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Zap your brain into the zone: Fast track to pure focus
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328501.600-zap-your-brain-into-the-zone-fast-track-to-pure-focus.htmlWhether you want to smash a forehand like Federer, or just be an Xbox hero, there is a shocking short cut to getting the brain of an expert
I'm close to tears behind my thin
cover of sandbags as 20 screaming, masked men run towards me at full
speed, strapped into suicide bomb vests and clutching rifles. For every
one I manage to shoot dead, three new assailants pop up from nowhere.
I'm clearly not shooting fast enough, and panic and incompetence are
making me continually jam my rifle.
My salvation lies in the fact that my
attackers are only a video, projected on screens to the front and sides.
It's the very simulation that trains US troops to take their first
steps with a rifle, and everything about it has been engineered to feel
like an overpowering assault. But I am failing miserably. In fact, I'm
so demoralised that I'm tempted to put down the rifle and leave.
Then they put the electrodes on me.
I am in a lab in Carlsbad, California,
in pursuit of an elusive mental state known as "flow" - that feeling of
effortless concentration that characterises outstanding performance in
all kinds of skills.
Flow has been maddeningly difficult to
pin down, let alone harness, but a wealth of new technologies could
soon allow us all to conjure up this state. The plan is to provide a
short cut to virtuosity, slashing the amount of time it takes to master a
new skill - be it tennis, playing the piano or marksmanship.
That will be welcome news to anyone embarking on the tortuous road to expertise. According to pioneering research by Anders Ericsson
at Florida State University in Tallahassee, it normally takes 10,000
hours of practice to become expert in any discipline. Over that time,
your brain knits together a wealth of new circuits that eventually allow
you to execute the skill automatically, without consciously considering
each action. Think of the way tennis champion Roger Federer,
after years of training, can gracefully combine a complicated series of
actions - keeping one eye on the ball and the other on his opponent,
while he lines up his shot and then despatches a crippling backhand -
all in one stunningly choreographed second.
Flow typically accompanies these
actions. It involves a Zen-like feeling of intense concentration, with
time seeming to stop as you focus completely on the activity in hand.
The experience crops up repeatedly when experts describe what it feels
like to be at the top of their game, and with years of practice it
becomes second nature to enter that state. Yet you don't have to be a
pro to experience it - some people report the same ability to focus at a
far earlier stage in their training, suggesting they are more naturally
predisposed to the flow state than others. This effortless
concentration should speed up progress, while the joyful feelings that
come with the flow state should help take the sting out of further
practice, setting such people up for future success, says Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi at Claremont Graduate University in California.
Conversely, his research into the flow state in children showed that, as
he puts it, "young people who didn't enjoy the pursuit of the subject
they were gifted in, whether it was mathematics or music, stopped
developing their skills and reverted to mediocrity."
Despite its potentially crucial role
in the development of talent, many researchers had deemed the flow state
too slippery a concept to tackle - tainted as it was with mystical,
meditative connotations. In the late 1970s, Csikszentmihalyi, then a
psychologist at the University of Chicago, helped change that view by
showing that the state could be defined and studied empirically. In one
groundbreaking study, he interviewed a few hundred talented people,
including athletes, artists, chess players, rock climbers and surgeons,
enabling him to pin down four key features that characterise flow.
The first is an intense and focused
absorption that makes you lose all sense of time. The second is what is
known as autotelicity, the sense that the activity you are engaged in is
rewarding for its own sake. The third is finding the "sweet spot", a
feeling that your skills are perfectly matched to the task at hand,
leaving you neither frustrated nor bored. And finally, flow is
characterised by automaticity, the sense that "the piano is playing
itself", for example.
Exactly what happens in the brain
during flow has been of particular interest, but it has been tricky to
measure. Csikszentmihalyi took an early stab at it, using
electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the brain waves of expert chess
players during a game. He found that the most skilled players showed
less activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is typically associated
with higher cognitive processes such as working memory and
verbalisation. That may seem counter-intuitive, but silencing
self-critical thoughts might allow more automatic processes to take
hold, which would in turn produce that effortless feeling of flow.
Later studies have confirmed these findings and
revealed other neural signatures of flow. Chris Berka and her colleagues
at Advanced Brain Monitoring in Carlsbad, California, for example,
looked at the brain waves of Olympic archers and professional golfers. A
few seconds before the archers fired off an arrow or the golfers hit
the ball, the team spotted a small increase in what's known as the alpha
band, one of the frequencies that arises from the electrical noise of
all the brain's neurons (The International Journal of Sport and Society, vol 1, p 87).
This surge in alpha waves, Berka says, is associated with reduced
activation of the cortex, and is always more obvious in experts than in
novices. "We think this represents focused attention on the target,
while other sensory inputs are suppressed," says Berka. She found that
these mental changes are accompanied by slower breathing and a lower
pulse rate - as you might expect from relaxed concentration.
Defining and characterising the flow
state is all very well, but could a novice learn to turn off their
critical faculties and focus their attention in this way, at will? If
so, would it boost performance? Gabriele Wulf, a kinesiologist at the
University of Nevada at Las Vegas, helped to answer this question in
1998, when she and her colleagues examined the way certain athletes move
(Journal of Motor Behavior, vol 30, p 169).
