Super Brain (6 page)

We can safely discard the myth about losing millions of brain cells a day. Even the parental warning that alcohol kills off brain cells has turned out to be a half-truth. Casual alcohol use actually kills only a minimal number of brain cells, even among alcoholics (who, however, incur many real health dangers). The actual loss from drinking occurs in dendrites, but studies seem to indicate that this damage is mostly reversible. The bottom line for now is that as we age, key areas of the brain involved with memory and learning continue to produce new nerve cells, and that this process can be stimulated by physical exercise, mentally stimulating activities (like reading this book), and social connectedness.

Myth 5. Primitive reactions (fear, anger, jealousy, aggression) overrule the higher brain

Most people have at least caught some wind that the first four myths are untrue. The fifth myth, however, seems to be gaining ground.
The rationale for declaring that human beings are driven by primitive impulses is partly scientific, partly moral, and partly psychological. To put it in a sentence, “We were born bad because God is punishing us, and even science agrees.” Too many people believe some part of this sentence, if not all of it.

Let’s examine what seems to be the rational position, the scientific argument. All of us are born with genetic memory that provides us with the basic instincts we need to survive. Evolution aims to ensure the propagation of our species. Our instinctive needs work hand in hand with our emotional urges to gather food, find shelter, seek power, and procreate. Our instinctive fear helps us avoid dangerous situations that threaten the lives of ourselves and our kin.

Thus an evolutionary argument is used to persuade us that our fears and desires, instinctively programmed in us from the womb, are in charge, overruling our higher, more evolved brain, with its reason and logic (glossing over the all-too-obvious irony that the higher brain invented the theory that demoted it). Undoubtedly, instinctive reactions are built into the brain’s structure. Some neuroscientists find convincing the argument that certain people are programmed to become antisocial, criminals, or rage-aholics, much as others are programmed for anxiety, depression, autism, and schizophrenia.

But emphasizing the lower brain overlooks a powerful truth. The brain is multidimensional, in order to allow
any
experience to occur. Which experience will dominate is neither automatic nor genetically programmed. There is a balance between desire and restraint, choice and compulsion. Accepting that biology is destiny defeats the whole purpose of being human: we should submit to destiny only as a last, desperate choice, but the argument for a domineering lower brain makes submission the first choice. How can that be condoned? We shrug that our forebears resigned themselves to human wrongdoing because it was said to be inherited from Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden. Genetic inheritance runs the danger of inducing the same resignation, dressed up in scientific garb.

Even though we experience fear and desire every day as natural reactions to the world, we do not have to be ruled by them. A frustrated driver stalled on the L.A. freeway in choking smog will feel the same fight-or-flight response as his ancestors hunting antelope on the African savannah or saber-toothed tigers in northern Europe. This response to stress, an instinctual drive, was built into us, but it doesn’t make drivers abandon their vehicles en masse to run away or attack each other. Freud held that civilization depends on our overriding primitive urges so that higher values can prevail, which sounds true enough. But he believed pessimistically that we pay a high price for it. We repress our lower drives but never extinguish them or make peace with our deeper fears and aggressions. The result is eruptions of mass violence like the two world wars, when all of that repressed energy takes its toll in horrendous, uncontrollable ways.

We can’t summarize the thousands of books that have been written on this subject, or offer the perfect answer. But surely to label human beings as puppets of animal instinct is wrong, in the first place because it is so unbalanced. The higher brain is just as legitimate, powerful, and evolutionary as the lower brain. The largest circuits in the brain, which form feedback loops between the higher and lower areas, are malleable. If you are an enforcer in professional hockey and your job is to start fights on the ice, you’ve probably chosen to shape your brain circuitry to favor aggression. But it was always a choice, and if the day ever comes when you regret your choice, you can retire to a Buddhist monastery, meditate upon compassion, and shape the brain’s circuitry in a new, higher direction. The choice is always there.

