Train Your Brain
How to be smarter, sharper and happier
The brain is the most complex organ of the human body. Everything about this 1.3kg mass of squishy matter that sits inside our skull is truly fascinating, from how it’s made up of more than 100 billion nerve cells, to its production of approximately 1000 trillion connections; it’s responsible for our every regulating body function as well as every thought, reaction, emotion and decision.
Despite the brain’s incredible capabilities, most of us can put our hand up to having experienced a ‘brain block’ or inability to complete a train of thought, right? That forgetfulness, or simply wishing we could process information that little bit faster – we’ve all been there. But here’s a game-changing fact: we’re not actually stuck with the neurological hand that we’ve been dealt.
Classically, the brain was considered a ‘hard-wired machine’ that reached its peak when people got to their twenties and stopped changing after that. However, new findings in neuroscience, gained over the last three decades through extensive research, studies and clinical trials are telling us that the brain never loses its capacity to rewire itself.
This is known as neuroplasticity – and it’s arguably the biggest breakthrough in neuroscience ever. It tells us that with the help of specially developed cognitive exercises – also known as brain training – we can target specific areas and pathways in our cerebral cortex (the outermost layer of the brain) and rewire them to strengthen and correct brain weaknesses. The outcomes are beyond exciting too – brain training can help alleviate learning disorders and make us better, faster learners and thinkers with quicker reactions and sharper memories. Brain training can rehabilitate traumatic brain injury and help ward off neurodegenerative diseases.
The woman who changed her brain
Someone who knows all too well about how brain training can overcome severe learning disabilities is Barbara Arrowsmith-Young, the international bestselling author of The Woman Who Changed Her
Brain (2012), and creator of one of the first practical applications using the principles of neuroplasticity, the Arrowsmith Program.
Growing up, Arrowsmith-Young was plagued with several severe mental and learning disabilities, including dyslexia. She couldn’t tell the time. She had trouble processing rules for the playground and concepts in language and conversation. She was continually getting lost and was physically uncoordinated. In her teenage years, Arrowsmith-Young even contemplated ending her life, seeing no future for herself.
But at age 25, Arrowsmith-Young’s life changed forever, after discovering the works of Mark Rosenzweig on neuroplasticity, and Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Romanovich Luria, whose book
The Man With A Shattered World documents the journey of braindamaged soldier Lev Zasetsky, who sought to recover his memory and other mental capabilities after a bullet entered his brain. Both Rosenzweig and Luria’s descriptions of brain function helped Arrowsmith-Young better understand her own learning problems, influencing her to create her first brain training exercise to help her tell the time. It worked. Encouraged, she went on to target other areas of her brain with different exercises, radically increasing their functioning to normal, and in some cases, above normal levels.
Arrowsmith-Young continued to explore the nature of specific learning capacities and in 1980, the Arrowsmith School for learningdisabled children was opened in Toronto, with its curriculum based on the exercises she had developed for herself, which came to be known as the Arrowsmith Program. At the time her book was published in May 2012, the programme was in 34 schools in Canada and the United States. Today it is used in 93 schools in seven countries, including six schools in New Zealand.
“It’s incredibly promising that when I started school, the belief was that the brain was fixed and if you had a problem, too bad, you have to live with it, cope and compensate,” says Arrowsmith-Young. “And now we are learning more and more about the brain, to really make learning exciting, to change the fundamental capacity of a learner to learn. Rather than thinking that the learner is a black box, that it’s fixed and we have to find ways to pour content into that box, [we’re] recognising that the learner can change. The fundamental capacity of that learner can be enhanced or strengthened and then they can go out in the world and engage in a whole different way to absorb knowledge, to understand, to relate to the world.”
Arrowsmith-Young’s programme addresses a number of cognitive challenges in all ages. “From a person who [is unable to] read non-verbal cues to the person who can’t recognise faces, the person
that has no sense of quantity, so 10, 100, 1000 all mean the same to them. They run out of gas on the highway, they can’t budget, they can’t balance their cheque book, the individuals who just can’t hold onto auditory information so they’re constantly having to write to-do lists; they can’t hold information inside their head. The individual that can’t think, plan or problem-solve, programmes for reasoning, for motor planning and writing…” It was working with these individuals that enabled Arrowsmith-Young to develop all of these programmes. The Arrowsmith Program now even has a training group in Melbourne, which trains teachers from all around the world how to implement the programme into their schools.
