Advances in Alzheimer's research.
Recently, the New York Times reported a fascinating study of great promise to the understanding of Alzheimer's disease, with far reaching implications to potential treatment.
Here is the link to that report:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/health/research/rare-gene-mutation-is-found-to-stave-off-alzheimers.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120712
While there are still many unanswered questions about the role of beta amyloid in the causal links that may lead to the disease, the reported research is a key.
Friday, July 13, 2012
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Too
much experience might dull our brains.
Besides its obvious advantages, of all
the disadvantages of experience, and there are many, the most frightening one
is its cumulative effect on the brain.
As growingly more activities become familiar and routine, sometimes even
automatic, there is less and less need for analysis and thought. Rather, our brains search their enormous database
and conveniently find a precedent. This
is a fast process with minimal expenditure of mental effort.
A superficial look at this situation
would not see anything wrong with it. On
the contrary, as we gain more experience we move through our days with greater
ease and efficiency. There is, of
course, always the danger that a precedent doesn't fit well the current
situation and thus we shall, practically without awareness, commit a mistake. (See my earlier blog on this issue). But on the whole the system seems to be
working quite well.
The true danger lies elsewhere. As our need for effortful thought
diminishes, so does our cognitive vitality.
A lazy brain that can manage without major and frequent challenges, by
necessity becomes a dull brain. There is
now plenty of scientific evidence about the importance of novelty and challenge
to cognitive health. Our book: "Maximum Brainpower: Challenging the Brain for Health and
Wisdom" (Shlomo Breznitz and
Collins Hemingway, Ballantine, June 2012) devotes several chapters to this
important issue. We even
understand today some of the biological mechanisms that are involved in the
benefits of cognitive challenge. Chief
among are: blood supply to oxygen
starved neurons, the establishment of new connections between neurons and their
close and distant neighbors, nerve growth factors, and neuronal regeneration.
The above argument is so critical that
I would even venture to claim that the age-related cognitive decline found
in elderly people is at least partially due to the vast experience of this
group. As we grow old we rarely find
ourselves in unfamiliar situations. We
have already seen everything, heard everything, and thought about everything in
the past, and "there is nothing new under the sun."
This is a systemic problem, since our
brains cannot not to learn from experience (see also my previous blog). Systemic problems require a deliberate
intervention and can't be left to chance events. More about that in the future.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Cry Wolf: When experience becomes
fateful.
In my previous blog,
posted simultaneously at www.mypsychologytoday.com
and at www.maximumbrainpower.com, I argued that
experience, once it leads to automatic routines, can be detrimental. The fast and efficient reactions become out
of our control and prevent us from making the necessary adjustments in slightly
altered circumstances. In this blog I
wish to discuss yet another potential danger of prior experience.
We are all familiar with
the story of the shepherd who cried wolf and subsequently paid for it
dearly. In one form or another, this
story appears in most, if not all, cultures.
The universality of this theme clearly suggests its deep rooted
wisdom. Here it is not the frequent
repetition that leads to an established routine, but rather a single, but
emotionally meaningful experience, that dramatically reduces our reaction to
similar subsequent threats. Laboratory
research suggests that a single false alarm reduces the fear reaction to the
next threat by close to fifty percent.
(Shlomo Breznitz: "Cry Wolf: The psychology of false alarms." Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1984).
The main problem seems to
be that our brains are incapable of not learning from experience. The ensuing loss of credibility that follows
a false alarm is thus practically inevitable.
Furthermore, the more frightening the initial alarm, the greater the
credibility loss following the realization that it was a false one. Needless to say, frequent exposure to threats
of hurricanes, floods, and other types of dangers, all tend to desensitize us
to future threats.
Not long ago, people knew
about an approaching hurricane when it was practically upon them. Consequently, the number of false alarms was
much smaller. These days, with
sophisticated satellite pictures, even distant, low probability events, are easily
detected and reported in the media.
However, only a very tiny number of detected hurricanes actually hit a
particular area, thus producing a large number of false alarms. The willingness of people to take
precautionary measures is much reduced by these repetitive false threats.
The ways to reduce the
negative impact of false alarms, whether in the context of natural disasters,
or in medical threats, are quite complex.
Some of them are reported in the forthcoming book by Breznitz and
Hemingway: "Maximum
brainpower: Challenging the brain for
health and wisdom". (Ballantine,
June 2012).
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Experience is a package deal.
The title of our forthcoming
book: "Maximum Brainpower: Challenging the Brain for Health and
Wisdom" (S. Breznitz and C. Hemingway, New York: Ballantine, June 2012) could just as well
have been: "The Many Dangers of
Experience." By that I do not mean
that sometimes we have to go through major negative experiences that adversely impact
our lives for years to come. Rather, it
is experience as such, irrespective of its content that often leads us into
trouble.
On the one hand, there is,
of course, no need to sing the praise of experience. After all, it is the basis of all learning,
without which we would be totally at loss when dealing with the world and its
challenges. The value of having as much
experience as possible is practically axiomatic. It is, therefore, with some trepidation that
one embarks on the road attempting to show some of its negative consequences. I
hope to address these issues in a series of blogs, of which this is the first
one.
Routines and automaticity.
The brain's exquisite
capacity to learn from experience ensures that repeated behaviors in similar
circumstances quickly become routine.
Events become anticipated and the corresponding reactions are readily
available. Once a routine has developed
it dramatically reduces the need of the brain to search for the appropriate
reactions. Thus, one of the main
advantages of learning is that it reduces the effort that the brain has to put
into analyzing a particular situation.
Instead of analysis, it can now rely on quickly searching its database
for an appropriate precedent. If more
repetition takes place, the routine can become automatic. Automatic behavior is fast and saves a lot of
cognitive effort. At the same time, our
control over our actions is also affected, since automaticity reduces
awareness. We do not know anymore why we
act in a certain way and cannot very much behave otherwise.
This is often seen in the
behavior of experts. Their database of
experience is so vast that when faced with a particular situation they can
automatically come up with a "solution", without being able to tell
us how they reached it. In fact, they do
not know themselves why was it that an idea, usually an appropriate one,
suddenly popped up in their heads. That
is one of the reasons why experts are not so good in teaching their
expertise. Their chances of sharing
their wisdom are much better when they are good at what they do, but not yet
experts. In other words, while they
still need to think about their actions, rather than relying exclusively on
automatic, experience based responses.
But what about most of us,
who are not experts, but still rely progressively more on previous encounters
with similar situations? There is no
guarantee that the brain will come up with the best solution to a problem,
particularly since though similar, situations are rarely, if ever,
identical. From the moment we abdicate
conscious analysis in favor of an automatic routine, we are at the mercy of the
brain's ability to distinguish between nuances and give them sufficient
weight.
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