Richard G. Petty, MD

Close Your Eyes and I’ll…

Every young neuroscience student learns about a classic experiment that was published in 1956 by Raul Hernandez-Peon, in which he had an electrode in the acoustic nerve of a cat, while a metronome was ticking. Every tick caused a pulse of electricity in the nerve. But as soon as the cat saw or smelled a mouse, the electrical activity plummeted: now all of his attention was on lunch, and his brain damped down the unnecessary ticking of the metronome. Something similar happens with the “Cocktail Party Phenomenon:” our ability to focus our listening attention on a single talker and ignoring other conversations that are going on.

A study by researchers from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and the University of North Carolina was presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego this week, suggesting that our brains can turn down our ability to see, so that we are better able to listen and focus on music and complex sounds.

The research used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in 20 non-musicians and 20 musical conductors aged 28-40, and found that both groups diverted brain activity away from visual areas during listening tasks. The activity fell in the visual regions areas as it rose in auditory ones. But during harder tasks the changes were less marked for conductors than for non-musicians.

While being scanned the subjects were asked to listen to two different musical tones played a few thousandths of a second apart and identify which was played first. The task was made harder for the professional musicians than for the non-musicians, to allow for the differences in their background.

As the task was made progressively more difficult, the non-musicians carried on diverting more and more activity away from the visual parts of the brain to the auditory, as they struggled to concentrate on the music. However, the conductors did not suppress their brains, suggesting that their years of training had given them an advantage in the way that their brains were organized and functioning. They are less likely to be distracted and are highly tuned to musical sounds.

This is like closing your eyes to listen to music and the advantage of the trained musicians is similar to the advantage that we see in the brain of the chess master compared with the amateur. Years of study and practice enable the chess player to move without much conscious thought.

It shows how well we are able to divert activity from one part of the brain to another as needed. It is that ability to be flexible and to recruit more brain when we need it that lies at the heart of the neurocognitive revolution that is changing the way that we think about the brain and mind.

Zen and the Aging Brain

The two main kinds of meditation that have received a lot of research attention are Zen and Transcendental Meditation. Both produce measurable physiological changes and both may produce changes in the brain.

Zen meditation is centered on attentional and postural self-regulation.

As we age, there is normally some decline of cerebral gray matter volume and attentional performance. As I have pointed out, those changes do not necessarily mean a decline in functioning, but simply a change. 

In a new study researchers here in Atlanta examined how the regular practice of meditation might affect the brain. The researchers studied 13 regular practitioners of Zen meditation and 13 matched controls.

They used some sophisticated techniques to calculate the volumes of different regions of the brain. They also performed a computerized sustained attention task.

While the control subjects showed the expected negative correlation of both gray matter volume and attentional performance with age, the meditators did not show a significant correlation of either measure with age.

Interestingly, the effect of meditation on gray matter volume was most prominent in a region of the brain called the putamen, a system of the brain that is strongly implicated in attentional processing.

These findings are intriguing and are consistent with some of the research done in Richard Davidson’s laboratory in Wisconsin, that looked at people practicing a different form of meditation, but also showed that expert meditators produce both structural and functional changes in their brains.

The study on aging suggests that the regular practice of meditation may have neuroprotective effects and reduce the cognitive decline associated with normal aging.

If that is confirmed, I think that we have something else to add to our list of “things to do to reduce your risk of getting Alzheimer’s.”

Brain Training and the Paradox of Aging

For centuries, people in cultures throughout the world have believed that increasing age is associated with increasing wisdom. Not just knowledge and experience, but wisdom. Is this an old wives' tale, or is there something to it?

There is growing evidence that as we age our brains actually become stronger. Everyone missed it, because the emphasis was on memory, concentration and thinking speed, and those may all deteriorate with age. What changes is that as we age we become more efficient at making associations rather than thinking linearly. we also recruit regions of the brain that may have lain dormant for years. At the same time, different types of mental training, including meditation, can improve many aspects of our cognitive abilities, and may also enrich and even grow appropriate regions of the brain.

Some new data from a study being conducted at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina suggests that it is possible to use a fitness program for your brain that can improve thinking skills, attention and concentration as reliably as lifting weights can increase muscle strength.

Preliminary findings from the study, which used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record brain activity, were presented last week at the Organization for Human Brain Mapping conference in Chicago.

As we age, we do experience changes in how we perceive the information that our senses gather from the environment. As I mentioned older adults combine information from the different senses more readily than do younger adults. This is known as sensory integration, and the down side is that it can lead to difficulties in blocking out distracting sights and sounds while still maintaining focus on important information. You are probably familiar with the "Cocktail Party Phenomenon." You are in a loud room, but because someone is saying something interesting, you are able to block out uninteresting information. This technical term for this is cortricofugal inhibition. As we get older it gets more difficult to do the inhibiting.

The Brain Fitness in Older Adults (B-fit) study has been designed to establish whether eight hours of brain exercise can improve the ability of healthy older adults, ages 65 to 75 years, to filter out unwanted sights and sounds.

The B-fit study uses fMRI to visualize blood flow and brain activity to determine how attention training affects brain function. The training involves either a structured one-on-one mental work-out program or a group brain exercise program. During the one-on-one sessions, the volunteers were asked to ignore distracting information and tasks get harder as the eight-week training progresses. For the group sessions, participants learn new information relevant to healthy aging and are then tested on their ability to apply the new information.

All participants had an fMRI scan during a distraction task. They had to look for target words or numbers while ignoring distracting sounds. The scans showed brain activity in areas related to both sight and sound. Follow-up fMRIs showed that in the group receiving the one-on-one training, activity related to sight was increased, while activity related to sound was decreased. In addition, performance on the task was improved.

So the data do indeed suggest that attention training is a way to reduce older adults' susceptibility to distracting stimuli and therefore help improve concentration.

And what about wisdom?

I have written in Healing, Meaning and Purpose that "Wisdom is the integration of understanding:" making more new associations and drawing conclusions based on a new perspective is a gift of aging. The training enables us to make sense of and communicate our conclusions.

When it comes to the brain, use it or lose!

Meditation and Learning to Pay Attention

I have talked before about the increasing difficulties that we all have with paying attention.

