The following text is drawn from

January 16, 2006 Time magazine.

Mind & Body

 

How to Tune Up Your Brain

In a special report, TIME explores the latest research on how to stay mentally sharp. In a complex world, it's news we all need

 

By CLAUDIA WALLIS

We live in an age that's gushing with information and dizzying possibilities. You can almost feel your brain cells crackling to keep up with the choices—trivial and profound—that confront us at every turn: picking a cell-phone plan or an on-demand movie, selecting the best mix of investments in a 401(k) or the right health plan or just knowing which eggs to buy at the supermarket. (Cage free? Organic? Omega-3 enriched?) Surely there has never been a greater need to stay alert and informed, to act shrewdly and remain focused.

Luckily, we also live in an era in which research is showing us how to nurture and maintain our mental faculties—from infancy through the golden years—and how to deter what was once seen as an inevitable decline. Some new findings confirm what we have always suspected: Grandma was right—fish really is brain food; a steaming cup of joe actually does turbocharge our mental acuity; getting less than eight hours of sleep seriously compromises our ability to concentrate and solve problems.

But some findings are unexpected, even counterintuitive. Creativity, for instance, rarely strikes in a flash but more typically results from steady cogitation. Multitasking, for all its seeming efficiency, can exact a heavy toll on the quality of our output. Daily meditation physically transforms the cerebral cortex. Physical exercise may be as important as mental gymnastics in keeping Alzheimer's disease at bay. Baby Einstein-type videos make a poor substitute for human interaction in stimulating a tender young mind. And perhaps the most unexpected and comforting, recent research confirms that the human brain retains an astonishing degree of plasticity and capacity for learning throughout life. In some respects, our mental performance, despite a few glitches with short-term memory, doesn't peak until midlife, when the white matter in the loftiest parts of the brain is thickest.

In the following pages, TIME offers a wealth of new discoveries and practical information to guide you in the care and maintenance of your mental faculties. Pay careful attention. Don't get distracted. But don't stress too much either; relaxation is a balm for the overtaxed brain.

 

5 Guilt-Filled Days on the Big R, for Ritalin

In pursuit of truth and a tidy desk, a TIME senior editor spends a week on a mind-altering stimulant

By BELINDA LUSCOMBE

It wasn't until I was in the limo being whisked to the studio that it occurred to me that it was probably a bad idea to go on live TV under the influence of mind-altering drugs. When I got the call asking me to talk about a TIME story on that night's late news, I was playing host to a 5-year-old's birthday party, with attendees who included Ella, Ella, Stella, Ale (pronounced Ellay), Elee (same) and Belle, the princess I had rented. I don't know if my suggestibility was caused by a surfeit of medication—in this case, Ritalin—or of liquid consonants, but I agreed to do it.

The Ritalin was supposed to make me sharper and prevent this kind of distraction. My pharmacological experience is rather shallow—I had a nasty SweeTarts addiction a while back that scared me off the harder stuff—but I knew that millions of kids with attention-deficit problems were on methylphenidates, as Ritalin and its cousins are known. I too have attention problems. I too am still maturing. Why shouldn't it work for me?

Lots of adults have started taking Ritalin, hoping it will give them mastery over their oversubscribed lives. Could I get my work done more efficiently? Could I make decisions more quickly? Could I just maybe tidy my desk? I wanted to see what it would be like to have focus, clarity, direction. So I found a friendly psychiatrist, whom I'm going to call Mark although that's only half his name. After giving me a long lecture on the risks of taking it, most of which I was too busy answering e-mail to hear, he sent me a prescription.

The TV appearance was at the end of my very first day on the big R, as we users call it. I have no clear memory of what I said, probably because I woke up three times that night, with a start, as if someone had hit me with a wet sock. At 3:10 a.m., I remembered I owed my mother money. At 4:12 a.m., I felt guilty about something I said to my son. At 5:14 a.m., I deeply regretted a headline I had written. Dr. Mark hadn't warned me about this: Ritalin is basically a drug that wakes you up to remind you of what a loser you are.

At work the next day, however, the TV bookers showered me in praise. The word adorable was used several times. The word funny was used. The words better than Diane Sawyer were not used, but I got the picture. Ritalin plus Ernie Anastos (a local-TV newscaster). It's a winning combo.

But it wasn't all sweetness and klieg lights. I was always thirsty. I was often hungry. When I walked down the street I would involuntarily clench and unclench my fists, as if I were the Thing. I woke in the wee hours so often I no longer bothered to wake my husband to tell him about it. And Ritalin made my toes hurt. O.K., technically it was the wall I was kicking that made my toes hurt. I was trying to get my kids downstairs to school, and they were moving with the speed of treacle on asphalt. This is their standard speed, but I don't usually take my frustrations out on the wall. My children, being New York City kids, simply shrugged. They've seen worse.

In fact, being on Ritalin was like landing in Manhattan and assimilating in fast-forward. First you feel confusion, then a little exhilaration and then, after a few days and a few more milligrams than is recommended, all-out aggression. As I walked down the streets, I didn't even see the tourists. I just saw the line I had to pick through them to get where I had to go. I stepped out in front of cars that were shooting through the lights, threw myself on to subways and cursed gratuitously. I had to apologize to one poor lunch companion, a journalist from out of town who wanted advice on working in the city and whose chances of success I outlined a little too graphically. I told him I had just started taking Ritalin. He told me he took it instead of a disco nap to go clubbing. Wait. We're putting what percentage of the nation's kids on this drug?

But if I was becoming a New Yorker squared on Ritalin, I was doing it without any big-city jadedness or ennui. Nothing seemed too hard. All my deadlines were invigorating, and all the work I had to get done to meet them lay like a playground before me. It was going to be a hoot. I didn't get the work done any faster, but I never felt intimidated or overwhelmed by it.

On the other hand, I didn't get it done any better either. I think I might have done it worse. There was an engine driving me and no moment of rest. Watching TV was almost impossible. I couldn't sit still, could not even derive pleasure from our household's favorite pastime, mocking David Caruso's cadences on CSI: Miami: "Where's [long pause] your vault?" I kept wishing Deadwood were on. Now that's a Ritalin-friendly show.

I definitely got more done, but it was at the cost of those moments when, while doing nothing, you have a great idea or find a solution or arrive at the perfect headline. I had no great ideas on Ritalin. I had some really bad ones, like chasing the pills with two vodka gimlets—my teeth felt itchy for hours—but it was all movement, no color. My life became like a bad soccer game in which there were lots of goals but no thrilling play on the field.

By the way, that's the kind of incisive sports analysis that lands you on TV. And I'm keeping a few extra pills handy, just in case.

 

Can You Prevent Alzheimer's Disease?

The latest research suggests that exercising your brain—and your heart—may help

By CHRISTINE GORMAN

Laura Pizzuto, 78, of Seattle admits she loses her words every now and then. An avid gardener, she will sometimes forget the name of a familiar plant. "But I know how to look things up," she says. "Or I can go to the library or call a friend." Occasional memory lapses are not going to slow down this professional artist. "I want to keep myself going so I can work and enjoy my grandchildren," she says.

To that end, Pizzuto is doing everything she can to keep her brain, as well as the rest of her body, in top shape. The odds are decidedly in her favor. For one thing, she's blessed with good genes. But she also finds fulfillment in her painting, is active in her community, eats lots of vegetables and exercises regularly. According to the latest research on aging, those are exactly the sorts of things we all should be doing to help maintain our ability to remember, reason, make decisions and learn.

There are even tantalizing hints that those healthful habits may also prevent or delay Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia—although that conclusion is controversial. "I would phrase it differently," says Marilyn Albert, director of the division of cognitive neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. "What the studies have done is to take people who are middle-aged and elderly and look at what maintains good brain health."

No one is suggesting that a crossword puzzle a day will keep senility at bay or that somehow it's your fault if your mental capacity fails. But given how quickly the average age of Americans is rising and how much the risk of dementia leaps with advancing years, finding anything that delays cognitive decline even a little would be of enormous value.

No wonder research looking for links between lifestyle and a healthier brain has been booming in recent years. Later this month the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia will publish a long-awaited report prepared for the National Institutes of Health that summarizes what scientists know and don't know about improving cognitive and emotional health in the elderly. And the fourth major study on the role of exercise will be published in the Annals of Internal Medicine by the Center for Health Studies in Seattle (Pizzuto is one of the 1,740 participants).

Along the way, neurologists have discovered that the brain is much more adaptable as it ages than they realized. They have determined that the so-called plasticity of the brain, which allows the formation of new neurons as well as new connections between those neurons, can last a lifetime. "As far as our brains are concerned, learning something new or even retrieving something from memory is a plasticity response," says Molly Wagster of the National Institute on Aging. It may get harder as you age, but if you can teach an old brain new tricks, you might, just might, also be able to keep it functioning well into the 90s.

One of the top ways to take care of your mind, it turns out, is to make sure your heart is performing at its best. And there's nothing like physical activity to promote cardiac fitness. For some people, that will mean participating in an aerobics class three or more times a week. For others, walking as fast as they can half an hour a day most days of the week will do the trick. In fact, all other things being equal, people who engage in a wide variety of physical activities—like walking and biking and dancing and swimming—seem to be better protected against cognitive decline than those who don't.

The research linking heart and brain health is so strong that as you continue reading this article, you may get the feeling that you've stumbled into a story about how to prevent cardiac disease. But if fear of a heart attack isn't enough to get you to pamper your ticker, fear of senility just might. So think about doing your heart and your head a favor. If you smoke, quit. Get your cholesterol levels and blood pressure checked, and if they are high, get them treated. If you have diabetes, do everything you can to keep it under control. Eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, consume fish once or twice a week and cut down on the amount of trans and saturated fat in your diet. The effects appear to be cumulative. A study published in August found that folks with three or more major cardiovascular risk factors—for example, hypertension, diabetes and current smoking—were more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease as well.

Why is cardiovascular fitness so important to cognitive health? Researchers used to think it was all about making sure that plenty of oxygen-rich blood made it to the brain. Now they are starting to suspect there may be more to it. In laboratory animals, at least, exercise also seems to stimulate the body's production of certain molecules called growth factors, which help nerves stay healthy and keep functioning. "We don't understand a lot about why this happens," says Arthur Kramer, a researcher at the University of Illinois who uses brain scans to study the effects of exercise. "But we're learning more about that."

