Joe: My doctor told me to give up drinking, smoking, and fatty foods.

Sam: What will you do?

Joe: I think I’ll give up my doctor.

I try not to get too excited about memory benefits of supplements, because too often the claims are not substantiated by studies that are well controlled and peer reviewed. I now think resveratrol may be one of the few supplements that benefits brain function.

When I wrote my first blog on research on resveratrol benefits for brain function and memory, there were over 2,000 scientific papers.[1]Don't worry; I am only going to tell you about a few studies.

Resveratrol is an active ingredient in red wine. This compound has been credited for explaining why red-wine drinkers in France, who drink more wine than most people, are healthier than would be predicted by their lifestyle of little exercise and eating lots of cheese. The problem is most studies suggest you would have to drink a 100 or more glasses of red wine a day to get much resveratrol effect (and that effect would obviously be negated by a toxic dose of alcohol). An obviously more healthful choice is the highly concentrated pill forms of resveratrol that are now on the market.

Most of the protective biological actions associated with resveratrol have been associated with its scavenger properties for free radicals and the protective effects that it confers on the heart and diabetes. 

One important study comes from a diabetes research group in Brazil recently who reported a beneficial effect of resveratrol on diabetic rats.[2]Resveratrol (in a modest rat dose of 10 and 20 mg per kilogram per day for 30 days) prevented the impairment of memory induced by diabetes. Resveratrol may be protecting neuron terminals that diabetes can damage. An earlier study by another group showed resveratrol improved glucose metabolism and promoted longevity in diabetic mice.

Another benefit of resveratrol is the anti-oxidant property. The brain produces more free-radical damage than other organs, because it burns so much oxygen. Compared with other organs, the brain has especially low levels of antioxidant defense enzymes. 

One recent study has revealed resveratrol had protective effects against brain damage caused by a chemical that kills acetylcholine neurons. Injection of this toxin into the brain of rats impaired their memory performance in two kinds of maze tasks. The impairment was significantly reduced by repeated injection of resveratrol (10 and 20 mg/kg) per day for 25 days, beginning four days before the toxin injection.[3]

Another recent study examined effects on working memory in mice fed a resveratrol-supplemented diet for four weeks before being injected with a cytokine to induce inflammation and accelerate aging. Resveratrol significantly reduced memory impairment in the aged group, but not in the young adults[4]. The lack of benefit in young adults was a little misleading, in that there was a "ceiling effect" in that the young adults were not impaired by the cytokine injection.

 The practical issue for us is whether resveratrol will help cognitive function in humans, especially healthy humans. It seems likely because other substances that have strong anti-oxidant properties seem to improve memory capability. Because animal studies have shown promise for resveratrol in preventing or treatment several different conditions associated with aging, several human clinical trials have been initiated.[5]

 An impressive new study of older humans, male and female, has just been reported.[6]Twenty-three healthy, but overweight people completed 6 months of daily resveratrol intake (200 mg ― the commercial brand I take has 300 mg/capsule). A paired control group got placebo pills. A double-blind design assured that neither the subjects nor the experimenters knew which individuals were in each group during data processing. Memory tests of word recall revealed significant improvement in the resveratrol group. Resveratrol also increased brain-scan measures of functional connectivity, which identified linked neural activity between the hippocampus and several areas of cerebral cortex.

Because others had shown that resveratrol increased insulin sensitivity in humans, these authors examine several markers important to diabetes. Resveratrol decreased the standing levels of sugar-bound hemoglobin, a standard marker for glucose control.  

What foods besides red grapes have resveratrol? The most likely other sources you would eat or drink are blueberries, cranberries, and peanuts. It is not likely that you could drink or eat enough of such substances to get enough resveratrol to do much good. Because of the scientifically documented benefits of resveratrol, highly concentrated supplements are now on the market (I have been taking it for a couple of years). I haven't given up my two glasses of red wine each day, but I have started taking one of the supplements. I haven't seen any reports that high doses of resveratrol are toxic.