Over the years we have tried all sorts of things to help people to become better at focusing and controlling their attention, from games, to biofeedback devices to meditation. It is the last of those that seems to be the most effective.

We know from personal experience that paying close attention to one thing can keep us from noticing something else. If we are shown two visual signals half a second apart, we usually miss the second because we are still focused on the first one. We are consciously unaware of the second flash. It is rather like missing something when we blink our eyes, and indeed psychologists call it “attentional blink.” Many psychologists have assumed that attention is something fixed: we can only give a certain amount of attention to one thing at a time before we have to move onto something else or get a kind of brain freeze.

But we have known for some time now that sometimes people do notice the second flash of light, and with practice they can notice it all the time, suggesting that the limitation on seeing the two flashes is not entirely physical, but that it may be possible to bring it under mental control. The first style of meditation that I ever learned was Vipassana, and I well remember being astonished at how quickly my attention and focus began to improve, even when I was not meditating.

Now there is an important new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison that suggests that attention does not have a fixed capacity, and that it can be improved by directed mental training such as meditation.

The work was done in Richard Davidson’s lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and the Waisman Center for Brain Imaging and Behavior and published online in the journal PLoS Biology. (This is one of the growing number of open access journals, and for people not yet convinced of the value of open journals have a look at this paper, in which everything is available to you for free.)

The investigators recruited people who were interested in meditation to study whether conscious mental training can affect attention.

They examined the effects of three months of intensive training in Vipassana meditation, which focuses on reducing mental distraction and improving sensory awareness.

Volunteers were asked to look for target numbers that were mixed into a series of distracting letters and quickly flashed on a screen. As subjects performed the task, their brain activity was recorded with electrodes placed on the scalp. In some cases, two target numbers appeared in the series less than one-half second apart - close enough to fall within the typical attentional blink window.

The researchers found that the three months of rigorous training in Vipassana meditation improved people's ability to detect a second target within the half-second time window. In addition, though the ability to see the first target did not change, the mental training reduced the amount of brain activity associated with seeing the first target.

Because the subjects were not meditating during the test, their improvement suggests that prior training can cause lasting changes in how people allocate their mental resources.

As Richard Davidson says,

“Their previous practice of meditation is influencing their performance on this task. The conventional view is that attentional resources are limited. This shows that attention capabilities can be enhanced through learning.”

The finding that attention is a flexible skill opens up many possibilities. It provides further evidence that attention training is worth examining for attentional problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

“When we raise ourselves through meditation to what unites us with the spirit, we quicken something within us that is eternal and unlimited by birth and death. Once we have experienced this eternal part in us, we can no longer doubt its existence. Meditation is thus the way to knowing and beholding the eternal, indestructible, essential center of our being.”
--Rudolf Steiner (Croatian-born Austrian Mystic, Occultist, Social Philosopher, Architect and Founder of Anthroposophy, 1861-1925)

“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”
--Henry Miller (American Writer, 1891-1980)

“The path of spiritual attention is not easy, although anyone can make a beginning by trying to understand.”
-- Sri Raghavan Iyer (Indian-born Prodigy, Rhodes Scholar, Academic, Philosopher, Theosophist, and, from 1965-1986, Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Father of Pico Iyer, 1930-1995)

Brain-Derived Growth Factors and Bipolar Disorder

As we are learning more about the plasticity of the brain, and the way in which new neurons can continue to grow throughout life, there is a great deal of interest in factors that stimulate the growth or development of neurons. This is particularly important in condition like schizophrenia and bipolar in which cognitive decline may occur.

Researchers from Portugal presented some interesting new data (NR68) on Monday at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in San Diego, California. Genetic and pharmacological studies have suggested that brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), one of the most common neurotrophic factors in the brain, may be associated with the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder. The data has been a bit of a mixed bag: previous studies have suggested that BDNF may be associated with either a worse or better neurocognitive outcome in tests of frontal lobe function.

The researchers examined 28 people with bipolar disorder whose mood was currently normal: i.e. they were euthymic,  and they compared them with 25 healthy volunteers. They measured BDNF levels and performed a battery of neuropsychological tests.

The people with bipolar disorder had clear evidence of problems with attention and executive function even when their mood was normal. However it does not seem to have much to do with BDNF: the levels were the same in both patients and healthy volunteers. There was an association between BDNF levels and memory in people with bipolar disorder. This makes sense: BDNF has been implicated in the formation of memory traces in the brain.

What this means is that problems of attention and executive function are likely to be trait-markers of bipolar disorder, while BDNF levels may be a state-related biological marker.

It is interesting how the wheel keeps turning: the person who first differentiated dementia praecox (schizophrenia) from manic depression (bipolar disorder) was Emil Kraepelin. He originally said that people with dementia praecox became worse over time, because of progressive cognitive decline, while people with manic depression did not. When he passed away in 1926 he was working on a whole re-visioning of mental illness, saying that the two could not be so clearly differentiated, because cognitive decline could occur in either illness.

Many pharmaceutical companies are looking into the possibility of improving cognition in major mental illnesses, but there are also a great many non-pharmacological interventions  that can be done to help cognition in people with major mental illness.

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Diagnosis and Complications

I have had a great many requests to talk more about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): what it is, and what it is not; when is it a problem and when is it just “normal” childhood or adolescent behavior? And what evidence is there for non-pharmacological approaches?

Although there is a lot of information about ADHD available in books and on line, some is better than others, and some is misleading. I have recently had the privilege of giving a series of lectures on each of these topics, and many people have thought that I had a different take on the issue, so I an going to summarize some of the lectures here.

First I would like to direct you to a short article on the diagnosis on ADHD. The most important point is that we have to tell the difference between kids being kids and a problem that needs treatment.

Second is an article that talks about some of the problems that may follow if someone has ADHD and it is not diagnosed or treated.