At the time, she had no particular
interest in the flow state. But Wulf and her colleagues found that they
could quickly improve a person's abilities by asking them to focus their
attention on an external point away from their body. Aspiring skiers
who were asked to do slalom-type movements on a simulator, for example,
learned faster if they focused on a marked spot ahead of them. Golfers
who focused on the swing of the club were about 20 per cent more
accurate than those who focused on their own arms.
Wulf and her colleagues later found
that an expert's physical actions require fewer muscle movements than
those of a beginner - as seen in the tight, spare motions of top-flight
athletes. They also experience less mental strain, a lower heart rate
and shallower breathing - all characteristics of the flow state (Human Movement Science, vol 29, p 440).
These findings were borne out in later
studies of expert and novice swimmers. Novices who concentrated on an
external focus - the water's movement around their limbs - showed the
same effortless grace as those with more experience, swimming faster and
with a more efficient technique. Conversely, when the expert swimmers
focused on their limbs, their performance declined (International Journal of Sport Science & Coaching, vol 6, p 99).
Wulf's findings fit well with the idea
that flow - and better learning - comes when you turn off conscious
thought. "When you have an external focus, you achieve a more automatic
type of control," she says. "You don't think about what you are doing,
you just focus on the outcome."
Berka has been taking a different
approach to evoke the flow state - her group is training novice marksmen
to use neurofeedback. Each person is hooked up to electrodes that tease
out and display specific brain waves, along with a monitor that
measures their heartbeat. By controlling their breathing and learning to
deliberately manipulate the waveforms on the screen in front of them,
the novices managed to produce the alpha waves characteristic of the
flow state. This, in turn, helped them improve their accuracy at hitting
the targets. In fact, the time it took to shoot like a pro fell by more
than half (The International Journal of Sport and Society, vol 1, p 87).
But as I found when I tried the
method, even neurofeedback has a catch. It takes time and effort to
produce really thrumming alpha waves. Just when I thought I had achieved
them, they evaporated and I lost my concentration. Might there be a
faster way to force my brain into flow? The good news is that there,
too, the answer appears to be yes.
That is why I'm now allowing Michael
Weisend, who works at the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque, New
Mexico, to hook my brain up to what's essentially a 9-volt battery. He
sticks the anode - the positive pole of the battery - to my temple, and
the cathode to my left arm. "You're going to feel a slight tingle," he
says, and warns me that if I remove an electrode and break the
connection, the voltage passing through my brain will blind me for a
good few seconds.
Weisend, who is working on a US
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency programme to accelerate
learning, has been using this form of transcranial direct current
stimulation (tDCS) to cut the time it takes to train snipers. From the
electrodes, a 2-milliamp current will run through the part of my brain
associated with object recognition - an important skill when visually
combing a scene for assailants.
The mild electrical shock is meant to depolarise the
neuronal membranes in the region, making the cells more excitable and
responsive to inputs. Like many other neuroscientists working with tDCS,
Weisend thinks this accelerates formation of new neural pathways during
the time that someone practises a skill. The method he is using on me
boosted the speed with which wannabe snipers could detect a threat by a
factor of 2.3 (Experimental Brain Research, vol 213, p 9).
Mysteriously, however, these long-term
changes also seem to be preceded by a feeling that emerges as soon as
the current is switched on and is markedly similar to the flow state.
"The number one thing I hear people say after tDCS is that time passed
unduly fast," says Weisend. Their movements also seem to become more
automatic; they report calm, focused concentration - and their
performance improves immediately.
It's not yet clear why some forms of
tDCS should bring about the flow state. After all, if tDCS were solely
about writing new memories, it would be hard to explain the improvement
that manifests itself as soon as the current begins to flow.
One possibility is that the electrodes
somehow reduce activity in the prefrontal cortex - the area used in
critical thought, which Csikszentmihalyi had found to be muted during
flow. Roy Hamilton, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania
in Philadelphia, thinks this may happen as a side effect of some forms
of tDCS. "tDCS might have much more broad effects than we think it
does," he says. He points out that some neurons can mute the signals of
other brain cells in their network, so it is possible that stimulating
one area of the brain might reduce activity in another.
Uncertain effect
Others are more sceptical. Arne
Dietrich of the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, suspects that
learning will be impaired if the frontal cortex isn't initially engaged
in the task. What's more, he thinks you would need a specialised type of
tDCS to dampen activity in the prefrontal cortex. "But then again, it
is not clear what sort of ripple effect tDCS has globally," he concedes,
"regardless of which brain area is targeted."
In any case, it is clear that not all
forms of tDCS bring about flow. Roi Cohen Kadosh at the University of
Oxford certainly saw no signs of it when he placed an anode over the
brain regions used in spatial reasoning.
