The Difficulty of Minding Our Minds
Many of us will try just about anything to get smarter, or to prevent cognitive decline as we age. Puzzles, memorization exercises and brain games are hot sellers these days.
Generally not recommended: do-it-yourself electrical stimulation. That’s what many people are trying, although the safety risks are unclear, Anna Wexler reported in The Times.
Scientists have experimented extensively with transcranial direct current stimulation for 15 years, at levels hundreds of times weaker than that employed for electroconvulsive therapy, treatments for mental illness where electric currents trigger mild seizures.
Studies suggest, Ms. Wexler wrote, “that the stimulation may be beneficial for treating problems like depression and chronic pain as well as enhancing cognition and learning in healthy individuals.”
The treatment, in which electrodes are connected by wires to nine-volt batteries and attached to various parts of the head, is easily done at home. Many hope to improve cognitive skills, she wrote, “but a significant proportion are self-treating depression, anxiety or A.D.H.D.”
If you are not inclined to build your own battery-powered brain stimulator, perhaps the best thing to do is stop thinking so much.
That’s the advice Moshe Bar, a neuroscientist, offered in The Times. A cluttered mind prevents us from mining the full potential of our inner lives.
“The capacity for original and creative thinking is markedly stymied by stray thoughts, obsessive ruminations and other forms of ‘mental load,’ ” Professor Bar wrote. His studies suggest that “innovative thinking, not routine ideation, is our default cognitive mode when our minds are clear.”
Grocery lists, meeting preparations, and the thought patterns that cause stress and depression all combine to consume mental capacity. The trick is to empty the mind of thoughts, which Professor Bar attempts to do at a meditation retreat one week a year.
“Honing an ability to unburden the load on your mind, be it through meditation or some other practice,” he wrote in The Times, “can bring with it a wonderfully magnified experience of the world.”
But even if we can get to that point, how well do we even know ourselves?
Not very well, Alex Rosenberg argued in The Times.
“Experiments in cognitive science, neuroimaging and social psychology have repeatedly shown how wrong we can be about our real motivations, the justification of firmly held beliefs and the accuracy of our sensory equipment,” Professor Rosenberg wrote.
He reports that humans and other animals evolved mind reading skills so that we could anticipate threats and survive.
But mind reading is a crude tool and often mistaken. Evidence suggests that human self-awareness is merely this same mind reading ability, Professor Rosenberg writes, “turned around and employed on our own mind,” with all the unreliability associated with the guessing we do about what others are up to.
This theory is supported by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging research, the study of autism, and other experiments that show mind reading is a well-localized module in the brain.
“Our access to our own thoughts is just as indirect and fallible as our access to the thoughts of other people. We have no privileged access to our own minds,” Professor Rosenberg wrote. “If our thoughts give the real meaning of our actions, our words, our lives, then we can’t ever be sure what we say or do, or for that matter, what we think or why we think it.”