Over the next two days I am going to follow up with articles that I have written on "Non-pharmacological and Lifestyle Approaches to Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder":
Diet, nutrition, allergies and sensitivities
Herbs and supplements
Movement, exercise, sleep and environmental design
Massage, qigong, tapping therapies and acupuncture
Mind-body approaches to treating ADHD
Homeopathy and flower essences in ADHD
Using Integrated Medicine in ADHD


“Thoughts of themselves have no substance; let them arise and pass away unheeded. Thoughts will not take form of themselves, unless they are grasped by the attention; if they are ignored, there will be no appearing and no disappearing.”
--Bhikshu Ashvaghosha (Indian Playwright and Master of Buddhist Philosophy, c. A.D. 1st Century)

“The true art of memory is the art of attention.”
--Samuel Johnson (English Biographer and Essayist, 1709-1784)

“Attention makes the genius; all learning, fancy, and science depend upon it. Newton traced back his discoveries to its unwearied employment. It builds bridges, opens new worlds, and heals diseases; without it taste is useless, and the beauties of literature are unobserved.”
--Robert Aris Willmott (English Author, 1809-1863)

A Possible New Treatment for Attention Deficit Disorder

Although I am always eager to use non-pharmacological treatments whenever possible, sometimes it just isn't possible to us them on their own. I've outlined some of the reasons for treating attention deficit disorder (ADD) in a previous post.

We should soon hear whether the regulatory authorities in the United States and Europe are going to approve a medicine - guanfacine - that we currently use for treating high blood pressure, for the treatment of ADD. In the United States it is currently sold under the trade name Tenex. The medicine works in the brain by modulating a population of receptors known as the central nervous system α-2 adrenergic receptors, which results in reduced sympathetic outflow leading to reduced vascular tone. Its adverse reactions include dry mouth, sedation, and constipation.

The idea of using a medicine like this for treating ADD is not new. Fifteen years ago researchers showed that receptor agonists like clonidine decreased distractibility in aged monkeys. And clonidine itself has occasionally been used for treating ADD for over twenty years.

Guanfacine seems to have some unique properties including decreasing the activity in the caudate nucleus while increasing frontal cortical activity. We would therefore expect it not only to help with ADD symptoms, but it may have some quite specific properties relating to learning new material. A key point is that if approved it will only be the second nonstimulant medicine for ADD, along with atomoxetine (Strattera). Many clinicians have had a lot of trouble with side effects of atomoxetine, particularly if it is used in adult men. So if guanfacine is approved, and if it does not have the same side effects, that would be a big bonus.

New options are always welcome, but it remains important for any new pharmacological treatment to be nested in an Integrated approach, which always includes nutrition, physical and cognitive exercises, psychological and social help, as well as attending to the subtle and spiritual aspects of the problem.

And ADD can be a very big problem, despite the protestations from people who claim that it is a non-disease dreamed up by pharmaceutical companies. Our interest is not just professional, but personal. Every single day we see what can happen if someone forgets their medicine.

If the FDA gives approval for guanfacine I shall immediately report it for you, as well as giving you details of all the safety and tolerability data.

 

Teen Driving Risks

I have been very concerned about the burgeoning evidence of the dangers of being distracted while driving.

My concerns have been buttressed by a new report.

A national survey of more than 5,600 high school students conducted by an alliance between The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and State Farm Insurance Companies indicates that high school students are routinely driving under highly dangerous conditions.

Teens who participated in the study say they routinely drive while fatigued and while talking on cell phones, and that they let strong emotions cloud their judgment. Many also admitted that they are not wearing seatbelts.

The National Teen Driver Survey represents 10.6 million 9th, 10th, and 11th grade students in U.S. public high schools.

The survey results are available as a downloadable report on Keeping Young Drivers Safe, a new Web site for parents and educators from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia/State Farm alliance. The site is packed with practical information on developing a plan that will enable new drivers to develop the skills and habits they need to stay safe.

You can also visit the site at www.chop.edu/youngdrivers, where you will find information on working with a new driver to set goals and rules; developing a timeline for parent-guided driving lessons; and developing a parent/teen driving agreement.

Cognitive Brain Health Test

One of the blogs that never fails to provide me with some food for thought is Zack Lynch's Brain Waves.

He has just alerted his readers to a very interesting resource.

The Brain Resource Company launched a free, confidential, 40-minute cognitive brain test in partnership with the Alliance for Aging Research. The company is offering the test at no cost until May 14, 2007.

When you first click on the link for the test, you are taken to a page on Brain Health with a great many links.

I am extremely familiar with the literature on the brain, aging and cognition. So on your behalf, I passed a critical eye over the material. I was really pleased with it. I have one or two very minor quibbles, and one or two of the links are not working yet, but overall the information is excellent and above all reliable.

One thing about doing the test is that it needs for you to be using Windows. So we Macintosh users are left out in the cold. But the test is well worth doing, so if you are a Macintosh user, you might want to see if you can borrow a Windows machine for an hour.

“Most people would sooner die than think; in fact they do so.”
--Bertrand Russell (Welsh Mathematician, Philosopher, Pacifist and, in 1950, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1872-1970)

“The longer I live, the more beautiful life is.”
--Frank Lloyd Wright (American Architect, 1867-1959)

Mindless Eating

One of the keys to any successful weight management strategy is awareness:

1. Awareness of our bodies
2. Awareness of our bodies' needs
3. Awareness of what we are doing physically
4. Awareness of what we are eating
5. Awareness of the impact of food on our bodies and our minds
6. Awareness of the content and consequences of our diets
7. Awareness of our eating on other people
8. Awareness of our food choices on animals and our physical and emotional environment
9. Awareness of the things that drive us to eat even if we are not hungry
10. Awareness of the spiritual consequences of eating

I have looked at hundreds of books on diet, health and nutrition and it constantly astonishes me that hardly any of them address this central component, not just of weight management, but of life management. There is some fine exceptions: one is a new book by Brian Wansink called Mindless Eating, that does a good job of discussing some of these problems of awareness about eating.

The author is a practicing researcher and Professor at Cornell, and he has an interesting paper in the current issue of the Journal of Marketing Research. Part of his thesis is that “low fat” nutrition labels may lead to the over-consumption of nutrient-poor and calorie-rich snack foods. 