A healthy cardiovascular system may even, to some extent, compensate for tiny defects in the brain. Doctors have long known that suffering one or more strokes, which interrupt the flow of blood to the brain, increases the likelihood of dementia. They assumed that Alzheimer's disease was a completely unrelated problem. In fact, a long-running study of a group of nuns who agreed to donate their brains when they died has found that isn't necessarily the case. About a third of the nuns whose brains at autopsy showed clear signs of the plaques and tangles associated with Alzheimer's disease had exhibited normal memory and cognitive function until the day they died. The difference: the blood vessels in their brains were in great shape.

That doesn't mean those women wouldn't eventually have developed dementia had they lived long enough. But the study suggested to a lot of physicians that good vascular health may make it easier for a brain with incipient Alzheimer's to work around the plaques and tangles in its midst.

Now that you've got your body running along smoothly, are there any mental gymnastics you can do to keep dementia at bay? The evidence is provocative but not terribly compelling. There's no question that you can improve your ability to remember names or other bits of information by practicing memory tasks, just as practice will help you learn a new instrument or another language. A number of researchers have proposed that a lifetime of such efforts could allow you to build up a healthy cognitive reserve to offset the declines of old age, though the idea remains theoretical.

Several studies have found that folks who regularly engage in mentally challenging activities—like reading, doing crossword puzzles or playing chess—seem less likely to develop dementia later in life. The difficulty comes in figuring out whether their good fortune is a direct result of their leisure activities or whether their continuing pursuit of those pleasures merely reflects good genes for cognitive function.

A 20-year survey of 469 elderly people living in the Bronx, N.Y., tried to get to the bottom of this chicken-or-egg question by following subjects who had no signs of dementia in the first seven years of the study. The results, which were published in 2003, showed that reading and playing board games or a musical instrument was associated with a decreased risk of Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia. Intriguingly, those with the strongest habits demonstrated the greatest benefits. Participants who solved crossword puzzles four days a week, for instance, had a 47% lower risk of dementia than those who do the puzzles once a week.

By the same token, several studies have suggested that older folks who are socially active—who, for example, do volunteer work or attend religious services—have a reduced risk of dementia. There are, of course, plenty of caveats that go along with those observations, including the same old chicken-or-egg problem that haunts all observational studies: In this case, is withdrawal from society a cause or result of Alzheimer's disease?

So where does this leave us? "I use a thermostat analogy with my patients," says Dr. Laurel Coleman, a geriatrician who sits on the board of the Alzheimer's Association. "Let's say you're dialed in to get Alzheimer's disease at 82. You may be able to push that back until maybe you're 92." Depending on where their personal thermostat is set, some people will do everything right and still develop dementia in their 50s. Others will do everything wrong and be perfectly lucid at 101. Most of the rest of us will fall somewhere between those two extremes. For now, at least, preventing dementia is still a numbers game, but one in which we're starting to grasp the variables.

 

Getting and Staying in the Zone

Achieving peak performance depends on controlling the mind that controls your body

By ALICE PARK

Elite athletes talk a lot about being in the zone, that magical place where mind and body work in perfect synch and movements seem to flow without conscious effort. Major-league pitchers, NBA stars, pro golfers and Olympic hopefuls dedicate their careers to the search for this elusive feeling, devoting hours of training to "listening" to their body and "reading" their muscles—trying to construct a bridge between mind and body sturdy enough to lead them straight to athletic nirvana.

But the truly great athletes, those with long careers and performances that fans talk about for generations, know that maintaining a competitive edge is less about keeping it honed to perfection at all times than realizing they can lose the edge every once in a while and still get it back.

Few athletes know that better than Olympic sprinter Michael Johnson, one of the fastest men on earth. Johnson holds two individual world records in track and five Olympic gold medals. He was the first sprinter to win both the 200-m and 400-m events in a single Olympic Games. He has also had his share of disappointments. He contracted food poisoning a month before the 1992 Games and didn't make it past the early heats in the event he was favored to win. And just before the 2000 Olympics, he injured his quadriceps and failed to qualify for the 200-m race.

Setbacks like those would be enough to put most athletes off their game. But Johnson found a way to push them behind him. "If you have a disappointment," he says, "you need to ask yourself 'Why did I not perform well today?'" Was it the preparation? A mistake in execution? "Then you need to get yourself at peace with that situation," he says.

According to Johnson, achieving that peace is the key to avoiding a full-fledged slump. A slump—that downward spiral that only gets worse the harder you try—is familiar to even amateur athletes. For golfers, it can start with the yips, an uncontrollable twitch of the arm or an involuntary snap of the wrist at just the wrong moment. For a pitcher, it's the strike zone over home plate that suddenly begins to jump around. For the basketball player, it's the hoop that has inexplicably shrunk.

Athletes in the throes of a slump will swear that it came all of a sudden, out of nowhere. But psychologists say the episodes are less mysterious than they seem. They usually stem from a failure to prepare mentally for the pressure of athletic competition. "Training is about strengthening the mind-body connection," says Kirsten Peterson, sports psychologist for the U.S. Olympic Committee. "Athletes need to train their mind with the same discipline that they train their bodies."

The mind-body connection in sports is not some New Age construct. Thoughts have direct and powerful connections to all sorts of physiological functions. Think hard enough about jumping out of an airplane, and your heart will start to race and your palms to sweat. Other thought-induced changes may be more subtle, and for athletes who rely on fine motor skills, those imperceptible adjustments can mean the difference between a strikeout and a home run.

At the root of most slumps is a perceived decline in performance. Athletes tend to define themselves by their results, and any dip in their stats can make them start to think they are not as good as they used to be or as good as they thought they were. In some cases, they may not be slipping at all; their opponents may just be getting better. Or the decline may be a matter of perspective; after all, no one can perform at peak levels 100% of the time. Over-training and bringing the muscles to the brink of fatigue can lead to a physical plateau, after which the body just can't run any faster or swing any harder.

What elevates any of those scenarios from an ordinary off day to a prolonged slump is the way the athlete interprets the dip. "It has less to do with what is contributing to the decrease in performance and more to do with how you react and adjust to the decline," says Jonathan Katz, a psychologist at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Much of the action takes place without the athlete's even being aware that it's occurring. After years of practice, hitting a baseball or shooting a basket becomes almost second nature to a professional athlete. So it's easy to think the skill resides in muscle memory. But even those rote actions involve a tremendous amount of mental processing; they are just happening too fast for the athlete to realize they are going on. "It's not the conscious kind of processing, the kind where you're thinking about how to control your body," says Jeff Simons, a sports psychologist at California State University, East Bay. "Our conscious brain cannot keep up with the speed of information processing necessary to perform a high-level skill."

Any learned sports skill begins in the thinking part of the brain, with nerves in the prefrontal cortex. As those neurons get excited, they activate nerve cells connected to the limbic system just under the cerebrum of the brain, the area associated with emotions such as fear, anxiety, elation and satisfaction. That area is tied in turn to the motor cortex, which controls the muscles.

If the feedback loop is dominated by fear—fear of failure, fear of disappointing teammates, fear of being unworthy—the circuit starts to resemble the classic fight-or-flight response. In the perform-or-perish version, anxious thoughts trigger the release of adrenaline, the hormone that sets the heart racing, primes the muscles to run and puts all the senses on alert. The eyes slip into tunnel vision—the last thing a quarter-back needs when he's relying on peripheral perception to spot a waiting receiver.

One way experts help athletes control the jitters is by teaching them to take command of the interior monologue that psychologists call self-talk. This is the endless conversation that we all have with ourselves, processing events as they pass before our eyes. The average person speaks to himself at a rate of 300 to 1,000 words a minute. According to Trevor Moawad, director of mental conditioning for IMG Academies, a leading sports-training facility, that means that for a tennis player competing in a typical 2-hr. match, only about 40 min. are spent on the court contesting points, leaving an hour and 20 min. between points with little to do but talk to oneself. Positive chatter can help the athlete stay focused, but if the conversation strays into fears of failing, then the self-talk can become counterproductive.

"You can't stop those negative thoughts from coming," says Michael Johnson, "especially when you enter an arena or when you see your competitors walk by. The only way to stop those thoughts is to replace them with something else." For Johnson, the substitute images and words were all about the race ahead. "If you're going to replace them, you might as well replace them with something that's going to help you," he says. He liked to visualize the upcoming race, concentrating on the start, the weakest part of his race, and thinking about himself shooting off the blocks like a bullet.

Aynsley Smith, director of the sports-medicine research center at the Mayo Clinic, gives her athletes a more tangible system of thought swapping. "I tell them that self-talk exists on three channels: positive, negative and escape. You try to be on the positive channel as much as you can while you're training or competing, but when the negative thoughts start coming, it's the speed of the transition that counts. I give them a clicker pen and tell them to just click over from the negative to the positive channel." If the anxiety doesn't go away, says Smith, then it's time to switch to the escape channel. That's for thoughts about how the athlete's role model would react. How would Joe DiMaggio get over the disappointment? What would the Babe do?

Smith, who works with ice-hockey players, finds that biofeedback techniques are particularly effective for controlling jitters. Most athletes are skilled at visual imagery, and when shown monitors that display their anxiety levels as a graph or chart, they quickly learn to corral their nervousness and keep it from interfering with the smooth flow of their practiced skills. "I tell people they need to try to get back to doing rather than thinking," says Simons.

Relaxation techniques like deep breathing are also good for helping athletes quiet the mental chatter long enough for their bodies to perform. "You have to help them realize that 'I have to get out of my own way,'" says Simons. "Relaxing can help them imagine competing, getting in their own groove, feeling it, tasting it, reminding them of that feeling of flow."

For Michael Johnson, who competed in three Olympic Games over a span of a dozen years, avoiding a slump was mostly a matter of staying in control. "The first thing an athlete has to realize is that you are always in control," he says. "And you need to maintain that control." Control, that is, of both the body and the mind.

 

The Hidden Secrets of the Creative Mind

Innovation requires no special thought processes, says an expert. Creative people just work harder at it

What is creativity? Where does it come from? The workings of the creative mind have been subjected to intense scrutiny over the past 25 years by an army of researchers in psychology, sociology, anthropology and neuroscience. But no one has a better overview of this mysterious mental process than Washington University psychologist R. Keith Sawyer, author of the new book Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (Oxford; 336 pages). He's working on a version for the lay reader, due out in 2007 from Basic Books. In an interview with Francine Russo, Sawyer shares some of his findings and suggests ways in which we can enhance our creativity not just in art, science or business but in everyday life.

Q. Has the new wave of research upended any of our popular notions about creativity?

A. Virtually all of them. Many people believe creativity comes in a sudden moment of insight and that this "magical" burst of an idea is a different mental process from our everyday thinking. But extensive research has shown that when you're creative, your brain is using the same mental building blocks you use every day—like when you figure out a way around a traffic jam.

