Jayne Jubb

Traditionally psychologists have attributed negative body image to pictures in the media of unusually thin or beautiful people with whom the rest of us compare our own physique. In June 2011 the American Medical Association released a statement that urged advertisers to stop the use of digitally altered photographs after researchers found links among exposure to mass media, negative body image and disordered eating.

The impact of distorted body image is widespread. Almost half of adolescent girls report being dissatisfied with their appearance, and the number of males reporting serious body image dissatisfaction is also on the rise (although the exact number of males thousands suffer from a clinical body image disturbance such as an eating disorder or body dysmorphic disorder, in which people cannot stop thinking about minor or imaginary “flaws” in their appearance.

Yet the question remains: Given that everyone is exposed to images of presumably perfect bodies, why don’t we all have serious trouble with body image? Research indicates that various biological and environmental factors must come together to create a problem. One of the more recently studied, and perhaps biggest biological contributors, is difficulty with interoception. Interoception informs us of emotions, pain, thirst, hunger and body temperature. People vary on how well they receive such cues. A deficit in this internal sense plays a leading role in the development of anorexia, bulimia and body dysmorphic disorder. Identifying this sensory defect as a major contributor to these ailments suggests new treatments that could speed recovery.

Internal Difficulties

We know whether we are full or hungry, hot or cold, itchy or in pain when receptors in the skin, muscles and internal organs send signals to a region of the brain called the insula. This small pocket of neural tissue is nestled in a deep fold of the brain’s external layer near the ears. It cultivates an awareness of the body’s internal state and, in doing so, plays an important role in self-awareness and emotional experience. Interoceptive data combine in the insula with external information about the body. This region will, for example, connect the sharp pain we experience when touching a hot stove with the red welt that appears on our palm. This integration forms our body image—that is, what we think we look like.

The greater the contribution from interoception as opposed to external, visual cues, the better a person’s body image. A runner with good interoception, say, might focus on the steady thud of her heart and the jolt of her feet against pavement, cues she might use to guide the speed and length of her run. By paying attention to how her body is functioning, the runner feels good about it no matter its exact proportions. A runner with poor interoception, on the other hand, might be thinking about whether onlookers notice the jiggling of her thighs. Because she has little internal input to anchor her sense of self, she can become overly concerned with small visual details, potentially resulting in a diminished body image. Someone with body dysmorphic disorder also lacks this sense of self, inadvertently causing him to focus more on what his nose looks like than how his nose feels on his face.

Distorted body image—known formally as body dysmorphia—can range from mild worries about whether these jeans make one’s bum look fat to an almost delusional misinterpretation of body size and shape as seen in anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder. People can also have misconceptions in the reverse direction: In a 2010 study almost one in 10 obese adults thought their weight was normal. One explanation for the positive distortion in body shape in these individuals is poor interoception.

In 2004 neuroscientists developed a way to easily and reliably measure this internal experience. Healthy subjects were asked to try to count their heartbeats without taking their pulse while researchers electronically monitored their heart rate. The investigators found that the people whose guesses were closest to their real heart rates also scored highest on other measures of interoceptive awareness, such as questionnaires and brain scans of insula activity.

These heartbeat tests correlated well with how people judged other physiological changes, like feelings from their stomachs. Even those who are good at sensing their internal state do not know they have this talent because they have no way to compare themselves with others. As a result, most people who take the heartbeat test are at least somewhat surprised by their score. (To take the heartbeat test yourself, see the FREEBIE section)

Image Issues

The score does matter. Differences between women in interoceptive skill predict their level of body satisfaction. In a study last year, 214 college-age females were given tests for psychological problems ranging from social anxiety to disordered eating. They found that those who scored lower on measures of interoceptive ability had not only higher levels of body dissatisfaction but also more symptoms of eating disorders than those who were more in tune with their body.

People with anorexia have problems interpreting hunger and fullness cues. Someone with damaged interoception may not be able to physically sense her weight loss and so persists in thinking her body weight is normal or high even as she becomes emaciated. In anorexia patients, these difficulties extend to all areas of interoception: when they perform the heartbeat task, they typically do worse than people without the disorder.

In a study published in 2008 it was found that 28 anorexic women were about 68 percent accurate in sensing their heart rate compared with a 77 percent accuracy rate for women who did not have an eating disorder. This result represents a significant difference in interoceptive ability. Besides being worse at interoception, the anorexic women also had more psychological problems, such as depression and anxiety, lower body weights and significantly higher body dissatisfaction. (Virtually all the imaging studies done in anorexia patients have involved women because of the low number of males diagnosed with the illness.)

Underlying the interoceptive issues of anorexic individuals may be an unresponsive insula. In a study published in 2005 functional MRI was used to scan the brains, at rest, of 12 women who had recovered from anorexia nervosa. They found diminished blood flow—suggesting lower activation—in the insula of these women relative to 11 control subjects who had never had anorexia. An fMRI study published in 2003 had shown similar results. Both studies suggest that recovered anorexics are relatively slow to process interoceptive information, a bottleneck that likely leads to less input to their brain about their body and may complicate the recovery process.

Outside Influences

In addition to interpreting internal cues at rest, the insula typically responds with a burst of activity when a person is looking at a picture of herself. When normal, healthy women see photographs of themselves, blood rushes to the insula, suggesting that the picture enhances a person’s experience of what it is like to be inside her own body.

In anorexic women, however, the insula remains mute, even when prodded by such images. In a study published in 2008, researchers asked 10 anorexic women and 10 other females to view photographs of themselves and of others while in an MRI machine. Although seeing images of themselves caused a boost in insula activity in the healthy women, no such increase in activity appeared in the anorexic women (see MRI images below).

This finding hints that anorexics lack the ability to link external cues about their appearance to internal knowledge of their body, which was likely minimal in the first place. (The differences disappeared when the women looked at pictures of other people: in both groups, the insula was quiet.)

Compounding the problem, deficiencies in interoception may make your body image more vulnerable to other visual influences. In a 2011 study 46 female college students were tested using an unusual type of visual cue: a rubber hand. In what is known as the rubber hand illusion, a person can be made to feel as if a rubber hand is part of his body by having him place both hands on a table and blocking his view of the left hand with a cardboard divider. Immediately to the right of the divider, an experimenter places a lifelike rubber hand. Then he or she gently strokes both the person’s left hand and the rubber one with a small paintbrush. After a minute or two, many people begin to believe that the rubber hand is their real hand. Amazingly, the temperature of the left hand also drops significantly, suggesting that the brain loses ownership of the real left hand and gains ownership of the rubber hand.

Based on the results of the heartbeat test, the women were split into two groups: those with high scores—the group average was better than 80 percent—and those whose scores were below 50 percent. They found that the females with lower bodily awareness could more easily be fooled into thinking that a rubber hand was part of their body. Similarly, researchers think media images of thin women will have an outsize effect on those who lack internal awareness. People with good interoception, with their solid sense of themselves, would be less affected by seeing someone skinnier or, by some standards, more attractive than they are.

People with body dysmorphic disorder may have an additional perceptual problem. Evidence suggests they have visual-processing abnormalities that distort what they see. This distortion probably combines with low interoception to create a particularly poor body image.

Those who lack a keen awareness of their internal state also seem to be easily swayed by the opinions of others. They may evaluate their goals and attributes based on how they think others perceive them rather than by their own standards. In a study in 2004 scientists asked adult women with body dysmorphic disorder to recall specific memories from childhood. The researchers found that these women were significantly more likely to relate personal experiences as if they were happening to someone else. Instead of describing an event using a first-person perspective (for instance, “I saw …”), the patients with body dysmorphic disorder told the story as if they were a narrator in a novel (“this happened …”). Building better interoceptive awareness, then, could not only improve body image, it could also bolster a fragile sense of self.

Minding the Body

One way to increase your internal sense is to practice mindfulness, a mental mode characterized by attending fully to the present moment without elaboration or judgment. In numerous studies in the past decade researchers have found that incorporating mindfulness training into cognitive-behaviour therapy and other treatments for eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder has diminished symptoms and enhanced quality of life. Training people to closely heed their current, ongoing physical sensations may improve their interoception, scientists theorize.

Recent studies have tested yoga as a potential therapy for eating disorders. Certain forms of yoga, such as hatha or vinyasa yoga, encourage the participant to focus on both their breathing and the different bodily sensations produced by each pose—practices central to mindfulness.

In 2010 clinical psychologists assigned 27 adolescents receiving outpatient eating disorder treatment to eight weekly hour-long yoga sessions. The researchers hoped that by focusing their attention on the yoga poses and their own body, the adolescents would decrease their obsessions with food and weight.

The strategy seemed to work. At the start of treatment, these adolescents were so disconnected from their body that they had trouble balancing on one foot. After eight weeks of yoga, the teens had gained enough interoceptive skills to easily find their balance. They also showed greater improvements in all areas of eating disorder psychopathology, including body dysmorphia, than did 27 similarly afflicted youth who did not take yoga. It appears that yoga helps to give the young people a way to be more in tune with their body.

References:

Functional Neuroimaging in Early-Onset Anorexia Nervosa. B. Lask et al. in International Journal of Eating Disorders, Vol. 37, S49–S51; 2005. Discussion on pages S87–S89.

Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial of Yoga in the Treatment of Eating Disorders. T. R. Carei, A. L. Fyfe-Johnson, C. C. Breuner and M. A. Brown in Journal of Adolescent Health, Vol. 46, No. 4, pages 346–351; April 2010.

Just a Heartbeat Away from One’s Body: Interoceptive Sensitivity Predicts Malleability of Body-Representations. M. Tsakiris, A. Tajadura-Jiménez and M. Costantini in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Vol. 278, pages 2470–2476; August 22, 2011.

Inside the Wrong Body. C. Arnold. Scientific American Mind (May/June 2012), Vol. 23, pages 36-41.

When someone approaches you to ask, “What’s wrong?” you know that you are broadcasting unhappiness, whether or not you said a word. Perhaps it was a grimace or your sluggish gait that conveyed the message. You cannot help but communicate your mood to colleagues, neighbours and fellow commuters through numerous subtle cues.

Sensing the emotional states of others is an important part of social interaction. If you could not do this well, you might end up incongruously slapping the back of a person who is teary or stopping an anxious co-worker on his way to a meeting. People with autism and schizophrenia find it virtually impossible to detect other people’s feelings and as a result have extreme difficulty relating to others.

Being a master of these social hints is critical to success in many domains. You can solidify friendships by recognizing when a person is sad and doling out appropriate comfort, for example. To succeed in business, you also need to accurately detect the sentiments of other people when pitching a new idea or deciding when to ask for a promotion. National security can even hinge on sensing emotions. In the U.S., millions of dollars are spent every year on training law-enforcement and security officials to read feelings in people’s faces. Suspects who are faking, say, regret or calm might, after all, be hiding a criminal act or the intention to commit such an act.

In the past, scientists focused largely on the muscles of the face and a region of the brain responsible for detecting facial features. Lately, however, researchers have found that contextual cues—including a person’s posture, the tone of his or her speech, and the attitudes of bystanders—are critical to emotion perception. By pinpointing the regions of the brain that subconsciously assemble those clues within milliseconds, scientists are now beginning to understand how our senses shape our social skills.

Face First

In pioneering studies on emotion perception back in the 1970s, psychologist Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, then both at the University of California, San Francisco, classified expressions by what they called “facial action units,” which consist of combinations of physical changes in the face. For example, to generate a smile we raise the sides of our mouth and contract muscles that create wrinkles at the corners of our eyes. Some two decades later psychologist Nancy Kanwisher, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her colleagues identified a blueberry-size region in the brain, the fusiform face area (FFA), that responds specifically to faces.

In reading the emotions of others, the FFA collaborates with the amygdala, a processor of emotions. In 2001 neurologist Patrik Vuilleumier of the University of Geneva and his colleagues found that an individual’s amygdala responds to the appearance of fearful expressions even if that person is paying attention to something else. The FFA also responded more strongly to fearful than neutral faces, suggesting that the amygdala sends feedback that can augment the firing of neurons there.

Yet researchers now know that faces alone do not always betray feelings with great fidelity. As a result, we typically evaluate an expression’s context, including body posture, surrounding faces and tone of voice. The combination, it turns out, makes our judgments more reliable. Faces that in isolation appear contorted in disgust look proud when they are attached to a muscular physique with arms raised in triumph. What seems like a scowl may instead signal fear if it accompanies a description of danger. In the close-up of tennis player Serena Williams’s face in the left photo below, she looks either angry or pained. But zoom out (photo on the right), and you see she is clearly triumphant after a big win at the 2008 U.S. Open.

The more ambiguous the expression, the more we look to other information. Researchers have begun searching for regions of the brain that can interpret all the incoming data—and then solicit more, if necessary. Neurons in such “convergence zones” would need to respond to more than one type of sensory cue—sound as well as sight, for example—and identify them as arising from a common source, taking the first step toward gaining insight into another person’s mind.

Sensory Switchboards

In a study published in 2000 evidence was found for one such zone. The researchers exposed volunteers to word fragments either by displaying them on a screen or by playing their sounds. The scientists asked them to assemble the pieces into words as quickly as possible while inside a brain scanner. Regardless of whether the subjects saw letters or heard their sounds, the words came faster when the fragment was presented a second time. Accordingly, parts of the prefrontal cortex charged with forming abstract thoughts reacted to repeats more weakly than they did to novel fragments, which suggests a boost in brain efficiency the second time around. Because these regions showed the same response for both visual and auditory input, they satisfied the criteria for a region that could integrate different streams of sensory information to yield an overall impression of an object or scene.

Analogous brain regions seem to assimilate emotional stimuli. In a 2010 study Vuilleumier and his colleagues monitored brain activity while volunteers viewed or listened to actors expressing five different emotions: anger, disgust, happiness, fear or sadness. The actor expressed each emotion with his or her body (and the face obscured), face (with the body out of view) or tone of voice (with no visual input). The participants then rated how intensely they thought the actor was feeling the emotion portrayed.

The researchers were able to pinpoint two brain regions whose responses appeared to represent the feeling rendered independent of whether the face, body or voice conveyed the mood. These were the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the social brain involved in understanding others’ intentions, and the superior temporal sulcus, a groove in the temporal lobe involved in perceiving biological motion and the direction of a person’s gaze [see below]. These cerebral hotspots may serve as part of the switchboard that gathers and analyses data relevant to recognizing emotion in others.

