Ten ideas for enhancing your brain and preventing mental decline. These include 99 blue Loius Armstrongs pouring out of an elevator, playing Halo, and hanging out with your friends, among others.
Introduction
In 1990 it wasn’t clear wether we could enhance our mental faculties. This question was a hot topic in the scientific community, and it was widely believed that we had very little control over our intelligence. You were either born with it, or not. Fast forward to 2015 and we have learned more about the brain in the last ten years than in the last 100 combined. We discovered the brain’s amazing ability to change itself and improve, and now we believe that, if you apply yourself, you can increase your intelligence.
I happen to turn 30 this year, and this unique circumstance has forced me to think about the future in ways I haven’t before. Not only have I thought about retirement, but also about my physical and mental abilities and how to improve them.
This has sparked my curiosity about what science knows on how to improve our brains and protect them from the decline of old age. In my search I stumbled across many books and articles, but one book has stood out, Think Smart, written by Richard Restak, M.D. The tagline reads, “A neuroscientist’s prescription for improving your brain’s performance.” Myself also being a neuroscientist, this title caught my attention. After reading this hardback, I highly recommend it to anyone seeking to improve their own brain’s performance and wanting to prevent mental decline with age.
The following are 10 thoughts about improving the brain I thought would give you the most bang for your buck.
A quick note: Your mileage may vary. There is still a lot we don’t know about the brain, like why people develop dementia and diseases of mental decline, and so it is important to keep in mind that scientific information is being discovered at lightning speed; what’s thought to be true today, may be thought to be untrue tomorrow. So please consult with your doctor about what is the right thing for you to do.
1. We can increase our intelligence with deliberate effort.
This idea is crazy to me, simply amazing, and also disappointing. It means I can no longer complain about not being smarter. It also means that on top of everything I do like working, spending time with the family, going to the gym, now I also need to make time to exercise my brain as well. But it also means that we have this incredible opportunity to take what we have and make it better.
Dr. K. Anders Ericsson is the premier researcher in the science of elite performance, and he has found that superior performers in any skill bearing profession, like music, chess, or basketball, owe their talents almost entirely to working really hard, and smart. Of course there are people who are exceptions to the rule, but I’m certainly not!
I wrote about how what we think is true and what is actually true differs more than we know, here.
A great book that has inspired me over the years is, Talent Is Overrated, by Geoffrey Colvin.
So if you want to improve your cognitive abilities the first step is to commit to doing the work.
2. What’s good for the heart is good for the brain.
I’m sure you all already know this, as we’re constantly taunted by the media with our decline in physical exercise as as a society, but physical exercise is really good for the heart. According to Dr. Restak, however, what’s good for the heart is good for the brain.
Exercise has been found to increase vascularization of the brain. In other words, you have more blood vessels to carry blood to the brain, which contains oxygen and nutrients. You don’t need to be a neuroscientist to see how this is good for you!
One interesting distinction between physical exercise and brain exercise is that physical exercise tends to help your overall health. Building muscle helps burn more fat, which has a bunch of health benefits, like reducing your chances of developing Alzheimer’s, for example. However, brain exercises tend to only improve the specific thing your working on. Improving your memory, for example, will help you remember better, but not your fine motor skills, like playing the piano. However, there are mental exercises that exhibit cognitive transfer, the ability to improve other unrelated areas of brain function.
My advice is to get a fitness tracker and get moving! Try to get 10,000 steps a day, as physical activity has been shown to improve cognitive and emotional brain function, especially in late adulthood. I use a fitbit, but am thinking about using a Polar tracker.
3. Different brain functions that are important to awesome performance.
According to Dr. Restak, these areas are all very important key brain functions that can be improved with practice.
Attention: This refers to the ability to focus and concentrate on a task at hand. Obviously, this is very important. It’s hard to get anything done without paying attention to it.
Sensory Memory: The primary forms of sensory memory are what we see (iconic memory) and what we hear (echoic memory). By focusing on what we hear and what we see we can improve our abilities to perceive visual and auditory stimulus.
Long-term Memory: Any information that is permanent, like vocabulary, your birthday, your name, autobiographical stuff, cultural holidays, societal structures like days of the week, etc is considered a long-term memory.
Working Memory: The temporary storage of information and the usage of is what is referred to as working memory. So, you probably don’t remember what you had for breakfast two weeks ago, but at that moment you knew and were able to use that information appropriately. Also, when you’re driving you’re not committing to long-term memory every street that you’re on, but you’re using that information at that point in time to get to where you’re going.
Fine motor skills: These are dexterity and coordination of small muscle movements, like hands, toes, mouths, etc. These skills can be learned through playing the piano, typing, painting, dancing, kissing, etc.
Recall: Knowing stuff is awesome, but without being able to remember it it’s useless.
