Healthy Brain, Happy Life (20 page)

fMRI

fMRI
stands for “functional magnetic resonance imaging.” Like standard MRI (see “MRI” on page 54), fMRI is also done with a big magnet but it detects the change in blood flow related to the energy used by the brain. We know that when a brain area is active, blood flow to that region increases and, in addition, there is a change from oxygenated to deoxygenated blood in highly active areas (the brain is the single highest user of oxygen in the body). fMRI provides an indirect measure of activity in specific brain areas by detecting changes in blood flow and oxygenation levels and is the most common tool used to measure brain activity in people.

A memory-encoding task.

(Reproduced with permission from Brickman, A. M., Khan, U. A., Provenzano, F. A., Yeung, L. K., Suzuki, W., Schroeter, H., Wall, M., Sloan, R. P., and Small, S. A. “Enhancing Dentate Gyrus Function with Dietary Flavanols Improves Cognition in Older Adults.”
Nature Neuroscience
17 (2014): 1798–803.)

This is where my Columbia University colleagues Scott Small and Adam Brickman came in. They had used a human brain imaging technique similar to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study active brain areas as subjects performed various tasks.

In one particular study, they asked subjects to commit a complex figure to memory (called memory encoding) and then identify that same complex image relative to similar complex images. Here is the protocol: As subjects performed this challenging memory-encoding task, Brickman and Small saw that the same specific subarea of the hippocampus where all the new neurons are born lit up like fireworks. The fact that this region was very active during the task, suggests the possibility that if we were able to use exercise to rev up this same brain area and create more new brain cells, we might see even better performance on this task. So the idea, or hypothesis, that we tested in this study was, Would an increase in aerobic exercise improve performance on this memory-encoding task?

And what does it mean that exercise can improve memory encoding? My lab and others are testing the idea that increased aerobic exercise enhances neurogenesis in the hippocampus, and those new hippocampal cells (because we know they are more excitable than the cells that have been there for a long time) improve our ability to encode, or lay down, new long-term memories. In particular, there is evidence that these newly born hippocampal cells help differentiate between incoming stimuli that have similar characteristics. For example, when I try to remember whether Julia or Pam came up after class to ask a question, it’s the new hippocampal cells that help differentiate between the two, who both happen to have medium-length brown hair. What are the implications? That long-term exercise can increase the number of new cells in the hippocampus and might significantly improve our ability to lay down new memories for as long as that level of neurogenesis (and exercise!) lasts. I don’t know about you, but my memory-encoding abilities could always use some help, and understanding how this works and how to maximize this effect is one of the major goals of my lab.

Combining exercise and academics was an innovative element of my class, but turning the class into a real research study was even more exciting. This way, not only would the students become the research subjects but I could also include them in the act of analyzing the data. As part of the class, the students would have a chance to study the data from their own class (names removed, of course) and the control class to determine if exercise had really improved their memory function. While these students had all done lab courses, this kind of data analysis is generally done in a working research lab. We had brought the research lab to the classroom! What better way to apply the knowledge that they would be obtaining during the semester through my lectures and our discussions than to analyze the findings from a real experiment?

TRANSFORMATIONS CONTINUE

The intentional exercise I had been practicing not only inspired me in my teaching and research but was starting to shift the way I approached other parts of my life as well. After a little break following Cabin Boy and Car Boy, I was ready for the next step. I had two main questions for myself. How do I build a richer social life and how could I make myself feel ready and open for a lasting relationship?

After striking out with my first matchmaker, I decided to try it one more time with a different matchmaker—after all, Car Boy and Cabin Boy were both reasonable on paper, maybe I just needed someone with a new and different male dating roster. I met this next matchmaker in the lobby of a very cool hotel, and she seemed to be connected to all the right people and said all the right things. I signed up, and she connected me with a businessman and a doctor, both fairly nice and both decidedly not for me.

Then I seemed to hit it big. Through the matchmaker, I met a very sweet and intelligent lawyer. He lived in the city, and his name was Art. This one stuck. Neither of us had dated very much in the past few years, and we were both eager to find a steady relationship. We made a great couple—for a while—enjoying dinner together, weekends at his place in New Jersey, and occasional outings to the theater. Then Art and I got to the stage of our relationship where our various differences became more and more pronounced. And I thought I had a possible solution.

I would hire a personal coach. When I wanted some help in the dating department, a professional matchmaker seemed to do the trick. Now that I needed help improving my relationship, maybe a life coach would help. My gym sometimes offered free life-coaching sessions, so I signed up for a thirty-minute trial with coach Marnie.

Marnie was amazingly perceptive and immediately started helping me understand how I was in my relationship with Art
and
how I was in my relationships in the rest of my life. It turns out, I had a lot of things to clean up in my relationships overall. I had been focusing so much of my attention on my work, I hadn’t paid enough attention to the maintenance of my personal relationships. I learned quickly that it was not so much that I didn’t know how to have strong personal relationships, I just needed to focus more of my attention on them and they would start to thrive in the same way my career was thriving. I also needed more than a little guidance to get this process started, which is what I got in spades from my coach.