With rare exception, freedom of choice is not prohibited by preset programming.
My brain made me do it
has become a default explanation for almost every undesirable behavior. We can be consciously aware of our emotions and choose not to identify with them. This is more easily said than done for a person suffering from bipolar
disorder, drug addiction, or a phobia. But the road to brain wellness begins with awareness. It also ends in awareness, and awareness allows every step along the way. In the brain, energy flows where awareness goes.

When the energy stops flowing, you become stuck. Stuckness is an illusion, but when it is happening to you, it feels very real. Consider someone who is deathly afraid of spiders. Phobias are fixed (i.e., stuck) reactions. An arachnophobe cannot see a spider without an automatic rush of fear. The lower brain triggers a complex chemical cascade. Hormones race through the bloodstream to speed up the heart and raise blood pressure. Muscles prepare for fight or flight. The eyes become tightly focused, with tunnel vision on the thing one fears. The spider becomes enormous in the mind’s eye. So powerful is the fear reaction that the higher brain—the part that knows how small and harmless most spiders are—gets blacked out.

Here is a prime example of the brain using you. It imposes a false reality. All phobias are distortions of reality at bottom. Heights are not automatically a cause for panic; nor are open spaces, flying in an airplane, and the myriad other things that phobics are afraid of. By giving up the power to use their brains, phobics become stuck in a fixed reaction.

Phobias can be successfully treated by bringing in awareness and restoring control to the user of the brain, where it belongs. One technique is to have the person imagine what he is afraid of. An arachnophobe, for example, is asked to see a spider and to make the image grow bigger and smaller. Then to cause the image to move back and forth. This simple act of giving motion to the feared object can be very effective in dispelling its power to induce, because fear freezes the mind. Gradually, the therapy can move to a spider in a glass box. The phobic is asked to move as close as he can without feeling panicky. The distance is allowed to change depending on his comfort level, and in time this freedom to change also restores control. The phobic learns that he has more choices than simply running away.

Obviously, the higher brain can override even the most instinctual fears; otherwise, we wouldn’t have mountain climbers (fear of heights), tightrope walkers (fear of falling), and lion tamers (fear of death). The unhappy fact, however, is that we are all like the phobic who cannot even imagine the picture of a spider without breaking out in a cold sweat. We surrender to fears, not of spiders, but of what we call normal: failure, humiliation, rejection, old age, sickness, and death. It’s tragically ironic that the same brain that can conquer fear should also subject us to fears that haunt us all our lives.

So-called lower creatures enjoy freedom from psychological fear. When a cheetah attacks a gazelle, it panics and fights for its life. But if no predator is present, the gazelle leads an untroubled life, so far as we know. We humans, however, suffer terribly in our inner world, and this suffering gets translated into physical problems. The stakes are very high when it comes to letting your brain use you. But if you start to use it instead, the rewards are unlimited.

SUPER BRAIN SOLUTIONS
MEMORY LOSS

We’ve been pushing the theme that you need to relate to your brain in a new way. This especially holds true for memory. We cannot expect memory to be perfect, and how you respond to its imperfections is up to you. If you see every little lapse as a warning sign of inevitable decline with age, or an indication that you lack intellect, you are stacking the odds to make your belief come true. Every time you complain “My memory is going,” you reinforce that message in your brain. In the balance of mind and brain, most people are too quick to blame the brain. What they should be looking at is habit, behavior, attention, enthusiasm, and focus, all of which are primarily mental.

Once you stop paying attention and give up on learning new things, you give memory no encouragement. A simple axiom holds: whatever you pay attention to grows. So to encourage your memory to grow, you need to pay attention to how your life is unfolding. What does this mean, specifically? The list is long, but it contains activities that come naturally. The only difference as you age is that you have to make more conscious choices than you did earlier in life:

A MINDFUL MEMORY PROGRAM

Be passionate about your life and the experiences you fill it with.

Enthusiastically learn new things.