Odour perceptions seem to join other sensory data to form a swift impression of a person’s feelings. In a 2010 study Seubert and colleagues decided to analyse how the brain registers disgust, which can be difficult to recognize by a face alone. The researchers asked people to identify feelings from pictures of expressive faces— disgusted, happy or neutral—while inside an MRI scanner. Along with the pictures, participants were exposed to either pleasant or repulsive odours piped to their nose through narrow tubes.

If an unpleasant odour accompanied a disgusted expression, people recognised the revulsion much faster than they did with the face alone. As expected, odours did not speed up recognition of happiness. They found that the presence of an unsavory odour diminished activity in the FFA, suggesting that smell helps the brain process emotions more easily. It was found that similar decrements in responsiveness in pre-frontal brain areas and in the insula, which encodes disgust. Because sights and sounds also activate regions of the prefrontal cortex, these results bolster the idea that the brain contains a network of regions responsible for weaving together the emotional messages embedded in several types of sensory data.

Lower Thoughts

Not all of that sensory blending occurs at a high level in the brain, however. More basic cross talk between senses may also take place; for example, regions dedicated to sound perception may respond to the sight of moving lips. In 2002 a team led by psychologist Sophie Molholm of the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Orangeburg, N.Y., reported detecting brain-wave patterns indicative of early interactions between sensory components. The researchers asked volunteers to press a button as soon as they either saw a circle on a screen or heard a high-pitched tone. In some instances, a circle was accompanied by the tone. When the stimuli were simultaneous, people reacted significantly faster. The combination of sight and sound boosted the amplitude of a particular brain wave that appears within 50 milliseconds of a novel stimulus, beyond what the sum of the equivalent individual visual and auditory signals produced. Because a neural message from the eyes requires at least 50 milliseconds to travel to the first stage of processing in the brain, these results suggest that visual and auditory cues combine long before they reach the front of the brain.

In light of this and other evidence, scientists believe the brain deciphers emotional content in several stages. Its quick and dirty assessment, orchestrated largely by the amygdala, can combine related stimuli to initiate gut responses when a situation requires immediate action. Later, frontal brain regions may perform a more detailed analysis to guide more deliberate behaviour.

Whatever goes on in the brain, knowing that emotion perception involves knitting together an array of sensory input may help us read others more accurately. Software that can interpret the emotional cues in facial expressions and tones of speech already exists, and in the near future these technologies or other types of training regimens could help teach autistic individuals, people with schizophrenia or others who are poor at detecting feelings what to look for in social situations. For the rest of us, we should be aware that getting a good handle on another person’s mood may mean taking a step back to see what that smirk, smile or furrowed brow really means. The posture, manner of speaking or aroma that accompanies that facade could tell us all we need to know.

References:

◆ Supramodal Representations of Perceived Emotions in the Human Brain. Marius V. Peelen, Anthony P. Atkinson and Patrik Vuilleumier in Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 30, No. 30, pages 10127–10134; July 28, 2010.

◆ Processing of Disgusted Faces Is Facilitated by Odor Primes: A Functional MRI Study. Janina Seubert et al. in Neuroimage, Vol. 53, No. 2, pages 746–756; November 1, 2010.

◆ Context in Emotion Perception. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Batja Mesquita and Maria Gendron in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 20, No. 5, pages 286–290; October 2011.

◆ Sensational Senses: I Know How You Feel. Janina Seubert & Christina Regenbogen. Scientific American Mind, Vol. 23, nr. 1, pages 54-57, 2012.

I was standing in the queue, waiting to disembark from the airplane at Leeds Airport, when the strong acrid sweaty odour of a dishevelled man a few places in front of me, filled my nostrils. I found myself transported back into the sitting room of an old lady I used to visit when I was 17-years old as part of a community service program from my school. ‘Aunty Clara’ as I had to call her, would make me empty her urine and faeces filled toilet bowl that she kept in the sitting room….and she smelled old and sweaty. I did not like having to visit her for an hour on a Friday afternoon. I had not thought about her in years, but in that split second I was back in that little room, looking at the clock and watching the hands move round until I could finally leave after an hour. The powerful memories that smells evoke got me thinking…..

Memory comes in many forms. Every day we constantly receive and process sights, sounds, touches and smells from our surroundings, some of which will become our memories. The nature of those recollections, however, is inconstant. One memory can seem immediate and colourful, as if the event had just occurred, whereas another must be coaxed out of our brain little by little. Although a moment that excites our emotions is more likely to be recorded than a routine experience, the sensory qualities of the event we have buried in our brain also plays a part in how vividly and accurately we remember something. Although sight dominates our daily life, it has long been thought that smell might have a privileged relation with memory. Until relatively recently, however, the precise nature of that connection remained largely unexplored. Now scientists are revealing that recollections tied to smell can be stronger than memory of other types. Olfaction can transport our

thoughts back to some of our earliest experiences and tint these remembrances with feeling. On the flip side, its absence could be a sign—and potentially a cause— of cognitive decline. Scientists are at a very early stage of developing therapies to train people to smell better, which could one day stave off the deterioration of mental faculties.

Transported by Scent

Aristotle explored the apparent ties between odour and memory in his treatise from the fourth century B.C., On Sense and the Sensible. Since then, people have speculated that the memories elicited by smell are more intimate and immediate than other recollections. When we experience certain smells, we often find ourselves whisked back in time to a specific event or scene.

Psychology studies support the idea that memories associated with odours are unusually evocative. In a 2006 experiment psychologists Johan Willander and Maria Larsson of Stockholm University gave older adults one of three types of cues—visual, auditory or olfactory—and asked them to describe an autobiographical event that came to mind as a result. The participants also rated the event based on its emotionality, vividness and importance.

Although the volunteers came up with the same number of memories for each type of cue, odours elicited earlier memories, including far more from the first 10 years of life, than did sight or sound cues. Recollections emerging from scents were also associated with a stronger feeling of being brought back in time. The results suggest that memories tied to smell are both older and associated with a more time travel–like experience than are other types.

The use of odours to trigger memories has led researchers to reconsider the long-held notion that people recall more incidents from their teens and 20s than from any other time in their life. In 2000 psychologist Simon Chu and his colleagues discovered that although visual memories did peak between the ages of 11 and 25, odour-cued recollections crested between the ages of six and 10.

Rachel Herz, a cognitive neuroscientist at Brown University, sees olfaction as a potential key to a trove of past experiences that would otherwise remain locked. A whiff of a smell not encountered since childhood may bring us back to an event that we had all but forgotten existed, she theorises.

Smell might have this power because odours themselves are relatively rare, compared with, say, visual stimuli. Every day our eyes are constantly bombarded with images, many of which are quite similar, creating confusing interference in the brain. In contrast, our nose detects distinct odours only infrequently, a fact that Richard Doty, director of the Smell and Taste Center at the University of Pennsylvania, surmises is key to the evocative power of scent. Because smells are encountered rarely, individual odours are often tied to a unique experience, enabling a strong and stable connection.

Smell has a privileged relation with memory on an anatomical level as well. It is the only sense that connects with the memory system without stopping over in the thalamus, a sensory relay station. Signals travel from the nose to the olfactory bulb and then directly to the hippocampus, an essential hub of memory formation, and the amygdala, which processes emotion. Memory and odours are just sitting side by side in the brain!

The connection does not end there. In a parallel track, the olfactory bulb passes information to the olfactory cortex, which sits at the surface of the brain just above the ears. Part of this region is involved in complex learning and memory tasks. The olfactory cortex, together with an adjacent decision- making area, the orbitofrontal cortex, processes the information contained in a smell and sends the data back to the hippocampus. This back-and-forth communication ties scents with remembrances.

Sniffs of Young Noses

To understand why odours seem to strongly evoke very early life experiences, scientists began to search for other differences in how the senses interact with memory. In 2009 neuroscientist Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his colleagues taught subjects to pair pictures of objects with a smell or a sound, or both. Subjects then viewed pictures of the objects while in an MRI scanner and were asked to recall either the smell or sound associated with each image. In a second round, the researchers paired every object with an opposing odour or sound or odour-sound pair: if the first stimulus had been pleasant, this time, it was unpleasant—and vice versa. Another brain scan and test of these memories followed.

One week later the researchers presented the pictures a third time and asked participants to name the odour or sound that popped into their mind. Overall, people recalled the memories from the first round slightly more than those in the second set. The brain scans, however, produced a more nuanced picture. When a person thought of the first odour, the hippocampus became much more active than when he or she remembered the second smell, suggesting that the brain issues a special tag for first odour associations. In contrast, the hippocampus activity was the same for first and second sounds.

In addition, on the first memory test, the more the hippocampus responded during odour retrieval, the more likely a person was to later remember that first odour as opposed to the second. No such relation existed for sounds. Given the brain’s unique response to first odour memories, the smells of childhood may make early remembrances particularly durable.

Although its effect on our earliest recollections may be most pronounced, smell might also facilitate learning more broadly. In a study published in 2007 neuroendocrinologist Jan Born and his colleagues at the University of Lübeck in Germany asked people to inhale the smell of a rose while studying the locations of 15 pairs of cards on a computer screen. When the participants went to sleep that night in the lab, some of them were exposed to the rose odour, whereas others’ sleep was unscented. In the morning, all the participants were tested on their memory for the card locations. Those who had been exposed to the flower fragrance remembered 97 percent of them, compared with just 86 percent for those who had received an odourless stimulus, suggesting that odours can boost learning as memories are consolidated during sleep.

Waiting to Inhale

The memories that smell evokes also have a distinct emotional tint. In studies in which Herz and her colleagues asked people to rate the poignancy of various memories, those provoked by odours were steeped in more feeling than those brought to mind by visual, verbal, tactile and auditory cues. In these studies, the subjective responses of emotion jibed with physical changes, such as heart rate.

Consistent with the anatomical portrait of smell, odours also uniquely recruit brain regions that process both emotion and memory. In a 2004 study Herz’s team asked participants to identify a perfume that elicited a pleasant personal memory. One month later the people were shown a picture of the perfume as well as a photograph of a different perfume—and exposed to the odour of each— while inside a brain scanner. The researchers found that the odour related to the emotional memory generated more activity in the amygdala than did the pictures or the other odour. These chosen odours were also the only cues that boosted the neural response in memory-related regions. The brain’s response thus mirrors people’s subjective impressions that odours possess a unique power to summon emotional memories.

Accordingly, the loss of smell seems to have ripple effects on the integrity of memory and emotion centers. In studies published in 2010 and 2011 rsearchers at Friedrich Schiller University of Jena in Germany saw shrinkage of neural tissue in both the hippocampus and emotional brain structures in individuals with anosmia (the inability to perceive smells) and parosmia (the distortion of smells), as compared with people with no smell impairments, hinting that a loss of smell may impair memory or emotional processing, or a combination of both. Smell’s ties to emotion also become apparent in cases in which the loss of smell leads to depression—or depression leads to the loss of smell.

Whiff of Sadness

In addition to unleashing emotions from the past, the ability to detect scents also seems to influence a person’s current mood. Psychologist Bettina Pause, now at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, and her colleagues have shown that individuals who suffer from depression have a blunted sense of smell. Although it is not clear whether that sensory loss fed the depression or resulted from it, many researchers believe the influence runs in both directions.

For example, some data suggest a bad mood can impair smell. In a 2007 study a team led by psychologist Olga Pollatos, now at the University of Potsdam in Germany, coaxed participants into one of three emotional states—positive, negative or neutral—and then measured their sensitivity to an odour. The researchers found that the people in a negative emotional state had reduced sensitivity to the odour as compared with those in a neutral or good mood.

Anecdotal reports also hint that a loss of smell can spawn sadness. For instance, surgery in the nasal cavities to remove polyps often leads to mild depression, psychiatrists say. As a result of such observations, cognitive neuroscientist Rachel Herz of Brown University believes people can get into a “depression-olfaction loop”: sadness suppresses smell, and that sensory loss, in turn, deepens the depression.

The loss of emotional balance may subsequently affect a person’s ability to learn and form memories. Depression is often accompanied by a decline in both memory and learning ability. Sufferers have a smaller hippocampus, a key memory center, than nondepressed people and, as a study published in 2010 suggests, a smaller olfactory bulb.

Although it is not clear whether olfactory deficits directly impair cognition, they are often an early sign of a declining mind. In 2009 research psychiatrist Monica Scalco and her colleagues at the University of Toronto found that poor performance on a standard test of smell could serve as a very early indicator of cognitive decline in older people. Olfactory deficits in these individuals appear to precede cognitive impairment. Complete loss of smell is also a signature of incipient Alzheimer’s disease. In 2010 neurosurgeon Qing Yang and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University reported that they could use functional MRI to detect subtle deviations in the activity of the olfactory system in Alzheimer’s patients that were not present in people without the disease. In the future, doctors might look for such changes to predict the onset of Alzheimer’s at a very early stage.

Exercise Your Nose

No one yet knows whether improved detection of odours can enhance cognition. Given that it might, however, scientists are looking at the possibility of shoring up people’s sense of smell. In some cases, exposure to an odour can improve its detection. Take androstenone, a steroid found in sweat and urine. About one third of us cannot smell it at all, and for the rest, it smells like either sweaty socks or vanilla, depending on an individual’s genetic makeup. In 2002 a group led by Joel Mainland at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrated that exposing insensitive individuals to androstenone for 10 minutes daily for 21 days gave them the ability to pick up its scent. The researchers’ data suggest the changes occurred in olfactory brain systems rather than in the nose itself.

In findings published last November, Wilson and his colleagues revealed that rats could gain or lose the ability to smell the difference between two similar chemicals, depending on the circumstances. The results hint that, as with rats, humans may be able to learn or unlearn how to smell as a result of everyday experiences. If we then inadvertently lose our ability to distinguish among odours—say, as a result of inattention or lack of practice—data suggest that the loss may affect other parts of our brain. Those of us who end up with declining olfactory abilities may be at risk for a loss of mental acuity or changes in our memories.

As a remedy, some kind of smell training might help ward off such a decline. Doty believes that regular exposure to odours from childhood on—or more mindful attention to existing odours—might thwart a subtle erosion of cognition. In addition, people might be systematically tested for loss of smell just as they are examined for hearing and sight impairments now. It could be a warning sign if your sense of smell starts to fail.

And with that in mind, my nose is starting to tell me that the bread I have baking in the oven is almost ready. I often hear from clients and friends who come in when have just baked bread or am in the middle of doing so, that that smell transports them back to happy times…See you next month!

References:

◆ Learning to Smell: Olfactory Perception from Neurobiology to Behavior. Donald A. Wilson and Richard J. Stevenson. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

◆ The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell. Rachel Herz. William Morrow, 2007.