What did this relationship cleanup process look like? My favorite example involves a surprising target of my mission: a doorman in the co-op building where I live in New York. One of my negative personality traits that I identified with my coach is that I am very easily insulted. Even worse, once insulted, I don’t try to repair the hurt; I just stew. On top of that, I can hold a grudge for a very long time. You can imagine that a long-time grudge against my doorman, someone I rely on and see several times a week, not in my house but essentially outside my front door, is a prime candidate for cleanup!

The perceived insult happened very soon after I moved into my building. I tried to schedule a furniture delivery with the doorman on duty. But unlike my other friendly and helpful doormen, this one seemed quite curt in his interaction with me. He told me that he was not sure if he could schedule the delivery and that I had to check with the super to be sure. He seemed a little annoyed at my question and was not particularly helpful.

I then started to notice that he never seemed very friendly when I walked through the door. Even more annoying was that I saw him interact with other residents in what seemed like a much friendlier way than he ever acted with me. He never engaged me or went out of his way to help me. In the end, I started to dread seeing him at the door and interacted as little as possible with him because it was so clear that he didn’t like me.

That next Christmas, I prepared my annual tips for all of the building staff. I just could not bring myself to give this doorman a tip when I dreaded seeing him at the front desk, so I decided he would not be getting a tip that year. I knew that was a drastic (some might say foolish, childish, immature—fill in the blank) move, but I did it anyway, and then immediately regretted it for the rest of the year.

When I mentioned this to my coach, Marnie, as one of the relationships I had to repair, she asked me if I had ever spoken to him about why he was rude that first day. I said no. Then she asked if perhaps I had been a little cold to him, which might have influenced the way he interacted (or did not interact) with me. I admitted that my behavior could indeed be viewed as cold. My coach made me realize that this whole time, I had been making up a story in my own head that this doorman did not like me, even though I had been the one giving him the cold shoulder. She reminded me that this was a key relationship to clean up for me because this guy was a critical part of my extended home. He, like the other doormen in my building, knew all about me: what take-out I ate, which dry-cleaning shop I went to, and which friends visited me and when. Doormen often know about your romantic relationships before your BFF because they are the first ones to see who arrives early and stays late and who doesn’t go home at all. She said that the only way to turn this relationship around was to confess my theory about him to him, and see what he said. And she helped me work out what I was going to say. Yikes!

I remember sitting in my bedroom on the morning I knew he was working, going over my speech in my mind and really not wanting to go downstairs. I was experiencing that sick feeling that comes before you take your most important final or right before you go on stage for the first time. I somehow managed to stand up and make my way downstairs. When the elevator doors opened, I marched right up to him and said in a slightly trembling voice, “Hi. I wanted to ask you something. I first wanted tell you that I think the entire staff at this building is great and I appreciate all the great service. But, as you know, Christmas is coming up again, and I wanted to tell you that I felt so bad that I did not give you a tip last year at Christmas. I didn’t give you a tip because I have this idea that you don’t really like me, and I wanted to talk to you about this.”

Yikes—I had actually said it.

He looked totally stunned.

It took him just a second to recover before he assured me he harbored no ill-will toward me. Instead he said that his style was to stay professional and stay out of people’s business and suggested that that behavior might have been mistaken for him not liking me. He pointed out that he was very different from some of the other doormen who liked to talk to all the residents and ask questions about their lives.

My key realization was that he seemed genuinely surprised that I thought he did not like me.

I thanked him for his honesty and told him I must have just completely misinterpreted him. I reiterated that I thought he and the entire door staff did such a great job and I looked forward to rewarding everyone at Christmas.

This was maybe not the most elegant conversation I ever had, but I did what I had gone there to do. I thanked him again and awkwardly ran out the door. I nearly cried with relief as I went flying down the street to the subway, trying to get as far away from that stressful, yet successful conversation as I could.

But was it worth it?

Yes.

This embarrassing, awkward, difficult, and stress-inducing conversation completely shifted our relationship. Both of us now had permission and motivation to focus on positive interactions, and we were both about 300 percent more friendly every single time we saw each other after that, including that very night when I came back home. It was like my own little Christmas miracle.

This was just one example of how I was shifting the relationships in my life. More important, I was becoming more and more sensitive to the health of all the personal relationships in my life, and I was on a mission with the help of my life coach to fix them.

How did this relationship fixing work out with Art? I realized I had to ask myself why I wanted to fix this relationship. Was it because I loved him and wanted to spend the rest of my life with this man, or was it that I liked the idea of being with someone even if he was not particularly compatible with me. Art was very kind-hearted and very smart, both of which I appreciated. But in the end, we didn’t share a great deal of lifestyle traits. Probably the most telling difference was that he had very few friends in New York, and he was not social at all. He enjoyed hanging out with me but was not interested in meeting or knowing my growing group of friends. In the end I wasn’t sure he would like or get along with them very well anyway. I realized that while just a short time before, I had been just as isolated socially as he was, I had clearly and deliberately changed that in my life, and staying with him would be like moving back to those days of social isolation that I had worked so hard to change. He also had no interest in good food, which was challenging for me in the very beginning and another clear sign that we were just not meant to be.