I was pleased to see the experimental data, which exactly confirms my observations. After nearly thirty years of working with people with weight challenges, one of the more common problems is that some people have been brain washed into thinking that if it says “low fat” on the label, you can eat as much as you want. The trouble is that if you know how to read labels, some of the low fat foods are also low health foods. The authors of the paper make some good suggestions for changing policy to help rectify the situation.

When it comes to what we eat, part of the problem is that most of us are so comfortable with the status quo that we rarely notice much that is going on inside or around us.

A fish only becomes aware that it lives in water once it’s dragged up on shore!

And we only realize our own potential for growth and change when we become aware of the dynamic, interconnected beauty and complexity of a world that lies just beyond the reach of our senses. Growing our awareness of food, nutrition and eating can be a transformative experience. I have known some spiritual teachers who would not accept heavy people as students, saying that if they could not even control their weight, then how could they control their minds or any energies that might be released from meditation, qigong, yoga and the like?

Although I understand what they are saying, I respectfully disagree. As I have discussed many times, there are physical as well as psychological, social, subtle and spiritual reasons for having trouble with weight, and I don’t think that these are grounds for excluding people from learning these practices. For today I urge you to spend a few minutes working on your own “Ten Awarenesses” about food and nutrition. It could be the best thing that you do for yourself all year.



“Neither the body with its senses nor the mind with its thoughts is the ultimate being that I am. The body acts and the mind moves, but behind them is the thought-free Awareness, the Knowing Principle.”
--Paul Brunton (English Spiritual Teacher and Author, 1898-1981)

“The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
--Marcel Proust (French Novelist, 1871-1922)

The Forty-Eight Minute Hour

Every teacher and lecturer knows that the attention span of the average student is about forty five minutes. It was always said that the reason for instituting 55 minute periods in American public schools was a response to some psychological research into the attention spans of American teenagers. There is also an urban legend that the length of time between television commercials was driven by research that purported to show that the attention span of the "average American" was six minutes.

Though some days I wonder if attention spans are down to the one minute duration of the commerical breaks!

The very term "attention span" is imprecise and driven by multiple variables including innate ability to hold attention, mood, time of day, plasma glucose level and our level of engagement in the material before us. You can do a brief test to measure your own attention span.

For the psychoanalyst, an hour is actually only 50 minutes. In the early days of psychoanalysis it was found empirically that this was the ideal duration of a psychotherapeutic session. It just so happened that it also gave the therapist time to decompress before the next session.

Several months ago I revealed that I have a "problem" called hyperfocus. It was my own chiropractor in Atlanta - Teresa Brennan - who pointed out that sitting immobile for hours at a time was not a good way to treat the spine. Exactly what I had been telling other people for years! So I installed a little free gizmo on my computer desktop that reminds me to get up and stretch every 50 minutes. And since then my productivity has soared.

So I was very pleased to see an article that strongly advocates the approach of working intensely for 48 minutes and then taking a 12 minute break before resuming work. I think that this makes very good sense, and if you are not happy with your own work habits or work output, I suggest that you give it a try. 

From the psychological literature this duration seems to make sense. I also like that it introduces some balance into our work activities.

Though personally I would have preferred, perhaps, for the number to have been 42. Since that is, of course, the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything," in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (And Douglas, old friend, you are still missed.)

Or perhaps the number should have been 43.

After all, my name really is Richard Petty! (For readers outside North America: my namesake is a renowned former race car driver, but not, alas, a relative! His car was always number 43.)

Try the 48 minute approach and see if it works for you.

“Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste.”
--Benjamin Franklin (American Author, Inventor and Diplomat, 1706-1790)

When Being Positive Can Be Negative

One of the points that we make in Healing, Meaning and Purpose is that the constant insistence by some people in the self-help business - that we should all be happy and positive in all that we do - can be very counter-productive.

Not only do some people operate best when they are being negative but it is very task dependent. If you are doing something tedious, trying artifically to create a smiley face may actually be the worst thing that you can do.

I have given a lot of ideas for finding out about your style and how to adapt and develop it.

There is some terrific new research in today's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that helps answer the age old question: does a good modd help when you are doing your job?

It is certainly true that happy thoughts can stimulate creativity, but for mundane work such as dredging through databases, it may be better to be cranky or sad.

The new study is the first to suggest that a positive frame of mind can have opposite effects on productivity depending on the nature of a task.

It is well known that stress, anxiety, depression or just a good old fashioned bad mood lead us to narrow our field of attention: we only think about and focus on the things directly in front of us. On the other hand, subjective well being is known to broaden our thinking and make us more creative. What nobody knew was whether a good mood expands people's attention to visual details.

In this study, performed by Adam Anderson and his colleagues in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, 24 university students were asked to take two kinds of tests after listening to sad, happy, or neutral music. In one test, the students were asked to think of unusual words, to test their ability to think broadly.

As expected, those who had listened to happy music and who claimed to be in a better mood were more successful in recalling unusual words than the other two groups who listened to sad or neutral music.

In the second test, the students were presented with a row of three letters and asked to ignore everything except for the letter in the middle. This is a well-known test designed to measure the breadth of their visual attention and ability to focus on what was in front of them. This time, the happy music students were 40% more likely to be distracted by the unnecessary flanking information than students who had listened to the sad music.

Your attention acts like a torch or the beam of a spotlight. A good mood broadens the beam so that you see more things than usual. Including all the distractions and the irrelevant data.

So being a bit grumpy and irritable when you have to do your tax returns is probably the best way to get through the task quickly and with as few errors as possible.

A Memory for Faces

Your humble reporter has always had a good memory for faces. A month after a meeting in San Antonio at which we had about 250 attendees, he was in another part of the country when a charming man came over to say, "You won't remember me, but I was at your lecture in Texas last month."

He looked like a man who'd eaten a raw egg when he got the response, "Oh yes, fifth row from the back, fourth person along."

It would be great if that memory for faces could be linked to a memory for names or something else useful. But sad to say it isn't. Just the face, and when and where it was last seen.

But new research in neuroscience has shown us ways to tether other memories to each other.

So it was interesting to see a new report of some fascinating research from Vanderbilt University in Nashville suggesting that it is common for us to be better able to remember faces than other objects and in addition that faces “stick” the best in our short-term memory. The reason may be that our expertise in remembering faces allows us to package them better for memory, since faces are complex and their recognition is also essential for normal social relationships.