---

[1] http://thankyoubrain.blogspot.com/2010/04/resveratrol-red-wine-magic-chemical.htmlApril 4, 2010.

[2] Schmatz R, et al. (2009). Resveratrol prevents memory deficits and the increase in acetylcholinesterase activity in streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats. Eur J Pharmacol. 2009 May 21;610(1-3):42-8. Epub 2009 Mar 19.

[3] Kumar, A. et al. 2007. Neuroprotective effects of resveratrol against intracerebroventricular colchicine-induced cognitive impairment and oxidative stress in rats. Pharmacology.79 (1): 17-26. DOI: 10.1159/000097511

[4] Abraham, J., and Johnson, R. W. 2009. Consuming a diet supplemented with resveratrol reduced infection-related neuroinflammation and deficits in working memory in aged mice. Rejuvenation research. 12 (6): 445-453.  DOI: 10.1089/rej.2009.0888

[5]Smoliga, J. M. et al. (2011). Resveratrol and health – a comprehensive review of human clinical trials.  Mol. Nutrition Food Res. 55: 1129-1141

[6] Witte, A. V., et al. (2014) Effects of resveratrol on memory performance, hippocampal functional connectivity, and glucose metabolism in healthy older adults. J. Neuroscience. 34 23): 7862-7870.

"Memory Medic's latest book is for seniors (Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain. Memory Is the Canary in Your Brain's Coal Mine," available in inexpensive e-book format at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/496252.  See also his recent book, "Mental Biology. The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate" (Prometheus).

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness:” some people might argue that the U.S. Constitution endorses hedonism, and indeed many politicians want to ignore or get rid of the Constitution, but not necessarily because of hedonism. We should not be dismissive about encouraging people to pursue happiness. Happiness can be good for your brain. Depression is surely bad for your brain.

Positive mood states promote more effective thinking and problem solving. A recent scholarly report[1] reviews the literature demonstrating that positive mood broadens the scope of attentiveness, enhances semantic associations over a wider range, improves task shifting, and improves problem-solving capability. The review also documents the changes in brain activation patterns induced by positive mood in subjects while solving problems. Especially important is the dopamine signaling in the prefrontal cortex.

Published studies reveal that a variety of techniques are used to momentarily manipulate mood. These have included making subjects temporarily happy or sad by asking subjects to recall emotionally corresponding past experiences or to view film clips or hear words that trigger happy or sad feelings,

The effect of happiness on broadened attentiveness arises because the brain has better cognitive flexibility and executive control, which in turn makes it easier to be more flexible and creative. Happy problem solvers are better able to select and act upon useful solutions that otherwise never consciously surface. Happiness reduces perseverative tendencies for errant problem-solving strategies. The broadened attentiveness, for example, allows people to attend to more stimuli, both in external visual space and in internal semantic space, which in turn enables more holistic processing. For example, in one cited study, experimenters manipulated subjects’ momentary mood and then measured performance on a task involving matching of visual objects based on their global versus local shapes. Happy moods yielded better global matching.

Other experiments report broader word association performance when subjects are manipulated to be happier. For example, subjects in a neutral mood would typically associate the word “pen” as a writing tool and would associate it with words like pencil or paper. But positive mood subjects would think also of pen as an enclosure and associate it with words like barn or pigs. This effect has been demonstrated with practical effect in physicians, who, when in a happy mood, thought of more disease possibilities in making a differential diagnosis.
The review authors reported their own experiment on beneficial happy mood effects on insightfulness, using a task in which subjects were given three words and asked to think of a fourth word that could be combined into a compound word or phrase. For example, an insightful response to “tooth, potato, and heart” might be “sweet tooth, sweet potato, and sweetheart.” Generating such insight typically requires one to suppress dominant “knee jerk” responses such as associating tooth with pain and recognize that pain does not fit potato while at the same time becoming capable of switching to non-dominant alternatives.

