Category: Psychology

Assessing total cognitive burden

by hkatz, posted in Neuroscience, Psychology, Research, Self-Development

Here’s an interesting post to read about assessing and possibly reducing your risk of age-related cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s and other kinds of dementia.

Some questions posed there:

Do you have ongoing stress in your life, or have experienced significant amounts of stress at some period during middle-age?

Do you rarely engage in exercise?

Do you spend most evenings blobbed out in front of the TV?

Reading through the possible risk factors you see some that you can’t control, such as genes and family history and your early childhood circumstances (for instance if you grew up in a very stressful home), but the list also emphasizes modifiable risk factors: amount of exercise, drinking habits, sleep habits, mental stimulation, etc. How all of those interact is still an open question. But when you think about it there never seems to be one trick, one magic way (or magic pill), that improves your long-term cognitive and physical health (which are closely intertwined). Instead it’s about making your life as healthy as possible all around, in multiple areas.

Becoming a genius the hard way

by hkatz, posted in Neuroscience, Psychology, Research

There’s an interesting article in The Atlantic on people who develop a certain genius or talent after getting a head injury or while suffering from some kinds of neurodegenerative disease. They’re called “acquired savants.”

It happens rarely, though now scientists are trying to replicate these instances by using technologies that temporarily mimic (in some ways) the effects of brain injury.

Returning to the point that it happens rarely – why does it happen to some (very few) people and not to others? One suggestion is that among people with degenerative brain disease it occurs when the damage to the brain is relatively contained, as with frontotemporal dementia, and not spread throughout the brain as it is with Alzheimer’s for example. What about when it happens after head injuries? A guy hits his head on the bottom of a swimming pool and becomes a gifted pianist in spite of no musical training. Why him? What happened in his brain that doesn’t happen in so many other cases of head injury? Does it depend in part on how contained the damage is?

Researchers suggest that as other parts of the brain try to compensate for the injured area, sometimes these abilities arise. Maybe other parts of the brain try to “take over” for the damaged area and in consequence start to function in new, possibly unexpected ways. Maybe the brain can’t regain any of the lost function from the damaged area but tries to make better use of what remains, resulting in these isolated and highly specialized abilities.

A steep price can be paid for these enhanced talents. The article links to a bio of Alonzo Clemens:

Alonzo Clemons can’t read, write or drive a car, but there is one thing he can do like no one else: he can see an animal and, in less than an hour, turn a lump of clay into an incredibly accurate three dimensional sculpture.

Clemens suffered a brain injury at a very young age and has strong cognitive disabilities. But he has this gift too. Would the gift have developed to that extent without the severe injury? What a price to pay, though at least he has that gift; others in his circumstances have the severe cognitive impairments without the brilliant talent at sculpting.

It’s fascinating how unpredictable our brains can be. Usually people anticipate only negative changes after a brain injury. The textbook head injury case that probably every psychology and neuroscience student has come across is Phineas Gage, a railway worker who suffered a brain injury when a pipe blasted through his brain. He survived the immediate injury, but his personality reportedly changed – he became wild, reckless, more uninhibited and irresponsible. But there’s a debate regarding the extent of his wild behavior and for how long it persisted, with some evidence suggesting that he improved with time and was able to regain some equilibrium. That in and of itself is an amazing feat – to survive and keep functioning after such a trauma, and to be able to cope with radical changes to personality. We don’t fully understand how that happens, and why some people can survive and more or less function, while others never regain function and still others decline immediately and die. Gage himself died about twelve years after his accident, after suffering terrible convulsions. In any case he didn’t start composing operas. He didn’t develop any special previously undemonstrated talents. Just living after what happened to him was amazing enough.

The brain is powerful and delicate; incredibly fragile but also resilient to varying extents depending on the individual and the circumstances. What happens after brain damage can depend on where the brain has been damaged, but it also has to do with the way that all the parts of the brain are connected. No two brains are alike. Disturbing that web of connections can yield predictable (usually tragic) results, and other times can also give rise to something unexpected.

[There’s some good discussion in the comments section of the Atlantic article on how acquired savants might suddenly have the knowledge to sculpt or play piano when they weren’t trained before or didn’t necessarily exhibit those talents before. The article brings up the idea of “genetic memory” and that’s what the commenters are picking over.]

Getting the mind to pipe down

by hkatz, posted in Psychology, Self-Development

An article in More Intelligent Life called “Non Cogito, Ergo Sum” brings up the following point: thinking too much can make you mess up. Examples are given of tennis players who fumble when they think too much about their backhand, opera singers who falter if they start to think about whether their voice is at its best, and songwriters who can barely string together lyrics because their thoughts are interfering with their creative processes.

It’s not just any kind of thinking that messes you up, but badly timed self-conscious thinking, when you’re thinking about what you’re doing as you’re doing it (and on top of that, maybe thinking about how you appear to your audience). This cripples creativity and makes you second-guess yourself at the worst possible moment. What you may be hoping for instead during those moments of performance or creative functioning, is what the article calls “unthinking”:

Unthinking is the ability to apply years of learning at the crucial moment by removing your thinking self from the equation.

How do you best remove yourself from the equation? That’s definitely something I’d like to explore in future posts. I know what it’s like when I’m writing, and critical voices intrude during that first draft when everything should be coming out uninhibited. My mind is hamstringing itself.

In large part dealing with badly timed self-conscious thinking has to be a matter of mental flexibility and discipline. There are times when you want to evaluate your own thinking – revising your assumptions, checking yourself before you do or say something you’ll regret, evaluating your performance (after the fact, not during). It’s not good to always operate unselfconsciously. But you need to command the ability to switch between one mindset and another so that self-conscious thoughts don’t overtake your mind at exactly those moments when you should be acting with unthinking clarity and focus. Any advice on how to do this well? (There’s a topic for several future posts.)

Also it takes trust – the ability to let go and trust yourself. At the right moment you have to forget what you know and what you don’t know, what others think of you, what you think of yourself – you become a conduit for creativity, talent, ingenuity and unselfconscious thought. You have to trust that what you know and what you can do is enough, more than enough, and that for the moment at least you are sufficient and complete. All considerations of success and failure must disappear from your mind, because you’re entering a state of mind where the typical yardsticks measuring failure and success don’t exist anymore.

Easier said than done. How do you get to that state of mind when you most need to?