Can You Teach an Adult Brain New Tricks?

For many years, we thought that once you were an adult, your brain was mature and did not change for the rest of your life.

Recent research has shown that the neurons of your cortex and your hippocampus are constantly changing, responding and adapting to your environment and to what you’re thinking and doing. Research with victims of brain injury has shown that with precise focus, determination, and constant repetition, one part of the brain can take over function from an injured part of the brain.

Recently an interviewer asked Dr. Donald Stuss, a neurologist at the University of Toronto who specializes in brain research, "If 10 out of 10 is everything we know about the brain, where are we now?"

Dr. Stuss answered, "Not quite at 1. But we are leaps ahead of where we were 10 years ago. We now have imaging technology which enables us to see how the brain is working as it is working."

One of the discoveries of such imagining technology is that learning and physical exercising can stimulate new neurons and grow more dendrites on current neurons.

We can literally plump up our brains and slow the aging process.

This amazing phenomenon is known as brain plasticity, which simply means that where the brain is concerned, it’s never done growing and changing. See Dr. Stuss’s wonderful talk.

Don't be put off when you see it's 51 minutes long. Just invest in first five minutes. Did you know drumming can reprogram the brain after a stroke? Even if you watch it just 5 minutes at a time, as I did, you will learn a lot.

The Amazing Plastic Brain with Dr. Stuss

Brain Plasticity

What we know about brain plasticity is very encouraging. We have well researched evidence that:

1. Once we are adults, most of our neurons stay with us for life.
2. We do grow new neurons, mostly in our hippocampus and, although about 50% of them do not make it to fully developed neurons, we can improve the chances of neurons maturing by continuing to learn new information and new activities.
3. With specific, repetitive, and persistent work, some parts of the brain can take over function from other parts of the brain that have been damaged.
4. Some underdeveloped functions like accurately hearing and producing speech can be improved with specific, repetitive, and persistent work.
5. We can continue to stimulate our brains with learning, exercise, good nutrition, and enough relaxation and sleep to enhance the power of our brain and slow the aging process.

Get More Power from Your Brain

If you are 35 or older, you have had at least one moment when you cannot remember something you know well. At first, we laugh it off as a signal that we are just lacking a little sleep or we are too busy. But not having enough sleep, running on cortisone and adrenalin because there are too many deadlines in a day, being too busy to exercise or eat well is actually damaging that precious brain of yours.

We are all a little scared of Alzheimer’s and we have good reason to be scared. Although only 1% of people under 60 are affected by this horrible disease, it hits 10% of people between 65 and 74, 33% of those between 75 and 84 and 50% of those over 85.

How old will you be in 30 years?

There is good research now that indicates that we can delay or prevent the start of Alzheimer’s even if it is in your family genes. But the sooner you start deliberately taking care of your brain, the better for you.

If you are intent on keeping your brain healthy, then you must develop a way to continue your learning for your whole life. You must reduce your stress and get enough sleep. And you must exercise daily and eat food that is good for your brain and your body. Start by making sure you are getting some aerobic exercise, like walking, every day as this is the best and fastest way to slow the aging process.

The Multitasking Myth

Another thing you can do is to reduce the number of interruptions you have each day. People will argue that they can get more skilled at switching from one task to another and that is true if both tasks are familiar and relatively easy. But there is still a price of slower timing and reduced accuracy over being able to concentrate on one task at a time.

Research on people driving while talking on their cell phones shows that they’re a half-second slower to hit the brakes in an emergency than drivers who are not talking on their cell phones. A driver going at 70 mph travels 51 feet in a half-second. If you happen to be the unlucky pedestrian or another driver within that 51 feet, you’re going to be hit by a car traveling at 70 miles per hour!

The term multitasking comes from the computer world, where it appears as if you can run two or more programs on a computer simultaneously. In fact, what computers are doing is shifting tasks in and out of the central processing unit multiple times in less than a second. Computers can do that, but we can’t.

In 2009, researchers at Stanford University studied two groups of students. One group did a lot of multitasking on a daily basis and the other group did very little. The researchers expected to find that the high multitasking students were better at screening out irrelevant information, organizing their memories, and switching efficiently from one task to another. To their surprise, they found that the high multi-taskers were significantly worse at all three measures. They could not pay attention, control their memory, or switch from one job to another as well as those who seldom multi-task.

Multitasking implies that we can actually perform two or more tasks at the same time, but we cannot divide our attention like that. What happens is that when our attention is on one task, it is as if the other does not exist. When we shift to the second task, we have to make the shift, orient to the new task, stimulate the neurons that relate to that task, get them actually moving forward on the task, and hopefully stay on the task long enough to get something done. We are able to shift rapidly between tasks, but every shift takes a little extra time and we are more likely to make mistakes. In addition, constant multitasking can increase our stress level.

