces. You’re constantly
switching between a global and local focus.” But ordinary jigsaw puzzles are a
quiet entertainment. Only a computer-generated jigsaw could push the pace enough
really to stretch your brain cells, providing variety, or raising the tempo and
difficulty as much as a computer game would.
Merzenich already collaborates with San Francisco-based Scientific Learning
Corporation on training software to help kids learn reading skills. At the
moment the focus is on teaching poor readers, but the company wants to expand
into brain-boosting software for everyone. “In 10 or 15 years’ time, this kind
of thing will be very widely applied.”
Maybe. Nobody disputes that people who solve lots of jigsaws get good at
solving them. What’s not clear is whether these or any other mental exercises
can boost your brain power across the board. For a start, how do you measure
someone’s overall brain power? Qualities such as creativity are invariably seen
as too subjective to rate, forcing psychologists to rely on the sorts of
easy-to-score spatial and verbal reasoning tasks involved in IQ tests. And this
creates a problem for neurobics. Time and again psychologists have found that
our ability to do these tasks cannot be reliably improved by mental exercises or
any other type of brain-boosting regime, including so-called smart pills
designed to improve blood flow to the brain.
Remember the “Mozart Effect”? In the early 1990s, researchers reported that
people scored better on a standard IQ test after listening to Mozart. Rats
raised on Mozart, we were told, ran through mazes faster and more accurately.
People with Alzheimer’s disease functioned more normally if they listened to
Mozart. The music somehow synchronised with specific firing patterns and rhythms
in the brain linked to intelligence. Then, a few years later, Harvard
psychologist Christopher Chabris analysed the results from 16 follow-up studies,
involving a total of 714 subjects, and found no overall benefit. Chabris
concluded that the real reason some people did better was quite simple: music
improves people’s mood. And rats’ too, apparently.
None of this is very surprising. After all, it’s hard to come up with a magic
formula for making people brighter—be it a pill, musical style or mental
exercise—when you don’t know what makes some brains more intelligent than
others in the first place. Is it the number of brain cells? The way they’re
connected? The number of connections? The conduction speed of nerve fibres?
No one knows whether it is some of these, all of them, or none. True,
post-mortem studies of human brain tissue suggest that there is a link between
the density of nerve cells in the frontal area and a person’s ability to do
problem-solving. And just last year, studies using PET scans identified an area
of the brain around each temple, in the lateral frontal cortex, that gets
especially active when people perform tasks like those in an IQ test. But this
is a large, ill-defined area of the brain, and adding more cells here, though it
may help, is unlikely to be the universal key to intelligence.
Among other clues is that the size of the corpus callosum, a fibre tract that
transmits information from one hemisphere to the other, may influence how well
people do on certain tests of speech fluency and visuospatial ability. And the
most striking feature of Einstein’s pickled brain is an unusually large inferior
parietal lobule—yet another brain region.
For now, whether any of these regions have anything to do with basic
intelligence, let alone brilliance, remains as hypothetical as the idea that
they might be enlarged or boosted through neurobic exercise. So what steps can
we take to keep our minds supple?
All in the mind
Guy Claxton, an educational psychologist at the University of Bristol,
dismisses most of the neurological approaches as “neuro-babble”. Nevertheless,
there are specific mental skills we can learn, he contends. Desirable attributes
such as creativity, mental flexibility, and even motivation, are not the fixed
faculties that most of us think. They are thought habits that can be
learned.
The problem, says Claxton, is that most of us never get proper training in
these skills. We develop our own private set of mental strategies for tackling
tasks and never learn anything explicitly. Worse still, because any learned
skill—even driving a car or brushing our teeth—quickly sinks out of
consciousness, we can no longer see the very thought habits we’re relying upon.
Our mental tools become invisible to us.
Claxton is the academic adviser to the Mind Gym. So not surprisingly, the
company espouses his solution—that we must return our thought patterns to
a conscious level, becoming aware of the details of how we usually think. Only
then can we start to practise better thought patterns, until eventually these
become our new habits. Switching metaphors, picture not gym classes, but tennis
or football coaching.
The theory itself is not new. Russian psychologists like Lev Vygotsky and
Aleksandr Luria were putting forward much the same arguments in the 1930s. And
various attempts have been made to put such thinking into practice. The business
world is certainly familiar with a number of “better thinking” gurus such as
Edward de Bono and Tony Buzan, and habit-breaking techniques like
neurolinguistic programming, which combine positive thinking and persuasion.
In practice, the training can seem quite mundane. For example, in one of the
eight different creativity workouts offered by the Mind Gym—entitled
“creativity for logical thinkers”—one of the mental strategies taught is
to make a sensible suggestion, then immediately pose its opposite. So, asked to
spend five minutes inventing a new pizza, a group soon comes up with no topping,
sweet topping, cold topping, price based on time of day, flat-rate prices and so
on.
Bailey agrees that the trick is simple. But it is surprising how few such
tricks people have to call upon when they are suddenly asked to be creative:
“They tend to just label themselves as uncreative, not realising that there are
techniques that every creative person employs.” Bailey says the aim is to
introduce people to half a dozen or so such strategies in a session so that what
at first seems like a dauntingly abstract mental task becomes a set of concrete,
learnable behaviours. He admits this is not a short cut to genius.
Neurologically, some people do start with quicker circuits or greater handling
capacity. However, with the right kind of training he thinks we can dramatically
increase how efficiently we use it.
It is hard to prove that the training itself is effective—how do you
measure a change in an employee’s creativity levels, or memory skills? But staff
certainly report feeling that such classes have opened their eyes. For example,
they may have felt that the only way to solve a difficult problem is to bang
away at it as hard as possible. But then they learn that most creative thinkers
advise taking a break and letting ideas incubate. A simple tactic, yet one
that’s rarely taught in normal life.
So, neurological boosting or psychological training? At the moment you can
pay your money and take your choice. Claxton for one believes there is no reason
why schools and universities shouldn’t spend more time teaching basic thinking
skills, rather than trying to stuff heads with facts and hoping that effective
thought habits are somehow absorbed by osmosis.
-
John McCrone’s How The Brain Works
is published by Dorling Kindersley early next year