◆ The Olfactory System and Its Disorders. R. L. Doty in Seminars in Neurology, Vol. 29, No. 1, pages 74–81; February 2009.

◆ The Privileged Brain Representation of First Olfactory Associations. Y. Yeshurun, H. Lapid, Y. Dudai and N. Sobel in Current Biology, Vol. 19, No. 21, pages 1869–1874; November 9, 2009.

◆ Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way. Molly Birnbaum. Ecco, 2011.

◆ Smells Like Old Times: our sense of smell sways our memory and thought. Maria Konnikova. Scientific American Mind, Vol. 23, nr. 1, pages 59-63.

The scientific community is just beginning to appreciate how the fields generated by living systems and the ionosphere interact with one another. For instance, the earth and the ionosphere generate a symphony of frequencies ranging from 0.01 hertz to 300 hertz, and some of the large resonances occurring in the earth’s fields are in the same frequency range as those of the human heart and brain. Although researchers have looked at some of the possible interactions between the earth’s fields and human, animal and plant activity, scientists have barely scratched the surface of what is possible when we realise that these two fields could work together. But, I am jumping ahead of myself…!

A number of important findings already have emerged. For example, changes in the earth’s magnetic field are associated with:

• changes in brain and nervous system activity
• performance of athletic, memory and other tasks
• sensitivity in a wide range of extrasensory perception experiments
• synthesis of nutrients in plants and algae
• the number of reported traffic violations and accidents
• mortality from heart attacks and strokes
• incidence of depression and suicide.

It’s interesting to note that changes in geomagnetic conditions affect the rhythms of the heart more strongly than all the physiological functions studied so far.

There is also evidence in some cases that people’s brainwaves can synchronise with the rhythm of the electromagnetic waves generated in the earth’s ionosphere. When people say they “feel” an impending earthquake or other planetary events, such as weather changes, it is possible that they may be reacting to the actual physical signals that occur in the earth’s field prior to the event.

While it is not difficult to conceive that life-forms embedded in the earth’s magnetic fields could be affected by modulations in these fields, it is a more far-reaching proposition to suggest that the earth’s fields can be influenced or modulated by human emotions. Nevertheless, researchers theorise that when large numbers of humans respond to a global event with a common emotional feeling, the collective response can affect the activity in the earth’s field. In cases where the event evokes negative responses, this could be thought of as a planetary stress wave, and in cases where a positive wave is created, it could create a global coherence wave. This perspective is supported by research which has shown that emotions not only create coherence or incoherence in our bodies, but, like radio waves, also radiate outward and are detected by the nervous systems of others in our environment.

It is now clear that our nervous systems detect these electromagnetic waves generated by others in our environment, but does it work the other way around? Is there also evidence of a global effect when large numbers of people create similar outgoing waves?

Do Our Human Fields Affect the Earth’s Fields?

The events of 11^th September provided for the first time in our history the chance to monitor an outpouring of human emotion. In September 2001, two geostationary operational environmental satellites (GOES) orbiting the earth detected a rise in global magnetism that forever changed the way scientists view our world and us. The GOES-8 and GOES-10 each showed a powerful spike of Earth’s magnetic-field strength in the readings they broadcast every 30 minutes. It was the magnitude of the spikes and the time they occurred that first called them to the scientists’ attention. From a location of about 22,300 miles above the equator, GOES-8 detected the first surge, followed by an upward trend in the readings that topped out at nearly 50 units (nanoteslas) higher than any that had been typical for the same time previously. The time was 9a.m. eastern standard time, 15 minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center and about 15 minutes before the second impact.

At the same time, Roger Nelson and his team at Princeton University for the Global Consciousness Project utilsed a worldwide network of random number generators. Their findings have provided convincing evidence that human consciousness and emotionality create or interact with a global field, which affect the randomness of these electronic devices. The largest change in the random number generators occurred during the terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Even more intriguing was the fact that the random number generators were significantly affected some four to five hours prior to the attack, suggesting a worldwide collective intuition about the impending event (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Evidence of Collective Intuition: Random Number Generator Data from Around the World per 9/11/01 Terrorist Attacks.

In addition, two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) space weather satellites monitoring the earth’s geomagnetic field also displayed a significant spike at the time of the September 11th attack and for several days thereafter, indicating the stress wave possibly caused by mass human emotion created modulations in the geomagnetic field (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Geosynchronous Operational Environmental Satellites – Measuring the Earth’s Geomagnetic Field.

The correlation between the events and the reading was uncanny. And it was undeniable. In light of the data, two questions had to be asked: Were the attacks on the World Trade Center and the satellite readings actually related? If so, what was the link? It’s the answer to the second question that sparked the research, and the ambitious initiative that has followed. Subsequent studies by Princeton University and the Institute of HeartMath, have found that the correlation between the GOES readings and the events of 9/11 are more than coincidences.

Following the discovery that the satellites had recorded similar spikes during events of global focus in the past, such as the death of Princess Diana, the factor that seemed to connect the readings was clear: the indications pointed to the human heart. Apparently, the last episode of ‘The Bachelor’ (when the Bachelor chose the woman he wanted to marry) also caused a large spike! It seems that the world loves a love story :=)

So it would seem more specifically that it is the heart-based emotions (not just love) of the world’s population that results from such events that seems to be influencing the magnetic fields of the earth. What makes this discovery so significant is that those fields are now being linked to everything from the stability of the climate to peace between nations.

References:

http://www.glcoherence.org/monitoring-system/about-system.html

http://sites.google.com/site/peaceandconflictresolution/miracleprayerchains/magnetic-fields

At this time of year many of us are trying to turn over new leaves, and make plans for the coming year. We might even be trying to forget some of the more painful events of the last year. But is it possible to actually erase traumatic memories?

For decades scientists believed that long-term memories were unchangeable—unstable for a few hours and then etched into the brain for good. Research now suggests that recalling a memory causes it to revert temporarily to an insecure state, in which the recollection can be added to, modified, even erased. Memory is thus more dynamic, more fluid and malleable than was thought.

That idea, brought to the fore about a decade ago, has opened up a new controversial research area exploring the possibility of deleting, or at least muting, parts of human memory with drugs or targeted therapies. Some experts have found that a drug used to treat high blood pressure works to unseat recollections; others are testing novel biochemical means or behavioral interventions to interfere with unwanted remembrances.

Although scientists and ethicists worry that such drugs might be abused or have unsettling side effects, these treatments could also liberate individuals from experiences that haunt them—including a traumatic event—and the emotions that linger, such as the agony from the death of a loved one or the crippling apprehension from a car accident or sports injury.

Window of Vulnerability

To create, or consolidate, stable long-term memories, the brain must synthesize specific proteins in the hours after events occur. Those proteins are part of a cascade of chemical processes that remodel some of the tiny junctions, or synapses, between brain cells to make these cells communicate more efficiently. The construction process often includes the production of more synapses, which further facilitates neuronal chatter.

A decade ago most memory researchers believed these synaptic connections were extremely stable and resistant to degradation. They might fade with time, but they could not be changed or erased. Yet Karim Nader, as a 33-year-old postdoctoral student at New York University back in 1999, was new enough to question that dogma. After attending a lecture on memory delivered by Nobel winner neuroscientist Eric Kandel, Nader wondered exactly what happens when we recall an event. To do so, it seemed to him, you would have to take the memory out of storage. What if you added new information or blocked the chemical processes needed to put that memory back? To find out, Nader and his colleagues created the kind of searing emotional memory that should have been permanent and immutable. He placed a rat in a cage and played a tone while delivering a shock through the metal floor. Soon all Nader had to do was play the sound, and the rat would freeze in terror. The two stimuli, convention held, had been permanently connected.

Fourteen days later the researchers played the tone and simultaneously injected a drug that blocks protein synthesis into the rat’s amygdala, an emo- tion hub in the brain with an important role in establishing emotionally rich memories. Nader’s intent was to see if the drug would interfere with the memory’s return to storage. The strategy worked. In subsequent trials, the animal no longer froze at the sound. It had forgotten the meaning of the tone and therefore had been liberated from its trauma.

The experiment provided powerful support for a theory called reconsolidation that was first floated back in the 1960s but largely abandoned because of lack of evidence. It holds that reminding a person or animal of something makes that memory temporarily unstable. During a brief window before the memory is “reconsolidated,” it is susceptible to being changed. We used to think the memories we had were pictures of the original event. Now we know that it is the last version of the memory because each time we retrieve it, it changes a little bit.

Shutting Off the Alarm

Nader’s findings were a revelation to Alain Brunet, a Montreal-based psychiatrist who had already been experimenting with ways to prevent the initial consolidation of traumatic memories as a preventive measure against PTSD. Brunet had drawn his inspiration from a series of groundbreaking experiments conducted by James McGaugh in the 1990s. McGaugh had demonstrated that a drug called propranolol, a so-called beta blocker used to treat high blood pressure and anxiety, could also weaken new memories.

Propranolol interferes with a key signaling agent that normally augments memory formation in response to an emotional event. Anytime we get emotionally aroused, the adrenal gland releases stress hormones, which trigger the release of a chemical in the brain called norepinephrine. This neurotransmitter binds to receptors in the amygdala, which in turn dis- charges a flood of chemicals that signal the rest of the brain to encode the memory. Propranolol binds to, and blocks, those receptors. McGaugh showed he could inhibit typical memory formation by administering propranolol, which he thinks interferes with the action of noradrenaline—thus preventing the memory-boosting signal from ever going out. Brunet, together with a Harvard colleague Roger Pitman, immediately recognized the potential for treating patients who had been exposed to trauma—triggering what Brunet calls “pathological remembrances.” In 2002 and 2003 teams led first by Pitman and then by Brunet administered propranolol to trauma victims who came through emergency rooms in Boston and in Lille, France. Both research groups demonstrated that administering the drug was far more effective at reducing the likelihood the participants would develop PTSD than a placebo was. Brunet and Pitman were both excited by the effects of the drug. Yet the limitations of the therapy were clear. The procedure would help patients only during the brief window before the long-term memory had consolidated, within hours of the initial event. By definition, PTSD does not set in until at least six months later.

Nader’s findings offered new hope. They showed that established memories could be made labile again just by taking them out of storage. So, in 2005, Nader, Brunet and Pitman joined forces to test whether propranolol might also be able to tweak older memories. The researchers asked 19 patients suffering from chronic PTSD to recall their trauma. They gave half of them propranolol and the other half a sugar pill. A week later Brunet monitored the physiological response of the patients as they listened to an audio account of their event. Those who had received the beta blocker still retained a memory of the factual details but were significantly less aroused than those given the dummy drug. A few theories attempt to explain propranolol’s action. As with the initial trauma, recalling an agonizing memory releases stress hormones, which may well be involved in reconsolidating the memory afterward. One possibility is that propranolol blunts the action of noradrenaline then, too. Alternatively, the drug might be inhibiting the protein synthesis needed to put emotional memories back into storage.

Either way the initial evidence for propranolol’s effects, published in 2008, led to a larger study. Brunet published the results of his study, which included 66 patients in Boston, France and Montreal, just last August. On average, physiological symptoms of fear such as a racing heart and sweating diminished by 50 percent for the 40 PTSD patients who took propranolol, compared with a 7 percent decrease for the 26 patients who did not take the drug. After the experiment, Brunet claims, roughly three out of four propranolol patients were so improved they no longer met the criteria for PTSD.

New Knowledge

Yet propranolol may not offer a foolproof way to forget. Neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps of N.Y.U. spent several years attempting to erase fear memories in mentally healthy people using propranolol. They found that the drug could only temporarily expunge a learned association between a visual stimulus (a coloured square) and a shock. The fear later returned as if the therapy had never been applied at all. Phelps believes the propranolol failed because her subjects still knew that the coloured squares were associated with the shocks—and that this conscious memory generated a fear response even after the emotional record of the initial event was erased. Exactly why the drug worked for trauma victims is unclear, but Brunet says their memories are starkly different from the associations Phelps studied. In Brunet’s study, people with PTSD are dealt with, whereas in Phelps’ study subjects are dealing with a simple task using squares and triangles.

In a study published in 2010 Phelps and Schiller demonstrated a method Phelps believes eliminates the potential interference from overt knowledge. Instead of simply sending subjects home after the visual reminder of the shock, the researchers added an experience designed to modify both the conscious and emotional aspects of the memory.

After showing volunteers a picture of the square, Schiller and Phelps waited for a variable period, then delivered “extinction training,” a kind of behavioural therapy intended to overwrite the dreaded association with one that is benign. In this case, the researchers exposed the volunteers to images of the coloured squares, but this time they did not deliver a shock so that these individuals would think of the images as “safe” again. The timing of this extinction training was key. Previous research held that the initial reminder, the square, would spark chemical processes that would render the memory of the shock temporarily vulnerable to modification or erasure while the memory was being reconsolidated. This so-called reconsolidation window would close once those processes were complete.

Some volunteers viewed the square 10 minutes before receiving this extinction training, a time point within the reconsolidation window. Others saw the square six hours before the extinction training—safely outside that window. A third group did not see the square prior to extinction training.

All three groups returned to the lab on a third night and were presented with pictures of the squares as researchers monitored their fear response. The response virtually disappeared in those who had received the extinction training during the reconsolidation window, whereas it returned for those who had not, providing evidence that human memories are malleable during this window and can be blunted without drugs. In fact, altering memory with new information in this manner might be especially effective because it adds to conscious knowledge, rather than just altering an instinctive fear memory—a strategy that might not work in the long run. (Other forms of behavioral therapy, such as memory suppression, may also work most effectively during recall, within the reconsolidation window.)

Chemical Intervention

If you asked one of Phelps and Schiller’s volunteers what happened the first night of the trial, they would very likely be able to tell you about the shocks, even if they no longer linked them with the squares. The same holds for the propranolol-taking trauma victims. But what if we could erase those memory traces altogether?

Neuroscientist Todd Sacktor is developing a compound that would do just that. In 1990 Sacktor and his colleagues discovered an enzyme known as protein kinase M-zeta (PKMzeta) they suspected might play a role in long-term memory. Not only was the enzyme present in the appropriate regions of the brain, but it also had chemical properties that scientists thought were ideally suited to supporting the maintenance of such neural traces.