Speed Reading: Read Faster and Remember Longer

If you are like most people, you read more slowly than you can think. Since a piece of writing is actually slowing down your thought process, you will tend to be easily distracted, to get bored, and worst of all, to get drowsy and even fall asleep when you are reading. Given that most of us have learned to look at only one word at a time—even though we can easily see several words at a glance—we frequently look back along the line or back up the page when we read. In fact, the average adult “regresses” 15 to 20 time for every 100 words they read. Think about how much visual information the brain has to screen out when we are reading that way.

The term “Speed Reading” was first used by Evelyn Wood, a schoolteacher who decided to take a Masters degree in Education, specializing in reading. When she started in the late fifties at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, she discovered that the main professor she was studying with read at over 1,000 words per minute with good comprehension. Since she knew that most people read between 200 and 250 words per minute, Evelyn found this intriguing and decided to find others with this unusual ability and find out how they were doing it.

She tracked down about 40 people who met her criteria of “Natural Speed Reader”: they could read at over 1,000 words per minute with good comprehension. She watched them read, measured their speed and comprehension, and asked them to tell her what they were doing and how they were doing it. She found that all of them had developed this ability by themselves, but they all had three techniques in common. Using these techniques, she taught herself to speed read. She then designed a course to teach others to speed read as well. Later she offered her very successful techniques to high school teachers in Salt Lake City. But the school board declined her offer, and she realized she was going to have difficulty getting the educational world to accept the notion of speed reading as an acceptable new teaching technique.

So she moved to Washington, DC, and began working as an independent educational consultant. Because the Russians had beaten the US into space with the Sputnik, there was an intense interest in education in the US at that time. Not surprisingly, her business flourished. It became even more successful after she was invited to The White House to teach President Kennedy and his staff to speed read. Her methods gained national renown.

Evelyn Wood franchised her company throughout North America and gathered many devoted followers—because speed reading worked. I learned to speed read through her course and went on to teach it for her company while I was taking my undergraduate degrees at Dalhousie University. After graduating, I taught reading in elementary school for five years and then went on to take my Masters degree in Education, specializing in reading. During that time, I developed my own speed reading course, based on the work of Evelyn Wood, and I have been teaching it for over 20 years.

Most people have only two reading speeds: slow and slower. Once you have taken a speed reading course, you will be able to read at various speeds: very, very fast; very fast; fast; medium; and slow. You’ll be able to adjust your speed to suit your purpose in reading and the difficulty of the material. At work, people are very knowledgeable about the content of their professional material, so they can read it a lot faster than they think they can. By the end of the day, the average person taking my speed reading seminar can at least double—and often triple—his or her speed. And they will still maintain good comprehension!

Guided by the practice exercises in the take-home manual, you can increase those speeds for reading professional material within a week. During the seminar, participants learn to read a 150-page book and make effective notes in less than 35 minutes. They learn how to establish their purpose in reading, set up their note-taking system, and quickly find and record the key information that will meet their purpose. Reading becomes an engaging challenge, rather than a chore.

Do you love to read and are afraid that speed reading will take the pleasure out of reading? No need to worry. Like most people, you will probably use speed reading for your professional reading, which gives you more time for others things you like to do—including leisure reading, which you can do as slowly as you like.

Click here for details about my Speed Reading workshop.

Concentration at Work versus Mind Wandering

I heard an interesting discussion on CBC radio last Saturday. Dr. Judson Brewer was being interviewed about his study which showed that experienced meditators have a much more developed ability to concentrate and to resist mind wandering than people who are not experienced meditators. The challenge with mind wandering is that most people who are doing it are unhappy, worrying about past or future problems rather than being focused on the present, on what they are doing right now. From the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and others, I know that when we are engaged in the present moment, working towards a clear goal, facing challenges that match our skills, getting feedback from how we are doing, feeling a sense of control, and ignoring distractions, we are at our happiest.

People experienced in mindful meditation are able to deactivate a part of the brain called the ‘default mode network’, which normally causes our minds to wander. Dr. Brewer mentioned another study at Harvard that concluded that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The whole discussion is about ten minutes long and you can hear it at http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/. It is the January 28 show, the section called “Your Brain on Meditation”. Scroll down to Listen to the whole show, and then move the cursor to about minute 48. If you want to read more about it, then visit http://abcnews.go.com/Health/meditation-brain-rewire-study/ and read the article by Melissa Healy.

I am passionate about anything which has the potential to improve people’s happiness, both at work and outside of work. Being able to concentrate, stay in the present moment, and get fully involved in the task at hand seems to be rewarding for our brains.