More benefits – super-sized memory
The ability to perform astonishing feats of memory, such as remembering lists of several dozen words, can be learned, researchers report in neuroscience journal Neuron. The research, led by Martin Dresler, assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at Radboud University Medical Center in The Netherlands, involved a 40-day trial of daily 30-minute training sessions using a strategic memory improvement technique. Dresler examined the brains of 23 world-class memory athletes and 23 ordinary people similar in age, health status, and intelligence but with typical memory skills, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to measure brain activity by detecting blood flow changes inside the brain and differences in the strength of communication between brain regions.
Brain scans before and after training showed that this brain training exercise altered the brain functions of the ordinary trainees, inducing similar brain connectivity patterns as those seen in the memory athletes. The trainees who had no previous memory training, and had typical memory skills at the start, more than doubled their memory capacity, going from recalling an average of 26 words, from a list of 72, to remembering 62. Four months later and the participants who were still using the training continued to show substantial gains.
It can make us happier
We can even train our minds in habits of wellbeing, to generate a true sense of serenity and happiness, according to Matthieu Ricard, a former genetic scientist turned Buddhist monk and considered by researchers and popular media as the ‘world’s happiest man’. Ricard credits daily meditation for enhancing his capacity for joy, and was involved in a study where neuroscientist Richard Davidson wired up his skull with 256 sensors at the University of Wisconsin, as part of research on hundreds of advanced practitioners of meditation.
Scans showed that when meditating on compassion, Ricard’s brain produced a level of gamma waves – those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory – “never reported before in the neuroscience literature”, according to Davidson.
The scans also showed an abundance of activity in his brain’s left prefrontal cortex (the area associated with happiness) compared to its right counterpart (associated with negative mood), giving him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negativity, researchers believe.
In his TED talk, The Habits of Happiness, which has been viewed just short of seven million times, Ricard adds that mind training matters. “This is not just a luxury. This is not a supplementary vitamin for the soul. This is something that’s going to determine the quality of every instant of our lives. We are ready to spend 15 years achieving education. We love to do jogging, fitness. We do all kinds of things to remain beautiful. Yet we spend surprisingly little time taking care of what matters most – the way our mind functions – which, again, is the ultimate thing that determines the quality of our experience.”
Famous users of brain training
Superbowl legend and New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady credits brain training for his mental sharpness. He uses brain training exercises from BrainHQ, a neuroplasticity-based brain training app and website that has a suite of 29 exercises to target and strengthen different areas of the brain.
New Zealander Dr Melanie Cheung, a neurobiologist at the University of Auckland, began collaborating with BrainHQ in 2014.
Says Cheung, “In sport, it’s all about millimetres and milliseconds, as opposed to centimetres and minutes, and neuroplasticity-based training certainly gives you a much faster reaction time and helps your psychomotor skills, which involve the parts of the brain which help control movement. It’s a pretty outstanding programme in many different ways.
“The fact that [Brady] is 39 and still at the top of his game is actually phenomenal,” she adds.
The chief scientist at BrainHQ is American neuroscientist Dr Michael Merzenich, a leading pioneer in brain plasticity research for nearly five decades who was one of three recipients of the ‘Nobel Prize of neuroscience’ – the Kavli Prize – in 2016. He is also the author of Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life (2013). Merzenich says our brain is, indeed, an exquisitely adaptable machine, constructed for change and all about change. “It confers on us our ability to do things tomorrow that we can’t do today, things today that we couldn’t do yesterday,” he says.
Merzenich spent years researching and running scientific experiments on the brains of animals, analysing the different cortical areas in their brains (the areas associated with higher brain function such as thought and action), in order to show they could remodel themselves in ways that were specific to perfecting a skill or ability. These findings were instrumental in the future of brain training for human cognitive development.
“We’ve used this research to try to understand not just how a normal person develops and elaborates their skills and abilities, but also to try to understand the origins of impairment and the origins of differences or variations that might limit the capacities of a child or an adult.”
