MIND GAMES
Inside one woman’s mission to ‘hack’ her brain and improve her creativity and concentration — and how you can too
CAROLINE Williams long struggled with mental focus, so she spent a year hacking her brain.
“My family and I once arrived to the airport a day late because I put in the start of our vacation incorrectly,” she says.
Williams chronicles her attempts to improve her cognition and concentration in her new book “My Plastic Brain: One Woman’s Yearlong Journey To Discover If Science Can Improve Her Mind” (Prometheus Books).
For her research, she had her brain stimulated with magnets and electric shocks and performed various mental exercises. She came to recognize the ideal state of mind for different types of mental chores, which was eye-opening.
“I had been going about things all wrong,” she says. “I would struggle to concentrate when I had a deadline and really stress myself out . . . I learned that the better way to go about it, when you can’t focus but you have to, is to do some exercises, get into the right state and try again . . . [it] was a revelation.”
Reduce anxiety
Method: At Oxford University, researcher Elaine Fox works on cognitive therapy for chronic worriers. “Anxious people focus on the three miserable guests at a party, get anxious and view the whole night as negative,” says Williams. Fox retrains the brain using a system developed at McGill University in Montreal. Subjects must look at a computer screen with 15 angry-looking faces and one happy face and then click on the smiling face. Williams says undergoing the treatment trained her brain to seek out the positive.
Time at it: Ten minutes per day, every day for seven months.
Result: “Now, at my child’s school, I look away from unpleasant people and focus on the pleasant ones,” she says. “I feel better and also have fewer irrational fears.”
What we can do: Do your own McGill-style training via the free Happy Faces app for Android phones via Google Play.