Q. Then how do you explain the "aha!" moment we've all had in the shower or the gym—or anywhere but at work?

A. In creativity research, we refer to the three Bs—for the bathtub, the bed and the bus—places where ideas have famously and suddenly emerged. When we take time off from working on a problem, we change what we're doing and our context, and that can activate different areas of our brain. If the answer wasn't in the part of the brain we were using, it might be in another. If we're lucky, in the next context we may hear or see something that relates—distantly—to the problem that we had temporarily put aside.

Q. Can you give us an example of that?

A. In 1990 a team of NASA scientists was trying to fix the distorted lenses in the Hubble telescope, which was already in orbit. An expert in optics suggested that tiny inversely distorted mirrors could correct the images, but nobody could figure out how to fit them into the hard-to-reach space inside. Then engineer Jim Crocker, taking a shower in a German hotel, noticed the European-style showerhead mounted on adjustable rods. He realized the Hubble's little mirrors could be extended into the telescope by mounting them on similar folding arms. And this flash was the key to fixing the problem.

Q. How have researchers studied this creative flash?

A. By using many cleverly designed experiments. Some psychologists set up video cameras to watch creative people work, asking them to describe their thought processes out loud or interrupting them frequently to ask how close they were to a solution. Invariably, they were closer than they realized. In other experiments, subjects worked on problems that, when solved, tend to result in the sensation of sudden insight. In one experiment, they were asked to look at words that came up one at a time on a computer screen and to think of the one word that was associated with all of them. After each word—red, nut, bowl, loom, cup, basket, jelly, fresh, cocktail, candy, pie, baking, salad, tree, fly, etc.—they had to give their best guess. Although many swore they had no idea until a sudden burst of insight at about the 12th word, their guesses got progressively closer to the solution: fruit. Even when an idea seems sudden, our minds have actually been working on it all along.

Q. Has brain imaging illuminated the creative process?

A. The first such study was done this year but was inconclusive. In the next five to 10 years, cognitive neuroscience will be able to tell us more.

Q. What has been learned from historical research?

A. Studying notebooks, manuscripts and historical records, we've dissected the creative process of people like the Wright brothers, Charles Darwin, T.S. Eliot, Jackson Pollock, even business innovators like Citigroup's John Reed. We find that creativity happens not with one brilliant flash but in a chain reaction of many tiny sparks while executing an idea.

Q. But isn't it the original creative flash that's critical?

A. Not at all. Take the first airplane. On Dec. 8, 1903, Samuel Pierpont Langley, a leading government-funded scientist, launched with much fanfare his flying machine on the Potomac. It plummeted into the river. Nine days later, Orville and Wilbur Wright got the first plane off the ground. Why did these bicycle mechanics succeed when a famous scientist failed? Because Langley hired other people to execute his concept. Studying the Wrights' diaries, you see that insight and execution are inextricably woven together. Over years, as they solved problems like wing shape and wing warping, each adjustment involved a small spark of insight that led to others.

Q. Are there other generalizations you can make about creative people?

A. Yes. They have tons of ideas, many of them bad. The trick is to evaluate them and mercilessly purge the bad ones. But even bad ideas can be useful. Darwin's notebooks, for example, show us that he went down many dead ends—like his theory of monads. These were tiny hypothetical life forms that sprang spontaneously from inanimate matter. If they died, they took with them all the species into which they had evolved. Darwin spent years refining this bizarre theory before ultimately rejecting it. But it was a critical link in the chain that led to his branching model of evolution. Sometimes you don't know which sparks are important until later, but the more ideas you have, the better.

Q. So how can the average person get more ideas?

A. Ah, here's where we come up against another of our cultural myths about creativity—that of the lone genius. Ideas don't magically appear in a genius' head from nowhere. They always build on what came before. And collaboration is key. Look at what others in your field are doing. Brainstorm with people in different fields. Research and anecdotal evidence suggest that distant analogies lead to new ideas—like when a heart surgeon bounces things off an architect or a graphic designer.

Q. Can we become more creative by studying more than one field?

A. No one can be creative at everything. You have to work hard in your area, let's say music, and learn everything that's already been done. But multitasking on several music projects at once might foster unexpected connections and new ideas.

Q. Are great artists different from inventors and scientists?

A. All the research shows that the creative process is basically the same: generating ideas, evaluating them and executing them, with many creative sparks over time. The role of collaboration may be more obvious in business than in writing, but even apparently solitary creators like writers read constantly and talk to one another. In the 1920s and 1930s, for example, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis batted around religious and literary ideas with the Inklings, a group of unfashionably Christian professors who met weekly at an Oxford pub.

Q. What advice can you give us nongeniuses to help us be more creative?

A. Take risks, and expect to make lots of mistakes, because creativity is a numbers game. Work hard, and take frequent breaks, but stay with it over time. Do what you love, because creative breakthroughs take years of hard work. Develop a network of colleagues, and schedule time for freewheeling, unstructured discussions. Most of all, forget those romantic myths that creativity is all about being artsy and gifted and not about hard work. They discourage us because we're waiting for that one full-blown moment of inspiration. And while we're waiting, we may never start working on what we might someday create.

 

How to Get Smarter, One Breath at a Time

Scientists find that meditation not only reduces stress but also reshapes the brain

By LISA TAKEUCHI CULLEN

At 4:30, when most of Wall Street is winding down, Walter Zimmermann begins a high-stakes, high-wire act conducted live before a paying audience. About 200 institutional investors—including airlines and oil companies—shell out up to $3,000 a month to catch his daily webcast on the volatile energy markets, a performance that can move hundreds of millions of dollars. "I'm not paid to be wrong—I can tell you that," Zimmermann says. But as he clicks through dozens of screens and graphics on three computers, he's the picture of focused calm. Zimmermann, 54, watched most of his peers in energy futures burn out long ago. He attributes his brain's enduring sharpness not to an intravenous espresso drip but to 40 minutes of meditation each morning and evening. The practice, he says, helps him maintain the clarity he needs for quick, insightful analysis—even approaching happy hour. "Meditation," he says, "is my secret weapon."

Everyone around the water cooler knows that meditation reduces stress. But with the aid of advanced brainscanning technology, researchers are beginning to show that meditation directly affects the function and structure of the brain, changing it in ways that appear to increase attention span, sharpen focus and improve memory.

One recent study found evidence that the daily practice of meditation thickened the parts of the brain's cerebral cortex responsible for decision making, attention and memory. Sara Lazar, a research scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, presented preliminary results last November that showed that the gray matter of 20 men and women who meditated for just 40 minutes a day was thicker than that of people who did not. Unlike in previous studies focusing on Buddhist monks, the subjects were Boston-area workers practicing a Western-style of meditation called mindfulness or insight meditation. "We showed for the first time that you don't have to do it all day for similar results," says Lazar. What's more, her research suggests that meditation may slow the natural thinning of that section of the cortex that occurs with age.

The forms of meditation Lazar and other scientists are studying involve focusing on an image or sound or on one's breathing. Though deceptively simple, the practice seems to exercise the parts of the brain that help us pay attention. "Attention is the key to learning, and meditation helps you voluntarily regulate it," says Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin. Since 1992, he has collaborated with the Dalai Lama to study the brains of Tibetan monks, whom he calls "the Olympic athletes of meditation." Using caps with electrical sensors placed on the monks' heads, Davidson has picked up unusually powerful gamma waves that are better synchronized in the Tibetans than they are in novice meditators. Studies have linked this gamma-wave synchrony to increased awareness.

Many people who meditate claim the practice restores their energy, allowing them to perform better at tasks that require attention and concentration. If so, wouldn't a midday nap work just as well? No, says Bruce O'Hara, associate professor of biology at the University of Kentucky. In a study to be published this year, he had college students either meditate, sleep or watch TV. Then he tested them for what psychologists call psychomotor vigilance, asking them to hit a button when a light flashed on a screen. Those who had been taught to meditate performed 10% better—"a huge jump, statistically speaking," says O'Hara. Those who snoozed did significantly worse. "What it means," O'Hara theorizes, "is that meditation may restore synapses, much like sleep but without the initial grogginess."

Not surprisingly, given those results, a growing number of corporations—including Deutsche Bank, Google and Hughes Aircraft—offer meditation classes to their workers. Jeffrey Abramson, CEO of Tower Co., a Washington-based development firm, says 75% of his staff attend free classes in transcendental meditation. Making employees sharper is only one benefit; studies say meditation also improves productivity, in large part by preventing stress-related illness and reducing absenteeism.

Another benefit for employers: meditation seems to help regulate emotions, which in turn helps people get along. "One of the most important domains meditation acts upon is emotional intelligence—a set of skills far more consequential for life success than cognitive intelligence," says Davidson. So, for a New Year's resolution that can pay big dividends at home and at the office, try this: just breathe.

 

Measuring IQ Points by the Cupful

Does it feel as if caffeine makes you more clever, upbeat and alert? Maybe that's because it does

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK
I'm sitting in Small World Coffee, the place in Princeton, N.J., where locals go when they want to avoid the sterile trendiness of Starbucks, just around the corner. The place is packed with students and professors. Nobel prizewinners drop in frequently (John Nash, the mathematician hero of A Beautiful Mind, is a regular). But I'm not here for intellectual-celebrity watching. I'm here because my editor has ordered up a story on the question of whether caffeine makes you smarter. And without a latte—with three shots of espresso today instead of the regular two—I wouldn't feel equal to the task. Experience tells me that a strong dose of caffeine inevitably makes me more alert, focused, quick-witted, clever. As far as I'm concerned, the case is already closed.

That's a purely subjective assessment, but placebo-controlled laboratory experiments say exactly the same thing. Just last month Austrian scientists reported on a study showing that the equivalent of two cups of coffee boosts short-term memory significantly. And that's just the latest in a long line of tests proving that caffeine can enhance mental performance.

Indeed, there has been lots of surprisingly good news in general about caffeine and coffee. You would naturally assume that an addictive drug like caffeine—the most widely consumed psychoactive drug on the planet—must surely be bad for you, and initial studies suggested it might lead to bladder cancer, high blood pressure and other ills. More recent research has not only refuted most of those claims but also come up with some significant benefits. Caffeine appears to have some protective effect against liver damage, Parkinson's disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, gallstones, depression and maybe even some forms of cancer. The only proven medical downside appears to be a temporary elevation in blood pressure, which is a problem only if you already suffer from hypertension. Some studies have also suggested a higher risk of miscarriage in pregnant women and of benign breast cysts, but those results are highly controversial.