Logic: You know, reasoning and stuff, like Aristotle and his friends. I think logic simply describes the ability to problem-solve, apply potential solutions to difficulties. This is hugely important for everyday life, and so improving your reasoning skills, I believe, will translate hugely in your life.A book I really liked is called, The Little Blue Thinking Book, by Brandon Royal.
Imagination: We all know what this is intuitively, but it’s a fascinating mental faculty. We can create images and sensations in our mind without actually seeing, hearing, or touching them. We usually use this when we’re anxious about something and we imagine every “what if” scenario possible. But Dr. Restak is talking about the positive use of imagination, like when we read and create an entire world in our heads. Harry Potter comes to mind!
Visual-spatial thinking: Here we’re talking about thinking through visual processing. Where is your thinking constantly shaped by what you see? in activities like driving, video games, and navigating. There has been a peak in interest in the use of video games to improve cognitive skills, alas action video games have been shown to improve perceptual processing and cognitive flexibility. In this study they used Starcraft. Personally, I like first person shooters (do you like my pun?).
4. Enhancing attention: meditation and the end of multitasking.
Several studies have come out showing that meditation can help improve focus, but there are a plethora of meditation methods and to a beginner meditating can be daunting task. I have tried guided mediation as well as focused attention meditation. In the studies that I looked at focusing your attention on a specific stimulus, like your breathing, helped achieve better focus, as compared to not meditating at all.
In one study the participants meditated 5 hours per day for 3 months! Wow! I’m glad I didn’t participate in that study. In another they did 45 min in a class setting and 10 min on their own per day, for two weeks.
My suggestion is to start with 5 min per day, everyday and increase one minute per week up to as much as you want! I think the habit of meditating 20-30 minutes a day will change your life. Many of the world’s highest performers have some form of meditation practice.
On a side note, meditation can also help reduce mental stress. Reducing mental stress is important as chronic exposure to stress hormones reduces brain volume, and a bunch of other things that are bad for you.
Another habit that has helped me become more focused is to avoid multitasking, like practicing the piano while compulsively checking my iPhone. By putting my phone on silent when working, I have dramatically improved my focus.
I have seen this piece of advice on multiple books, The One Thing, The 4-Hour Workweek, and Think Smart.
Multitasking is usually due to a lack of prioritization. If it’s that important it should be your One Thing.
Now let’s take this to the next level, Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” By having short and aggressive deadlines you force yourself to focus on what’s most important.
5. Enhancing fine motor skills: Music is a great way to increase brain performance.
There are many great art forms and hobbies that can enhance fine motor skills. A particular one that’s very close to my heart is playing music. In fact, music training has been shown to transfer to non-related cognitive areas like verbal fluency and executive function. And at least one study found that information processing speed is increased in musicians.
That’s really exciting! I highly recommend learning music at any age. Several studies have shown that learning music enhances cognition in the elderly. It’s never too late!
Just so y’all know, verbal fluency tasks measure how many words you can list from a category in a specific time frame. This shows the ability to access and retrieve information, thus important.
Executive function is really just an umbrella term for doing everything in #3. It’s the use of the brain in goal oriented behavior.
Speed of information processing is exactly that, the speed at which your brain processes information.
6. Enhancing long-term memory: Learning new languages is a great way of increasing your long-term knowledge.
Language is extremely meaningful to us as a species. The fact that we have this capacity is mind blowing! Learning new languages will help you in innumerable ways, and it enhances your brain. Another way of increasing long-term memory is to being exposed to a new culture, and often you can do both simultaneously! A new culture will have different social norms, customs, and holidays. In Mexico, where I’m from, we celebrate independence from Spain on the eve of September 15, officially on September 16. In America, September 16 is just another good ol’ day. So I celebrate the 4th of July and also the 16th of September and added one extra holiday in my long-term memory.
Learning a new language increases the size of your brain, enhances executive function, and protects against age-related decline. So get to work!
I really like Rosetta Stone.
7. Enhancing recall and short term memory.
Obviously, we want to remember things, otherwise it doesn’t help us to know them. There’s a great book by journalist Joshua Foer called, Moonwalking With Einstein. He plunged into a year long quest to improve his memory, which culminated in him winning the US memory championship.
One of the great techniques discussed in this book is the memory palace, also called the method of loci. This technique uses the brain’s strengths to create powerful memories. The brain prefers stories, rather than lists, images rather than abstract ideas, it remembers emotion, and relies on the senses to store information. It also learns based on something it already knows. These are called anchors, and they help anchor your new memories.
So instead of rote memorizing that list, create a story based on images, emotion, the senses, and tell an interesting story. The crazier, the more likely you’re to remember it.