Other cited experiments showed that happy mood improved performance on “Duncker’s candle task.”  Here, subjects are given a box of tacks, a candle, and a book of matches, and are asked to attach a candle to the wall in a way that will burn without dripping wax on the floor. Subjects in a happy mood were more able to realize that the box could be a platform for the candle when the box is tacked to the wall.  

Such effects of happy moods seem to arise from increased neural activity in the prefrontal cortex and cingulate cortex, areas that numerous prior studies have demonstrated as crucial parts of the brain’s executive control network. Similar effects have been observed in EEG studies. Other research suggests that the happiness effect is mediated by increased release of dopamine in the cortex that serves to up-regulate executive control.
The review authors described a meta-analysis of 49 positive-psychology manipulation studies showing that momentary happiness is readily manipulated by such strategies as deliberate optimistic thinking, increased attention to and memory of happy experiences, practicing mindfulness and acceptance, and increasing socialization. The effect occurs in most normal people and even in people with depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. Biofeedback training, where subjects monitor their own fMRI scans or EEGs, might be an even more effective way for people to train themselves to be happier.

The main point is that people can be as happy as they choose to be.

For more on how positive mood influences memory ability, see my new book, Memory Power 101 (http://skyhorsepublishing.com ). Memory Medic's latest book explores the biology of mind. See "Mental Biology. The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate" (Prometheus).

[1] Subramaniam, K. and Vinogradov, S. (2013). Improving the neural mechanisms of cognition through the pursuit of happiness. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 7 August. Doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00452

What do you think is the major determinant of whether our children excel in school? IQ? Good teachers? Good schools? Good standards and curricula? No, I say it is the students' motivation, or just plain grit. Other teachers think so too.

Education reporter, Libby Nelson, calls attention to the issue of grit in student learning achievement. Teachers and parents sometimes put too much emphasis on intelligence, when the more typical problem in education is that students don't try hard enough and are not sufficiently persistent in trying to achieve excellence.

Indeed, excellence is not even a goal for most students. Many students just want to do the minimum required to pass tests. A few students don't care at all. They just drop out. One student told a teacher friend of mine, "I don't need to learn this stuff. Somebody will always take care of me."

Nelson points to evidence of grit's importance with these examples:

·         West Point cadets who scored highest on a scale of grit were more likely to complete the grueling first summer of training.

·         National spelling bee contestants with more grit ranked higher than other contestants of the same age who had less grit.

·         College admissions officers know how important grit is (more important than SAT tests) but they don't know how to measure it other than grades, which of course may be inflated and inaccurate indicators of grit.

Clearly motivation is essential. I regard motivation as the cornerstone of what I call the "learning skills cycle." Learning begins with being motivated to learn, and successful completion of every step in the cycle strengthens motivation. However, every step in this cycle (organization, attentiveness, understanding/synthesis, memory, and problem solving/creativity) requires a degree of grit—the more, the better.

As applied to specific learning tasks, grit is central to all the ideas in the learning skills cycle. In the case of memory, for example, the well-known strategy of deliberate practice requires disciplined grit. Students diligently need to use established memory principles in a systematic way. This includes constructing a systematic learning strategy that includes organizing the learning materials in an effective way, intense study focus in short periods, elimination of interferences, use of mnemonic devices, and frequent rehearsals repeated in spaced intervals. Learning success depends on mental discipline and persistence.

Students differ enormously in their level of grit. It would be nice if we knew how to teach grit. Surely, parental influence is central. Parents lacking in grit are unlikely to model or teach it to their children. Some schools, especially private schools, teach grit by having high expectations and programs that help students discover the positive benefits that come from having more grit. One of those benefits is confidence, because grit promotes achievement and achievement develops confidence.

Confidence in the ability to learn is necessary for a student to try hard to learn. Here is the area where teaching skills count most: showing students they can learn difficult material and thereby building the confidence to take on greater learning challenges.

