The New Brain

By Richard Restak, M.D.

Published by Rodale Books

October 2004; $14.95US/$21.95CAN; 1-59486-054-8

The New Brain is the story of technology and biology converging to influence the evolution of the human brain. Once considered a mysterious, hidden organ locked within our skulls, modern brain science now provides us with insights about the brain that only a few decades ago would have been considered the stuff of science fiction. We can now study the brain and how it functions as we take a test, practice a craft, experience an emotion, make a decision, or even tell a lie.

In The New Brain, Dr. Richard Restak guides us through the frontiers of modern brain science and offers cautionary but also optimistic thoughts on the direction of his work. He says that in the era of the New Brain, it will be necessary to tread carefully, lest we imprison ourselves in concepts that diminish, rather than enhance, our freedom.

Author

Dr. Richard Restak, a neurologist and neurophyschiatrist, is clinical professor of neurology at George Washington Medical Center in Washington, D.C. He has written the companion books to several PBS specials on brain function, including The Secret Life of the Brain. His last book, Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's Potential was a bestseller. An engaging science commentator, Restak has appeared on NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, the Today Show, Good Morning America, and the Discovery Channel. He lives and practices in Washington, D.C.

Excerpt

The following is an excerpt from the book The New Brain: How the Modern Age is Rewiring Your Mind

by Richard Restak, M.D.

Published by Rodale Books; October 2004; $14.95US/$21.95CAN; 1-59486-054-8

Copyright © 2004 Richard Restak, M.D.

The Expert's Brain Engages Differently from the Amateur's

So what's going on within the brain? The expert -- as opposed to the amateur -- golfer, by mentally attending to extremely subtle aspects of his performance during practice sessions, has successfully transferred this knowledge into working memory within his frontal lobes. Later, when under pressure, his brain concentrates on one or more components of his learned procedural skills. For him, task and not ego remain at the forefront of mental activity. This focused approach immunizes the expert player against "choking" under the intense pressure of competitive play.

The amateur, on the other hand, falls victim to a well-established relationship involving arousal, attention, and performance. In a state of heightened anxiety and/or arousal the amateur turns his attention inward and becomes self-focused rather than task-focused. This disrupts the execution of previously learned subunits of performance, resulting in choking under pressure. As Thomas Carr, a psychologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, explains, "Pressure-induced attention to well-learned components of a proceduralized skill disrupts execution."

Carr is an expert on the factors that govern choking. In essence, he's discovered that it's best to not let self-consciousness get in the way when carrying out a well-learned performance -- an idea often expressed by performers who have learned to relax under pressure rather than become self-conscious.

"My approach to performing is: The time to be careful is when you prepare. But, in performing, I say, take a chance, go for it," says concert violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg.

Theories of "flow" and "inner tennis" are based on enacting similar principles: Don't let self-consciousness and self-evaluation of personal performance interfere with just doing it -- bringing off a winning performance.

In terms of brain performance, "just doing it" involves the smooth non-self-conscious transfer of learned actions from working memory, stored in the frontal lobes, to the premotor and motor areas that transform the working memory into those effective, winning plays that result from thousands of hours of practice on the part of the performers. Recall from chapter 1 that this is essentially the process Leslie Ungerleider demonstrated with fMRI scans of volunteers who learned a simple sequence of finger movements. Thus, both comparatively straightforward activities and highly sophisticated ones, like learning to become a star athlete or musician, involve taking advantage of the brain's plasticity in order to set up the necessary programs for excellence.

The 10-Year Rule

On the basis of research,

Anders Ericsson has formulated what he calls the 10-year rule: "The highest levels of performance and achievement appear to require at least around 10 years of intense prior preparation," he says. Moreover, he believes that anyone who puts in the necessary time can eventually achieve prodigy-level performance.

French psychologist Alfred Binet provided a famous demonstration that anybody can become a prodigy. He pitted two math prodigies against three university students and four cashiers at the Paris department store, Bon Marche. While the prodigies easily outperformed the students, they lagged behind the performance of the cashiers on such challenges as multiplying as rapidly as possible 7,286 by 5,397. How was this possible?

The cashiers averaged 14 years of job experience, which in those days included multiplying a wide range of quantities (lengths of cloth, weights of food, numbers of items) by a wide range of unit prices. On the basis of their daily experience over many years in performing these complicated calculations, the cashiers were able to outperform two prodigies who made their living giving public demonstrations of their calculating prowess.

Both the cashiers and Rudiger Gamm provide partial confirmation of Ericsson's point: Practice hard enough and long enough and you too can become a prodigy. Gamm didn't display any signs of enhanced mathematical ability until, starting at age 20, he started devoting at least four hours a day to performing calculations and memorizing theorems, formulas, and other mathematical facts. Further, his expertise is limited; he doesn't perform with exceptional aptitude in any area other than mathematics.

But Gamm also differs from Ericsson's profile: He reached his prodigious powers in less than 10 years. And many other examples can be sited of people who required less than a decade to achieve superior, even prodigy-level, performance. Mozart, for example, wrote his first composition at age five and the next year was publicly performing on violin and piano.

Ericsson has turned up a possible explanation why some people can achieve genius-level performances in less than 10 years. "The key is to increase one's control over each component of the performance." He came to this conclusion after studying the practice habits of the 10 most highly regarded golfers of the twentieth century. Each exhibited an intense concentration, leading to heightened awareness of each of the many components of their actions coupled with an ability to adapt in ways that led to higher levels of control. In order to alter subtle aspects of their performance, many of them studied videotapes of past tournaments.

While motor and premotor programs can be established at any age, training during childhood and early stages of development yield especially powerful results. For example -- and contrary to popular opinion -- perfect pitch (the ability to name individual tones) isn't necessarily inherited but can be acquired by average children between three and five years of age if given appropriate training. The development of perfect pitch is accompanied by structural brain changes that fail to appear in the brains of musicians lacking that sensibility. Thanks to plasticity, brain changes also occur as musical talent matures. Further, the resulting changes vary depending on the instrument selected by the performer and the performer's practice patterns. For musicians who play stringed instruments, to take one example, the size and elaboration of cortical area in the brain given over to the fingers, especially the little finger of the left hand, correlates with the age that the person begins musical training.

Future research with fMRI and other technologies are likely to reveal individual "signatures:" patterns of brain activity that vary from person to person and perhaps even from one musical composition to another. The discovery of such individualized patterns will enable performers and their teachers to correlate enhanced musical skills with changes in brain organization and function.

For instance, the brain of a musician who achieves mastery over her instrument frequently undergoes reorganization so that the musical center -- the area activated when playing or listening to music -- shifts from the right hemisphere (the usual site in amateur musicians) to the left hemisphere. By measuring this change, neuroscientists can presently divide professional-level performers from lesser-skilled ones simply by looking at their respective PET scans. As a further development of this technology, brain scans coupled with electrical measurements will one day provide a flow diagram of the brain's activation patterns while a musician plays a specific composition.

And such fine-grained analyses won't be confined to music. As the technology becomes smaller and more portable, neuroscientists will be able to see what's going on in the brains of expert performers in many fields as they practice their crafts.

Copyright © 2004 Richard Restak, M.D.

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