The findings are currently in press at the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

The key component of the research is visual short-term memory or VSTM has a unique way of being coded in the brain. The findings have practical implications for the way we use our memories. Clearly being able to store more faces in VSTM may be very useful in complex social situations. Just think for a moment how much most people like being remembered, particularly if you can attach a name and salient fact to the memory. Most of the successful business people and politicians that I know are remarkably adept at doing this.

Short-term memory is crucial to the way in which we create impressions and adapt to a continuously changing world. It serves as temporary storage for information that we are currently using: rather like the RAM on a computer. For example, in order to understand this sentence, your short-term memory will need to remember the words at the beginning while you read through to the end. People with some neurological and attentional problems have a real problem with doing that. VSTM is a component of short-term memory that helps us process and briefly remember images and objects, rather than words and sounds.

VSTM allows us to remember objects for a few seconds, but as with working memory and all the short-term memory stores, its capacity is limited. The new research focuses on whether we can store more faces than other objects in VSTM and the possible mechanisms underlying this advantage.

Study participants were asked to look at up to five faces on a screen for varying lengths of time (up to four seconds). A single face was later presented and the subjects had to decide if this face was part of the original display. For a comparison, the process was repeated with other objects, like watches or cars.

The researchers found that when participants studied the displays for only a brief amount of time (half a second), they could store fewer faces than objects in VSTM. They think that this is because faces are more complex than watches or cars and therefore they require more time to be encoded. Surprisingly, when participants were given more time to encode the images (four seconds), an advantage for faces over objects emerged.

The researchers believe that our past experience with learning faces explains this advantage. This theory is supported by the fact that the advantage was only observed if the faces were upright: the most familiar orientation. Faces that were shown - and therefore encoded - upside-down showed no advantage over other objects.

This is very similar to the situation in chess, where, compared with a novice, a master can instantly remember a position on the board if the pieces are in logical places. If they are arranged at random, the master does no better than the rank amateur.

Most of the textbooks tell us that the capacity of short-term memory is something is fixed, and that you either have a decent capacity or you do not. However the research indicates that you can learn to improve your capacity for this form of memory.

This makes sense: as a child your reporter rarely made notes and his parents supported him in that. More than one school teacher thought him lazy and inattentive because his note books consisted of doodles and random scribbles in between pages of homework.

How many other children have also been accused of cheating or faced punishment or ridicule simply because they had a good memory, but did not learn in the same way as the other kids?

We already have some methods for training people to get better at using visual memory, but most have been discovered by trial and error. This new research will make it that much easier to devise memory training methods rooted in brain science.

But also remember something else: sometimes forgetting is as important as remembering.

Elbert Hubbard, the American Editor, Publisher and Author who perished aboard the Lusitania in 1915, had this to say,  “A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.”

Attention Deficit Disorder and Brain Laterality

Here two topics that are very close to my heart: the puzzle of laterality and asymmetry and attention deficit disorder.

We live in an asymmetric Universe. Fundamental particles tend to rotate and wobble to the left rather than the right; most molecules show a lateral shift; and all the biologically active amino acids - the building blocks of proteins - are in the L-form. Meaning that in solution they bend light to the left. The R-forms, that bend light to the right, for the most part don’t work in biological systems. Some of the most extraordinary asymmetry is seen in the human brain. There’s a myth that about the hemispheres of the brain that I’ve talked about before, but bears repeating.

The idea that the left hemisphere of the brain is specialized for logic, analysis and language, while the right hemisphere is holistic, artistic and mystical has been circulating for over thirty years. It has even been suggested that the right hemisphere of the brain is the seat of intuition, which cannot be correct. It may be involved in instinct, but it is impossible to reduce a non-local psycho-spiritual experience to groups of brain cells. There may be correspondence – the right hemisphere becoming activated during intuition, but not causality: right hemisphere activation as the cause of intuition.

This notion of discrete functioning of the hemisphere has become so pervasive that it is commonplace to hear people describing themselves as being "right brained,” or accusing someone else of being "left brained."

A simple concept that is also profoundly wrong. This is fine as a metaphor, but not as a fact. It is true that language is more highly represented in the left hemisphere of the brain in right-handed men. But language is bilaterally represented in women. Most men tend to use a small strip of the left hemisphere for language, women tend to use both hemispheres at once. There’s still a left-sided predominance, but it’s quite a different pattern from most men’s brain.

Boy’s brains mature more slowly than girls’ brains, and by adolescence are more lateralized than are the brains of girls and women. The truth is that we cannot neatly divide up the functions of our brains, and we need both sides of our brain if we are to function at our best.

Until very recently most experts said that handedness was a purely human attribute. Yet anyone who has every lived with a cat, dog or horse knows that that is wrong, and now there’s literature to prove it.

I tried to put that mistake to bed in a review article that included a detailed discussion about brain asymmetries in animals. I also reviewed the excellent evidence that certain regions of the brain have been becoming more lateralized over the last 100,000 years.

I’d like to show you why this talk of brain lateralization is not a sterile academic debate.

We do not know if left-handedness or mixed handedness is more common in ADD/ADHD. But the evidence is getting stronger and stronger that there is something different in people with ADD/ADHD in how they use the two sides of their brains.

Three conditions: autism, dyslexia and ADD/ADHD share one characteristic: they are all marked by what we call atypical cerebral asymmetry in that they don’t have the normal left hemisphere dominance for language. This is more of a problem for boy, since they normally make more use of their left hemispheres. But it’s not all bad: atypical cerebral asymmetry may also be associated with certain aspects of creativity.

Researchers in New Zealand have just reported something strange, but which is consistent with previous research. When healthy right-handed children are asked to bisect a line drawn on a page, when they use their right hand they tend to bisect the line toward the right, and with the left hand toward the left. But children with ADD/ADHD don’t do this. The researchers have now gone further and suggested that there are at least two types of ADD/ADHD, in one of which – ADHD-I – the primary problem is in the right hemisphere of the brain.

Using an entirely different methodology, researchers in Baltimore, Maryland, have found that children with ADHD use their brains differently when engaged in patterned motor activity.