While most of the findings about the effects of caffeine remain open to further testing, caffeine's boosting your brainpower has been proved beyond any reasonable doubt "As a research psychologist," says Harris Lieberman, who works in the Military Nutrition Division of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, Mass., "I use the word intelligence as an inherent trait, something permanently part of your makeup." Caffeine can't change that, Lieberman says. But what it can do, he says, is heighten your mental performance. If you're well rested, it tends to improve rudimentary brain functions, like keeping your attention focused on boring, repetitive tasks for long periods. "It also tends to improve mood," he says, "and makes people feel more energetic, generally better overall." Observes Dr. Peter Martin, professor of psychiatry and pharmacology and director of the Addiction Center at Vanderbilt University: "Attention and mood are both elements of how we focus our intellectual resources on a problem at hand."

Caffeine's real power kicks in, though, when you're tired. That's of obvious interest to the military, which counts on servicemen and -women to make life-and-death decisions even when they have been in the field without rest for days. "When you're sleep deprived and you take caffeine," says Lieberman, who has carried out extensive tests on Navy SEALS, among others, "pretty much anything you measure will improve: reaction time, vigilance, attention, logical reasoning—most of the complex functions you associate with intelligence. And most Americans are sleep deprived most of the time." Again, caffeine doesn't make you inherently smarter; it just lets you call more effectively on the intelligence you already have.

Precisely how it all works is still being figured out by neuroscientists. What they know is that caffeine binds to receptors that normally accept adenosine, a neurotransmitter that signals brain cells to quiet down their activity. Blocking adenosine staves off sleepiness. The resulting higher level of brain activity puts the nervous system on alert, triggering the release of adrenaline—the probable cause of caffeine's tendency to focus the mind.

Caffeine also triggers the release of dopamine, mostly in the frontal areas of the brain and the anterior cingular cortex, in which the so-called executive functions like attention, task management and concentration are located. This is consistent with what the Austrian scientists reported last month at the Radiological Society of America's annual conference in Chicago. Dr. Florian Koppelstaetter and his colleagues at the Medical University in Innsbruck gave 15 male volunteers 100 mg each of caffeine—about the same amount as in two cups of coffee—and then tested their short-term memory. Not only did the caffeine drinkers perform significantly better than those on placebos (all the subjects were in both the caffeine and the control groups in different rounds of testing), but when the scientists scanned their brains with functional MRIS, the anterior cingular cortex and the frontal lobes lit up with increased activity.

Caffeine is just a single chemical, of course, whereas coffee contains scores of substances. Some of them are antioxidants, which could explain part of its protective effect against disease. Some are psychoactive. "Our research," says Martin, "has focused on some of those other elements, such as chlorogenic acids, which keep adenosine in circulation in the brain longer than normal. That might augment coffee's ability to increase concentration without increasing irritability."

And then there's tea and chocolate, both of which also have caffeine, along with their own mélanges of antioxidants and other chemicals. Teasing out the specific actions of each one and separating them from caffeine's could take years. For the patrons crowding Small World Coffee, all of that is beyond the immediate point, which seems to be nothing more than getting a morning fix of one caffeinated drink or another before setting off to conquer the intellectual challenges waiting at the university just up the street. "A mathematician," the legendary number theorist Paul Erdos used to say, "is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." Organic chemistry, neuroscience, psychology and pretty much universal experience suggest that he probably was on to something.

 

Sleeping Your Way to the Top

Staying up late to get ahead? It might be more productive to get a good night's rest

By SORA SONG

Americans are not renowned for their powers of self-deprivation; doing without is not something we do particularly well. But experts say there is one necessity of life most of us consistently fail to get: a good night's sleep.

The recommended daily requirements should sound familiar: eight hours of sleep a night for adults and at least an hour more for adolescents. Yet 71% of American adults and 85% of teens do not get the suggested amount, to the detriment of body and mind. "Sleep is sort of like food," says Robert Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School. But, he adds, there's one important difference: "You can be quite starved and still alive, and I think we appreciate how horrible that must be. But many of us live on the edge of sleep starvation and just accept it."

Part of the problem is we are so used to being chronically sleep deprived--and have become so adept at coping with that condition--that we no longer notice how exhausted we really are. In 2003, sleep expert David Dinges and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine tested the effects of restricting slumber to eight, six or four hours a night for two weeks. During the first few days, subjects sleeping less than eight hours admitted to being fatigued and lacking alertness. But by Day 4, most people had adapted to their new baseline drowsiness and reported feeling fine--even as their cognitive performance continued to plummet.

Over time, the experiment's sleep-restricted subjects became so impaired that they had difficulty concentrating on even the simplest tasks, like pushing a button in response to a light. "The human brain is only capable of about 16 hours of wakefulness [a day]," says Dinges. "When you get beyond that, it can't function as efficiently, as accurately or as well."

In the real world, people overcome their somnolence--at least temporarily--by drinking coffee, taking a walk around the block or chatting with office mates. But then they find themselves nodding off in meetings or, worse, behind the wheel. Those short snatches of unconsciousness are what researchers call microsleep, a sure sign of sleep deprivation. "If people are falling asleep because 'the room was hot' or 'the meeting was boring,' that's not coping with sleep loss. I would argue that they're eroding their productive capability," says Dinges.

What most people don't realize is that the purpose of sleep may be more to rest the mind than to rest the body. Indeed, most of the benefits of eight hours' sleep seem to accrue to the brain: sleep helps consolidate memory, improve judgment, promote learning and concentration, boost mood, speed reaction time and sharpen problem solving and accuracy. According to Sonia Ancoli-Israel, a psychologist at the University of California at San Diego who has done extensive studies in the aging population, lack of sleep may even mimic the symptoms of dementia. In recent preliminary findings, she was able to improve cognitive function in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's simply by treating their underlying sleep disorder. "The need for sleep does not change a lot with age," says Ancoli-Israel, but often because of disruptive illnesses and the medications used to treat them, "the ability to sleep does."

If you're one of the otherwise healthy yet perpetually underrested, there's plenty you can do to pay back your sleep debt. For starters, you can catch up on lost time. Take your mom's advice, and get to bed early. Turn off the TV half an hour sooner than usual. If you can't manage to snooze longer at night, try to squeeze in a midday nap. The best time for a siesta is between noon and 3 p.m., for about 30 to 60 minutes, according to Timothy Roehrs, director of research at the Sleep Disorders and Research Center at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. He advises against oversleeping on weekend mornings to make up for a workweek of deprivation; late rising can disrupt your circadian rhythm, making it even harder later to get a full night's rest.

According to Dinges' analysis of data from the 2003 American Time Use Survey, the most common reason we shortchange ourselves on sleep is work. (The second biggest reason, surprisingly, is that we spend too much time driving around in our cars.) But consider that in giving up two hours of bedtime to do more work, you're losing a quarter of your recommended nightly dose and gaining just 12% more time during the day. What if you could be 12% more productive instead? "You have to realize that if you get a good night's sleep, you will actually be more efficient and get more done the next day. The more you give up on sleep, the harder it is to be productive," says Ancoli-Israel. "What is it going to be?"

If mental sharpness is your goal, the answer is clear: stop depriving yourself, and get a good night's sleep.

 

The Surprising Power of the Aging Brain

Scientists used to think intellectual power peaked at age 40. Now they know better

By JEFFERY KLUGER

It took Barbara Hustedt Crook an awfully long time to get around to writing her first musical. She started last year, shortly before her 60th birthday. Her friend and collaborator, Robert Strozier, waited even longer; he's 65. It's not that they didn't have the creative chops for the job. The two have spent their careers writing and editing in New York City, and Crook has a background in performing, singing and piano. But creating a musical always felt just out of reach--until now.

"Somehow I have a confidence I didn't have before," says Crook. "I find that my brain makes leaps it didn't make so easily. I can hear my inner voice and trust instincts and hunches in ways I didn't used to."

And, says Strozier, they're both a lot more willing to take chances than in the past. "At a certain age," he says, "you either get older or you get younger. If you get younger, you venture out and take risks."

Risk-taking seniors making daring mental leaps? That's not the stereotype. Indeed, until quite recently most researchers believed the human brain followed a fairly predictable developmental arc. It started out protean, gained shape and intellectual muscle as it matured, and reached its peak of power and nimbleness by age 40. After that, the brain began a slow decline, clouding up little by little until, by age 60 or 70, it had lost much of its ability to retain new information and was fumbling with what it had. But that was all right because late-life crankiness had by then made us largely resistant to new ideas anyway.

That, as it turns out, is hooey. More and more, neurologists and psychologists are coming to the conclusion that the brain at midlife--a period increasingly defined as the years from 35 to 65 and even beyond--is a much more elastic, much more supple thing than anyone ever realized.

Far from slowly powering down, the brain as it ages begins bringing new cognitive systems on line and cross-indexing existing ones in ways it never did before. You may not pack so much raw data into memory as you could when you were cramming for college finals, and your short-term memory may not be what it was, but you manage information and parse meanings that were entirely beyond you when you were younger. What's more, your temperament changes to suit those new skills, growing more comfortable with ambiguity and less susceptible to frustration or irritation. Although inflexibility, confusion and even later-life dementia are very real problems, for many people the aging process not only does not batter the brain, it actually makes it better.

"In midlife," says UCLA neurologist George Bartzokis, "you're beginning to maximize the ability to use the entirety of the information in your brain on an everyday, ongoing, second-to-second basis. Biologically, that's what wisdom is."

If your mind does indeed grow more agile as you age, one of the things that may help it do so is the amount of glue you carry around in your brain--glia (Greek for glue) being what the 19th century German anatomists called it. Only about half the mass of the brain is composed of gray matter, or nerve cells; the rest is white matter, the connecting tissue that, in a sense, glues it all together. Much of that white matter is made of conductive nerve strands, and covering each fine wire is a fatty sheath of myelin that keeps nerve signals from sputtering out or cross firing during transmission. "Myelin is what makes us human," says Bartzokis. "We have 20% to 30% more than other primates do."

Throughout our lives, fresh layers of myelin sheathing are laid down in the brain. In infants and children, who grow increasingly coordinated as they mature, the bulk of that takes place in the motor and sensory lobes. If we acquire better reasoning skills in middle age, Bartzokis long suspected, it would follow that most of the myelin added in those years would appear around the signal-transmitting axons in the higher brain regions that are the seat of sophisticated thought. Essentially, the brain spends decades upgrading itself from a dial-up Internet to a high-speed version, not fully completing the job until age 45 or so.