Merzenich, Cheung and other BrainHQ neuroscientists are currently focusing on developing more brain training exercises to work on diseases and disorders, including brain injury (concussion, post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, stroke, addiction, chemobrain); mental illness (depression, schizophrenia, bi-polar); and neurodegenerative disease (dementia, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and Multiple Sclerosis).
With neuroplasticity, Cheung says, “It’s all about making new connections and strengthening neural pathways… with the brain training that we do, we seek to understand the underlying impaired processes, and then we target those processes to strengthen them and ward off disease.”
Degenerative diseases and training older brains
Brain training can also be implemented in a bid to reduce degenerative problems in older people, including decline in memory and cognition, and in agility and balance.
Dr Jerri Edwards of the University of South Florida School of Aging Studies has been investigating speed-of-processing for more than two decades in The ACTIVE Study. In July of last year, she announced findings from the study which involved 2800 people aged over 65, over a period of 10 years. Participants were divided into a control group and three brain training groups – in memory, reasoning and speed training. They were asked to train for two hours a week for the first five weeks of the study. A sub-group was asked to train an additional four hours at the end of years one and two to measure dosing. Researchers found no significant difference in dementia incidence between the control group and the memory or reasoning training groups. However, they found the speed group, overall, had a 33 per cent reduction in dementia risk, and the sub-group that trained a little more had a 48 per cent reduction.
Says Cheung, “One of the things that is very clear about neuroplasticity brain training is that it is long-lasting. The ACTIVE study was able to show that 10 years after the original training, [participants] were still showing they had improved quality of life and decreased depression in this elderly population.”
Arrowsmith-Young also ran brain training for a 77-year-old retired professor from the University of Toronto. “She just couldn’t remember details, she couldn’t remember faces, and she came in and worked on an exercise and she made the same progress as a 15-year-old. There was no slow in progress given that she was older. As a result of the programme, she was able to remember faces, recognise objects, so to me it was really exciting and it suggested that there is neuroplasticity across our lifespan.”
With brain training for older minds, says Arrowsmith-Young, “What you see are substantial improvements of their immediate memory, of their ability to remember things after a delay, of their ability to control their attention, their language abilities and visual-spatial abilities… It means that most people who are at risk for senility, more or less immediately, are now in a protected position.”
Interpreting behaviour
In 2017, Arrowsmith-Young’s book was re-released with a new chapter, all about looking at behaviour through a cognitive lens. That can explain a lot of behaviour, she says.
“A lot of times when people make mistakes, we maybe attribute it to ‘oh, they don’t care’, or ‘they’re not being careful’. And again, that may be cognitive. I know students that are sent out to buy something at the grocery store and they’re given four items and they come back with only two, because they can’t hold that information. Often they’ll get labelled as irresponsible. Well, they’re not irresponsible, they’ve been given more information than their cognitive capacity can hold. So, I think that’s really important if we can start to look at behaviour and interpret behaviour through a cognitive lens... and then if we can recognise that the individuals don’t have to stay in that place, because there are programmes that address those cognitive difficulties and turn what was a weakness actually into a strength, then they can interpret the non-verbal cues, they can retain and remember the information. They can step back and be objective and analyse the situation before they act, or reason, have rationality; be able to step back and reason through a problem rather than just collapse and feel like you’re hitting a wall and you can’t figure out how to tackle a problem.”
How to guarantee success
The first step is to identify your cognitive troubles, and do your research in order to find brain training exercises to specifically target them – ones that are also backed up by scientific evidence.
Arrowsmith-Young recommends working on your brain for at least 20 minutes, five times a week. The key is also to pitch the difficulty level exactly right, so it’s neither too easy nor too hard, and gradually increase the level of difficulty as your brain improves.
The future
Arrowsmith-Young’s vision is to see cognitive programmes become a compulsory part of early education.
“I mean, we go to school to learn, and what do we learn with? We learn with our brain. Wouldn’t it make sense that as we’re learning, we’re doing activities that are enhancing our capacity to learn? It seems like it goes hand in glove.”
Says Merzenich, our full cognitive potential is within arm’s reach. “Now that you know, now that science is telling us that you are in charge, that it’s under your control, that your happiness, your wellbeing, your abilities, your capacities, are capable of continuous modification, continuous improvement, and you’re the responsible agent and party.”