Pay attention to the things you will need to remember later.

Most memory lapses are actually learning lapses.

Actively retrieve older memories; rely less on memory crutches like lists.

Expect to keep your memory intact. Resist lower expectations from people who rationalize memory loss as “normal.”

Don’t blame or fear occasional lapses.

If a memory doesn’t come immediately, don’t brush it off as lost. Be patient and take the extra seconds for the brain’s retrieval system to work. Focus on things or people you associate with the lost memory, and you will likely recall it. All memories are associated with other earlier ones. This is the basis of learning.

Be wide-ranging in your mental activities. Doing a crossword puzzle uses a different part of the memory system than remembering what groceries you need, and both are different from learning a new language or recalling the faces of people just met. Actively exercise all aspects of memory, not just the ones that come most easily.

The common thread in this program is to keep up the mind-brain connection. Every day counts. Your brain never stops paying attention to what you tell it, and it can respond very quickly. A longtime friend of Deepak’s, a medical editor, has prided himself on his memory since childhood. As he is quick to point out, he doesn’t have a photographic (or eidetic) memory. Instead, he “keeps his antennae out,” as he describes it. As long as he keeps paying attention to his day-to-day existence, he can retrieve memories quickly and reliably.

Recently this man turned sixty-five, as did most of his friends. They began to exchange wry jokes about their senior moments. (Sample: “My memory is as good as it ever was. I just don’t have same-day delivery.”) The man began to notice random lapses in
himself, although he had no trouble using his memory when he did research for his work.

“Without really worrying about it,” he says, “I decided to start making a grocery list. Up to then, I’d never made any lists. I went out shopping and simply remembered what I wanted. This was true even if I had to stock my depleted kitchen with several bags of groceries.

“I started keeping a grocery list on my desktop, and an amazing thing happened. Within a day or two I couldn’t remember what I wanted to buy. Without my list in hand, I was helpless, wandering the aisles of the grocery store in the hopes that once I spied potatoes or maple syrup, I’d remember that it was what I came for.

“At first I laughed it off, until one week when I forgot to buy sugar on two visits to the supermarket. Now I’m trying to wean myself off the list. I still intend to, but you get dependent on lists very quickly.”

Learning from his example, sit down and consider the things you could be paying more attention to while using fewer crutches. Our Mindful Memory Program will guide you, since it includes the major areas where it pays to pay attention. The most familiar things may seem unimportant, but they count.

Can you wean yourself off making lists for things that you can remember? Try taking your grocery list to the supermarket but not looking at it. Buy as much as you can from memory, and only then consult your list. When you get to the point that you leave nothing out, wean yourself from the list entirely.

Can you stop blaming yourself for memory lapses? Catch yourself the next time you would automatically say “I can’t remember a thing” or “Another senior moment.” Be patient and wait. If you expect memories to come, they almost always do.

Stop blocking your memory. Retrieving a memory is delicate: you can easily step in the way of remembering by being busy, distracted, worried, stressed out, tired from lack of sleep, or overtaxed
mentally from doing two or more things at once. Examine these things first, before you blame your brain.

Set up an environment that’s good for memory, one that has the opposite of what we just mentioned as obstacles. In other words, take care of stress, get enough sleep, be regular in your habits, don’t overtax yourself mentally with multitasking, and so forth. Developing regular habits helps, since the brain operates more easily on repetition. If you live in a scattered and distracted way, the sensory overload to your brain is damaging and unnecessary.

If you are getting older and feel that memory loss could be occurring, don’t panic or resign yourself to the inevitable. Instead, focus your effort on mental activity that boosts brain function. Certain software, including so-called “brain gyms,” and books like
Neurobics
, coauthored by the Duke University neurobiologist Larry Katz, are designed to exercise the brain in a systematic way. The reports of reversing mild-to-moderate memory loss by exercising the brain are as yet anecdotal, but they are encouraging nevertheless.