To test that idea, Bartzokis used magnetic resonance imaging to study the volume and distribution of white matter in 300 healthy subjects from 18 to 75 years old as well as in hundreds of older people suffering from such brain-related ills as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. As he suspected, the healthy adults had the most myelin in the frontal and temporal lobes--where big thoughts live. The quantity of sheathing reached its peak around 45 or 50, exceeding the amount in unhealthy older subjects and healthy younger ones.

"This last little bit of myelination essentially puts us online," Bartzokis says. "You may not have the same amount of information you had when you were 20, but you can use it better in everyday life."

It's not just the wiring that charges up the brain as we age, it's the way different regions start pulling together to make the whole organ work better than the sum of its parts. For all its plasticity, the brain is a specialized machine, with specific regions handling specific operations. The greatest divergence comes between the left and the right hemispheres, which often work almost independently of each other. That is not such a bad thing because one hemisphere can be busy writing a grocery list or solving an equation while the other scans the environment and tends to other basic chores. As we age, however, the walls between the hemispheres seem to fall, with the two halves working increasingly in tandem. Neuroscientist Roberto Cabeza of Duke University dubs that the HAROLD (hemispheric asymmetry reduction in older adults) model, and judging by his work, the phenomenon is a powerful one.

Cabeza recruited a sample group of adults 65 to 95 years old who had scored high on a memory test, along with a group of lower-performing adults of the same age and a group of younger, college-age adults. He then asked them all to perform a series of tasks that called on numerous skills, including language, memory, perception and motor functions. Throughout the tasks, he conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of their brains. Again and again, he found that the high-functioning older adults were using either a hemisphere different from the one the other subjects were using or both hemispheres at the same time.

Why that is so is still unclear, but Cabeza doesn't believe the brain is programmed to get stronger as it ages. Rather, he acknowledges, in many ways it gets weaker, with neurons processing information less efficiently. The bilateralization may be a trick the brain uses to compensate for the decline, sometimes integrating the hemispheres so efficiently that our thought and reasoning processes are actually better than they were before.

"It's similar to the way you need both hands to lift a weight that you could lift with one hand when you were younger," Cabeza says. "In the brain, there's a nice, natural distribution of resources. You get more neural tissue to support the task."

As the brain's flexibility improves, so too may the temperament we bring to our work. There's no question that personalities can calcify with age, causing us to become less receptive to new experiences and flat-out crabby when faced with them. But that's not the case with everyone. In fact, in many people the opposite happens.

In 1958 psychologist Ravenna Helson, now an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, began a long-term study of 142 women, all of them 21 years old, at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. She interviewed the subjects and took measures of their personalities, drives, relationship skills and the like. Then she reinterviewed them at ages 27, 43, 52 and 61 to determine how those traits changed over time. Just last year she and a graduate student, psychologist Christopher Soto, collated the data from the 123 women who stuck with the study. The results were surprising.

On the whole, they found, the women's highest scores in inductive reasoning occurred from their 40s to their early 60s. Similarly, their so-called affect optimization (the ability to highlight the better aspects of one's personality and restrain the less attractive ones) and their affect complexity (the ability to evaluate various contradictory ideas and remain objective) did not peak until their 50s or 60s. There was also an increased tolerance for ambiguity and an improved ability to manage relationships.

The Mills sample group was hardly random, consisting principally of white women of the same age who attended the same college. Still, they were 123 different individuals, and the results were nonetheless uniform. "People generally describe personality change in middle age as a midlife crisis, with all its negative connotations," says Soto. "In the Mills women, the change was positive--a reorienting, not a crisis."

If such a change occurs, says psychologist Robert Levenson, also at U.C. Berkeley, it may be shaped in part by evolutionary forces, offering advantages for the whole species. Human beings' comparatively long life spans and extended families are very good things, but keeping big broods healthy and well behaved over the decades takes more than the energy of young parents. It takes the cool heads and wise counsel of the family graybeards too. "Evolution isn't just about reproduction," Levenson says. "When you get into your 40s and 50s, you're caretaking, looking after your children, grandchildren, even the people who work for you. There's an advantage to having a more relativistic mind."

It's that talent for reflective thinking that explains the role older adults have always played in the human culture. It's not for nothing that history's firebrands and ideologues are typically young, while its judges and peacemakers and great theologians tend to be older. Not everyone achieves the sharp thought and serene mien that can come with age. But for those who do, the later years can be the best years they have ever had.

 

What's So Great About Acuity?

By WALTER KIRN

As a child, I measured my mental development (and I was the sort of child, I confess, who found his own mental development fascinating) by the complexity of the jigsaw puzzles I was able to complete. As I learned to do puzzles with smaller, more numerous pieces, graduating from simple farmyard scenes to detailed panoramas of city skylines, I felt better and better about myself. The adults in my life seemed to feel better about me too. But then something unexpected happened. One afternoon when I was 10 or so, I finished a 1,000-piece puzzle of the Milky Way and came to the realization that, puzzle-wise, I'd done all that I could do—meaning all that a normal child should ever wish to do. I realized that to master more difficult puzzles would be a sign not of desirable growth but of troubling compulsion.

I think back to that fiendishly complicated puzzle of stars and planets and whirling gas clouds whenever I think about the promise of human-intelligence enhancement. How much quicker and more acute do people really want to be? How many more bits per cubic inch of gray matter do people wish they could store? People whose minds are generally healthy, that is. People who, for their age and condition, are already smart enough.

The devilish problem, of course, is defining "smart enough." Enough to accomplish what, precisely? To make a living or to make a killing? And smart enough to satisfy whom? An employer who wants you to do your work by quitting time or one who wishes you had finished it yesterday? Being able to do what must be done is liberating, but being able to do whatever might be done (or whatever your driven ego or pushy boss might conceivably demand) can be enslaving.

And does anyone really want to be brilliant all the time? Though heightened intelligence would seem to be a universally desirable goal, not all tasks and stages of life demand the amped-up cognitive speed and processing power the new regimens and medications may make possible. Becoming a parent, for example. I read somewhere once that many mothers and fathers suffer a rapid, appreciable drop in IQ after their babies are born. This, if true, is a huge gift from nature. Diapering, feeding and comforting little ones demands dumb endurance, in my experience, not penetrating cleverness. Thinking too clearly while cleaning up diarrhea on two hours' sleep in a house that you've just realized is one room too small and two times too expensive can make you suicidal.

And yet people dream of aping their computers, which grow measurably more agile every six months. Not wiser or saner or more truthful, those immeasurable human qualities that are extolled by priests and poets, but just better at handling elaborate graphics, say, or performing multimillion-variable calculations. Assuming that we can keep up with these machines, where will it take us as a society? When the shared ideal is to be like Mr. Spock instead of Dr. Spock, and to emulate Dr. Jonas Salk rather than Marcus Welby, M.D., who will stroke humanity's fevered forehead? No one, I fear, unless we use our brainpower to develop an altruism pill.

Genius goes only so far—at least in the current, cybernetic sense. In terms of sheer neurological acuity, how would Jesus or the Buddha have ranked? And how would your dear old grandfather have scored—that guy who could whittle a cottonwood twig all day and invent new bedtime stories every night? How often, now that the fellow isn't around, do you catch yourself wishing he'd been sharper, swifter? Quite often, perhaps, if Grandpa suffered from Alzheimer's, but what if he was just a wee bit... plodding?

It's unrealistic to expect that people will forgo easy intelligence enhancement out of some fear that it may turn them into sociopaths obsessed with the goings-on inside their skulls and negligent about the outside world. The rat race keeps accelerating, and the labyrinths in which it is run are growing more complicated by the hour, it seems—as are the technological devices that are meant to help us through their tricky passages. If many more features are added in the next year to the average cell phone, for example, I may have to retire to a cave and survive on campfire-roasted venison. My synapses are on overload as it is.

Still, it seems important to remember that intelligence—human intelligence—involves a lot more than problem-solving skills or memory capacity. Sometimes the challenge of being a person is to recognize that the task at hand should be performed later, considered from a new angle or, if it's a waste of time, ignored. That's why, at age 43, I'm not at work on a 600,000-piece jigsaw puzzle depicting Australia's Great Barrier Reef. I was smart enough to know at 10 that it's not what one can do that matters but what's worth doing.

 

You (and Your Brain) are What You Eat

One of America's leading proponents of natural healing offers a guide to foods that go straight to your head

By ANDREW WEIL, M.D.

We know that what you eat, and don't eat, can affect your health. But is it possible, as the White Rabbit advised Alice, to "feed your head"? Is there such a thing as brain food? I'm convinced there is. The evidence for some foods, such as fish, is stronger than for others, like turmeric and brightly colored vegetables. But none of those foods is bad for you, and they certainly won't make you any less smart.

The reason fish is so good for the brain is the so-called omega-3 fatty acids it contains. Oily fish, like salmon, sardines, mackerel, herring, bluefish and black cod, are the best sources of those special fats. One of the omega-3s—DHA—is the main constituent of cell membranes in the brain, and a deficiency of it can weaken the brain's architecture and leave it vulnerable to disease.

Diets associated with longevity and good health, like the Mediterranean and traditional Japanese diets, are high in omega-3 fatty acids from fish. The North American diet is not. I have long recommended that people in the U.S. eat more fish—at least two servings a week—but I have been concerned lately about reports of increasing levels of mercury, PCBS and other contaminants in certain fish species. In my diet I stick to sardines, herring, Alaskan black cod and Alaskan sockeye salmon. All sockeye (red) salmon are wild—fish farmers haven't yet been able to domesticate them—and since those fish are less carnivorous than other types of salmon, they have lower levels of the environmental contaminants that accumulate as you work your way up the food chain. Canned sockeye, available in most supermarkets, is a perfectly good source of omega-3s.

But for some people it may be easier and safer to rely on fish-oil supplements. The best are distilled and certified to be free of mercury and other toxins. Some are flavored, and some even taste good—or at least a lot better than the cod-liver oil I was forced to take as a kid. One product I recommend is Antarctic krill oil, made from the tiny crustaceans that abound in southern seas and are consumed in great quantities by whales and other marine mammals. Krill oil is red from carotenoid pigments, which have high antioxidant activity, and it doesn't cause those fishy burps. A good starting dose of fish oil of any kind is 1g a day. Higher doses, up to 10g a day, have been used, with varying results, to treat such diverse conditions as depression, attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder and even autism.