Students who have passionate goals are much more likely to invest effort and persistence in doing what is needed to achieve those goals. It is unrealistic to expect grade-school children to have well-formulated career goals. But certainly by early high-school, students should be forming specific lifetime goals. What a career goal is probably does matter as much as having one in the first place. Achieving a goal, regardless of whether it is later abandoned or not, teaches a youngster that grit is necessary for the achievement. The student learns that grit has a payoff.

Grit may not always lead to excellence in students with innate limited abilities. But grit allows such students to "become all they can be," as the Army recruitment slogan claims. Moreover, the benefits of grit perpetuate beyond success at any one learning challenge. Learning anything requires physical and chemical changes in the brain needed to store the positive attitudes that come from learning success and the learning content itself. In other words, the more you know, the more you can know.

Source:

http://www.vox.com/2014/10/9/6835197/grit-kipp-noncognitive-skills-duckworth-teaching

"Memory Medic's new book has just been released: "Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain." Smashwords.com

As 2014 year comes to an end, I will continue the Brain Posts tradition of highlighting the Top Ten most viewed posts for the year.

It is always informative to find the posts that generate the most site visits. I am surprised at some of the posts that make the list and at some of the posts that do not.

Here are the posts making the list for 2014 beginning with number 10. Clicking on the post title will link you to the full post.

Naptime Stories Boost Word Learning in Children

This post summarized an interesting study of reading and word memory retention in children. It highlights the importance of sleep for memory consolidation and retention. The time immediately proceeding naps is an important time to use for teaching.

The Genetics of Religious Belief

In April, I reviewed some recent brain research related to religion and religious belief. The number 9 most viewed post examined a twin study of religious belief. This study found important genetic contributions to adult religious belief and attendance. Apparently, genetic brain wiring contributes to our later religious affiliation.

The Social Brain: Weeking Reading Links 

In 2014 I started posting links to a list of abstracts I felt were important. These came from my PubMed searches on specific topics. Some abstracts were later give a full post but many did not. The Weekend Reading links on the Social Brain was popular and ended up number 8 on the Top Ten list.

Is Insomnia Relief Just a Mouse Click Away?

The number 7 ranked post for 2014 was a review of an internet-based cognitive behavioral treatment for insomnia. This study supported the value of this approach and holds the potential to make CBT treatments more accessible and potential more affordable. Look for more studies of using internet and mobile health approaches for the treatment of common medical conditions.

Acute Brain Response to Exercise in Healthy Adults

There are both acute and chronic effects of exercise on the brain. The number 6 most viewed post this year highlighted a study of acute effects of exercise on healthy adults. The study used advanced brain imaging techniques and demonstrated changes in the pattern of blood flow distribution with exercise. These changes may contribute to the known beneficial effects of exercise on brain plasticity.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I will post the top five viewed posts next week.

Photo of angel Christmas ornament is from the author's files.

Follow the author on Twitter WRY999.

In response to the trend to abolish teaching of cursive in schools, about a year ago I posted an article on what I thought were the developmental benefits of handwriting (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201303/why-writing-hand-could-make-you-smarter). That post has generated over 230 comments.

Now there is evidence that handwriting of lecture notes, compared to typing on a laptop, improves learning by college students. Following up on prior studies that indicated relative ineffectiveness of taking notes by laptop, researchers Pam Meuller and Daniel Oppenheimer provide clear evidence that handwritten note-taking produces better learning in college students.

They reported three experiments that compared the efficacy of college students taking notes by handwriting or with a lap top. Those who used handwritten notes that they studied later scored significantly higher than students using laptops, including fleet typists who took vastly more copious notes. Handwriters took fewer notes overall with less verbatim recording. There are many possible explanations, beginning with the "less is more" idea in which too much information produces cognitive overload. Notably, when the typing students were told to avoid verbatim notes, they still did it. This suggests that there is something about typing that leads to mindless processing.  Handwritten notes involve more thought, re-framing, and re-organization, all of which promote better understanding and retention. The manual act of handwriting requires more engagement with the subject matter. Finally, handwritten notes capitalize on the use of drawings and of personalized spatial layout of the notes. Memorization involves not only what the information is, but where it is spatially located.