In an earlier post I talked about the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and there is an important connection to it is called the cingulate cortex. A new study has shown that adults with ADD had significantly smaller overall amounts of cortical gray matter, and reduced volumes of their prefrontal and anterior cingulate regions. Both are highly lateralized in the human brain.

Compared with controls, unmedicated children with ADHD have a small right cingulate cortex, but it is normal in children who have been treated, indicating that the treatment is doing more than treating symptoms: it may actually be re-wiring the brain.

Research from the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and David Geffen School of Medicine showed that in adults with ADHD, showed reduced left hemisphere specialization, were better at processing emotions, and worse at processing words compared to controls. They tend to use their right hemispheres more and their left hemispheres less.

Unaffected individuals constantly shift their attention toward the important or salient things in their environment. Children with ADHD have a problem with directed attention: the ability to allocate and direct attention toward a salient stimulus. New research has discovered that this is due to problems in a region of the brain called the parietal lobe that is known to play a significant role in shifting attention and detecting specific or salient targets in the environment. As a result the child’s brain does not know what is important.

These findings do not tell us whether the primary problem is a way in which specific parts of the brain talk to each other, or whether the scientists are actually measuring the way in which the brain reacts to deficits in one region. Perhaps other regions take over the functions of parts that are not working as they should.

The most important take home message is that we already have methods for stimulating and integrating the hemispheres of the brain. Few have so far been much used in ADD, but this information gives us a whole new way forward.

Attention Deficit Disorder and Executive Functioning

“Not to have control over the senses is like sailing in a rudderless ship, bound to break to pieces on coming in contact with the very first rock.”
--Mahatma Gandhi (Indian Nationalist and World Teacher, 1869-1948)

The Mahatma's statement could apply to most people stuggling with attention deficit disorder.

There is an important idea in neurology and psychology called "Executive functioning.” This refers to our ability to be able to make and carry out plans, direct our attention, focus and also to control our internal states: our impulses and emotions and to be able to switch from one task to another. In other words it is a key part of our ability to self-regulate our behavior, mind and emotions.

Most evidence now indicates that executive function is mediated by the regions of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. It happens that these same regions are amongst those that seem to undergo beneficial changes in people who practice meditation.

For people interested in attention deficit disorder, I’d like to recommend a book, “Attention Deficit Disorder: The Unfocused Mind in Children and Adults,” by Thomas E. Brown. In the book he encapsulates some up-to-date research indicating that one way of conceptualizing some of the difficulties faced by people with attention deficit disorder, is to break them down into the six major “domains” of executive functioning:

1. Activation: Organizing, prioritizing and getting to school or work
2. Focus: Tuning in, maintaining focus and shifting attention
3. Effort: Sustaining effort, regulating alertness and adjusting processing speed
4. Emotions: Modulating emotions and managing frustration
5. Memory: Holding and manipulating information and retrieving memories
6. Action: Monitoring and regulating actions

It can be very helpful for people to understand why they face the problems that they do, and how each may be amenable to a different type of help.

What we have done below is to re-draw and slightly simplify an extremely helpful diagram from Dr. Brown’s book, that will make it easier for you to see that kind of problems you or a loved one may be facing, and how treatment and coping strategies will be directed toward whichever of these is causing the most trouble in a person’s life.

(You can click on the diagram to see a large version of it.)

Apple Computers

I make no bones about it; I’m a Mac guy. Always have been, and probably always will be.

I don't have any stock in the company, but I think that I’m on about my ninth or tenth Apple computer. Every time that I have to scuttle off to use a Window’s based machine I start getting antsy.

Apple has just had their Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

As a scientist and clinician very concerned about the epidemic of attentional and mood disorders in the population, something caught my eye. During Steve Jobs’ keynote preview, in which he highlighted some of the key features of the new Mac OS X “Leopard” operating system, there was more and more emphasis on developments designed to reduce the frustrations of working with a computer and ways to deal with the ever-increasing number of demands on our attention. There were a dozen new gizmos all designed to simplify and streamline our interactions with our computers, email and our Internet experience.

I don’t know whether this is the fruit of market research, or just a natural reaction by computer developers who are feeling themselves overwhelmed by a constant barrage on information. But whichever it is, I’m delighted to see this very welcome development.

Note to self, maybe I should send this note to Steve Jobs and say a big "thank you" on behalf of millons of users.

Infomania

Here’s a study that came I under the radar, but is an important contribution to our on-going discussions about the perils of multi-tasking.

Glenn Wilson, a psychologist at my alma mater in London did a most interesting study funded by, of all people, Hewlett Packard.

It was a postal study carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and the main finding was that excessive use of technology reduced workers' intelligence.

Those distracted by incoming email and phone calls were fond to have a 10-point fall in their IQ. That would be more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking marijuana. People who are constantly breaking away from tasks to react to email or text messages suffer similar effects on the mind and the brain as losing a night's sleep

More than half of the 1,100 respondents said they always responded to an email "immediately" or as soon as possible, with 21% admitting they would interrupt a meeting to do so.

Do we really need any more evidence to confirm the dangers of multitasking and constant partial attention?

I don’t think so.

Therefore I’m going to continue to publish tips and techniques for dealing with the barrage of information that threatens to drown us.

Even before the oceans begin to rise….

Why the Multitasking Discussion is Not an Academic Exercise

I have written several pieces about the perils of multitasking, and why one of the most dangerous of all is the use of cell phones in cars.

I began to become concerned about this several years ago when a young woman in England was jailed after she killed someone while trying to drive a car while flirting with her boyfriend on her cell phone.

Now another tragedy has been reported by the BBC.

I am all for liberty and freedom: personal freedom is one of the most central planks of my philosophy.

Though these fatal cases are thankfully rare, is even one life more important than the “convenience” of using a cell phone? Because that is the real issue: none of us can effectively handle the ever-increasing numbers of sensory inputs that are demanding our attention. And why, exactly, does someone need to be talking while in control of a potentially lethal weapon?

And don’t let people tell you that it’s the only way to get everything done! Wouldn't that mean that they cannot deal with their day, and that you don’t care about the people that they could be affecting? Wouldn't that comment imply that it's time to re-evaluate their lives?