Vegetarian sources of omega-3 fatty acids, such as walnuts, flax and hemp, are good additions to the diet but not so reliable as fish. They supply a short-chain compound (ALA) that the body must convert to long-chain DHA, and the efficiency of that conversion can vary. Some people don't do it well, and those eating mainstream diets top-heavy in the omega-6 fatty acids found in processed food and prepared meals are at a disadvantage because omega-6s interfere with the conversion of ALA to DHA. For vegetarians and vegans, there is one nonfish source of long-chain omega-3s: supplements made from algae. (Algae is the source of the omega-3s that fish store in their fat)

I'm not aware of any brain foods that have as much scientific evidence behind them as fish and fish oil. But I would keep an eye on turmeric, the yellow spice that is a major ingredient in American mustard and Indian curries. A relative of ginger, turmeric comes from the underground stem of a tropical plant and is being carefully studied for its medicinal effects. It is a powerful anti-inflammatory agent that has anticancer properties and may offer significant protection against Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's begins as an inflammatory process in the brain. Anti-inflammatory agents like ibuprofen reduce the risk of Alzheimer's, and so do turmeric and its most studied component, curcumin. India has the world's lowest rate of Alzheimer's, and some experts think that daily consumption of turmeric is a contributing factor.

Finally, in addition to all the other reasons to eat fruits and vegetables, there are some that relate to the brain. The pigments that account for the varied colors of vegetables and fruits have antioxidant properties that offer significant protection against cancer and other chronic diseases, as well as protection from a range of environmental toxins, including pesticides. Toxic injury to the brain is almost certainly the cause of Parkinson's disease, and probably amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease). For that reason alone, it's a good idea to eat every day from as many parts of the color spectrum as you can. It's also a good idea to take a daily multivitamin-multimineral supplement that provides the right doses and forms of the key antioxidants: vitamins C and E, mixed carotenoids and selenium.

A good diet is certainly not the only way to protect and enhance brain health. Regularly exercising the mind and not smoking are also important. But food choices do count. So eat your vegetables, think about your daily dose of omega-3s, and consider flavoring more of your food with turmeric.

Andrew Weil is clinical professor of medicine at the University of Arizona, where he founded the program in integrative medicine

 

 

Want a Brainier Baby?

Loading up on tapes, games and videos may not be a smart move. There are better ways to nurture a young mind

By PAMELA PAUL     

Thomas Bausman, 2, and his brother Jake, 10 months, are typical American babies. Every day, Thomas settles down to watch two hours of television, while Jake sits in front of the set for an hour, the national average for their respective ages. Their favorite thing to watch, by far? Baby Einstein. Anita Bausman could not be more pleased with her children's preference. Jake, she reports, learned colors, numbers and his love of robots from the popular videos, which are filled with puppets, animals and moving objects, often set to classical music. "It's not just turning on Nickelodeon," Bausman says. "It's educational and beneficial. I know he's happy watching, and I can pop in and point out something onscreen, then go deal with the laundry."

Bausman's attitude is typical of U.S. parents. In a 2004 Kaiser Family Foundation study, more than half of the parents surveyed said that educational videos and toys are "very important to children's intellectual development." Efforts to get kids on the Ivy League track now begin at infancy, and in the past few years, the so-called edutainment market for babies and toddlers has exploded. According to Vicky Rideout, vice president of the Kaiser foundation, in 2003 there were 140 videos or DVDs for kids age 2 and younger for sale on Amazon. Today, there are 750.

Many of those products bear enticing messages on their packages: "stimulate baby's cognitive development" or "increase baby's brain capacity." But according to a new study, "A Teacher in the Living Room?," by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the companies do essentially no research to back up their claims. Nor can they cite research by others that relates specifically to their products. "We're not neurolinguistic scientists," admits Marcia Grimsley, a senior producer for Brainy Baby, purveyor of such DVDs as Right Brain and Left Brain, which claim to develop the creative and logical components of a baby's mind. "We went out and researched other people's work—scientists, neurologists, psychologists—and applied that knowledge to our products so they could be fun and beneficial to parents and children."

The unspoken assumption behind most of those products is that stimulation is good and that more stimulation is even better. But that's not necessarily so, says Meredith Small, an anthropologist at Cornell University and author of Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent. In fact, she says, "there's a growing thought that maybe Americans are overstimulating their babies, or stimulating them in the wrong ways."

There's a basic misunderstanding that stems from studies of children and laboratory animals that were starved of attention and stimulation, says Pat Levitt, director of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development. "Everyone heard about the orphans in Romania who were deprived of stimulation as babies, then had learning and emotional problems later," says Levitt. But just because a normal environment is better than a deprived one, that doesn't necessarily mean that a hyperenriched environment is better still. As Levitt puts it: "There is no evidence that says you can drive the baby's system to ever greater heights."

In fact, there is evidence to the contrary. According to Dimitri Christakis, codirector of the Child Health Institute at the University of Washington, "The more TV babies watch, the more likely they are to have attentional problems later in life." Christakis cites a long-term study that tracked children from age 1 through age 7. It found that for each additional hour of daily TV viewing before age 3, a child's chances of later developing problems paying attention increased 10%.

Christakis explains that the human mind—especially the mind of a baby—is driven by what Ivan Pavlov (of the famous dog) called the orienting reflex. When a baby is confronted with a novel sight or sound, he or she can't help focusing on it. By rapidly changing colors, sounds and motions, videos for children effectively force a baby's brain to stay at attention. If his or her gaze wanders, the action quickly rivets it back to the screen.

"Parents say, 'My child can't stop looking at it! She loves it!'" Christakis says. "Well, true, she can't stop looking at it, but that doesn't mean she loves it." Not only might Baby not be enjoying the program, Christakis says, "but based on the research I've done, there's reason to believe these products have deleterious effects on the developing mind." Christakis is not alone in this thinking. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV viewing of any kind before age 2.

CDs and DVDs designed to teach a baby Spanish or Chinese are also problematic. Patricia Kuhl, who studies language acquisition at the University of Washington, conducted an experiment comparing the effects of Chinese audio recordings for children and a Chinese-speaking human. She had a native Mandarin speaker play with a group of babies while speaking Chinese for 12 sessions of 25 minutes each over a four-week period. Later she tested the babies and was able to demonstrate that they recognized Mandarin sounds. But when she repeated the experiment with three control groups—one set of babies that saw the Chinese speaker play with babies on video, another that listened to an audio recording of the Chinese woman playing and a third that had no exposure to the Chinese speaker—none seem to perceive Mandarin sounds. Apparently, the presence of a living, breathing human was essential.

There's a lesson there for any parent who wants to encourage early learning. Most experts agree that what matters most is not what toy the baby plays with but the ways in which you interact with your child. "There's no question that the experiences a child has in its first year are crucial for cognitive, emotional and physical development," says Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at Chicago Medical School and author of What's Going On in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life. "But the good news is none of this costs any money. Babies prefer humans over anything inanimate."

One key difference between human interaction and even the most sophisticated educational toy is that interpersonal exchanges engage all the senses—sight, sound, smell, taste and, very important, touch. "People tend to forget that children are very tactile and their most sensitive part is their mouth," says David Perlmutter, a neurologist and author of the forthcoming book, Raise a Smarter Child by Kindergarten. "Babies need to mouth things and to smell, to have rich sensory experiences."

This is borne out by a new study of 96 babies conducted by Andrew Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks at the University of Washington. Meltzoff and Brooks knew that long before babies learn to talk, they form emotional connections with parents and caregivers by looking into their eyes. But there's a big cognitive leap between looking at someone's eyes and following that person's gaze to see what he or she is looking at. By tracking at what age babies learn to follow an adult's gaze, Meltzoff and Brooks have been able to establish an early indicator of language ability. It turns out that the earlier a baby follows the gaze of an adult (generally between 9 months and 11 months), the more advanced his or her language skills are at age 2.

"Babies read their mother's faces," explains Meltzoff, co-author of The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind. "Being able to read other people and their intentions and to know what they're thinking about is key to language development."

Babies can also read signs. Psychologists Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn, co-founders of the Baby Signs Institute, conducted a long-term study with 140 families funded by the National Institutes of Health to see whether teaching sign language to babies before they can talk helps or impedes language development. The results were surprising. Babies taught to sign at 11 months tested 11 months ahead of other babies in terms of vocabulary and linguistic ability by age 3. At age 8, signing babies scored higher on IQ tests than the control group. While many psychologists agree that teaching sign language probably does babies no harm, others have questioned the methodology of the research that shows signing's benefits. Moreover, the research that's been done has focused on signing as taught by trained parents. Today there are a slew of new videos and DVDs purporting to teach babies to sign, and no one has studied their effectiveness.

Of course, parents don't have to learn sign language to be active participants in their babies' development. For the past 20 years, New York University developmental psychologist Catherine Tamis-LeMonda has been observing babies as they interact with parents in "naturalistic" environments—at home, running errands, going about their everyday lives—to see how adult involvement affects language acquisition. Through longitudinal studies, she's documented that the more parents respond to babies' cries, expressions and articulations, the earlier the children will talk and the more advanced their language skills will be at age 5. Parents who respond to babies' cues—reacting to grimaces and giggles, mimicking their sounds, extrapolating from "bababa" to "bottle," labeling things they touch—help their children acquire language. This responsiveness, however, should not be forced. "If you're not enjoying yourself while playing with that baby, it's not going to do any good," Tamis-LeMonda cautions.

That's because babies are remarkably attuned to emotions. The best—and easiest—gift a parent can give his or her child is relaxed time when the parent is focused on the baby and follows the baby's lead. If the baby grabs at waxed paper, the adult can repeat the word paper and show him or her how it makes noise or how it can be crumpled. "The infant brain craves novel stimulation, but that can be found in ordinary nonstructured, nonmarketed things around the house," says Ross Thompson, a psychologist at University of California at Davis and one of the founders of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, a research organization of scientists and experts on early-childhood development.

Babies need to learn how to master new situations, but they also learn through repetition and thrive on predictability. "Having rituals, like bedtime and mealtime routines, brings order to babies' lives, which helps them organize their thinking," explains Tamis-LeMonda. Being able to anticipate future events as well as remember and create memories of past patterns fosters cognitive development. "Babies are very good at tracking statistical information in their environment," says Laura Schulz, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at M.I.T. "They're incredibly sensitive to human action and to intentional acts in the world. They watch what people are doing to learn causal connections." Babies will grab the same object over and over, replicating experiences, testing them out, conducting their own experiments. If I smile, will Mommy smile back? Providing babies with consistent actions and reactions helps them make sense of their world and the people in it.

"When a 9-month-old raises his arms to be picked up by Daddy, that demonstrates an incredibly complex chain of learning," says Claire Lerner, director of parent education at Zero to Three, a national nonprofit focused on early-childhood development. "First the child has to have an emotional connection to his father. Then he has to form an idea: I want to be picked up. Then he has to know to raise his arms. In that tiny vignette, you can see how complicated a baby's development is."