Added note: Readers interested in education are invited to join our Neuro-education group on Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=4883556&trk=my_groups-tile-grp)

Mueller, P. A., and Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science. 23 April. DOI: 10.1177/0956797614524581. http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/22/0956797614524581

The chart below is telling: SAT scores have been flat for over 40 years while education spending has increased 140%. Though this is Texas, I have seen similar data for other states.

 At the national level, federal government educational spending has skyrocketed, with no comparable improvement in educational outcomes.

 Clearly, the data debunk the supposition that more money is needed to fix education. What about changing standards and curricula? What have we got to show for all the reforms in the last 40 years such as Head Start, New Math, Nation at Risk, Goals 2000, Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, charter schools, Next Generation Science Standards, and Common Core?

Could it be that we are trying to apply right answers to the wrong problems? If money, revised standards and curricula, and high-stakes testing are not the real problems, what is?

I think the real problem is that students generally lack learning competencies. Amazingly, schools tell students more about what to learn than how to learn. I think that such schooling has it backwards. In my view, the main goal of school should be to motivate students to learn and to teach them how to do it. Good schooling also ought to cultivate good academic taste, that is, the ability to distinguish principle from fact, useful information from trivia, logical analysis from specious argumentation, and intellectual excellence from superstition, myth, and falsehood. With that accomplished most everything else will fall into place.

What do I mean by "learning competencies?" In this post, I will just identify the competencies needed for effective learning as follows:

Organization

Understanding

Synthesis

Memory

Application

Creativity

In a follow-on post, I will explain what I think teachers can do to promote student development of these learning competencies. The corollary is that Colleges of Education need to be doing more research on these competencies and provide more instruction to pre-service teachers on how to teach learning competencies. In short, what is the smart way to address the real problem in education?

Dr. Klemm has a new book, Mental Biology, The New Science of How Brain and Mind Relate. See review: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/mental-biology-klemm

To follow up my prior post on jazz, I just read a scientific report published last week that suggests that training of musical creativity in jazz causes long-lasting changes in brain function. In this study, musicians completed a questionnaire that allowed researchers to know the extent of each subject's prior classical and jazz training. Functional MRI brain scans were taken with subjects lying down on their back with a piano keyboard on their lap, playing improvisations with their right hand. Ear phones allowed players to hear their improvisations.

Brain scan showed distinct activity differences in the jazz musicians and that difference was greater in those with longer jazz histories. Past improvisation experience increased the functional bilateral connectivity of the dorsal premotor cortex, the pre-supplemental motor areas of cortex, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortices. Decreased activity connectivity was noted in executive control frontal-parietal areas. Thus, it would seem that creativity training, in jazz at least, changes the brain at a network level. Presumably, these connectivity changes were created by past histories in learning jazz and no doubt facilitated improvisation by automating some of the neural functions needed to perform it.

How do we interpret the decreased activity in executive-control areas of cortex? Multiple other brain-scan studies in other contexts have indicated that as a brain becomes proficient in a certain task, apparently less neural tissue is needed to perform the task. Decreased activity can therefore indicate task mastery.
Scientists have known for a decade or more that learning and memory in general change both brain anatomy and function. Such changes are typically linked to the neural requirements for performing specific kinds of tasks. This study of classical and jazz musicians follows on prior studies showing that musical training does change the brain. For example, violin players have enhanced neural activity in the motor cortex controlling hand movements. The relative size of the left and right motor cortex differs between piano and string players.

The importance of this present study is that it demonstrates that the brain change depends on the kind of musical training and appears to be selective for improvisation. Moreover, musical improvisational training affects more than just control over movements and extends to cognitive functions needed to improvise. Improvisation is a creative act that apparently recruits cortical circuits to support it and in the process rewires the brain to facilitate improvisation.