In 2006 Sacktor’s team confirmed its hunch. The researchers trained a rat to avoid an area of a room where it received an electric shock. Then they waited a day and injected a drug that inhibited PKMzeta into the hippocampus, where the memory was presumably stored. When they put the rat back in the room, it could not remember what area to avoid. Blocking the actions of PKMzeta had wiped out the rat’s memory of the event, proving the enzyme had a role in maintaining the memory. This past March, Sacktor and his colleagues reported the same effect with a mutation that crippled PKMzeta. They also did the reverse and enhanced memory in rats with a genetic manipulation that caused the animals to produce additional copies of the enzyme.

Meanwhile Sacktor’s team had figured out how the enzyme worked. It catalyzes a reaction that enables the transport of key proteins to the synapses. These proteins respond to the neurotransmitter glutamate, allowing a neuron to detect the firing of a neighboring cell by its resulting release of glutamate. The upshot is effective information transfer.

A drug that shuts down PKMzeta, however, is like a “nuclear bomb,” Nader says; it obliterates all memory, not just the recollections you want to detonate. Yet Sacktor may have found a way around this problem. Every time a memory is pulled out of storage, he believes, the brain breaks down the PKMzeta connected to that memory. To put the memory back, he posits, the brain must create the enzyme anew. Sacktor has developed a drug that, in unpublished experiments, blocks the synthesis of new PKMzeta in rats for about two hours. In theory, then, a person could selectively shut out troublesome memories by recalling them, making them active and then taking this drug, which would stop the brain from restocking them. If the drug works as Sacktor imagines—a big “if” at the moment—it promises to be more powerful than propranolol.

Bioethicists such as Paul Root Wolpe worry about such strong medicine for the mind. “Memory is such a crucial part of what makes us who we are that we have to be extremely cautious about changing or erasing [memories],” Wolpe says. “To what degree will we use this technology in ways that threaten selfhood and personality?” He also frets that people with sinister motives could abuse a potion that makes others forget— enabling an intelligence officer to get away with torture, say, or a parent with the abuse of a child.

Yet the terror many trauma survivors endured is (in their own words) not a critical part of who they are. It can often accomplish quite the opposite: it cracked their sense of self. Only calibrating that recollection, in fact, could enable them to reassemble the person they had been— and the delightfully ordinary lives they had once led.

References:

◆ Storage of Spatial Information by the Maintenance Mechanism of LTP. E. Pastalkova, P. Serrano, D. Pinkhasova, E. Wallace, A. A. Fenton and T. C. Sacktor in Science, Vol. 313, pages 1141–1144; August 25, 2006.

◆ Preventing the Return of Fear in Humans Using Reconsolidation Up- date Mechanisms. Daniela Schiller, Marie-H. Monfils, Candace M. Raio, David C. Johnson, Joseph E. LeDoux and Elizabeth A. Phelps in Nature, Vol. 463, pages 49–53; January 7, 2010.

◆ Does Reconsolidation Occur in Humans? Daniela Schiller and Elizabeth A. Phelps in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, Vol. 5, Article 24. Pub- lished online May 17, 2011.

◆ Trauma Reactivation under the Influence of Propranolol Decreases Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms and Disorder: 3 Open-Label Trials. Alain Brunet, Joaquin Poundja, Jacques Tremblay, Éric Bui, Émilie Thom- as, Scott P. Orr, Abdelmadjid Azzoug, Philippe Birmes and Roger K. Pit- man in Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology, Vol. 31, No. 4, pages 547–550; August 2011.

◆ Totaling recall. A. Piore. Scientific American Mind, Vol. 22, no. 6, pages 40-45, 2012.

There seems to be no escaping stress. Even the good things in life can stress you out! (After all, “desserts” spelled backward is “stressed.”)

You may think that the best way to reduce stress is through relaxation (e.g. yoga, meditation), but apparently that is NOT true……

Some experts suggest that a little stress is good for you. According to the latest research, this is misleading: these results were obtained from averaging data across many individuals. High levels of stress are harmful to most people, adversely affecting health, mood and productivity. And yes, most people do perform and feel better when faced with moderate levels of stress. It is bizarre but very few people know how to be productive when they are not being pushed by stressors—but it can be done. Just as some people are able to perform well under highly stressful conditions (think Olympic athletes), it is also possible to perform well when relaxed (think masters of kung fu). Wouldn’t it be gratifying to be able to lead a life that is productive but also virtually stress-free? Well, that DOES seem possible!

Bear in mind that there is only an approximate relationship between stress (our internal, adverse reaction to stimuli we perceive as threatening) and stressors (the threatening stimuli that actually surround us.) A traffic jam or busy train station might make us feel stressed one day but not the next. This is good news because it suggests that with the right training and preparation, we might be able to face any stressor in a much more relaxed way.

In real life, unfortunately, although we receive intensive formal training in writing and maths at school, but learning how to manage stress is left entirely to chance. Many people, overwhelmed by having to pay bills, traffic and abusive bosses, resort to destructive ways of coping, with drugs and alcohol being the most common. But research conducted over the past few decades suggests that there are at least four broad, trainable skill sets or “competencies” people can use to manage stress nondestructively. These are:

• source management (reducing or eliminating the sources of stress)
• relaxation (practicing techniques such as breathing exercises or meditation)
• thought management (correcting irrational thinking and interpreting events in ways that don’t hurt you), and
• prevention (planning and conducting your life so that you avoid stressors).

A new study looked at how an ethnically and racially diverse group of 3,304 people managed stress. The subjects ranged from 10 to 86 years old (average age was 34.9 years), and about 85 percent of them were from the U.S. or Canada, with the remainder from 28 other countries. They participated in the study by completing an online test accessible at http://MyStressManagementSkills.com.

Participants were asked to answer various questions and then to rate, on 10-point scales, how stressed they were, how generally happy they were, and how much success they had had in both their personal and professional lives.

You might assume that people with good stress-management skills would be not only less stressed but also happier and more successful both personally and professionally. Stress can really wear you down, after all, and can be brutal on relationships.

The main body of the test consisted of 28 questions about different practices that fall into the four broad competency areas mentioned above, with the questions asked in a random order. For example, “I often reinterpret events to reduce the stress I’m feeling” is an example of a test item that fits into the thought-management category. (To take a shorter version of the test, see the ‘Test Your Stress-Management Competence’ further on in this article). For each test item, people indicated on a five-point scale how much they agreed or disagreed with the statement. On completion of the test, participants were immediately given a total score, along with results in each of the four competency areas and information about what the scores meant.

A Surprise, a Lesson and a Dire Need

When I first started to read about this study, I thought I could predict the outcomes fairly well….I would have said relaxation would have been the top predictor. After all, a number of studies confirm what common sense tells you about relaxation: people who learn and practice techniques such as breathing exercises, muscle-relaxation exercises, yoga, meditation, and so on benefit in multiple ways. Meditating regularly, for example, has been shown to lower blood pressure and also to help people feel “immunised” against stressors. As for thought management, it is perhaps the main thing that therapists and counselors teach their clients: how to reinterpret events in your life so that they stop bothering you. It is empowering to learn how to do that.

But the new study showed clearly that PREVENTION is by far the most helpful competency when it comes to managing stress. Prevention—doing things such as planning your day or year and trying to avoid stressors before they can affect you—was by far the most powerful predictor of all four of the outcome questions.

Also suggestive, the second most powerful predictor was source management. This broad category includes practices such as delegating tasks, organising your space and scheduling your time well, all of which can be considered preventive measures.

Least predictive were those other two competencies, relaxation and thought management—the competencies that people who are concerned about stress are most likely to try to improve through counseling or training. Relaxation, which can be practiced both proactively and reactively, fared better than thought management, which is almost always reactive. (My favourite example comes from Aesop’s Fables. Frustrated that he can’t reach the bunch of grapes, the fox reframes his thinking and concludes, “They are probably sour anyway.” Problem solved! Stress relieved!)

The lesson here is to manage stress proactively. Taking a deep breath or counting to 10 when you are stressed is all well and good, but you will be much happier in the long run if you can find ways to avoid the situations that make you feel stressed in the first place [see ‘An ounce of prevention’ further on in this article].

Can we actually learn to fight stress more effectively?

The study shows that

(1) people who have had training in stress management are better at it than people who have not, and

(2) the greater the number of training hours, the better the skills.

This suggests that no matter what our natural reactions are to stress, learning stress-management skills is likely to be beneficial. That said, only 17 percent of the subjects in this study had had any stress-management training—a figure that is probably much lower in the general population. Even more disturbing, the new data show that people are poor at prevention; it ranked third out of the four competencies in the test scores.

The worst news, though, has to do with the overall scores. On a 100-point scale, people scored 55.3 on average on a test of simple, basic stress-management techniques. If you think of that as a score on an exam at school, that means that on average, people only just scrape a pass when it comes to managing the inevitable stress they face in their lives.

The Importance of Stress Management

The physiological mechanisms by which stress damages health have now been well established., and yet the inability (or unwillingness) to manage stress can have a devastating effect on people’s lives. One of the most dramatic results of the new study was a high positive correlation between test scores and the overall level of happiness people reported. To put this another way, the study suggests that nearly 25 percent of the happiness we experience in life is related to—and perhaps even the result of—our ability to manage stress.

The bottom line is that stress management is both trainable and beneficial, and individuals reap the greatest benefits by fighting stress before it starts. That insight leaves us with a great challenge: to teach techniques for managing stress to a public that knows little about them and, especially, to educate our children before the big stressors hit.

Test Your Stress-Management Competence

Here is a selection of items from the Epstein Stress-Management Inventory (ESMI-i).

To get a rough measure of your competence in the four areas measured by the test, tick off items that apply to you. If you are able to tick off three or four items in a category, you are probably reasonably competent in that category.

To compute your overall score, add up the number of ticks you made. If you scored under 12, you might want to consider taking a stress-management course.

To take the full version of the test, visit http://MyStressManagementSkills.com.

COMPETENCY I

Manages Sources of Stress

I have adequate shelf, file and drawer space to serve my needs.

I consistently put important tasks ahead of unimportant tasks.

I try to schedule appointments and meetings so that they won’t overlap.

I have no trouble keeping my work area organized.

COMPETENCY II

Practices Relaxation Techniques

I schedule some relaxation time every day.

I sometimes visualize soothing scenes to relax.

I sometimes use special breathing techniques to help me relax.

I sometimes tense and relax my muscles as a way of fighting stress.

COMPETENCY III

Manages Thoughts

I regularly examine and try to correct any irrational beliefs I might have.

I’m aware that my thinking is sometimes unclear or irrational.

I keep myself calm by being selective about what I pay attention to in my environment.

I often reinterpret events to reduce the stress I’m feeling.

COMPETENCY IV

Prevents Stress from Occurring

I try to fight stress before it starts.

I keep an up-to-date list of things I’m supposed to do.

I spend a few minutes each morning planning my day.

I have a clear picture of how I’d like my life to proceed over the next few years.

GRAND TOTAL _____________________

An Ounce of Prevention

Here are six strategies for fighting stress before it starts, which are suggested by the new study:

1. Seek and kill. Take a few minutes every day to identify stressors in your life and find ways to reduce or eliminate them. Do you always find yourself running for the train on a morning? Make yourself be ready 5 minutes earlier so that you are not starting your day in such a stressful rish!

2. Commit to the positive. In our culture, people often try to cope with stress in self-destructive ways, mainly by drinking, taking drugs or overeating. Commit to avoiding the self-destructive solutions—for a day, a week or whatever you can handle—and replacing them with positive, healthful ways of managing stress. Yoga class, anyone?

3. Be your own personal secretary. People who keep lists of things to do really do more things. Use a pen and paper (or your smartphone) to keep a list of things you need to do. You’ll never walk out of a supermarket again having purchased everything except what you went there to buy.

4. Immunise yourself. Through exercise, thought management and the daily practice of relaxation techniques, you will be in a better position to face stressors without feeling stress. Lion tamers manage to remain calm when working with lions, after all. With the right preparation, you can face almost any situation calmly.

5. Make a little plan. Spend a few minutes every morning planning your day. You will waste less time, get more done and feel less stressed.

6. And make a big plan. The famous behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner not only planned his day and year, he even maintained a 10-year planner. You don’t need to go that far, but planning your future is a great way of exercising more control over your life. The more control you have, the less stressed you will feel.

References

◆ The Big Book of Stress Relief Games. Robert Epstein. McGraw-Hill, 2000.

◆ Principles and Practice of Stress Management. Edited by Paul H. Lehrer, Robert L. Woolfolk and Wesley E. Sime. Third edition. Guilford Press, 2007.

◆ The Relaxation & Stress Reduction Workbook. Sixth edi- tion. Martha Davis et al. New Harbinger, 2008.

Many of you have (or are still) spending your Summer holidays outside your own country. This probably means that you have been trying to speak a few words of the local lingo….probably with mixed reactions, but probably lots of memorable fun too. Speaking different languages has always been something I’ve enjoyed, and the motivation (plus an abillity) to do so has been invaluable when working and living around the world. I used to dread family beach holidays – with my fair skin and freckles I burned as soon as the sun even looked at me. But trying out my school-French as a teenager on (another beach) holiday in Southern France, opened up a whole new world to me by being able to chat to locals (I wrote about my langauge adventures in a Dutch article entitled ‘Tien voor Taal’). Thankfully, trying to talk to locals is something I’ve not stopped doing :=)

In recent years, scientists have found that being able to speak different languages may actually facilitate the development of certain language and cognitive skills. These aptitudes include mental flexibility, abstract thinking and working memory, a type of short-term memory essential for learning and problem solving.

It is quite funny to realise that until the mid-1800s, bilingualism was common in the United States But in the 1880s popular sentiment began to turn against immigrants, and psychologists proclaimed that exposure to more than one language made children intellectually inferior. Although researchers began to discredit these early studies in the 1960s, the idea that children needed to choose a dominant language persisted. The hypothesis was that the brain is preset for only one language.

According to this hypothesis, a bilingual child’s mind is engaged in a constant tug-of-war, which leads to verbal delays and confusion over which language to use. But in a series of studies begun in 2001, it was found that children exposed to two languages before the age of 10 reached key language milestones, such as saying their first words and learning to read, at the same time as their monolingual peers Children seem to understand that they have two different languages right from the start, and are not confused.