And how simple it is to reinforce that learning. Just pick up the baby, and start cuddling.

Do These Toys Work?

BABY'S FIRST STEPS ITALIAN Parents and caretakers, not CDs, are best for teaching languages

BABY EINSTEIN These programs grab attention but don't create geniuses

BIG FROG They may be cute, but don't expect interactive stuffed animals to teach a baby numbers, colors or shapes. A teddy bear without batteries is just as good for cuddling and imaginative play

PICTURE CARDS Flash cards may help students cram for the SAT, but experts agree that the cards are inappropriate for babies younger than 2

YOUR BABY CAN READ Cognitive scientists say that babies forced to watch a DVD daily are memorizing responses, not reading

BRAINY BABY Doctors recommend no TV or videos before age 2

 

Help! I've Lost My Focus

E-mail and cellphones help us multitask, but they also drive us to distraction. How to take control and get more done

By CLAUDIA WALLIS, SONJA STEPTOE

                                   

            Jan. 16, 2006

Spend a few hours with Hollywood producer Jennifer Klein, and you might want to pop a Valium. Or slip her one. From the moment she rises at 7 a.m. in the Sunset Boulevard home she shares with her husband, she's a fidgety, demanding, chattering whirling dervish of a task juggler. Right now Klein, 41, whose credits include Pearl Harbor and Armageddon, has 15 film and TV projects in development--all of them requiring constant nudging and nurture. Her strategy for managing that and several overflowing In boxes: never do just two things at once if you can possibly do four or five.

"I'm an obsessive and addicted multitasker and gadget user," Klein cheerily concedes. A typical moment at her office finds Klein reviewing a screenplay by phone with its writers and jotting notes while glancing at an incoming e-mail on her BlackBerry, motioning signals to her assistant and firing off an instant message to a studio exec. "Here's how bad it is," she confesses. "When I'm flying, right before the plane lands, before the seat-belt sign goes on, I get the BlackBerry out and put it in front of me in the seat-back compartment. That way I can turn it on as soon as I land and see that little light flashing."

Actually, it gets worse than that for a woman known to do her daily sit-ups during a conference call. "While I'm driving, I've got the cell phone out. I'm drinking a cup of coffee, checking the Palm Pilot for the number and then calling," boasts Klein. Yup, got that all done while stuck in traffic.

Like many other modern workers, Klein takes pride in being a master multitasker, zipping through her daily to-do list: "I see the red lights go on or hear the beep, and I love it." But she has noticed some drawbacks and even some side effects: impatience, irritability and (gasp) some inefficiency. "Sometimes when e-mail goes down, I'm actually more productive, because I can concentrate on something," she says. She finds herself angry and snappish when callers make poor use of her endless availability. Although she feels anxious when her In box is empty, she feels no better when it's full: "When I wake up in the morning and have 15 e-mails, I get a nervous stomach."

Klein's action- and anxiety-packed work style may be extreme, but she's really only a couple of juggling pins ahead of most of us. By now every modern officeworker--from the mail-room clerk to the CEO--knows that the gadgets designed to lighten our loads also ensnare us. And the dinging digital devices that allow us to connect and communicate so readily also disrupt our work, our thoughts and what little is left of our private lives.

What sort of toll is all this disruption and mental channel switching taking on our ability to think clearly, work effectively and function as healthy human beings? Do the devices that make it possible to do so many things at once truly raise our productivity or merely help us spin our wheels faster? Over the past five years, psychologists, efficiency experts and information-technology researchers have begun to explore those questions in detail. They have begun to calculate the pluses, the minuses and the economic costs of the interrupted life--in dollars, productivity and dysfunction. More important, they're exploring what can be done about it--how we can work smarter, live smarter and put our beloved gadgets back in their proper place, with us running them, not the other way around.

AN EPIDEMIC OF

ATTENTION DEFICIT

DR. EDWARD HALLOWELL, A PSYCHIATRIST in Sudbury, Mass., has seen the fallout of multitasking mania: it walks through his door five days a week. Over the past decade, he says, he has seen a tenfold rise in the number of patients showing up with symptoms that closely resemble those of attention-deficit disorder (ADD), but of a work-induced variety. "They complained that they were more irritable than they wanted to be," he says. "Their productivity was declining. They couldn't get organized. They were making decisions in black-and-white, shoot-from-the-hip ways rather than giving things adequate thought, all because they felt pressured to get things done quickly." But Hallowell, an ADD expert and co-author of several best-selling books on the subject, including 1994's Driven to Distraction, noticed something different about his new cases. Unlike patients with typical ADD, which persists no matter the setting, the new patients felt frantic only in certain situations--mainly in the workplace or, for at-home moms, while managing the home front.

In a Harvard Business Review article last January, Hallowell gave the condition a name: attention-deficit trait, or ADT. He explains that ADT takes hold when we get so overloaded with incoming messages and competing tasks that we are unable to prioritize. The result is not only distractibility, impulsiveness and haste but also feelings of guilt and inadequacy. "People think it's their fault that they're falling behind," he says. "They think they have to sleep less and work harder and stay later at the office, which only makes it worse because they're not taking care of their brain by getting enough sleep." How common is this phenomenon? "It's rampant," says Hallowell, who believes that corporate downsizing and job insecurity contribute to the problem. "When I give lectures around the country, there's always instant identification with what I'm saying. People in the audience immediately say, 'Oh, yes, that's me,' or, 'My whole office is like that.'"

THE HIGH COST OF INTERRUPTIONS

IT'S NO WONDER SO MANY OF US SUCCUMB to the panicky feeling that we can't keep pace with workplace demands. A series of new studies that examined the modern, multitasking worker show that the constant splintering and diversion of our attention wastes time and money. In a study of 1,000 officeworkers from top managers on down, Basex, an information-technology research firm in New York City, found that interruptions now consume an average of 2.1 hours a day, or 28% of the workday. The two hours of lost productivity included not only unimportant interruptions and distractions but also the recovery time associated with getting back on task, according to a Basex report titled "The Cost of Not Paying Attention," released in September. Estimating an average salary of $21 an hour for "knowledge workers"--those who perform tasks involving information--Basex calculated that workplace interruptions cost the U.S. economy $588 billion a year.

In a revealing set of studies, a team led by Gloria Mark and Victor Gonzalez of the University of California at Irvine tracked 36 officeworkers--in this case information-technology workers at an investment firm--and recorded how they spent their time, minute by minute. The researchers found that the employees devoted an average of just 11 minutes to a project before the ping of an e-mail, the ring of the phone or a knock on the cubicle pulled them in another direction. Once they were interrupted, it took, on average, a stunning 25 minutes to return to the original task--if they managed to do so at all that day. The workers in the study were juggling an average of 12 projects apiece--a situation one subject described as "constant, multitasking craziness." The five biggest causes of interruption in descending order, according to Mark: a colleague stopping by, the worker being called away from the desk (or leaving voluntarily), the arrival of new e-mail, the worker switching to another task on the computer and a phone call.

Of course, not all interruptions are created equal. Some are related to the job at hand and may be helpful--if not to the individual, then maybe to the team. Some are unrelated but nonetheless welcome: the Basex report found that 62% of workers at all levels said being interrupted by a friend with a nonbusiness-related question was "acceptable" (though the boss might take a different view). Several studies, including one by Mary Czerwinski, a senior researcher at Microsoft, show that interruptions at the beginning and the end of a task are the most detrimental to performance. An interruption when work has just got under way "blows away the goals you've established," says Czerwinski, while a ping or a knock at the end of the process "breaks the train of thought as people are reflecting and preparing for what they'll do next."

While the researchers did not look specifically at the quality of the work, a long history of psychological research has proved what one might expect: performance declines--and stress rises--with the number of tasks juggled. Similarly, there's a long-held principle in psychology that maintains that a little stimulation or arousal improves performance but too much causes it to decline. "If you apply that law to multitasking," says Mark, "you would expect that a certain amount of multitasking would increase arousal, perhaps leading to greater efficiency. But too much will produce declining performance."

Jonathan Spira, CEO and chief analyst at Basex, suspects that so-called NetGen'ers-- those who grew up IMing, Googling and texting--are less stressed by gadget-abetted multitasking than are older workers. "Younger people may actually be wired a little differently," he says. But, he adds, there's no getting away from the fact that to do your best work on difficult tasks, "sometimes you need to shut everything else out and focus."

Some of the world's most creative and productive individuals simply refuse to subject their brains to excess data streams. When a New York Times reporter interviewed several recent winners of MacArthur "genius" grants, a striking number said they kept cell phones and iPods off or away when in transit so that they could use the downtime for thinking. Personal-finance guru Suze Orman, despite an exhausting array of media and entrepreneurial commitments, utterly refuses to check messages, answer her phone or allow anything else to come between her and whatever she's working on. "I do one thing at a time," she says. "I do it well, and then I move on" (see box).

IS IT AN ADDICTION?

WHAT'S STRIKING TO RESEARCHERS IS HOW few people take even the most basic steps to reduce workplace interruption. In the Basex study, 55% of workers surveyed said they open e-mail immediately or shortly after it arrives, no matter how busy they are. "Most people don't even think about turning off the dinger," says Spira, who turned off the alert sound on his e-mail nine years ago with no regrets. "We can't control ourselves when it comes to limiting technological intrusions."

Indeed, there's a compulsive quality to our relationships with digital devices. Hallowell has noticed that when a plane lands nowadays, BlackBerrys light up the way cigarettes once did. "A patient asked me," he says, "whether I thought it was abnormal that her husband brings the BlackBerry to bed and lays it next to them while they make love." Hallowell and his frequent collaborator, Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey, believe that the neurochemistry of addiction may underlie our compulsive use of cell phones, computers and "CrackBerrys." They say that dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in seeking rewards and stimulation, is doubtless at work. "If we could measure it as we're shifting [attention] from one thing to another," says Ratey, "we would probably find that the brain is pumping out little shots of dopamine to give us a buzz." Psychologists call the increasingly common addiction to Web-based activity "online compulsive disorder." Hallowell has a more descriptive term: screen sucking. "These screens have a magnetism we haven't quite figured out."