Improvisation relies heavily on memory of previously learned musical patterns and implementation strategies. Jazz players call this "musical vocabulary." Thus, jazz players have to become musicians first, then learn how to improvise. Because memory is a "process in a population, not a thing in a place," neural representation of musical vocabulary is probably widely distributed, and the brain must learn how to recruit connections from multiple brain areas and integrate them in real time in the prefrontal and movement-control parts of the brain, which apparently generate creative ideas and implement them.


Source:

Pinho, A. L. et al. (2014) Connecting to create: expertise in musical improvisation is associated with increased functional connectivity between premotor and prefrontal areas. J. Neuroscience. 34 (18): 6156-6163. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4769.13-2014.

                         Memory Medic has a new book being distributed by Random House: 

                         Mental Biology. The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate.

I just got back from my second trip to the Katy Jazz festival, run by a school district just West of Houston. It was time for a jazz fix. You see, I am a jazz fan, and though not compulsive, I do need to dash occasionally to New Orleans or go to a festival like the one in Katy.

How does one become a jazz fan, particularly somebody like me who doesn't know much about music and who can't stand 200-year-old church music or the new mind-numbing songs in so many "contemporary" services. For Texas students who live in enlightened districts like Katy ISD, jazz appreciation starts as early as middle school in the larger schools that spin off jazz training from their marching and concert bands.

My fanhood began in the summer when I turned 19. After finishing my freshman year at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, a fraternity brother talked me into spending the summer in Hollywood, where his family had moved. He steered me around all the clubs and concert venues, and I saw in person jazz icons like Stan Kenton, Cab Calloway, Gerry Mulligan, Louie Belson, Chet Baker, Shelley Mann, and Shorty Rogers. My buddy and I would even spend a whole evening listening to Dave Brubeck and Joe Morello for the price of one beer, which we managed to take three hours to milk.

At first, I thought what I was hearing was just unstructured noise. My buddy explained what was going on, usually opening with the tune's melody line, then improvising on that melody line, and then gracefully finding the way back home to the tune's opening statement. And I didn't need to know musical details to appreciate the rhythms that flowed through my body like honey on a warm biscuit.

I am since learning a lot at the Katy festival where some 12 schools showed off their jazz bands and subsumed combos. The festival also featured sets from eight professional combos. But the really important part is that the student groups are given critiques by professional musicians, many of whom are or have been college music professors. The critiques are miked so the audience can hear. From such instruction I am learning that really big things are happening in the brain's mental biology as one listens to or plays jazz.

First the listening: the most obvious effect is stress reduction. Stress, as I have explained in early posts, is the arch-enemy of memory ability. In my case, I put my West Coast jazz experience to good use in mastering the veterinary curriculum at Auburn. While classmates were beating their brains up trying to learn all the stuff involved in veterinary medicine (more than in human medicine), I spent a lot of my time listening to jazz records. And I still beat all but four classmates in grades.

Listening is also fun, probably less so than playing jazz, but still a lot of fun. In San Antonio, Jim Cullum's band used to be called the "Happy Jazz Band." Think about where jazz came from. It is uniquely an American innovation, beginning as emotional relief for slaves who found comfort in the blues, which eventually spawned jazz in its happier forms. Wholesome fun promotes happiness. Happy brains learn better. They can also often live longer (remember my blog on the long life span of so many stand-up comedians). Think about Preservation Hall in New Orleans. There and elsewhere around the country, many jazz artists are still performing sophisticated music in their 80s.

 As for mental biology, a jazz player experiences enormous mental stimulation, Even as a listener, after a concert my untrained brain churns out a continuous stream of improvisation in my mind's ear that can include multiple instruments that I have no idea how to play. A player has to engage the brain in multiple ways that classical musicians do not. First, there are added technical requirements, such as playing blue notes, swinging eighth notes, and unusual time signatures like 12/8 and 5/4 or complex African or Latin rhythms.  Then there is the huge challenge of improvisation, which is basically composing on the fly. When improvising, there is a safety net of knowing the proper chord structure and melody, but players have to have a huge musical vocabulary and realize in milliseconds what new notes will fit. They also have to listen hard so they can interact properly with what others in the band are playing. The "call and response" paradigm in jazz is actually musical conversation. I can't think of anything more mentally demanding, especially for youngsters in early stages of learning music. Early middle school is a particularly time-sensitive period for mental development, and I suspect that middle school jazz bands can have disproportionate beneficial effects on brain development.