Recent research suggests that not only can children differentiate between two languages at any early age, the cognitive benefits from being exposed to a second language start as early as infancy. In a study in 2009 of “crib bilinguals,” a visual test was used to measure what neuroscientists call cognitive flexibility in preverbal seven-month-olds. Scientists wanted to see how quickly the infants could adapt to changing rules. They taught the infants a pattern consisting of speechlike sounds. At the end of the sequence, a visual reward in the form of a puppet would appear in one part of a computer screen. The infants were expected to learn that a given sound pattern predicted the appearance of the puppet in that location. Both bilingual and monolingual infants showed that they associated the sound sequence with the puppet’s location equally well by looking in the right place for the puppet to appear. But when the sequence was modified—and the puppet was moved—the bilingual infants adjusted, switching their gaze to the new location. The monolingual infants, however, continued to look for the puppet in the original location.

Shaping the Cerebrum

Other research suggests that being raised bilingual improves other cognitive skills once a child becomes verbal. In a study published in 2010, researchers found that four- to five- year-old bilingual children showed more creativity than did their monolingual peers when asked to draw a fantastical house or flower. The monolingual children tended to draw flowers with missing petals or leaves, whereas the bilingual children drew imaginary hybrids, such as a “kite-flower” and a “robot-house,” indicating a superior ability to grasp abstract concepts [see illustration]. Meanwhile data from a 2008 study suggested that children from English-speaking homes who attended half-Spanish, half-English schools perform better on reading tests than those in English-only programs.

Several studies have also linked bilingualism to improved working memory, which is associated with both reading and math skills. Bilingual seven-year-old children outperformed their monolingual peers on two working memory tests—one requiring them to recall and rearrange a series of numbers and the other to retrace a pattern of hops made by an animated frog on a computer screen.

All these cognitive differences imply that learning a second language tweaks the structure of the developing brain. Although standard brain-scanning technology, functional MRI, is not generally recommended for young children, a relatively new noninvasive neuroimaging technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy now enables scientists to compare the brains of bilingual children with their monolingual peers. So far studies indicate that the language areas of monolingual and bilingual brains develop similarly, but certain regions, such as the inferior frontal cortex, which is involved with both language and thinking skills, appear to be more active in bilingual children, particularly when they are reading.

Researchers say the best way to become proficient in a second language is to start young and practice often. Daily exposure to the second language is ideal, experts note. Children growing up in multilingual environments can reach this level of exposure naturally, but those from monolingual backgrounds may need more intensive instruction.

Words of Wisdom

Becoming fluent, or even just reasonably competent, in more than one language not only advances a child’s thinking skills, it also confers cognitive gains in adulthood. In particular, something about being bilingual seems to bolster the brain against mental decline. In 2010 psychologists reviewed the mental health and education records, including language training, of 211 patients diagnosed with dementia. They found that as a group, the 102 patients classified as bilingual had been diagnosed 4.3 years later (and reported the onset of symptoms 5.1 years later) than had the 109 monolinguals, despite all of them having roughly equivalent cognitive function and similar occupational demands while they were all healthy. These data, which confirm those from an earlier study, indicate that bilingualism may help delay the onset of dementia.

Knowing a second language somehow seems to moderate the effects of encroaching pathology in the brain. The brains of 450 monolingual and bilingual patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s­like dementia were scanned for lesions and structural changes. The subjects all displayed a similar degree of cognitive function, but the bilingual subjects’ brains showed more atrophy and damage in regions involved in long­term memory, language recognition and auditory perception. Scientists hypothesize that by virtue of being bilingual, the patients can somehow compensate for the greater structural damage.

Speaking more than two languages may offer an even better defense. Also in 2011 researchers reported evaluating the neuropsychological health of 230 elderly men and women who spoke two to seven languages. They found that the people who spoke three or more languages were one quarter as likely to be mentally impaired than those who spoke just two. That greater amounts of language learning seem to offer stronger protection buttresses the contention that this training is constructing some kind of cognitive shield.

Such findings fit with the more established idea that learning and education thwart intellectual decline by building up the brain’s overall capacity for thought—its so­called cognitive reserve. Bilingual adults are apparently quicker and more efficient at certain tasks involving the use of skills known as executive functions, such as planning and problem solving. Of course, a person’s mental capacity can influence his or her ability to learn a new language, raising the possibility that the bilingual speakers had better cognition to begin with. But other work has indicated that learning a second language can promote beneficial brain changes. For example, it can boost the neuronal cell density in certain areas important for cognitive functioning. And research underscoring the cognitive advantages of growing up bilingual reinforces the notion that something about learning to say oui, sí or hai helps to shore up the thinking parts of your brain.

Tot de volgende keer, until next time et à la prochaine!

References

◆ New Discoveries from the Bilingual Brain and Mind across the Life Span: Implications for Education. Laura-Ann Petitto, Mind, Brain, and Education, vol. 3, no. 4, pages 185–197; 2009.

◆ The Benefits of Multilingualism. Jared Diamond. Science, vol. 330, pages 332–333; 2010.

◆ The Bilingual Advantage Learning: a second language can give kids’ brains a boost. Erica Westly. Scientific American Mind, vol. 22, no. 3, pages 38-41; 2011.

Science and the Arts are full of highly creative people whose personal behaviour sometimes strikes others as odd. Albert Einstein picked up cigarette ends off the street to get tobacco for his pipe; Howard Hughes spent entire days on a chair in the middle of the supposedly germ-free zone of his Beverly Hills Hotel suite; the composer Robert Schumann believed that his musical compositions were dictated to him by Beethoven and other dead composers from their tombs; and Charles Dickens is said to have fended off imaginary urchins with his umbrella as he walked the streets of London. More recently, we have seen Michael Jackson’s preoccupation with nose surgery, Salvador Dalí’s affection for dangerous pets and the Icelandic singer Björk dressed for the Oscars as a swan.

It isn’t just the average person-on-the-street who perceives highly creative individuals as eccentric. These individuals often see themselves as different and unable to fit in. The latest findings in brain imaging, creativity research and molecular biology suggest that these perceptions are not just based on a few anecdotal accounts of “weird” scientists and artists. In fact, creativity and eccentricity often go hand in hand, and researchers now believe that both traits may be a result of how the brain filters incoming information. Even in the business world, there is a growing appreciation of the link between creative thinking and unconventional behaviour, with increased acceptance of the latter.

Making the Connection

The incidence of strange behaviour by highly creative individuals seems too extensive to be the result of mere coincidence. As far back as ancient Greece, both Plato and Aristotle made comments about the peculiar behaviour of poets and playwrights. (Aristotle was also the first to note the relation between creativity and depression, an association that has been substantiated by modern research.) More than a century ago Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso catalogued the bizarre behaviour of creative luminaries in his book The Man of Genius and attributed this behaviour to the same hereditary “degeneration” that marked violent criminals.

In the past few decades psychologists and other scientists have explored the connection using empirically validated measures of both creativity and eccentricity. To measure creativity, researchers may look at an individual’s record of creative achievements, his or her involvement in creative activities or ability to think creatively (for example, to come up with new uses for ordinary household items). To measure eccentricity, researchers often use scales that assess schizotypal personality.

Schizotypal personality can appear in a variety of forms, including magical thinking (fanciful ideas or paranormal beliefs, such as Schumann’s belief that Beethoven channeled music to him from the grave), unusual perceptual experiences (distortions in perception, such as Dickens’s belief that he was being followed by characters from his novels), social anhedonia (a preference for solitary activities—Emily Dickinson, Nikola Tesla and Isaac Newton, for example, favoured work over socializing), and mild paranoia (unfounded feelings that people or objects in the environment may pose a threat, such as Hughes’s legendary distrust of others).

Schizotypal personality is a milder version of the clinical psychiatric condition called schizotypal personality disorder, which is among a cluster of personality disorders labeled “odd or eccentric” in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). The schizotypal diagnosis grew out of large epidemiological studies in which researchers noticed that the relatives of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia were more likely to exhibit odd behaviours and beliefs than relatives of those not afflicted with schizophrenia. Schizotypal people, for instance, may dress in an idiosyncratic style; their speech patterns may be somewhat out of the ordinary; they may respond ineptly in social situations; their emotional responses may be inappropriate; they may believe in supernatural phenomena such as telepathy and omens; and they may be hard to get close to—both physically and emotionally. In short, schizotypal individuals are eccentric. But not all schizotypal people have a personality disorder, however. They are often very high functioning, talented and intelligent.

Nature or Nurture?

The first scientific evidence of a connection between schizotypal personality and creativity came from a 1966 study by American behavioural geneticist Leonard Heston. In this classic study, Heston reported that children adopted away from their schizophrenic biological mothers at birth were more likely to pursue creative careers and interests than children adopted away from non-afflicted mothers (thus lending support for Lombroso’s theory that the bizarre behaviours that often accompany creativity are inherited).

Harvard researcher Dennis Kinney and his team replicated Heston’s study 40 years later and suggested that schizotypal individuals may inherit the unconventional modes of thinking and perceiving associated with schizophrenia without inheriting the disease itself. In this study, Kinney and his colleagues rated 36 adopted offspring of schizophrenic parents and 36 matched control subjects adopted from nonschizophrenic parents using the Lifetime Creativity Scales. They found that the adopted off-spring of schizophrenic individuals who themselves displayed signs of schizotypal personality had higher scores for creativity than the control subjects. The Kinney group also made a new discovery: some of their control subjects who did not have a family history of schizophrenia met the profile for schizotypal personality—and they too scored higher for creativity than other control subjects.

Taking the reverse approach, recent studies by British investigator Daniel Nettle and Australian researchers David Rawlings and Ann Locarnini have confirmed that creative individuals tend to score higher on scales of schizotypal personality than less creative individuals. Research at Harvard, has found that study participants who score high in a measure of creative achievement in the arts are more likely to endorse magical thinking—such as belief in telepathic communication, dreams that predict the future, and memories of past lives (does this mean that healer are magicians?!). These participants are also more likely to attest to unusual perceptual experiences, such as having frequent déjà vu and hearing voices whispering in the wind.

In two reviews of schizotypy and creativity— published in 1989 and 1997, respectively—concluded that not only do highly creative people display more of the traits associated with schizotypy but that the combination of creativity and schizotypy tends to run in families, again pointing toward a genetic component. But how could weird thoughts and behaviours enhance a person’s ability to think creatively? Research suggests that these manifestations of schizo-typal personality in and of themselves do not promote creativity; certain cognitive mechanisms that may underlie eccentricity could also promote creative thinking, however.

Too Much Information

Cognitive disinhibition is the failure to ignore information that is irrelevant to current goals or to survival. We are all equipped with mental filters that hide most of the processing that goes on in our brains behind the scenes. So many signals come in through our sensory organs, for example, that if we paid attention to all of them we would be overwhelmed. Furthermore, our brains are constantly accessing imagery and memories stored in our mental files to process and decode incoming information. Thanks to cognitive filters, most of this input never reaches conscious awareness.

There are individual differences in how much information we block out, however; both schizotypal and schizophrenic individuals have been shown to have reduced functioning of one of these cognitive filters, called latent inhibition. Reduced latent inhibition appears to increase the amount of unfiltered stimuli reaching our conscious awareness and is associated with offbeat thoughts and hallucinations. It is easy to see that allowing unfiltered information into consciousness could lead to strange perceptual experiences, such as hearing voices or seeing imaginary people For healers, this is often our normal daily experience!

Cognitive disinhibition is also likely at the heart of what we think of as the aha! experience. During moments of insight, cognitive filters relax momentarily and allow ideas that are on the brain’s back burners to leap forward into conscious awareness, in the same manner that bizarre thoughts surface in the mind of the psychotic individual. Consider the example from Sylvia Nasar’s 1998 book A Beautiful Mind, about Nobel Prize winner (and diagnosed with schizophrenia) John Forbes Nash. When asked why he believed that aliens from outer space were contacting him, he responded: “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.” (Nash’s case illustrates how the cognitive mechanism of the eureka moment is similar to the delusional experience called thought insertion, in which individuals suffering from psychosis believe that outside forces have placed thoughts in their brains. Most people suffering from psychosis or schizophrenia do not produce ideas that are considered creative, however. The ability to use cognitive disinhibition in a creative way depends on the presence of additional cognitive abilities associated with a high level of functioning.)

Reduced cognitive filtering could explain the tendency of highly creative people to focus intensely on the content of their inner world at the expense of social or even self-care needs. (Beethoven, for example, had difficulty tending to his own cleanliness.) When conscious awareness is overpopulated with unusual and unfiltered stimuli, it is difficult not to focus attention on that inner universe.

In 2003 scientists found that highly creative individuals are more likely to display cognitive disinhibition when compared with those who are less creative. In a series of studies, several hundred subjects were tested on a latent inhibition task (a measure of how easily subjects ignore stimuli to which they have already been exposed). Creativity was also measured in several different ways, including divergent thinking tasks (which require a large number of responses or solutions to a problem), openness to experience (the personality trait most highly predictive of creativity), the Creative Personality Scale, and the Creative Achievement Questionnaire (a measure of lifetime creative achievement). High scorers on each of these creative measures were more likely to have lower scores on the latent inhibition task (indicating cognitive disinhibition) than were the less creative subjects. It would therefore seem that the reduction in cognitive inhibition allows more material into conscious awareness that can then be reprocessed and recombined in novel and original ways, resulting in creative ideas.

Brain-imaging and electroencephalography (EEG) studies support the theory that highly creative individuals tend to experience more cognitive disinhibition than do less-creative control groups. Beginning in the late 1970s, researcher Colin Martindale of the University of Maine initiated a series of EEG studies related to creativity. He and his colleagues found that highly creative people tend to produce more brain waves in the alpha range (a frequency of eight to 12 hertz, or cycles per second) during creative tasks than do less creative people. Martindale and his group interpreted alpha power as a marker of decreased cortical arousal and defocused attention and suggested that creative people were allowing more information into their conscious awareness during creative work.

Andreas Fink and his group at the University of Graz in Austria, who replicated Martindale’s findings in a set of studies over the past five years, have a different interpretation of the increased alpha waves associated with creativity. They say increased alpha activity indicates that the brain is focusing on internally generated stimuli rather than on the outside world. This interpretation explains the tendency of creative people to focus on their inner lives, which is also a sign of schizotypal personality.

Other brain research, published in 2009 by John Kounios of Drexel University and Mark Beeman of Northwestern University, has examined the aha! moment in greater detail. Kounios and Beeman had subjects solve word-association problems while their brain patterns were recorded using either functional magnetic resonance imaging or EEG. (For example, think of a word that can form a compound word with all three of the following words: crab, pine, sauce. The answer is “apple.”) Subjects signaled the exact moment the answer came to them, and whether they had come to the solution through trial and error or in a sudden rush of insight. The results indicate that a period of alpha activity precedes a burst of gamma activity (characterised by brain waves in the bandwidth above 40 Hz) at the moment of insight. Kounios and Beeman surmise that alpha activity focuses attention inward, whereas the gamma burst coincides with the arrival of the solution into conscious awareness.