TAKING CONTROL

CAN THE TECHNOLOGY THAT'S overloading our circuits help address the problems it has created? Czerwinski and her bosses at Microsoft think so. She's helping design an intelligent office-communication system that calculates whether an interrupting e-mail or IM should be transmitted immediately or delayed on the basis of, among other factors, the worker's appointments and projects that day, his past preferences and habits and the organizational-chart relationship between sender and receiver. "Something like this has got to happen sooner or later," says Czerwinski, though she acknowledges that it raises privacy issues. The alternative is to turn off the IMs, phones and e-mail--if management allows it. "I've observed some people who did that, and they were highly productive," says Czerwinski, "but they also missed some very important e-mails. I don't think most people will be willing to do that."

Czerwinski has also been helping Microsoft design alternatives to current software products to allow workers to stay on task for longer periods, even as onscreen interruptions arrive. In next-generation systems, which Microsoft's competitors are pursuing as well, interruptions are designed to be less intrusive--nothing flashes, pops up or makes a noise--and the alerts appear on the periphery of a screen that's larger than today's standards so that workers stay centered on their main task. The key, she says, is for an incoming message to provide just enough information for the worker to judge whether to grab it or ignore it until later. "We found that it's more calming to give them subtle alerts that aren't intrusive and which, should you glance at them, let you know whether you need to worry," she says.

U.C. Irvine's Mark also thinks improved technology will help, but she points to low-tech solutions as well. Some companies, she notes, give employees DO NOT INTERRUPT screens to put over their cubicles or establish quiet times when it's not permissible to bother a colleague. In some offices, she says, "workers wear colored hats to signify when they do and do not want to be interrupted." Another simple trick, suggests Spira, is to leave more explicit instructions on e-mail "away messages" and answering machines about how and when you prefer to be interrupted.

But to truly take control of our productivity, we also have to stop fooling ourselves about our capacities to juggle. We have to resist the "it will only take a second" impulse to read an e-mail, check a stock price or chat with a colleague in the middle of a demanding assignment. At the same time, we have to stop pretending that we are machines that can endlessly process tasks without a break. There's a reason that research shows the No. 1 work interruption is not an electronic signal but rather a human being stopping by. It's the same reason a personal call feels welcome even when you are superbusy. We are social creatures, and to do our best work, we need to set aside time in the workday to connect with others--and also to break free from our checklist and just think.

Psychiatrist Hallowell offers some basic solutions to multitasking mania in a book to be published in April, titled CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap--Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD. Among his suggestions: prioritize ruthlessly ("Cultivate the lilies, or the things that fulfill you," he says, "and cut the leeches, those that deplete you"), allot 30 minutes a day for thinking, relaxing or meditating, and get significant doses of what he calls vitamin C--the live connection to other people. "As much as we are connected electronically, we have disconnected interpersonally," he says. Compulsive screen sucking, he suggests, may actually be a symptom of vitamin-C deficiency. To perform your best, maintain your individual creativity and avoid the pitfalls of ADT, he insists, "you want to have some face-to-face moments of closeness." And when you do, turn off that blinking BlackBerry.

—With reporting by With additional reporting by Wendy Cole/Chicago

 

The Surprising Power of the Aging Brain

Scientists used to think intellectual power peaked at age 40. Now they know better

By JEFFERY KLUGER

Jan. 16, 2006

It took Barbara Hustedt Crook an awfully long time to get around to writing her first musical. She started last year, shortly before her 60th birthday. Her friend and collaborator, Robert Strozier, waited even longer; he's 65. It's not that they didn't have the creative chops for the job. The two have spent their careers writing and editing in New York City, and Crook has a background in performing, singing and piano. But creating a musical always felt just out of reach--until now.

"Somehow I have a confidence I didn't have before," says Crook. "I find that my brain makes leaps it didn't make so easily. I can hear my inner voice and trust instincts and hunches in ways I didn't used to."

And, says Strozier, they're both a lot more willing to take chances than in the past. "At a certain age," he says, "you either get older or you get younger. If you get younger, you venture out and take risks."

Risk-taking seniors making daring mental leaps? That's not the stereotype. Indeed, until quite recently most researchers believed the human brain followed a fairly predictable developmental arc. It started out protean, gained shape and intellectual muscle as it matured, and reached its peak of power and nimbleness by age 40. After that, the brain began a slow decline, clouding up little by little until, by age 60 or 70, it had lost much of its ability to retain new information and was fumbling with what it had. But that was all right because late-life crankiness had by then made us largely resistant to new ideas anyway.

That, as it turns out, is hooey. More and more, neurologists and psychologists are coming to the conclusion that the brain at midlife--a period increasingly defined as the years from 35 to 65 and even beyond--is a much more elastic, much more supple thing than anyone ever realized.

Far from slowly powering down, the brain as it ages begins bringing new cognitive systems on line and cross-indexing existing ones in ways it never did before. You may not pack so much raw data into memory as you could when you were cramming for college finals, and your short-term memory may not be what it was, but you manage information and parse meanings that were entirely beyond you when you were younger. What's more, your temperament changes to suit those new skills, growing more comfortable with ambiguity and less susceptible to frustration or irritation. Although inflexibility, confusion and even later-life dementia are very real problems, for many people the aging process not only does not batter the brain, it actually makes it better.

"In midlife," says UCLA neurologist George Bartzokis, "you're beginning to maximize the ability to use the entirety of the information in your brain on an everyday, ongoing, second-to-second basis. Biologically, that's what wisdom is."

If your mind does indeed grow more agile as you age, one of the things that may help it do so is the amount of glue you carry around in your brain--glia (Greek for glue) being what the 19th century German anatomists called it. Only about half the mass of the brain is composed of gray matter, or nerve cells; the rest is white matter, the connecting tissue that, in a sense, glues it all together. Much of that white matter is made of conductive nerve strands, and covering each fine wire is a fatty sheath of myelin that keeps nerve signals from sputtering out or cross firing during transmission. "Myelin is what makes us human," says Bartzokis. "We have 20% to 30% more than other primates do."

Throughout our lives, fresh layers of myelin sheathing are laid down in the brain. In infants and children, who grow increasingly coordinated as they mature, the bulk of that takes place in the motor and sensory lobes. If we acquire better reasoning skills in middle age, Bartzokis long suspected, it would follow that most of the myelin added in those years would appear around the signal-transmitting axons in the higher brain regions that are the seat of sophisticated thought. Essentially, the brain spends decades upgrading itself from a dial-up Internet to a high-speed version, not fully completing the job until age 45 or so.

To test that idea, Bartzokis used magnetic resonance imaging to study the volume and distribution of white matter in 300 healthy subjects from 18 to 75 years old as well as in hundreds of older people suffering from such brain-related ills as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. As he suspected, the healthy adults had the most myelin in the frontal and temporal lobes--where big thoughts live. The quantity of sheathing reached its peak around 45 or 50, exceeding the amount in unhealthy older subjects and healthy younger ones.

"This last little bit of myelination essentially puts us online," Bartzokis says. "You may not have the same amount of information you had when you were 20, but you can use it better in everyday life."

It's not just the wiring that charges up the brain as we age, it's the way different regions start pulling together to make the whole organ work better than the sum of its parts. For all its plasticity, the brain is a specialized machine, with specific regions handling specific operations. The greatest divergence comes between the left and the right hemispheres, which often work almost independently of each other. That is not such a bad thing because one hemisphere can be busy writing a grocery list or solving an equation while the other scans the environment and tends to other basic chores. As we age, however, the walls between the hemispheres seem to fall, with the two halves working increasingly in tandem. Neuroscientist Roberto Cabeza of Duke University dubs that the HAROLD (hemispheric asymmetry reduction in older adults) model, and judging by his work, the phenomenon is a powerful one.

Cabeza recruited a sample group of adults 65 to 95 years old who had scored high on a memory test, along with a group of lower-performing adults of the same age and a group of younger, college-age adults. He then asked them all to perform a series of tasks that called on numerous skills, including language, memory, perception and motor functions. Throughout the tasks, he conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of their brains. Again and again, he found that the high-functioning older adults were using either a hemisphere different from the one the other subjects were using or both hemispheres at the same time.

Why that is so is still unclear, but Cabeza doesn't believe the brain is programmed to get stronger as it ages. Rather, he acknowledges, in many ways it gets weaker, with neurons processing information less efficiently. The bilateralization may be a trick the brain uses to compensate for the decline, sometimes integrating the hemispheres so efficiently that our thought and reasoning processes are actually better than they were before.

"It's similar to the way you need both hands to lift a weight that you could lift with one hand when you were younger," Cabeza says. "In the brain, there's a nice, natural distribution of resources. You get more neural tissue to support the task."

As the brain's flexibility improves, so too may the temperament we bring to our work. There's no question that personalities can calcify with age, causing us to become less receptive to new experiences and flat-out crabby when faced with them. But that's not the case with everyone. In fact, in many people the opposite happens.

In 1958 psychologist Ravenna Helson, now an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, began a long-term study of 142 women, all of them 21 years old, at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. She interviewed the subjects and took measures of their personalities, drives, relationship skills and the like. Then she reinterviewed them at ages 27, 43, 52 and 61 to determine how those traits changed over time. Just last year she and a graduate student, psychologist Christopher Soto, collated the data from the 123 women who stuck with the study. The results were surprising.

On the whole, they found, the women's highest scores in inductive reasoning occurred from their 40s to their early 60s. Similarly, their so-called affect optimization (the ability to highlight the better aspects of one's personality and restrain the less attractive ones) and their affect complexity (the ability to evaluate various contradictory ideas and remain objective) did not peak until their 50s or 60s. There was also an increased tolerance for ambiguity and an improved ability to manage relationships.

The Mills sample group was hardly random, consisting principally of white women of the same age who attended the same college. Still, they were 123 different individuals, and the results were nonetheless uniform. "People generally describe personality change in middle age as a midlife crisis, with all its negative connotations," says Soto. "In the Mills women, the change was positive--a reorienting, not a crisis."

If such a change occurs, says psychologist Robert Levenson, also at U.C. Berkeley, it may be shaped in part by evolutionary forces, offering advantages for the whole species. Human beings' comparatively long life spans and extended families are very good things, but keeping big broods healthy and well behaved over the decades takes more than the energy of young parents. It takes the cool heads and wise counsel of the family graybeards too. "Evolution isn't just about reproduction," Levenson says. "When you get into your 40s and 50s, you're caretaking, looking after your children, grandchildren, even the people who work for you. There's an advantage to having a more relativistic mind."

It's that talent for reflective thinking that explains the role older adults have always played in the human culture. It's not for nothing that history's firebrands and ideologues are typically young, while its judges and peacemakers and great theologians tend to be older. Not everyone achieves the sharp thought and serene mien that can come with age. But for those who do, the later years can be the best years they have ever had.

For more information about the Crook/Strozier musical go to http://www.workshoptheater.org/