Learning jazz may be the ultimate in training young minds to think critically and creatively. An earlier blog post after my fist trip to the Katy festival focused on the exceptional teaching skills of jazz band directors. Many teachers protested, saying in essence that anybody can teach good students. Regular teachers get stuck with so many underachievers. Maybe we should consider the possibility that jazz-band students are such high achievers because their jazz training has trained their brains in invaluable learning capacities for hand-eye coordination, the ability to memorize, discipline, patience, critical and creative thinking, high-speed intellectual engagement with the ideas of others, and self-actualization and confidence.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence that mental challenge develops new connections in the brain and with it, new biological capabilities. In jazz, such mental enrichment enhances the ability to memorize, not only directly in terms of having to learn a large musical vocabulary and the rules of jazz, but also in terms of basic mental biology. My new book, Mental Biology, explains some of the basic ideas.

Scientific and philosophical fashion these days is to claim that humans have no free will. That is, we are basically biological robots, driven to our thoughts, beliefs, and actions by unconscious forces in our brain. Our genes and our experiential programming control everything we do. Free will is an illusion.

So goes the assertions of a clutch of activist scientists, such as Richard, Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Wegner, who have probably gotten rich off their best-seller books arguing the case against free will.

Religion is also nailed to the cross, so to speak. Ideas of moral responsibility originate in views of right and wrong, and every religion expects that followers have the capacity to make the correct choices. Their free-will capacity makes them morally responsible. I think it is no accident that most of the illusory free-will activists I have read are also activists for atheism. Otherwise, their position would be cognitively dissonant.

Legal issues arise, as stated by the legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen, who wrote in The New York Times Magazine, “Since all behavior is caused by our brains, wouldn’t this mean all behavior could potentially be excused? … The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility.”

There are serious social consequences attached to accepting the premise of illusory free will. One is the obvious conclusion one should draw that consciously willed effort to improve oneself or lot in life is futile.

Another consequence of such thinking is the need to proclaim, as many scientists now do, that consciousness cannot do anything. Freely chosen actions would have to come from a conscious brain. Therefore, the conscious brain must not be the source of actions that occur during consciousness. Consciousness is thus seen as audience watching a movie of what is happening.

Of course, the futility argument is not evidence for free will. It is however, a practical reason to believe in it, for otherwise people would not make much effort to change and improve themselves. They would otherwise become intellectually and emotionally paralyzed by such nihilism.

This is not the place to elaborate the research that neuroscientists claim provides the basis for asserting illusory free will. I do that in my just-released book, Mental Biology: The New Science of How Brain and Mind Relate. I point out the uncontrolled variables in the experiments conducted in the 1980s that purported to show there is no free will. Subsequent reports that confirmed those findings had the same poorly controlled variables. Moreover, there are some new studies using better designs that show that the original findings do not withstand scrutiny.

So, is there a reasoned counter-argument? Eddy Nahmias points out that "the sciences of the mind do give us good reasons to think that our minds are made of matter. But to conclude that consciousness or free will is thereby an illusion is too quick. It is like inferring from discoveries in organic chemistry that life is an illusion just because living organisms are made up of non-living stuff."

In my new book, I have a large section defending the position that consciousness IS able to do things, among them exerting at least a significant modicum of freely chosen thoughts and actions. One line of argument, which is in line with the learning and memory theme of this blog site, is memorization. It is true that the brain is forming memories of a day's events while you sleep and obviously unconscious. But the initial encoding and working memory are performed while you are conscious. Moreover, conscious use of mnemonic devices profoundly enhances the formation of memory, as I will demonstrate in future posts about how "memory athletes" do such astonishing working-memory feats as learning the sequence of a shuffled deck of cards in a minute and a half or memorizing 80-digit number strings. Conscious use of mnemonics is required. Using these mnemonics is challenging, requiring intense selective attention and strongly will executive functions. You obviously cannot do such things when you are unconscious.