Another brain-imaging study, done in 2010 by investigators at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, suggests the propensity for both creative insights and schizotypal experiences may result from a specific configuration of neurotransmitter receptors in the brain. Using positron-emission tomography, the density of dopamine D2 receptors in the sub-cortical region of the thalamus was examined in 14 subjects who were tested for divergent-thinking skills. The results indicate that thalamic D2 receptor densities are diminished in subjects with high divergent-thinking abilities, similar to patterns found in schizophrenic subjects in previous studies. The researchers believe that reduced dopamine binding in the thalamus, found in both creative and schizophrenic subjects, may decrease cognitive filtering and allow more information into conscious awareness.

Several studies have linked gene variations that are associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine to both creativity and eccentricity. Hungarian researcher Szabolcs Kéri, who reported in 2009 that highly creative achievers were more likely to have a variant of the neuregulin 1 gene previously associated with schizophrenia, speculated that this gene variation facilitates cognitive disinhibition. These findings support the theory that cognitive disinhibition may be affected by genetic variations and that it may be one factor that predisposes an individual to both creative thought and eccentricity.

The Importance of Intelligence

Clearly, however, not all eccentric individuals are creative. Other cognitive factors, such as high IQ and high working-memory capacity, enable some people to process and mentally manipulate extra information without being overwhelmed by it. A series of studies has shown that a combination of lower cognitive inhibition and higher IQ is associated with higher scores on a variety of creativity measures.

This all suggests that at least a subgroup of highly creative individuals may share some (but not all) biological vulnerability factors with individuals who suffer from psychotic illnesses, such as schizophrenia. This vulnerability may allow the highly creative person access to ideas and thoughts that are inaccessible to those of us with less porous mental filters.

For several years a question has bene included in the creativity research questionnaires that asks “Do you often feel like a square peg in a round hole?” Participants who score high on the Creative Achievement Questionnaire have answered “yes” significantly more often than those who have low scores in creative achievement. In fact, one participant—a Hollywood screen-writer—answered “no” but then wrote below the question: “I don’t feel like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. I feel like an octagonal peg with conical appendages.”

The good news is that the plight of square pegs may be improving. The increase of innovative technology as a key factor in economic growth has elevated creativity from merely a positive trait to a highly sought-after commodity in the global market. Many leading corporations—such as Coca Cola, DuPont, Citigroup and Humana—now have chief innovation officers on their leadership teams. Prestigious business schools—such as Harvard, Stanford, Columbia and Yale—have added courses on creativity to their curricula. And Fortune 500 companies, including PepsiCo, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Aetna and Marriott, now routinely put employees through creativity training programs. Trainers in these classes use a variety of tools and techniques to help noneccentrics open their minds to “out of the box” thoughts and stimuli that might otherwise be ignored or suppressed.

As the market value of creative thinking increases, the round-hole world may continue to make adjustments to accommodate and assimilate eccentrics. Such accommodations already exist in communities with high concentrations of artists, writers, scientists and computer geeks. Managers within these communities tolerate bizarre clothing choices, disregard of normal social protocols and non-traditional work schedules in the interest of promoting innovation.

Square pegs (and octagonal pegs with conical appendages) no longer have to work so hard at fitting in. It is high time. Indeed, we all owe a deep debt of gratitude to those whose creative work has been accomplished at the expense of square-peg feelings of alienation and ostracism. The creative efforts of eccentrics add richness, beauty and innovation to the lives of those of us who have fit some- what more comfortably into our round holes.

References

◆ Creativity in Offspring of Schizophrenic and Control Parents: An Adop- tion Study. D. K. Kinney, R. Richards, P. A. Lowing, D. LeBlanc, M. E. Zim- balist and P. Harlan in Creativity Research Journal, Vol. 13, No. 1, pages 17–25; January 2001.

◆ Decreased Latent Inhibition Is Associated with Increased Creative Achievement in High-Functioning Individuals. S. H. Carson, J. B. Peter- son and D. M. Higgins in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 85, No. 3, pages 499–506; September 2003.

◆ The Aha! Moment: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight. J. Kounios and M. Beeman in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 18, No. 4, pages 210–216; August 2009.

◆ Genes for Psychosis and Creativity: A Promoter Polymorphism of the Neuregulin 1 Gene Is Related to Creativity in People with High Intellec- tual Achievement. S. Kéri in Psychological Science, Vol. 20, No. 9, pages 1070–1073; 2009.

◆ Thinking Outside a Less Intact Box: Thalamic Dopamine D2 Receptor Densities Are Negatively Related to Psychometric Creativity in Healthy Individuals. Ö. de Manzano, S. Cervenka, A. Karabanov, L. Farde and F. Ullén in PLoS One, Vol. 5, No. 5, page e10670; 2010.

◆ Creativity and Psychopathology: A Shared-Vulnerability Model. S. H. Carson in Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 56, No. 3, pages 144–153; 2011.

◆ The Unleashed Mind. S. Carson. Scientific American Mind, vol. 22, no. 2, pages 22-29; 2011.

The recent discovery of a network in the brain dedicated to autobiographical mental imagery is helping researchers understand the many purposes that day-dreaming serves in our lives. They have called this web of neurons “the default network,” because when we are not absorbed in more focused tasks, the network fires up. The default network appears to be essential to generating our sense of self, suggesting that daydreaming plays a crucial role in who we are and how we integrate the outside world into our inner lives.

Videos in the Mind’s Eye

Most people spend about 30 percent of their waking hours spacing out, drift- ing off, lost in thought. Yale University emeritus psychology professor Jerome Singer defines daydreaming as “watching your own mental videos.” (He has a more complex definition too: “shifting attention away from some primary physical or mental task toward an unfolding sequence of private responses”). Singer divides daydreaming styles into two main categories: positive-constructive, which includes upbeat and imaginative thoughts, and dysphoric, which encompasses visions of failure or punishment. Most people experience both kinds to a small or large degree.

Other scientists distinguish between everyday musings and extravagant fan- tasies. Michael Kane, a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina, considers “mind wandering” to be “any thoughts that are unrelated to one’s task at hand.” In his view, mind wandering is a broad category that may include everything from pondering ingredients for a dinner recipe to saving the planet from alien invasion. Most of the time when people fall into mind wandering, they are thinking about everyday concerns, such as recent encounters and items on their to-do list. More exotic daydreams in the style of James Thurber’s grandiose fictional fantasist Walter Mitty—such as Mitty’s dream of piloting an eight-engine hydroplane through a hurricane—are rare.

Daily routine concerns figured prominently in one study that rigorously mea- sured how much time we spend mind wandering in daily life. In a 2009 study Kane asked 72 students to carry PalmPilots that beeped at random intervals eight times a day for a week. The subjects then recorded their thoughts at that moment on a questionnaire. About 30 percent of the beeps coincided with thoughts unrelated to the task at hand. Mind wandering increased with stress, boredom, sleepiness, or being in chaotic environments. Mind wandering decreased with enjoyable tasks. Ths could be because enjoyable activities tend to grab our attention.

Intense focus on our problems may not always lead to immediate solutions. Instead, allowing the mind to float freely can enable us to access unconscious ideas hovering beneath the surface—a process that can lead to creative insight-as many of you will know. We may not even be aware that we are daydreaming. We have all had the experiencing of “reading” a book yet absorbing nothing—moving our eyes over the words on a page as our attention wanders and the text turns into gobbledigook. Aimless rambling across the moors of our imagination may allow us to stumble on ideas and associations that we may never find if we consciously strive to seek them.

A Key to Creativity

Artists and scientists are well acquainted with such playful fantasizing.” Albert Einstein pictured himself running along a light wave—a reverie that led to his theory of special relativity. Filmmaker Tim Burton daydreamed his way to Hollywood success, spending his childhood holed up in his bedroom, creating posters for an imaginary horror film series. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, imagined “another world,” to which he retreated as a child, where he was “someone else, somewhere else … in my grandmother’s sitting room, I’d pretend to be inside a submarine.

Why should daydreaming aid creativity? It may be in part because the waking brain is never really at rest. Floating in unfocused mental space serves an evolutionary purpose: when we are engaged with one task, mind wandering can trigger reminders of other, concurrent goals so that we do not lose sight of them. Some researchers believe that increasing the amount of imaginative daydreaming we do or replaying variants of the millions of events we store in our brains can be beneficial. A painful procedure in a doctor’s office, for example, can be made less distressing by visualisations of soothing scenes from childhood.

Yet to enhance creativity, it is important to pay attention to daydreams. This has been called “tuning out” or deliberate “off-task thinking.” In an as yet unpublished study, 122 undergraduates at the University of British Columbia were asked to read a children’s story and press a button each time they caught themselves tuning out. Researchers also periodically interrupted the students as they were reading and asked them if they were “zoning out” or drifting off without being aware of it. The study concluded that the people who regularly catch themselves—who notice when they’re doing it—seem to be the most creative.

The mind’s freedom to wander during a period of deliberate tuning out could also explain the flash of insight that may pop into a person’s head when he or she takes a break from an unsolved problem. It has been found that people who engaged in a mildly demanding task, such as reading, during a break from, say, a visual assignment, such as the hat-rack problem—in which participants have to construct a sturdy hat rack using two boards and a clamp—did better on that problem than those who did nothing at all. They also scored higher than those engaged in a highly demanding task—such as mentally rotating shapes—during the interval. Allowing our minds to ramble during a moderately challenging task, it seems, enables us to access ideas not easily available to our conscious minds or to combine these insights in original ways. Our ability to do so is now known to depend on the normal functioning of a dedicated day dreaming network deep in our brain.

The Mental Matrix of Fantasy

Like Facebook for the brain, the default network is a bustling web of mem- ories and streaming movies, starring ourselves. When we daydream, we’re at the centre of the universe. This network was first described in 2001 by neurologist Marcus Raichle of Washington University. It consists of three main regions: the medial pre-frontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex and the parietal cortex. The medial prefrontal cortex helps us imagine ourselves and the thoughts and feelings of others; the posterior cingulate cortex draws personal memories from the brain; and the parietal cortex has major connections with the hippocampus, which stores episodic memories—what we ate for breakfast, say—but not impersonal facts, such as the capital of Kyr- gyzstan. The default mode network is critical to the establishment of a sense of self.

It was not until 2007, however, that cognitive psychologist Malia Fox Mason, discovered that the default network becomes more active when people engage in a boring verbal task, when they are more likely to mind wander. This default network lights up when people switch from an attention-demanding activity to drifting day-dreaming with no specific goal. In an experiment, participants were shown a string of four letters such as R H V X for one second, which was then replaced by an arrow pointing either left or right, to indicate whether the sequence should be read forwards or backwards. When one of the characters in the string appeared, subjects were asked to indicate its position (first, second, third or last, depending on the direction of the arrow). The more the participants practiced on each of the four original letter strings, the better they performed. They were then given a novel task, consisting of letter sequences they had not seen before. Activity in the default network went down during the novel version of the test. Subjects who day- dreamed more in everyday life—as determined by a questionnaire—also showed greater activity in the default network during the boring original task.

Mason did not directly measure mind wandering during the scans, however, so she could not determine exactly when subjects were “on task” and when they were daydreaming. But a subsequent study by a different research group in 2009 directly linked mind wandering with increased activity in the default network. These researchers scanned the brains of 15 students while they performed a simple task in which they were shown random numbers from zero to nine. Each was asked to push a button when he or she saw any number except three. In the seconds before making an error—a key sign that an individual’s attention had drifted—default network activity shot up. Periodically the investigators also interrupted the subjects and asked them if they had zoned out. Again, activity in the default network was higher in the seconds before the moment they were caught in the act. Notably, activity was strongest when people were unaware that they had lost their focus. The more complex your mind-wandering episode is, the more of your mind it will consume.

When the default is faulty

Defects in the default network may also impair our ability to daydream. A range of disorders—including schizophrenia and depression—have been linked to malfunctions in the default network in recent years. A 2007 study found that people with schizophrenia have deficits in the medial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with self-reflection. In patients experiencing hallucinations, the medial prefrontal cortex dropped out of the network altogether. Although the patients were thinking, they could not be sure where the thoughts were coming from. People with schizophrenia daydream normally most of the time, but when they are ill they often complain that someone is reading their mind or that someone is putting thoughts in their head.

On the other hand, those who ruminate obsessively—rehashing past events, repetitively analysing their causes and consequences, or worrying about all the ways things could go wrong in the future—are well aware that their thoughts are their own, but they have intense difficulty turning them off. Scientists believe that rumination is not a form of day-dreaming, because it imagines situations in the future that are not largely positive in tone. Nevertheless, in obsessive ruminators, who are at greater risk of depression, the same default network circuitry turns on that is activated when we daydream.

These ruminators—who may repeatedly scrutinise mistakes made, family issues or lovers’ betrayals—have trouble switching off the default network when asked to focus mentally on a neutral image, such as a truckload of watermelons. They may spend hours going over some past incident, asking themselves how it could have happened and why they did not react differently and end up feeling overwhelmed instead of searching for solutions. Experimental studies have shown that positive distraction—for example, exercise and social activities—can help ruminators reappraise their situation, as can techniques for cultivating mindfulness that teach individuals to pay precise attention to activities such as breathing or walking, rather than to thoughts.

Is Your Mind Wandering Out of Control?

How do you know when you have tipped over from useful and creative day- dreaming into the netherworld of over-ruminating?

First, notice whether you are deriving any useful insights from your fantasies. Creative individuals report ideas that have occurred to them during daydreams.

Second, it is important to take stock of the content of your daydreams. To distinguish between beneficial and pathological imaginings, ask yourself if this is something useful, helpful, valuable, pleasant, or are you just rehashing the same old thoughts over and over again. And if daydreaming feels out of control, then even if it is pleasant it is probably not useful or valuable.

Whether or not mind wandering causes distress often depends on the context, Mind wandering is not inherently good or bad; it all depends on what the goals of the person are at the time. It may be perfectly reasonable for a scientist to mentally check out in the midst of a repetitive experiment. A novelist who can pour her day-dreams onto paper and publish them is clearly putting them to good use. And fortunately, a lot of what we do in life doesn’t require that much concentration!

References:

◆ The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. James Thurber in My World and Welcome to It. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1937.

