Brown2020

Biochemist Gregory Petsko gave a talk at TED forecasting how an aging population will lead to an epidemic of neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. As advancing science cures or reduces the mortality of other diseases, the last to go is the brain. More people than ever are living long enough to face cognitive decline. Is that really such bad news?

As the focus of medicine shifts to the brain, we will see new advances and discoveries in brain science. We have already learned that the brain is plastic and can continue to grow and develop even into old age—if we keep challenging ourselves to learn new things. Petsko ends his talk with what we can do about neurological disease: “use it or lose it.” An entire industry of brain fitness and brain training is emerging because baby boomers don’t want to lose their minds.

While many have expressed concerns about how immersion in digital media technology is shaping the brains of young people, not enough people are talking about the potentially positive impact of new social media on the brains of people young and old.

Social media, and the rapidly changing digital devices and tools that enable it, force us to learn something new every day. To fully participate, we need to write down our thoughts and ideas, take notes on our experiences, and share them. We need to form sentences, make decisions about which photos to keep, edit the videos down to something compact enough to share, and choose soundtracks to spice them up.

Participating in social media can be hard cognitive work. Writing a Wordpress blog post, editing a YouTube video, or touching base with 100 old friends on Facebook is like a good hard run for the brain. One of the best remedies for the neurological epidemic might be sitting right in front of you right now.

In 1853 when Giuseppe Donati invented the classical wind instrument he called the “ocarina” in his workshop in the village of Budrio, Italy, people tended to know the daily activities of their neighbors. When someone in your neighborhood played the ocarina in his or her home late at night, not only could you hear it, but you also might have recognized the player and the tune. Maybe you would join in on your own instrument.

You would probably have much less of an awareness of the world beyond the vicinity of Budrio, not much past the big city of Bologna. But you knew your neighbors: Their stories, their experiences, their music, their relationships, and their gossip all had a place in your brain.

In the next century people would gain an ever-expanding awareness of the world beyond their local community through the virtual experiences of mass media. Starting with motion pictures, then television, 24-hour news channels, and the Internet, the world would become a lot smaller. We now live in a state of continuous awareness of the entire world. At the same time, we have become less aware of and connected to the people in our own local communities.

There has been much written lately about brain training and brain plasticity, and how we are entering the brain fitness age. If our experiences with the world can change the wiring of our brains, then how is our immersion into the constant stimulation of digital media affecting us? Is our continuous experience with the larger world through digital media impairing our ability to socially connect with our neighbors?

The brain maps of our ancestors just a century ago probably included many more connections for the social network of our local community. Some of that map has probably been superseded and replaced by our current awareness of and pseudo-relationships with the celebrities of the mass media. Too many of us know all about the daily activities, relationships, and gossip of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, but do not even remember the names of our neighbors.

The Ocarina application for the iPhone from Smule is a deeply compelling example of how a new generation of social media technology could be the start of a new kind of community experience. The social media experience surely will change our brains, and I believe in a highly positive direction. Learning to play the ocarina on the iphone gives us yet another chance to learn new skills, which keeps our brains fit and growing. The brain training impact of individual practice is trivial, however, compared to the deep impact of connecting us to a new global community.

We might not know our geographical neighbors, but more than ever we can find and connect with our creative, intellectual and spiritual neighbors, anywhere in the world. And from our home late at night, we can hear them playing a new tune. And we can join them.

Phineas Gage

Growing up, I learned about Phineas Gage, the railroad construction foreman who survived an incredible accident in 1848 that shot a large iron rod through his brain, destroying the frontal lobes. Although Gage survived for another decade, his personality changed profoundly. The brain science books I read in the late 1980’s still used the over century-old example to introduce the idea that every function had a special location in the brain, and everything was hard-wired for life once you finished childhood. It turns out the hard-wired model of the brain was dead wrong, and academic opinion and dogma had led research down the wrong path for over 100 years.

Dr. Michael Merzenich, founder of Posit Science and one of the world’s leading brain scientists helped disprove the old “what you have is what you get” brain theories. In the 1980’s, Merzenich’s team developed the cochlear implant, a device that stimulates nerves in the inner ear with electrical signals that correspond to sound. With the “bionic ear”, people with profound deafness have learned to process the electrical signals and hear again. Merzenich went on to show that the brain can adapt and change based on all sorts of sensory input. How neurons wire together not only changes based on our experience with the world, but also based on our own thoughts. Posit Science applies this new knowledge of brain plasticity to brain training and brain fitness products that improve memory and processing speed to treat age-related cognitive decline.

I asked Dr. Merzenich: If I were to read just one book about the state of the art in brain science and better understand the background for Posit’s brain fitness research, what would it be? He gave me a copy of “The Brain that Changes Itself” by Norman Doidge, M.D. With compelling cases studies ranging from recovery from brain injury and stroke to overcoming learning and physical disabilities, Doidge details the radical advances in the science of brain plasticity of the past couple of decades. Now that we can measure brain activity even down to the firing of individual neurons, we can see without a doubt that the substance of our thoughts changes the wiring of our brain. The experience of the world around us—what we sense, what we do, what we concentrate on—can change the brain even into old age.

Dispelling the myth that we only stand to lose our minds over time is great news, especially to baby boomers worried about memory loss and cognitive decline as they get older. My English teacher in 7th grade used to say—to much teasing—that the brain is just like a muscle: You need to exercise it every day. It turns out she was right. The other side of brain plasticity, however, is that our brains can get set in their ways by the same principles of brain plasticity: Neurons that fire together wire together.

Dr. Merzenich described neural connections as like cow paths in a pasture. When cows continually tread the same paths over and over, the paths become ruts and the cows grow ever more fearful of treading anywhere else. Unless someone kicks the cows off the path, the ruts can become deep and permanent. Our thoughts are like the cows. We need to learn something truly new to make sure that our neurons keep growing and strengthening new connections. Merzenich showed that the biggest changes in our brains take place when we engage in “massed practice”, or efforts that demand intense concentration over a period of time. It also helps to be unique, striking, dangerous, or emotional: When the brain sees a new idea or skill as important, the brain goes into building mode and generates millions of new connections.

What struck me most about the book was the extent to which the scientific community had impeded progress in an area so obviously vital to everyone. Rather than looking at examples like Phineas Gage as evidence that the brain can adapt and change, Gage was used as an example of the opposite. For over 100 years, the academic community refused to consider the idea of brain plasticity and refused to support, encourage, publish, or even give a fair hearing to the few scientists who challenged convention. The social network of academia was much like their outdated idea of the hard-wired brain: Set in its ways with the same cows treading the same ruts.

Luckily for us, Dr. Michael Merzenich and his peers defied their academic advisors and department heads and went on to quietly pursue their brain plasticity research. Their breakthroughs and discoveries have spawned a new wave of brain research and brain training innovations that could improve the lives of millions of people for years to come.