Technorati tags: Attention Distraction

Yet Another Piece of Research on the Dangers of Multitasking

Time has published another article on one of my “favorite” topics: the dangers of multitasking. I’ve written several items about this pernicious problem.

The new study from UCLA, is in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The investigators recruited a group of volunteers, all of whom were in their 20s. They had them work on a simple categorization task, in which they were asked to sort a stack of cards into different piles depending on the shapes printed on them. The volunteers then repeated the experiment with a second set of cards, this time while also listening to a set of high- and low-pitched beeps through a headphone and counting up all the high-pitched ones. As they worked, the subjects also underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging that enables us to follow brain blood flow.

In both versions of the test, the subjects did equally well on the categorization task, making about the same amount of errors. But when the investigators later asked the volunteers more-analytical questions, asking them details about the patterns of the cards and ways in which they could be categorized, the subjects showed a far more flexible understanding of those cards they had sorted without the distraction of the beeps.

When not distracted, the hippocampus of the brain, which is involved in creating short term memories and in constructing a map of external space, was actively engaged. When distracted by beeps, a less sophisticated part of the brain - the striatum – took over the task. This is one of the brain regions normally dedicated to mastering repetitive motor task or simple habits.

The practical consequence of this is that if you need to learn new information that requires analysis, you should not be doing anything else at the same time.

It may be that some people with attention deficit disorder will behave differently: there is some data that a proportion of them learn better if there are external distractors.

Technorati tags: Multitasking Attention Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Attention deficit disorder

An Online Resource for Attention Deficit Disorder

Regular readers will know that I am very interested in attention deficit disorder, and I have written a number of articles on it. (Just click on the Category over on the left hand side).

It a common clinical problem, thought to affect 5% of American adults and an even larger number of children. Yet there is even more to it, in that attentional problems may also be able to teach us a great deal about gender differences in the brain and in psychology. To say nothing of helping us learn methods for improving everyone's abilities to concentrate, focus and pay attention, at a time when ever more objects and events are demanding our attention.

Additude magazine has as its mission statement "to provide clear, accurate, user-friendly information and advice for families and individuals affected by AD/HD." Even as a professional, I have found the quality of the magazine to be excellent, and they are certainly succeeding in their aims. They certainly do not focus on medication as anything more than one aspect of treatment.

If you are interested in ADD, I highly recommend this resource.

“Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.”
--Nadia Boulanger (French Conductor and Musician, 1887-1979)

Technorati tags: Attention Attention deficit disorder Gender differences

More on the Perils of Multi-Tasking

I have talked before about the perils of multi-tasking and partial attention.

New research by Professor David Strayer at the University of Utah has confirmed previous research indicating that speaking on a mobile phone is at least as dangerous as driving while over the legal alcohol limit. The research is published in the journal Human Factors. Cell phones are so distracting because of a phenomenon called "inattention blindness," where the drivers enter a kind of "virtual reality" with the person they're talking to. In the research, the drivers who talked on phones remembered half as many of the objects they looked at compared to those who were driving without talking on phones. Furthermore, the drivers did not even realize that they weren't really "seeing" everything in front of them on the road: they thought they were driving perfectly safely. So it is likely that using a cell phone – even a hands free model – is considerably more distracting even than eating or drinking while driving.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can safely juggle driving and your cell phone: you may drop one or the other.

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”
-- Henry David Thoreau (American Essayist and Philosopher, 1817-1862)

Technorati tags: Attention Distraction David Strayer Driving

Hyperfocus

“Success isn't magic or hocus-pocus its simply learning how to focus.” --Jack Canfield (American Motivational Speaker, Author and Trainer, 1944-)

We have all been taught the importance of focusing to learn and to get jobs done. But there is also a problem that we call hyperfocus. This phenomenon has been known for centuries; in fact the Athenian Philosopher Socrates had it, and I’m going to put my hand up and admit that I have it too. When I am focused on a task I can easily become oblivious to the world and sit at my desk for many hours at a time without moving. I will not even hear the phone on my desk ring. And I have recently learned the hard way that sitting hunched over a hot computer for hours is not good for the spine. My chiropractor has given me strict instructions to break the spell of hyperfocus every hour and have a good stretch. (Thank you Teresa!). I’ve been giving that advice to other people for years, but doctors are, of course, the worst patients. Now my computer sends me a reminder every hour. Fortunately there can be an upside to hyperfocus, which I shall explain in a moment.

So what is hyperfocus? Interestingly, it is can be a feature of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). People with the disorder may not just exhibit distractibility, but may also have a tendency to focus very intently on things that interest them. The ability of a child to sit for hours playing complex video games does not at all rule out the diagnosis of ADD. I have known many people whose hyperfocus lead them to spend countless hours playing games or surfing the Internet, to the detriment of their relationships.

The real problem in ADD is not a short attention span; it is a poorly regulated attention system. It is thought that attentional problems are related to low levels of dopamine in key regions of the frontal systems of the brain, which is why people with ADD tend to be drawn to activities that provide instant feedback, and may also be part of the explanation for the disastrously high rates of substance abuse and impulsivity in untreated patients. Particularly in young people with ADD, they tend constantly to seek out things that are exciting and entertaining rather than schoolwork and chores.

So what to do about hyperfocus? I shall mention in a moment why, in its place, it can be helpful. But when it is interfering with things that have to get done, or causing other problems, here are some tips:

1. Use you computer’s alarm functions: I use a Macintosh, so I’ve been able to set up some fun distractions that come along once an hour.

2. Alarm watches: set the sound and/or vibration that it will be able to break through your hyperfocus. Experiment to find the decibels needed.

3. You can send yourself regular cell phone messages via email.

4. Most modern cell phones have good alarm functions that you can set to help yourself.

5. Kitchen timers are also very helpful.

Though there’s not a shred of scientific evidence to support it, I have also had some successes with the Bach Flower Essence, Chestnut Bud, in reducing unwanted hyperfocus.