◆ The Inner World of Daydreaming. Jerome L. Singer. Harper and Row, 1975. ◆ Mind-Play: The Creative Uses of Fantasy: Using Mind Imagery to Relax, Overcome Fears and Bad Habits, Cope with Pain, Improve Your Decision-Making and Planning, Perfect Your Skill at Sports, and Enhance Your Sex Life. Jerome L. Singer and Ellen Switzer. Prentice-Hall, 1980.

◆ The Daydreamer. Reprint edition. Ian McEwan. Anchor, 2000.

◆ Maladaptive Daydreaming: A Qualitative Inquiry. Eli Somer in Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, Vol. 32, Nos. 2–3; Fall 2002.

◆ Rethinking Rumination. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Blair E. Wisco and Sonja Lyubomirsky in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol. 3, No. 5, pages 400–424; 2008.

We know that there are certain foods that are supposed to be good for our brain health, but did you know that some spices also have been found to help your little grey cells grind more effectively? Come with me on this month’s journey to explore how a bit of fruitiness and the spice of life can help your brain function better and longer…and then try to resist a breakfast of horny goat weed and blueberries….!

What is blue, juicy and something that Americans cannot get enough of?

If you answered ‘blueberries’ then you guessed right!

We may often think that our American friends are a bit crazy by European standards, but it turns out that this latest trend for Vaccinium cyanococcus is actually protection against craziness.

Emerging research suggests that compounds in blueberries known as flavonoids may improve memory, learning and general cognitive function, including reasoning skills, decision making, verbal comprehension and numerical ability. In addition, studies comparing dietary habits with cognitive function in adults hint that consuming flavonoids may help slow the decline in mental facility that is often seen with aging and might even provide protection against disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Researchers once assumed that flavonoids worked in the brain as they do in the body—as antioxidants that protect cells from damage caused by ubiquitous unstable molecules known as free radicals. Now, however, new research demonstrates that the power of flavonoids to bolster cognition results mainly from interactions between flavonoids and proteins integral to brain-cell structure and function. To date, scientists have identified more than 6,000 different flavonoids, which come in a variety of types. These compounds are widely distributed in fruits and vegetables, cereal grains, cocoa, soy foods, tea and wine. Thus, overdosing on blueberries alone is not necessary to keep your mind in good shape.

Memorable Diets

As powerful antioxidants, flavonoids protect us from the cellular damage caused by free radicals, which are formed by our bodies during metabolism, and are also spawned by pollution, cigarette smoke and radiation. As a result, researchers have for decades investigated the potential of these compounds or boosting immunity, staving off cancer and reducing excess inflammation; flavonoids also appear to help regulate blood flow and blood pressure.

About 15 years ago chemist Ronald Prior and the late neuroscientist James Joseph of the Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service were measuring the antioxidant, disease-fighting potential of various foods when Joseph heard about preliminary data hinting that people who ate modest amounts of fruits and vegetables performed better on cognitive tests than those who consumed little or none of these foods. The researchers were intrigued and wanted to test the idea that an antioxidant-rich diet might improve brain function.

Prior and Joseph fed feed enriched with extracts of strawberry, spinach or blueberries to 19-month-old, middle-aged rats for eight weeks, equivalent to about a decade in the human life span. At the end of the eight weeks the now aging rats fed regular food did significantly worse on learning and motor skills such as walking elevated planks, climbing poles, balancing on rotating rods and swimming through mazes, reflecting normal mental decline. In contrast, rats eating the supplemented diet performed better at these tasks than they had at the start of the study. (The rats fed the blueberry helpings got an extra boost in motor function; for reasons that remain unclear, they were much more adept than even the rats eating strawberries and spinach at maintaining their balance in the plank and rod tests.)

This was an “aha!” moment for the scientists: something in the fruit- and vegetable-enriched meals was responsible for the animals’ superior performance. Noting that all the test foods were rich in flavonoids, Prior and Joseph speculated that these compounds might be behind the cerebral tune-up.

Meanwhile studies of humans were also indicating that eating meals full of flavonoids might have cognitive benefits. In a study published in 2007 epidemiologist Luc Letenneur and his colleagues at INSERM in France asked 1,640 cognitively healthy older adults to fill out a questionnaire about their dietary habits and take a test of their cognitive function. They followed the subjects for 10 years, repeating the questionnaire and test four times during that decade. At each testing period, the investigators quantified the subjects’ consumption of five different flavonoids and correlated those amounts with their cognitive test scores, controlling for other health habits known to affect cognition such as exercise, smoking and obesity.

Subjects with the highest levels of flavonoid intake at the start of the study also performed best on thinking skills such as the ability to do simple arithmetic, recall items in different categories, repeat words and phrases, and identify time and place. In addition, their performance on such tests tended to be more stable over time than that of individuals whose diets included very low levels of flavonoids, whose thinking skills tended to decline over time. Those with the best scores in this study were eating between 18 and 37 milligrams of flavonoids a day, which translates to about 15 blueberries, a quarter of a cup of orange juice and half a cup of tofu.

Other studies correlating flavonoid intake with cognition have hinted at benefits from particular flavonoid-rich foods. In an investigation published in 2009 a research team led by nutritionist Eha Nurk at the University of Oslo in Norway asked 2,000 adults in their early 70s to fill out food-frequency questionnaires and then tested them on measures of mental agility such as their memory of events in their lives, speed at naming objects, and ability to quickly come up with words beginning with a particular letter of the alphabet. Individuals who reported that they regularly consumed wine, tea and chocolate—which are especially rich in flavonoids—performed significantly better on these cognitive dimensions than those who consumed these items only rarely. The adults who did not consume any wine, tea or chocolate scored worst of all. Individuals who reported drinking wine regularly (but in moderation) had about a 45 percent lower risk of poor cognitive performance, defined as a score in the lowest 10th percentile on the test. The corresponding benefit for tea or chocolate was a 10 to 20 percent diminished risk. Those who regularly consumed all three items decreased their chances of a poor score by 70 percent.

Soy, Pine Bark and Cocoa

In addition to associating flavonoid consumption with improved cognition, researchers in recent years have tested the effects of adding flavonoids to people’s diets, the rough human equivalent of the work with rats. Although it is hard to control people’s base diets—humans are not all eating the same food—adding flavonoids to your diet might preserve or improve memory, thought processing and other cognitive capacities. In 2009 nutrition researcher Anna Macready and her colleagues at the University of Reading in England published a review of 15 small dietary intervention trials in which researchers tested this thesis by asking people to add flavonoid-containing foods to their meals. The flavonoids came from either soy products, supplements (Ginkgo biloba or pine bark extract) or, in one case, a beverage containing cocoa.

Although interpretation of the findings was complicated by inconsistencies in the types of cognitive testing, the authors concluded that flavonoid consumption from any of the sources examined improved aspects of cognition such as verbal comprehension, simple reasoning and decision making, object recall, and recognition of numerical patterns. Flavonoids also seemed to hone fine motor skills such as finger tapping. Consuming the equivalent of about one and a half cups of tofu or two and a half cups of soy milk a day was enough to produce the improvement, as was taking 120 mg (one to two capsules) of ginkgo, 150 mg (about three capsules) a day of pine bark extract or 172 mg of flavonoids from the cocoa drink. The latter is equivalent to about seven 35g squares of dark chocolate.

Among flavonoid-containing foods, the blueberry may provide particularly strong protection for the human brain. In a study published in 2010 psychiatry researcher Robert Krikorian of the University of Cincinnati and his colleagues gave memory tests to nine adults older than 75 who had mild memory loss. The participants then drank two cups of wild blueberry juice (similar to about five cups of blueberries) every day for 12 weeks, after which they received a repeat test on their ability to recall words and pairs of objects. The blueberry drinkers performed about 30 percent better on average than did a comparison group of seven elderly adults who drank a flavonoid-free, sweetened beverage resembling blueberry juice. Despite the small sample size, the trial strongly suggested that adding blueberries to your diet can boost your memory, at least if you are older, Krikorian says. He also speculates that regular blueberry consumption may stave off the cognitive decline that often comes with aging.

Brain-cell snacks

How might flavonoids influence cognition? By examining brain tissue from rats that ingested flavonoid-containing foods, researchers have shown within the past decade that some classes of flavonoids cross into the brain from the blood. Once in the brain, the compounds could influence cognition by acting as antioxidants, but recently scientists have questioned this theory. Data suggest that flavonoids are present in the brain in much smaller quantities than other antioxidants, such as vitamin C. Thus, compounds other than flavonoids are likely to be doing the bulk of free-radical scavenging there. Instead scientists have found that flavonoids change the chemistry of neurons in other ways.

Joseph and his colleagues discovered early on that four-month-old juvenile mice fed blueberry-enriched feed for eight months displayed higher levels of enzymes called kinases in their brain cells than did those who ate the standard feed. Although scientists do not know how flavonoids might spur kinase production, many types of kinases are essential to learning and memory; thus the additional enzyme could help boost cognition.

More recently, Jeremy Spenser, a nutritional biochemist at Reading, has outlined ways in which flavonoids may influence the actions of proteins critical to thought. Flavonoids may, for example, help to regulate the activity of kinases as well as that of enzymes called phosphatases; the correct balance of these is critical for maintaining the integrity of the synapses, or junctions, between neurons and thereby sustaining normal patterns of brain-cell activity.

Soy isoflavones may improve memory by acting like weak estrogens, binding to and stimulating estrogen receptors on neurons. Exciting these receptors is known to trigger changes in both neuronal shape and chemistry in the hippocampus, a structure involved in memory and whose function most likely diminishes with age. These changes may facilitate communication between neurons and thereby improve memory. Some flavonoids may even spur the growth of new nerve cells in the hippocampus.

Flavonoids may even defend neurons from damage and death and so combat neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Animal and cell culture data suggest that flavonoids may ameliorate the effects of neurotoxins such as glutamate—a neurotransmitter that at high concentrations damages neurons—by preventing these toxins from binding to their receptors on neurons. Flavonoids also may oppose the action of enzymes called secretases that are involved in the destruction of nerve cells and that may be elevated in neurode-generative disorders.

In the future, imaging technologies such as functional magnetic resonance may enable researchers to see how consuming flavonoids alters brain activity in real time. For example, in a study published in 2006 researchers used fMRI to detect increased cerebral blood flow during a letter-digit matching test in subjects consuming a flavonoid-rich cocoa drink. Such findings may guide the development of dietary interventions for reversing or preventing cognitive decline.

The science does not yet reveal which flavonoid-containing foods have the greatest potential for enhancing learning and memory. But eating flavonoid- rich foods is probably better than taking supplements. Processing may destroy or reduce the actual flavonoid content of supplements, and intact fruits and vegetables are likely to contain the amounts and combinations of these compounds that are most beneficial to the brain.

The Spice of Life

We can spice up our minds not only by choosing which foods we eat but also by seasoning our savory dishes in specific ways. Spices and herbs, including sage, oregano and thyme, are full of brain-boosting compounds called flavonoids, and recent research suggests that these compounds may have powers over our mood as well as our mental faculties.

After ingesting the oil of common sage and Spanish sage, people immediately perform better on tests of word recall as compared with those who took a placebo, several studies have shown. Individuals who swallowed a capsule containing sage oil also report increases in their alertness, calmness and contentedness. Now psychologists at Northumbria University in Newcastle, England, have found that simply smelling the extract of sage can reproduce some of these effects. In July 2010 the researchers reported that people who took a computerized battery of tests in a room infused with the aroma of common sage demonstrated, on average, a more accurate memory than people who took the same tests in an unscented room. They also reported feeling more alert.

These and other studies of sage have employed the essential oil, a concentrated extract from the plant used for aromatherapy, rather than the familiar dried or fresh sage leaves used in cooking. Yet researchers believe that eating sage regularly in its leaf form may produce similar, albeit milder, memory-enhancing effects.

These studies did not attempt to pin down which component of the plant was responsible for the memory effects, but flavonoids very likely play a role. Sage is high in hispidulin, a flavonoid that has been shown in cell culture studies to interact with brain cell receptors for gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), a neurotransmitter that affects cognition and mood.

Flavonoids from spices other than sage can also produce observable changes in mood, at least in rodents. In June 2010 pharmacologists at Federal University of Ceará in Fortaleza, Brazil, reported that the flavonoid carvacrol, which makes up the bulk of oregano and thyme oils, has an antidepressant effect in mice. After drinking a solution of dissolved carvacrol, the rodents tried harder to escape from a swimming tub—an experimental setup used to assess depression in the animals.

By blocking different chemical pathways in the brains of the mice, the researchers showed that carvacrol’s effects depend on its interaction with dopamine, a neurotransmitter known best for governing feelings of reward. It is unclear whether eating small amounts of oregano and thyme would boost mood, but the scientists hope that isolating and studying carvacrol could lead to new antidepressant drugs.

Beyond herbs familiar in the kitchen, many traditional medicinal herbs contain flavonoids that seem to have a protective effect on the brain. One such herb is Epimedium brevicornum Maxim, better known by its unfortunate nickname: “horny goat weed.” In November 2010 microbiologists at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology and at Peking University in Beijing showed that rats with the rodent equivalent of Alzheimer’s disease, marked by protein clumps in the brain, learn and remember better if their feed is supplemented with the most prominent flavonoid in horny goat weed: icariin. This compound apparently prevents the clumps from causing brain cells to commit suicide—suggesting that icariin might one day be useful as a treatment for Alzheimer’s.

And now it’s time for that blueberry and horny goat weed breakfast shake! But where did I leave my bicycle key….?

References:

◆Superfoods Rx: Fourteen Foods That Will Change Your Life. Steven Pratt and Kathy Matthews. Harpercollins, 2003.

◆ Nutrition and Brain Function: Food for the Aging Mind. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, August 2007.

www.ars. usda.gov/is/AR/archive/aug07/aging0807.htm?pf=1

◆ Diet of Walnuts, Blueberries Improve Cognition; May Help Maintain Brain Function. ScienceDaily, november 7, 2007.

www.sciencedaily. com/releases/2007/11/071106122843.htm

◆ A Healthy Diet May Be Important to Brain Health as Well as Body Health. U.s. national institutes of Health, updated 2008.

www.nia.nih.gov/Alzheimers/Publications/ADProgress2005_2006/Part2/ healthydiet.htm.htm

◆ U.S Highbush Blueberry council: www.blueberry.org. the section “Blues in the news” offers links to health information and research about blueberries: www.blueberrycouncil.com/for-the-media.php

◆ Your Brain on Blueberries. Mary Frantz. Scientific American Mind. Volume 21, number 6, pages 55-59 (2011).

