Is neuroplasticity simply a brain teaser?
For her new book My Plastic Brain, a science writer becomes her own test case, spending a year undergoing experiments and techniques to see if she could alter the way her brain works — including her worrisome tendency to worry
“I’d like you to think of something that you worry about often,” says Alex Temple-McCune, a babyfaced PhD student with the air of a much older, kindly doctor.
“Oh, that’s easy. My son running into the road outside my house,” I reply. Alex stares at me, impassive. “He’s 5,” I add, by way of explanation. “It’s a very busy road.”
He nods, slowly. “OK, I am going to leave the room for five minutes, and I’d like you to worry about that for the whole time I am gone. Think about it in as much detail as you can, and try not to think about anything else.” Oh God. “This is going to be horrible!” I plead, feeling my eyes widen as Alex gets up to leave. He hesitates at the door but goes out anyway, leaving me alone in a sparse, white, windowless room to think, in horrifying detail, about the worst thing that could happen in my life.
I am here at Oxford University to take part in a study into the cognitive basis of worrying, in the lab of Professor Elaine Fox.
I’ve taken all the necessary screening tests to confirm that I am, indeed, a frequent worrier — and over the next two weeks the plan is to try and rectify that with a training course, designed to change the way the brain deals with stress.
It seems to be one of the areas where there is pretty good evidence that you can, with a bit of effort, make real changes to your brain. There has been a good 15 years’ worth of work in this area because worrying too much is not only bad for sustaining focus, but it is also seriously bad for your health.
Here’s a statistic that worriers everywhere will enjoy: persistent worrying — even low-level fretting that doesn’t qualify as a proper anxiety disorder — makes you 29 per cent more likely to die of a heart attack and 41 per cent more likely to die of cancer. In fact, according to the study of 8,000 people that generated these figures, worrying a lot makes you more likely to die of anything, and the bigger the daily dose of stress, the greater the risk.
I can’t help thinking that if my friend Jolyon hadn’t spent his 20s and 30s enjoying a totally debauched lifestyle, he’d probably live forever. Because Jolyon never, ever, worries. While I have been getting my knickers in a twist over various incarnations of this book, he has formed a company, launched two successful brands, and made several million pounds. He named the company “Gusto” for good reason — this is a man who never does anything by halves and couldn’t care less what anyone thinks about him while he’s doing it.
You could say that he doesn’t even worry when he probably should: he launched Gusto while his partner was pregnant with their first child, giving up a highly paid, steady job that he was very good at, and putting all of their financial security on the line to do so. If it failed, as he cheerfully told me most businesses do, they would find themselves broke, with a newborn and nowhere to live. It was touch and go during the first few months, but he never really believed that it wouldn’t work.
It’s the same story you hear over and over again about plucky overachievers: they don’t get bogged down by what could go wrong or what just did go wrong; they just dig in and get on with it. It must be a really nice way to live.
Then there is the fact that anxiety is really bad for pretty much any kind of thinking. It not only narrows focus, but it reduces impulse control and robs the brain of processing power that could better be used for other things. Over time, it has been found to shrink the hippocampus, a crucial brain area for memory. There has been some evidence unearthed recently that having an anxious temperament has some benefits, such as making a person more empathic and quicker to respond in a crisis — but overall it’s not a great state to be in if you want to get the best out of your brain.
Some scientists — including Elaine Fox and her team at Oxford — think that differences between the likes of Jolyon and the likes of me come down to basic differences in the way our brains process information about the world around us. In her research, and in her 2012 book Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain, Fox argues that it all comes down to the balance between two of the most ancient and powerful circuits in the brain — one responsible for seeking out danger and the other for spotting potential rewards — and how well connected they are to the newer, thinking, bits of the brain.
A skew to one way or the other is known as a cognitive bias — in other words, an assumption we don’t know we are making. The direction and strength of these cognitive biases, Fox says, make us who we are — whether that is a driven and confident risk-taker like Jolyon, or more of a reticent worrier like me.
So again it all seems to come down to what we do with our limited budget of attention. This is an automatic kind of attention that operates within milliseconds, directing your focus to whichever parts of your surroundings seem particularly important. Crucially, all of this happens before we are consciously aware of noticing anything, and that means that, although we don’t realize it, our conscious mind is constantly being fed a fundamentally skewed view of the world. This makes it particularly challenging to control. How can you change something that you’re not even aware you are doing?
A negative cognitive bias might not be very good for you, but it undoubtedly evolved for good reason: it came in handy in the days when we were at the mercy of large, toothy predators and men with clubs because it drastically cuts down processing time in the brain when we need to move fast. The downside is that the unconscious nature of these biases means that we live under the illusion that our own impression of the world — whether it is fundamentally safe or to be fretted about at every opportunity — is a totally accurate window on reality, when it is actually anything but. And that means that if you want to change your outlook on life — say, if you don’t like the idea of hurtling, greyhaired and haggard, to an early grave — it isn’t an easy thing to do.