I firmly believe that most problems contain their solution. Therefore I try not to fight hyperfocus, but to harness it. For a child with hyperfocus, learning that is active and physical is far more likely to be successful than book learning. Many entrepreneurs have hyperfocus, because they like working intensely on projects that give them a quick and enjoyable payoff. They often find it difficult to work in corporate America, if they have to work at someone else’s speed and at times laid down by another person.

“Successful minds work like a gimlet, to a single point.” --Christian Nestell Bovée (American Lawyer and Writer, 1820-1904)

Technorati tags: attention, ADD, hyperfocus

Partial Attention

“To do two things at once - is to do neither.” -- Publilius Syrus (Syrian-born Latin Writer, 1st Century B.C.E.)

Just yesterday I was counseling a successful young businesswoman who was telling me that she was planning to buy a Blackberry to add to her cell phone, laptop, PDA and pager. I strongly advised her not to buy one. Not because I have anything against Blackberries: they are wonderful pieces of equipment, and some people cannot do their jobs without them. My suggestion was based on something else entirely: Overload. Apart from being in business, she is also a mother of a young teething child and the last thing that she needs is yet another device to occupy her attention.

So I was delighted by the remarkable coincidence that this week’s Newsweek magazine is carrying an important article by Steven Levy, reporting on the recent emerging Technology Conference in San Diego that took "The Attention Economy" as its theme. He described an issue that has been worrying me for several years and which I shall be addressing when I am interviewed for Success.com in a couple of weeks time. A former Apple and Microsoft executive named Linda Stone described the epidemic of continuous partial attention.

We have all been multitasking since before our ancestors came down from the trees, but she discussed the way in which people’s attention is now constantly being distracted by a host of new inputs: email, text messaging, instant messaging and a hundred other things. And think of those news broadcasts that since 2001 have regularly had more than one item at a time on the screen. Many people have learned to give only partial attention to the task before them. The downside of this is that the appearance of competent multitasking (“Look mom, I can do ten things at once!”) is an illusion. If you are only working on a project with 10% of your attention, it is going to take much longer to get it done, and errors are far more likely to occur. What if needed is intense focus on one thing at a time.

In a speech, Linda Stone said that I prominent cause of continuous partial attention is "a desire to live as a node on the network." Some people can manage several inputs very well indeed. I often have more than one screen of input open at once, and Bill Gates is able to monitor four active screens at once. But when I’m really concentrating on producing high quality material for you, gentle reader, I turn off all the inputs until I am finished. In fact, checking my email is a reward for having finished the job at hand. While there are many advantages to being in perpetual contact, the balance has tipped more toward distraction, and, as Linda Stone put it, “a sense of constant crisis.”

I am also reminded of the phenomenon of “Flow” made popular by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. We feel that we are in a state of flow state when we are engaged in self-determined, goal-related, meaningful actions that are moving in the direction that we desire. Having our attention and energy pulled away from the flow is likely to interfere without ability not just to be productive, but also to enjoy life. There is, of course nothing wrong at all with being in continuous contact and communication with others people. But in order to be productive or to enjoy the moment, at some point you need to actually stop the conversation and focus on what you are doing.

Professor David Meyer from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is a research psychologist who has demonstrated that multitasking, far from increasing our productivity, actually makes us less productive. Some data from Europe has influenced lawmakers, after research indicated that driving and talking on a cell phone is a particularly bad multitasking combination that has been shown to cause even more accidents than drunk drivimg.

Remember the old saying: “If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.”

Technorati tags: attention, multitasking, Productivity, Work, Stress

Modafinil and ADD

The Washington Post has just reported that the FDA has turned an application from the Pharmaceutical Company Cephalon to have modafinil approved for use in children with ADD, because of worries about a potentially serious skin reaction called Stevens-Johnson syndrome .

This is a real shame: we need more options for treating children and adults with ADD, and although I am a huge proponent of non-pharmacological methods of treatment, the fact is that a lot of people simply do not respond to the methods that we currently have available, and some do not even respond to the medications that are available.

Modafinil had looked very promising: in December 1998 the FDA approved modafinil under the brand name Provigil for treating adults with sleepiness associated with narcolepsy. Its main mechanism of action is to inhibit the reuptake of dopamine in key regions of the brain, effectively increasing the amount of dopamine available. It has been used off-label for excessive daytime sleepiness and last year a study form the University of Pennsylvania indicated that it might help some cocaine addicts fight their cravings. It is an open secret that a great many students and academics have been using it for years to enable them to study and work longer. I remember an article from someone who was due to lecture in India, immediately after his arrival from the United States. He admitted to taking modafinil to help him get through the ordeal.

The application to use modafinil in ADD is not dead. The FDA has said that they want a 3000 patients study to assess the risk of Stevens-Johnson syndrome, and the company will discuss that with them. But it will inevitably mean delays.

Technorati tags: ADD, ADHD Modafinil

Attention Deficit, Money and Motivation

People often say that I’m someone who’s glass is always half full. Well, that’s not quite correct: I’m a huge realist, but I don’t like the idea of pathologizing everything that happens to us. One example of this is ADD.

Though untreated clinical ADD can lead to a great deal of distress and the ever-present risk of impulsive behaviors and substance abuse, I am also eager to examine the positive aspects of having attentional problems. Many of the young people and adults with ADD are also extremely successful in settings that don’t require the academic type of concentration. I have met entrepreneurs with ADD, as well as some highly creative people and athletes. A question has been whether ADD might confer some others gifts, benefits or advantages on people.

Although a year old, we recently came across an item that is not as well-known as it should be. Studies using fMRI have indicated that some of the regions of the brain that do not normally show much activity in young people with ADD become highly activated by monetary rewards.

This is not to say that giving young people money is the way to “conquer” ADD. Instead it suggest that rather than just thinking about people with ADD as just having an attention problem, we should also think of them as people who derive pleasure from different things than the bulk of the populations. Not having to spend all their time attending to linear learning may actually lead to greater freedom of imagination, creativity and emotional expression.

People with sever attentional problems can run into a lot of problems in relationships, even losing attention during sex. But it may be that may also be that minor degrees of loss of attentional focus may also enhance some people’s ability to feel empathy.

Technorati Tags: ADHD, ADD, reward, Motivation, Creativity