We Humans like to think that we have much more self-discipline than other animals. We know how to set goals— losing 5 kilos, starting our own businesses—and then we resist temptations and plough through difficulties to achieve them. We are far from perfect at this talent, but in most of our minds there is no question that our powerful self-control is one of the things that sets us apart from more lowly animals.

Scientists have long argued that delaying gratification requires a sense of “self.” Having a personal identity allows us to compare who we are today, at this very moment, with who we want to be— an idealised self. Such aspirations are thought to foster the kind of behaviour that leads to self-improvement. But new research suggests a more primitive source of our powers of self-discipline. It appears that, lofty as our goals may be, we rely on the same basic biological mechanism for self-discipline as our four-legged best friends.

Sit and stay

Experimental psychologist Holly Miller and her colleagues at the University of Kentucky knew from previous research that in people, self-control relies on the brain’s “executive” powers, which coordinate planning and action. It is further known that this kind of effortful cognitive processing requires energy in the form of glucose, the simple sugar that serves as the body’s fuel. Studies show that depletion of the brain’s glucose supply compromises self-discipline. For instance, passing up a tempting happy-hour drink after work may make it tougher to forgo your favourite television show later on that evening to exercise. Of course, all mental activities require energy, but self-control seems to be one process that is especially compromised when the energy starts running out. But is this a uniquely human phenomenon? To find out, Miller recruited a group of dogs ranging in age from 10 months to more than 10 years old. Some were pure-breds, such as Australian shepherds and vizslas; others were mongrels. All the dogs were familiar with a toy called a Tug-a-Jug, which is basically a clear cylinder with treats inside; dogs can easily manipulate the Tug-a-Jug to get a tasty reward. In the experiment, some of the dogs were ordered by their owners to “sit” and then “stay” for 10 minutes. That’s a long time to sit still; it was meant to exhaust the animals mentally and thus to deplete their fuel reserves. The other dogs, the controls, merely waited in a cage for 10 minutes.

Then all the dogs were given the familiar Tug-a-Jug, except that it had been altered so that it was now impossible to get the treats out. The hungry dogs could see and hear the treats—but they could not get at them. The idea was to see if the previous demand for self-discipline made the dogs less, well, dogged in working for the treats. And it did, unmistakably. Compared with the dogs that had simply been caged, those that had willed themselves to stay still for 10 minutes gave up much more quickly—after less than a minute, as opposed to more than two minutes of effort from the controls. In other words, it seemed as though exerting self-discipline had used up much of the dogs’ blood sugar supply—weakening their brain’s executive powers and diminishing the animals’ ability to exert goal-directed effort.

Sugar-powered discipline

Executive powers? In dogs? These findings suggest that self-control may not be a crowning psychological achievement of human evolution and indeed may have nothing to do with self-awareness. It may simply be biology—and beastly biology at that. These are humbling results, so the scientists decided to double-check them in a different way. In a second experiment, they recruited another group of dogs, this time made up of Shetland sheepdogs and border collies. As before, some of the dogs sat and stayed for 10 minutes, whereas the others were caged. But this time half of the obedient dogs got a sugar drink following the exercise, whereas the others got an artificially sweetened drink. Miller wanted to see if she could restore the dogs’ executive powers by re- fueling their brains.

And that is exactly what happened. The dogs that exerted self-control and then got replenished with sugar performed just like the dogs that had not been exhausted to begin with. They persisted with the Tug-a-Jug, even though it was frustrating and demanding to do so. The depleted dogs that had not received the sugar drink gave up much more quickly. In short, all the dogs acted the way that humans do in similar situations requiring restraint and goal-directed activity.

So perhaps humans are not unique—at least not in this regard. It appears that the hallmark sense of human identity—our selfhood—is not a prerequisite for self-discipline. Whatever it is that makes us go to the gym and save for college is fueled by the same brain mechanisms that enable our hounds to sacrifice their own impulses and obey.

References:

Self-Control without a “Self”?: Common Self-Control Processes in Humans and Dogs. H.T. Miller, K.F. Pattison, C.N. deWall, R. Rayburn-Reeves and T.Z. Zentall. Psychological Science (2010), volume. 21, number. 4, pages 534–538.

Dog tired: What muts can teach us about self-control. W. Herbert. Scientific American Mind (2010), volume 21, number 5, pages 66-67.

I always get a deep sense of satisfaction when I read that something in science has ‘proved’ what we know in the healing & energy worlds.

During a healing session, there is not only an energetic phenomenon that occurs, but also a simultaneous psycho-emotional component. This is why during a healing people can often experience a range of emotions, recall childhood memories, and let go of deeply held (psychological and/or emotional) pain. The combination of energy and psychotherapy is a powerful one. A recent article by psychiatrist Jonathan Shedler was so outstandingly clear about why psychotherapy works, that I have reproduced it here with only slight modifications.

Psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy, traces its heritage to psychoanalysis in the famous drapery-hung study of Sigmund Freud in Vienna. But psychodynamic therapy as practiced today bears little resemblance to the world of Oedipal conflict, penis envy and castration anxiety that has been hilariously depicted in cartoons and Woody Allen films. Patients do not lie on a couch free-associating as an inscrutable therapist silently looks on, nor must they commit to four or five sessions a week for years on end.

Freud’s legacy is not a specific theory but rather an appreciation of the depth and complexity of mental life and a recognition that we do not fully know ourselves. It is also an acknowledgment that what we do not know is nonetheless manifested in our relationships and can cause suffering— or, in a therapy relationship, can be examined and potentially reworked.

But the modernisation of psychodynamic therapy has gone largely unnoticed. For years psychoanalysts did little to spread ideas to the world outside their own circles, and this self-imposed exile from academic research left a void, into which was born an alternative: cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT). In this newer approach, therapists focused on specific problems and readily observable thoughts and behaviours, rather than embracing the messy, emotional complexity of people’s mental lives.

Over the past decades psychologists have conducted thousands of studies that showed the effectiveness of cognitive-behaviour therapy. The approach initially seemed to promise quick cures—a promise that dovetailed with the interests of health insurers in the United States, who wanted to pay as little as possible for mental health care. CBT was portrayed as the gold standard, and many practitioners wrote off psychodynamic therapy as antiquated and unscientific. But as Jonathan Shedler (pictured left) recently showed in a research review published in American Psychologist (see reference list below), the prestigious flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, psychodynamic therapy has been not only misunderstood but vastly underestimated.

The reality is that psychodynamic therapy has proved its effectiveness in rigorous controlled studies. Not only that, but research shows that people who receive psychodynamic therapy actually continue to improve after therapy ends—presumably because the understanding they gain is global, not targetted to encapsulated, one-time problems. Thanks to misinformation and entrenched interests, however, much of this research has been overlooked.

Enhancing Self-Awareness

There is no end of cartoons spoofing psychoanalysis. But cartoons are not reality. Psychodynamic therapy is practical, and it helps free people from suffering. So what is it that makes psychodynamic therapy so powerful? By analysing tapes from hundreds of hours of actual therapy sessions, researchers have identified seven distinctive features.

Exploring emotions. Psychodynamic therapists encourage patients to explore their full emotional range—including contradictory feelings, feelings that are troubling or threatening, and feelings they may initially be unable to express. A CBT practitioner might respond to emotional difficulty with homework assignments and worksheets or seek to persuade patients that irrational thinking has skewed their feelings. Psychodynamic therapists, in contrast, are likely to invite patients to explore their feelings further.

Examining avoidances. Efforts to avoid distressing or threatening thoughts and feelings can be obvious, as when patients miss sessions or fall silent. They can also be subtle, as when people focus on facts and events to the exclusion of emotions or emphasise external circumstances instead of their own role in shaping events. Psychodynamic therapists encourage patients to examine why and how they avoid what is distressing.

Identifying recurring patterns. Sometimes people are acutely aware of painful or self-defeating patterns—like choosing romantic partners who are unavailable or sabotaging themselves when success is at hand—but feel unable to escape them. Sometimes they need help to recognize the patterns.

Discussing past experience. Related to identifying recurring patterns is the recognition that past experiences affect our experience of the present. By exploring how early experiences color present-day perceptions, psychodynamic therapists help patients free themselves from the bonds of the past and live more fully in the present.

Focusing on relationships. Psychodynamic therapists recognise that mental health problems tend to be rooted in problematic relationship patterns. For example, some people do not express their emotional needs for fear of rejection and consequently cannot get them met—a recipe for depression vulnerability.

Examining the patient/therapist relationship. In other therapies, patients’ emotional reactions to the therapist may be seen as distractions. In psycho-dynamic therapy, they are the heart of the work. This is because a person’s habitual way of being in relationships inevitably emerges in the therapy relationship as well—psychodynamic therapists call this phenomenon “transference.” For example, a person who has trouble with intimacy may struggle to open up to the therapist, and one who fears rejection may strive to be an especially “good” patient. Recognising transference offers patients a unique opportunity to rework old patterns.

Valuing fantasy life. In contrast to CBT, in which therapists may follow a predetermined agenda, psychodynamic therapists encourage patients to speak freely about whatever is on their minds. Fantasies, dreams and daydreams provide a rich source of information about their hopes, desires and fears.

All successful therapies must relieve symptoms such as anxiety or depression. But psychodynamic treatment aims for more: it focuses on building core psychological strengths— such as the capacity to have more fulfilling relationships, to make more effective use of one’s abilities, and to face life’s challenges with greater freedom and flexibility.

Scientific evidence

Initially Jonathan Shedler started delving into the research supporting psychodnamic therapy because he kept encountering patients who had been shunted from one “quick fix” treatment to another, with little or no lasting benefit. In his experience, the brief therapies promoted as “empirically supported” were often failing, despite claims that their benefits are scientifically proven.

Cognitive-behaviour therapists may also incorporate some of the seven features described above, but not to the same extent as psychodynamic therapists. Instead of encouraging patients to speak freely, they may teach exercises or skills. Instead of exploring feelings in depth, they are more likely to focus on thoughts. Instead of examining how past and present are interrelated, they are more likely to focus on current events. These approaches often do not address root problems, so patients may feel better temporarily, then continue replaying patterns that cause suffering.

Whilst trawling through the reports for his American Psychologist paper, Shedler was amazed by how strong the scientific evidence was in support of psychodynamic therapy. One of the most rigorous studies he described in his paper was led by psychologist Allan Abbass of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and published in 2006 in the prestigious Cochrane Library. Abbass examined the effectiveness of psychodynamic treatments that lasted for fewer than 40 sessions. His team compiled the results of 23 randomized controlled trials—the kind of carefully orchestrated, rigorous study that medical researchers use to test new drugs. These trials involved 1,431 patients who suffered from depression, anxiety, stress-related physical ailments and other psychological problems.

This kind of investigation is called a meta-analysis because it compiles the findings of numerous other studies. Abbass’s meta-analysis found an “effect size” of 0.97 for overall psychiatric improvement. What does that mean? Effect size measures the amount of treatment benefit. In this type of study, an effect size of 0.2 is considered small, 0.5 moderate and 0.8 large, so the benefit Abbass found is huge. Seven other meta-analyses, collectively including 160 studies and a wide range of mental health conditions, also showed substantial benefits for psychodynamic therapy. These studies included both randomised controlled trials—in which groups of patients who receive treatment are compared with groups who do not—as well as studies that evaluated the same patients before and after treatment.

In contrast, a recent (and fairly representative) meta-analysis of 33 rigorously conducted studies of cognitive-behavior therapy for depression and anxiety showed an effect size of 0.68.

Even more intriguing, Abbass’s meta-analysis also looked at patient assessments conducted nine months or more after therapy ended. The effect size grew from 0.97 to 1.51. Now, this is astonishing. In fact, six separate meta-analyses reported data from follow-up assessments, and all showed benefits that kept growing after treatment ended. This continued improvement suggests that psychodynamic therapy sets in motion psychological processes that lead to ongoing change.

Secret ingredients

Therapy is not a pill you swallow to feel better; it is a delicate and complex process that reflects the patient’s and therapist’s unique personal qualities and interactions. The relationship between therapist and patient—what therapists call the “working alliance”—is critical to success.

In several 1996 studies Pennsylvania State University psychologist Louis Castonguay and his associates found that depressed patients improved more when the working alliance was strong and when therapy put patients on a trajectory of deepening self-examination that led to awareness of previously unconscious feelings and meanings—a core principle of psychodynamic therapy.

In contrast, attempting to change negative thoughts—a foundational feature of CBT—actually predicted worse results.

And in a study in the journal Psychotherapy: Research, Theory, Practice, and Training, leading psychotherapists and researchers teamed up to ask: What happens in therapy that helps or hinders progress? Over an 18-month period, patients and therapists separately filled out cards after each session, describing memorable interactions. According to therapists and patients alike, the most helpful interventions were those that yielded emotional, not just intellectual, insight.

Of particular note—given the field’s knee-jerk approbation of cognitive-behaviour therapy—is research conducted in the 1990s by the late psychologist Enrico Jones of the University of California, Berkeley. His team analysed recordings of hundreds of therapy sessions, both psychodynamic and CBT. They found that the more the therapists drew on key psychodynamic principles such as addressing patients’ avoidances or defenses, exploring emotions and fantasies, identifying recurring themes, and discussing the therapy relationship, the better patients fared— in both psychodynamic and cognitive-behavior therapy. In contrast, the use of bed-rock CBT methods such as teaching skills and strategies or assigning homework showed no benefits.

In other words, when CBT was successful, it was largely because therapists departed from their official playbook and did the kinds of things psychodynamic therapists do.

Ultimately, there are basic truths of human psychology that most people understand intuitively. We do not fully know ourselves; the things we do not know can cause suffering; and there is benefit in self-awareness.

Psychodynamic therapy is based on these truths and has demonstrated its benefits scientifically. It’s time for academic researchers to examine their resistance to the truth.

References:

◆ Getting to Know Me. J. Shedler in Scientific American Mind, Volume 21, Number 6, pages 52-57, November/December 2010.

◆ Schopenhauer’s Porcupines: Intimacy and Its Dilemmas. Deborah Luepnitz. Basic Books, 2002.

◆ Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner’s Guide. Nancy McWilliams. Guilford Press, 2004.

◆ The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. J. Shedler in American Psychologist, Vol. 65, no. 2, pages 98–109; February/March 2010.

◆ That Was Then, This Is Now: An Introduction to Contemporary Psycho- dynamic Therapy. Jonathan Shedler. http://psychsystems.net/shedler.html