Greater Brain Power Skills Defeat Procrastination

Fear and doubt are what’s actually causing us to procrastinate most of the time, so to alter that habit we need to look into what’s causing our fear and doubt. When we put off something we really need or want to do, it’s often because we have imagined that:

• There are too many difficulties and we won’t be able to handle them
• We can’t do it perfectly now, so we have to wait for more time and energy
• We will make mistakes and then will be blameworthy
• We are not in the mood, and we have to wait until we feel just right

When we use our mind to imagine future difficulties, we stimulate the release of the same stress hormones into our brain as if those difficulties are actually happening. Using your powerful mind to frighten yourself and create stress when there is no need for stress is a poor use of your intelligence and energy.

To defeat procrastination, identify what you’re telling yourself that causes you stress and gives you permission to delay. Then: challenge that thinking. For example, you might find that you’re saying something like,

“X will be too difficult.”

Things might be difficult, but they are not too difficult. You've done difficult things in the past and you've usually been pleased with yourself once you've finished them. The only way to find out whether you can handle the difficulties is to get started.

“I can’t do it right now.”

This comment is often shorthand for “I can’t do it perfectly right now.” Many of us mislead ourselves into thinking that we must, or have to, do things perfectly. First of all, you can’t do anything perfectly because that would mean that it couldn't possibly be improved in any way. So delaying yourself from starting because conditions are not “just right” is neurotic and a terrible waste of time. Striving for excellence by doing the best job we can with the time and energy we have is much more healthy and realistic. Susan Sweeney, best-selling author and internet marketing speaker, and a person I really admire because she has accomplished so much, told me that her favourite saying when she finds herself beginning to procrastinate is,

“Done is better than perfect.”

Delaying starting something you've got to do, like your tax return, means that you will be stressed about it for longer and you will probably have to rush it at the last minute, which leaves you open to making mistakes and doing a less than excellent job. Delaying starting something that you want to do, that will bring you some real benefit from getting it done, by telling yourself any of the above excuses is just a bad thinking habit.

“I might make a mistake and then I’ll be a failure.”

Remind yourself that the most successful people make the most mistakes. They learn to be successful through their mistakes. Just like a young child tries, tries, and tries again until she learns how to do something, successful people know that the best way to learn is to get into action.

The last excuse is often the one that causes the most procrastination.

“I’m not in the mood right now.”

Basically when you’re facing a challenging job, you’re almost never in the mood before you start. Remember the last time you faced an overwhelming project like cleaning out your closet or basement? You didn’t really get in the mood to do it until you were well started. Then once you were started, you kept going and worked at it longer than you had originally planned because you got into the flow. You had a clear goal, unambiguous feedback about how you were progressing, a good match between your skills and the challenges of the task, a sense of control, and few distractions.

It helps tremendously to recognize that we’re rarely in the mood to do something before we’re actually involved in doing it. The answer here is to say to yourself, “I will be in the mood to do this once I've started.”

I’m Right, You’re Wrong

“I’m right - you’re wrong!”

Although we would rarely, if ever, make that bold statement out loud, we often act as if we believe that our interpretation of a situation is the “correct” or only possible interpretation. This thinking pattern can lead to misunderstanding, frustration, conflict, and stress.

The important thing to understand is that the more firmly you believe that your interpretation of a situation is the “right” one, the more likely it is that you are going to be in conflict with other people.

The cost of misunderstanding is enormous.
It annoys our customers, it upsets our colleagues, it disappoints our bosses, and it can enrage our family members. But the good news is that there is a lot we can do about it, as long as we appreciate that learning to avoid damaging conflicts starts with understanding ourselves and our thought process.

Each of us interprets events through the filter of our previous life experiences.
As The Talmud says, “We don’t see the world as it is; we see it as we are.” When we encounter somebody who sees the world differently, rather than thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting, tell me more about how you see it,” we are more likely to advocate for our own interpretation. Instead of listening to understand, we listen to defend or to advocate. So the other person starts to do the same thing. Once we are at loggerheads and getting nowhere, we may damage the relationship and miss the opportunity to learn and grow.

Try to be less judgmental with other people.
Listen to what they have to say, be present, be mindful, and be prepared to understand something from the other person’s point of view. This does not mean you need to agree with the different point of view, just appreciate that it is different and take time to explore it. Demonstrate to the other person that you are really trying to understand their side first. Summarize back to them what you have understood and ask if you have “got it”. Then you will find that the other person is much more prepared to listen to you.

Once we can listen without judging what is right or wrong, we can begin to work on discovering creative possibilities within the reality that we do share - instead of frittering away energy and good will trying to make other people’s reality match our own. That’s never going to happen.