On the plus side, the laws of neuroplasticity aren’t swayed by a little thing like the border between unconscious and conscious processing, and Fox and others are working on finding ways to nudge troublesome cognitive biases back in a more positive direction. It sounds like something that is definitely worth a try, especially because some research suggests that all you need to do to retrain your cognitive bias toward a rosy view of life is to play a computer game for a few minutes every day.
It’s a controversial area of research, and not everyone is convinced that it works, but it resonates with me partly because it treats an anxious temperament not as a fundamental part of who you are but as a kind of system error in the brain. And I get that because if I’m really honest about it, my main problem with all this worrying is that it really isn’t me. Outwardly, I’m quite a risk-taker and most people would probably describe me as mostly upbeat.
The other day, another mother at the school gate described me as a “super mum,” and I don’t even think she was being sarcastic. So clearly I give off the impression that I have things pretty much under control. Only I know about all of the negative chuntering, worrying and general unease that goes on under the surface, and that, frankly, gets on my nerves.
Earlier, I found out that I score highly on a measure of trait anxiety (also known as neuroticism), and research has shown that people like me, who score high on this measure, tend to have a negative cognitive bias, which we use to subconsciously scan the environment for threats at all times. We are also more likely to get stuck in threat-obsessing mode, assessing and reassessing a situation in pessimistic terms and getting progressively more worried. And yes, I do both of these things.
The first of them, threat readiness, is pretty understandable, I think. When I was 19, my father was killed in a car accident. In the 20-odd years since then, I have perfected a kind of 360-degree, all-seeing eye for danger — especially the randomly occurring kind that could take a loved one away from me at any moment.
My age when my father died might explain why this harsh life lesson stuck fast in my brain. It has long been suspected that the adolescent brain is particularly plastic. This, after all, is a time when growing independence relies on being able to learn from your mistakes. Research has shown that the adolescent brain not only stores memories more vividly than adults, but it is also particularly sensitive to stress, taking longer to recover from emotional setbacks. These two factors together explain perfectly why unpredictable danger would have been writ large in my brain from there on in, but even in my most angst-ridden moments I know that the panic I feel is wildly out of proportion to any real threat …
Of course, it was possible that my neurotic tendencies would have nothing to do with a wonky cognitive bias, so … I headed to Elaine Fox’s website where there are two tests — one for cognitive bias and a questionnaire to measure a tendency toward optimism or pessimism. Just for fun, I asked Jolyon to do it too.
Psychologists measure cognitive biases using a computer-based puzzle called a “dot-probe task.” First, a cross appears in the centre of the screen, to give you something to look at. Then, two images flash up for 500 milliseconds, followed swiftly by a target (which can be anything — an arrow, a dot, whatever). Your job is to press a button on the left or right, depending on where the target has shown up. Research has shown not only that a) people with an anxious temperament are quicker to spot targets that appear on the same side as the angry face (a negative bias) but also that b) people with a negative bias are more prone to anxiety disorders and depression.
Alittle bit of background research later and I have the proof: Jolyon is as strange as I am. According to surveys of large numbers of people, an average score on the optimism/pessimism test is15 out of 24, meaning that the average person is generally slightly optimistic. Jolyon and I are each six points away from the average but in opposite directions. He is unusually positive (hence the risky financial deals) while I am an almost perfectscoring pessimist.
Which ties in nicely with the direction of our unconscious cognitive biases. A score of –31 means that I press a button 31 milliseconds faster when it follows an angry face than when it follows a smiley one. Jolyon, on the other hand, is 51 milliseconds faster to spot the target when it comes after a happy face. His brain automatically seeks out the good side of life — which probably explains his unusually high levels of optimism.
If all it takes to put things right is a quick bit of computer-based training, then it shouldn’t matter how we got to be so different — but I must admit I’m curious. A glance around my close relatives makes me suspect that at least some of my neurotic tendencies might be inherited. On one side of my family it’s considered unusual if you’re not anxious, prone to depression, or emotionally a bit volatile. A quick head count of my aunts, uncles, and cousins on that side of the family reveals that while the average number of people with emotional issues in the United Kingdom is one in every four, our family has roughly twice as many.
Elaine says she’d be happy to put me into her next study on the genetics of worry, but they probably won’t be ready to do the tests for at least another year. As a backup, she puts me in touch with the lab that does the analysis for her studies. She warns me that it’ll be expensive, but it might be possible as a one-off. It’s my only hope because while some medical insurance companies in the United States will do the test under certain circumstances, commercial genetesting companies like 23andMe — which offer off-the-shelf tests for risk genes, for everything from Alzheimer’s to male pattern baldness — don’t offer it, at least not yet.
As it happens, when I contact the lab, they are happy to help and can even chuck a few more samples in for me at no extra cost. I get a testing kit sent to Jolyon, and then we swab our cheeks, pop them in the post to the lab, and wait with bated breath to see what comes back. After several weeks of back and forth between Jolyon and the lab, where he manages to avoid getting any DNA on his first set of swabs and the second batch gets lost in the mail — and I start to wonder how he runs a successful business at all — we finally get the results. And the verdict is … not at all what I expected.
The research treats an anxious temperament not as a fundamental part of who you are but as a kind of system error in the brain