This debate will only be resolved with
much more research. For now, I'm intrigued about what I'll experience
as I ask Weisend to turn on the current. Initially, there is a slight
tingle, and suddenly my mouth tastes like I've just licked the inside of
an aluminium can. I don't notice any other effect. I simply begin to
take out attacker after attacker. As twenty of them run at me
brandishing their guns, I calmly line up my rifle, take a moment to
breathe deeply, and pick off the closest one, before tranquilly
assessing my next target.
In what seems like next to no time, I
hear a voice call out, "Okay, that's it." The lights come up in the
simulation room and one of the assistants at Advanced Brain Monitoring, a
young woman just out of university, tentatively enters the darkened
room.
In the sudden quiet amid the bodies
around me, I was really expecting more assailants, and I'm a bit
disappointed when the team begins to remove my electrodes. I look up and
wonder if someone wound the clocks forward. Inexplicably, 20 minutes
have just passed. "How many did I get?" I ask the assistant.
She looks at me quizzically. "All of them."
Diy brain enhancement
Zapping your brain with a small current seems to improve everything from mathematical skills to marksmanship, but for now your best chance of experiencing this boost is to sign up for a lab experiment. Machines that provide transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) cost £5000 a pop, and their makers often sell them only to researchers.That hasn't stopped a vibrant community of DIY tDCS enthusiasts from springing up. Their online forums are full of accounts of their home-made experiments, including hair-curling descriptions of blunders that, in one case, left someone temporarily blind.
What drives people to take such risks? Roy Hamilton, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, thinks it is part of a general trend he calls cosmetic neuroscience, in which people try to tailor their brains to the demands of an increasingly fast-paced world. "In a society where both students and their professors take stimulant medications to meet their academic expectations," he warns, "the potential pressure for the use of cognitive enhancing technologies of all types is very real".
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203315804577211351204163814.html?grcc=88888Z0&mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_news
Memory Gets Jolt in Brain Research
By SHIRLEY S. WANG
An electrical brain-stimulation technique used to treat Parkinson's disease and chronic pain appears to enhance human memory as well, according to a tiny but intriguing new study that bolsters hope for one day developing a nondrug treatment for memory problems, including ailments like Alzheimer's disease.
The new study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, focused on seven patients with severe epilepsy whose memory abilities ranged from normal to severely impaired. They had electrodes implanted through a hole in the skull in order to detect the source of their seizures. This gave researchers the chance to send an undetected burst of current to different brain regions, known as deep-brain stimulation, and observe changes in memory.
The participants completed a task where
they pretended to be taxi drivers who needed to drop off passengers at
stores on different blocks. Researchers stimulated the brains of
participants when they were learning the location of half the stores but
not the others. Participants were tested for how well they remembered
the location of the stores.
The entorhinal cortex is an area of the brain that is one of the first to be damaged by Alzheimer's. Fibers from that region transmit the sensory information to the hippocampus, a brain region critical to learning and memory. The thinking is that the stimulation enhanced learning or the encoding of memories, perhaps by resetting the electric rhythm of brain cells within the hippocampus, according to Itzhak Fried, a study author and professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Tel Aviv University in Israel.
The work is preliminary, and extensive follow-up is needed. But, "the hope would be that this type of approach—deep-brain stimulation—can be used to help people with memory problems," Dr. Fried said.
For the field of Alzheimer's research, the finding "breaks new ground," said Stephen Salloway, an Alzheimer's researcher and professor of neurology at Brown University who wasn't involved in the current study. "It doesn't provide a definitive answer; it opens new doors to exploratory treatments for Alzheimer's," he said.
The majority of treatments in development to treat Alzheimer's and related dementias are drugs that target the protein amyloid, which clumps to form plaques in the brain and is thought to contribute to the disease.
Questions remain about using deep-brain stimulation to treat dementia, including whether it would work for Alzheimer's patients and at what stage of decline, whether it is safe and how long the effect will last, said Dr. Salloway. The Food and Drug Administration has approved deep-brain stimulation to treat Parkinson's and a movement disorder known as dystonia, and it is used to treat chronic pain and severe depression.
The next step is to figure out if stimulation also can help when recalling old memories, because that function can also be impaired with dementia, according to Nanthia Suthana, the first author on the study and a UCLA postdoctoral researcher.
Unlike stimulation for treatment of Parkinson's or other issues, in which the brain is stimulated continuously or repeatedly with an implanted pacemaker-like device, memory in the latest study was improved by a single burst of current when administered in the right location as memories were being formed, according to Dr. Fried.
Recent animal studies have shown that stimulating the entorhinal cortex improved the growth of brain cells in adult mice and appeared to enhance memory for locations and spatial knowledge.
In humans, evidence has been limited. A 2010 study of six Alzheimer's patients who received continuous brain stimulation to a different part of the brain over a 12-month period suggested possible improvements in memory. And in some previous studies where the hippocampus was stimulated, memory was actually disrupted.
The notion that deep-brain stimulation may have benefits for memory was prompted in part by serendipity. In a 2008 case report, a man who was receiving experimental brain stimulation for obesity also showed improvement in his memory, which prompted excitement and calls for future research.
Write to Shirley S. Wang at shirley.wang@wsj.com
