Mind over matter

Greg Finucane & Norman Doidge NZ Listener July 2009

Practice, on-going rote learning and imagination are the key to improving your memory, says British expert Ed Cooke.

Memory is a “slothful creature’ writes memory expert Ed Cooke in his new book, Remember, Remember. But that slothfulness can be combated when the brain is given bright, interesting things to remember.

Cooke, a Grandmaster of Memory who can memorise a 1000-digit sequence in less than an hour, is speaking from New York the day after giving a lecture at Princeton University about tools to help improve your memory.

He became interested in memory techniques when, as an 18-year-old, he spent several weeks in hospital with leg and back problems. The original aim was to learn Russian, he says, laughing, but then someone suggested his time would be better spent learning how to remember things.

Since then, Cooke has made a career out of his abilities, but the Londoner says he feels a bit of a fraud because his success is due to skills anyone can perfect: practice, on-going rote learning and imagination. One of the keys is to push the boundaries of your brain and its ability to memorise things, he says. Consequently, he is able to memorise the names of every British prime minister or American president or long poems, simply because he’s learnt a few important techniques.

The first rule, he says, is to realise that much of the information we have to learn isn’t necessarily interesting in itself. But if you create vivid images in your mind, that makes it more interesting. The second, he says, is to relate the information you’re trying to learn with information you already know. Finally, he says, it’s important to put information into context. If you’re the type of person who always forgets where you put your car keys, try to visualise something interesting when you put your keys down. The problem with car keys, for example, it that it’s not important to know where they are until you need them again. But, he says, if you visualise an explosion when you put your keys on the bench, chances are you’ll remember the keys are on the bench.

As for selective memory, Cooke argues that we actually do remember everything, it’s just that we place more importance on some things than on others. “It’s not true that we forget stuff, it’s always there somewhere.”

But why is it so hard to remember some things? Cooke reckons some of the blame rests on the education system. In the past, he says, students were forced to challenge their brains by rote learning large tracts of poetry or Shakespeare, thereby strengthening neurons and giving them the small amounts of information, meaning they have not stretched their memory to its full capacity.

One example is a recent study that found students at English schools who had learnt French for five years had a vocabulary of only 850 French words. Cooke says someone who has practised using their memory should be able to learn – and remember – 1000 French words in a week.

Responsible or our more flexible and our more rigid behaviours. That is because plasticity is competitive – once you learn something that coalition can develop what Doidge calls “squatter’s rights” in the part of the brain where it resides. That makes it harder for other new ideas to reside there.

And Doidge says it’s important for people to realise that a “tortoise-and-hare effect” is needed before we can really master a new skill. He cites a 1990s study by Spanish researcher Alvaro Pascual-Leone, who used a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) mapping device to measure how blind people learnt to read Braille. What Pascual-Leone found on TMS mapping was that blind people had a bigger section of their motor cortex devoted to their index fingers – the ones they used to read Braille. The results showed that people who crammed their Braille learning did not have the on-going permanent changes to their motor cortex evident in those who learned at a steady pace.

Says Doidge, in his book: “After a brief period of practice, as when we cram for a test, it is relatively easy to improve because we are likely strengthening existing synaptic connections. But we quickly forget what we’ve crammed – because these are easy-come, easy-go neuronal connections and are rapidly reversed. Maintaining improvement and making a skill permanent requires the slow, steady work that probably forms new connections.”

Both Dr Greg Finucane and Doidge say depression has a huge impact on brain function and the current recession is likely to affect how effectively we use our brains. Says Doidge: “We know that stress and depression and anxiety arises in people who are unemployed for the obvious reason, but at some level the lack of stimulation if they withdraw from the world is very bad. A lack of stimulation is very bad for the brain, the brain is a learning organ and often if we’re sick we do take to bed. It’s understandable, we’re exhausted and upset and depressed, but you can set up a vicious cycle. “

So for example, Doidge says, we know that elderly people who lose their driver’s licence or go into a nursing home have a higher chance of them getting sick and dying than those who don’t. They no longer have challenges and their social circle reduces. “The brain is far more likely to waste away through inactivity than it is to wear out due to hyperactivity.”

Like many medical experts, Doidge practises what he preaches. He says anything good for the heart is also good for the brain because it increases oxygen flow to the brain. He tries to work out nearly every day and likes stimulating his senses by listening to new forms of music, playing his guitar and singing to get some right-brain stimulation because so much of his work involves left-brain linear thinking. He also does brain exercises and recommends Posit Science brain games, which can be bought online, because studies show they can make people’s brains function at a more youthful level.

Doidge also does meditation and psychoanalysis with the aim of reducing stress because, as the German medical students’MRI scans show, stress affects brain function. “My attitude has really been changed by my work,” he says. “As long as we thought brain development stopped at the end of childhood or early youth, the whole notion of adult development was a euphemism for learning to accept your deterioration with wisdom and grace. It wasn’t really about development or trying grand new learning projects and I now see more than ever that this is possible and very healthy.”