So how do we do this? Let’s pick a list of 5 words to memorize: Book, pan, dog, dinosaur, and piano. Next, pick a blueprint for our anchors. Let’s use your house/where you live as our blueprint. Next, let’s select our anchors and a route for them. Let’s pick the front door, the living room, the dining room, kitchen, and bathroom as our anchors, and we’ll use them in that order. So now I’m going to make up a story:
You are hanging at home and the doorbell rings. You open it and it’s a man in a giant book costume asking for money. He looks terrible. His costume is dirty, torn up, and the man reeks of alcohol.
You go back into your house and as you sit on the couch in the living room you notice the sun setting in the distance. As you look out at the sun you realize there is a giant frying pan cooking a pair of giant eggs on the sun, creating a giant shadow on the earth. You can hear people outside screaming in panic from the craziness of this giant frying pan.
You go into the dining room, and there is a man dressed in scrubs performing surgery on your dog on the dining room table. You’re freaking out. You look at him and ask him,”What are you doing?” He says to you, “Don’t worry, he’s going to be okay!”
You now walk into the kitchen, and a giant dinosaur with really tiny arms is trying to wash the dishes. He’s whacking things left and right with his huge tail and has nearly destroyed the kitchen, although he had good intentions.
Now, after all this commotion you really need to pee. You go to the bathroom and you notice that exactly where you’re toilet used to be is now an upright piano. What do you do?
Now let’s see if we can remember the list of 5 words. Man dressed in book outfit, giant frying pan on the sun, man doing surgery on my dog, giant dinosaur washing dishes, and piano instead of toilet. Yes!! Good job!
In a more practical scenario, I was at the airport in the blue parking area 99 and I took the Armstrong elevator. I imagined 99 blue Louis Armstrongs pouring out of the elevator, and I remembered my parking space!
So my recommendation is to read about the memory palace, learn it, and use it often. It will help you for long-term memory, and also for short-term memory. I forget everything, all the time, and I still remember my parking space that one day in the airport. In the words of my friend Nelson Dellis,a four time US memory champion, “You have to remember to remember!”
8. The Dual N-back test.
This is a training task that increased fluid intelligence and working memory in a study published in 2008. This was a really cool article because it showed for the first time that you could increase a type of intelligence called fluid intelligence, which is the ability to solve problems in situations where you have no previous knowledge.
This paper has allowed brain training software companies to get a lot of momentum in the market. Basically you practice at performing this task and you get smarter.
You might hear about this a lot in the media. However, as far as I can tell it’s not clear yet if the dual n-back test works as promised. Another researcher in Michigan state could not replicate the study suggesting, in this article, that there is an important control missing in these kind of studies.
Even though the jury is not out on this I still have toyed with this idea out of curiosity. Luminosity has several versions of the dual n-back test, which I like and are fun to play, but, to my knowledge, no brain training software has shown to cause cognitive transfer in a peer-reviewed scientific article.
9. Having a social life
There’s a reason why solitary confinement is reserved for a specific set of prisoners. It sucks. It is important to develop a healthy social life, as feeling lonely hurts the brain, and increases your chances of developing heart attacks, and mental illness.
Something about feeling important and being part of a community promotes brain health. Several studies have come out showing that loneliness can double your risk of Alzheimer’s as compared to those who don’t feel lonely.
Go to that happy hour, the book club, meet ups, concerts; whatever it is you’re into do it with others.
10. Retirement
Retirement is an interesting topic for me. As we get older our body is not as capable of recovering from physical and emotional stress, and as a result people work less when they’re older. Setting yourself up financially to allow for this is obviously important. However, retirement is often confused with being idle. And while relaxing is important, challenging your brain is a necessary component of healthy aging.
The investigation of post mortem brains led to the discovery that some people had Alzheimer’s disease brain pathology but didn’t exhibit any symptoms. How could this be? Scientists call it Cognitive Reserve. Many of these people have high levels of education, and so it is thought that people with higher levels of education build up a greater reserve of brain power. The exact mechanism is not known but this could be due to a higher number of neurons, or to a more efficient use and connectivity of brain cells. As a result, they’re better able to withstand the damage caused by aging.
I believe that education doesn’t have to be formal to create a cognitive reserve, because I think that the benefit of formal education is that it forces us to work harder than we would otherwise, so our brains get better. When we graduate, or just in general if you don’t go to college, it is important to invest in your personal education. Work hard at learning new material. I firmly believe in studying from books. Find a subject matter you want to learn about, and then get a book and get to work! Be a lifelong learner.
Conclusion
So in conclusion, how can we increase our brain power, and help stave off brain decline? Keep a healthy heart, go for a walk, meditate, prioritize, learn an instrument, learn a new language, learn a new culture, learn the memory palace, read and study a ton, and have a beer with your friends and play Halo.
PS. It’s been 8 hours since I wrote our little memory palace story and I still remember those 5 words, book, pan, dog, dinosaur and piano!