Across the road from Greg Finucane’s office, neurobiologise Dr Johanna Montgomery is making startling discoveries about how quickly the brain can reshape itself. She is principal investigator for the University of Auckland’s Synaptic Function Research Group, which is examining how synapses – pathways that link neurons in our brains – are formed and maintained and how they can be altered. The group’s aim is to try to work out whether certain synaptic functions can be altered so as to treat or avoid neurological diseases”

Montgomery’s own mother-in-law was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. “If there’s a way that you could slow the progression or make the newborn neutrons integrate and ensure a person could have a better quality of life for a much longer period of time that would be fantastic.”

She says the ability of brain cells to communicate through synaptic connections often changes in response to other activities in the brain. “That changing of strength is thought to underlie things such as learning and memory … in seconds you can get a synapse going from quite weak to quite strong … We do electrophysiology, which measures what synapses are doing, and the components of synapses, through live-cell imaging. That has really changed the face of neuroscience because it’s suddenly shown us how dynamic brain cells are.”

One of the challenges is that stem cells create new brain cells but often those new brain cells die. “It’s almost as if your brain wants to fix itself when it’s been damaged by various diseases but it can’t,” Montgomery says. “The new cells don’t form synaptic connections with the circuitry that’s already there, and neurons are very sociable cells; they need to be able to talk to other brain cells, and so if these new cells don’t form synaptic connections then they die.”

Like Finucane and Doidge, Montgomery is a big supporter of “use it or lose it”> “Your brain is like a muscle, and the more you use it, the better shape you get into,” she says. “Brain health is starting to come out as something that’s very important … anything that can slow that decline is critical.”
She has young children and is fascinated by how their brains work. “Sometimes I find myself thinking, what’s happening in their hippocampus right now … what astounds me is they have enormous capacity for learning and I wonder why we lose it. I think it’s a choice to lose it in some ways; I think you can continue to be that curious about things and I think that’s something people need to get into more – not losing that sense of wonder that kids have of ‘how does this work?’”

Brendan Telfer says doctors have been unable to determine what caused his haemorrhage. “I feel resigned to the fact that it’ll be my head that’ll do me in eventually because they haven’t been able to tell me why I had this brain haemorrhage, and this is why they’ve taken such a conservative line with me. My neurosurgeon said to me, ‘Brendan, you are complex. You have had a remarkable physical recovery, but the situation is complex.’ He said normally there are four causes of a haemorrhage, but I don’t present symptoms consistent with any of these four options.”

He says the experience has given him a slightly more depressed outlook on life – common when people have a brain injury.

Telfer says until doctors know what caused his brain bleed, they can’t know the risk of his having another one.

He is still having twice-weekly sessions with an occupational therapist, who encourages him to do various tasks to help his brain. That includes trying to quickly divide a pack of playing cards into suits and then into, for example, cards that have a T in them (like a queen of hearts or eight of clubs) – all of which assists cognitive processing.

Telfer is not alone in not knowing exactly what the future will hold. Kiwi rock musician Chris Knox suffered a stroke in mid-June. Family spokesman, Roy Martyn, says Knox, 57, is improving as well as can be expected but the prognosis is unclear. “The doctors are reluctant to make long-term predictions which is something we’re learning about strokes. The brain is an amazing thing. We just don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Johanna Montgomery says over the past 30 years neuroscience has become a massive field of research. Often a cure comes from a serendipitous discovery from very basic science, not necessarily someone trying to look for a cure. A lot of great discoveries have come this way and it’s very important for people to know there’s a lot of hope.” Some of the world’s biggest brains are applying their minds to it.
Better by far

Don’t like the look of your daughter’s new boyfriend? That’s no problem if you’re controversial American psychiatrist Daniel Amen – he’s perform a brain scan to check there is nothing wrong with the new beau’s mind.

Amen finds nothing unusual in the fact that he performed brain scans on his children’s partners. His adult children are happily married. “It’s just part of discussions in our family.”

It’s 10 years since Amen wrote his book Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, a self-help guide that encourages you to be aware of brain function and the impact a poorly functioning brain has on your health and happiness. He is a strong advocate of brain scans, saying they can pinpoint many behavioural problems, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But it’s a view that has fallen foul of traditional psychiatrists who say brain scans aren’t necessarily accurate.

Despite the opposition, Amen has made a lucrative career from brain scans and proudly says the Amen Clinics have now performed more than 50,000 – at $US3400 for two scans and a follow-up analysis – in the US. New Zealanders have been among the clientele, he says.

Amen recently began studying whether American football players suffer brain damage. He believes that tackles often damage the front part of NFL players’ brains. “I think they have chronic brain damage and it’s important to understand that playing some of these sports can ruin people’s lives … it can affect the way they behave with their wives, in their jobs. You cannot continually hurt the organ that runs your life and just expect it to still be fabulous.”

Amen has had his own brain scanned 11 times and says he is encouraged by the fact that his brain looks younger than it used to. “I developed brain envy where I want to have a better brain so I work on it every day.”

And how does he do that? He takes fish-oil supplements and a Chinese moss extract supplement called huperzine, eats healthily – including blueberries every day – drives in a safe car, is always trying a new skill, and limits the amount of sugar and trans-fats that he consumes.

“I protect my brain. I don’t drink, I don’t do any drugs, I don’t smoke and I try to hang around positive people who have the same beliefs that I have … I always tell people if you want a better body, you should first work on your brain, because that’s actually what will get you a better body.”
 

Great article originally in the New Zealand Listener July 4-10 2009