Skeptics will say that such feats are all driven and performed by the unconscious mind and that consciousness is just around to realize it has happened. But consciousness is also around to recite what was memorized. Try that in your sleep.

Sources:

Klemm, W. R. (2014). Mental Biology. The New Science of How Brain and Mind Relate. New York: Prometheus.

Nahmias, Eddy (2011). Is neuroscience the death of free will? New York Times. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/is-neuroscience-the-death-of-free-will/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

In the last couple of columns I have been explaining how stereotyping affects performance. For example if seniors buy into the stereotype that they are supposed to have failing memories they are more likely to have failing memories. How you identify yourself (young, old, male, female, and so on) is a key factor in how you will respond to advertising. Indeed, self-identity creates all kinds of bias, from the sports team you root for to the candidate you want to become President.

Marketing research has established that most consumer decisions are memory based. You buy something because you remember a persuasive ad for it. Thus, advertisers seek to find ways to get consumers to remember their products and services. One obvious way is to repeat the ad over and over. But that costs a lot of money.

One advertising strategy is to target consumers with promotions that capitalize on social identity. The idea is that you will prefer a product that is pitched to your identity. No doubt you have seen the TV ads on reverse mortgages, where a clearly older celebrity makes the pitch. You are supposed to be persuaded by the ad because you can identify with such a person. He’s a senior, you’re a senior. He’s a star, and you can imagine how great it might feel if you were one. In other words, your personal identity is wrapped up in how responsive you are to a given ad. This same principle is at work in ads that use beautiful models to sell clothes and star athletes to sell athletic gear.

Social identity can be threatened when the ad presents events, information, or choices in a way that is inconsistent or negative. A senior, for example, would not be persuaded to consider reverse mortgages if the salesman was a young and gorgeous female model. Recent studies show that these kinds of cognitive disconnect interfere with how consumers encode and remember advertising messages. Advertisers certainly don’t want to create identity-threat ads because consumers will be automatically motivated to forget the ads.

The process of motivated forgetting is being explored by Hong Kong University marketing professor, Amy Dalton and her colleague, Li Huang. When people see or hear an ad that presents identity threat, they are automatically motivated to forget it. It’s a defense mechanism. Naturally, the effect is greatest in people who have the strongest in-group identities. That’s why advertisers have to be really careful in ads that involve such emotionally charges matters as gender, race, religion, or political belief.

In their studies, they use identity linked promotions, such as “Ladies get one drink free,” or “10% discount for Seniors,” and the like. To enhance attention and encoding, they prime the experimental audience ahead of time to reinforce the intended identity. In one experiment, they primed a social identity, produced identity-linked promotions, introduced social identity-threat, and then tested for memory of the promotions.

For example, experimental subjects were students. Students were primed about their student identity by telling them that the experiment was being performed also with students at other universities. Students then watched 20 print ads for three seconds each and told they would be quizzed on how much they remember of the ads. Identity-linked promotions were created for eight of the ads by stating that “Additional 10% discount for Hong Kong University students.” Then students read news reports about their university, either neutral reports or negative ones (in the identity-threat group).

 What they found was that identity strength enhanced memory for identity-linked promotions if the identity had been primed. When the primed identity was threatened, ad memory was impaired, reflecting the motivated forgetting effect.

A related experiment tested the role of the news source for neutral and negative-identity conditions. Identity strength increased the resistance to read news from a source that presented an identity threat but not in control conditions. This may explain why some people steadfastly get their news from a single distinct identity source, such as NBC (more liberal viewers) or Fox News (more conservative viewers). Such loyalties minimize identity threat and make the news and opinion better remembered. Obviously, such loyalties contribute to political polarization. In U.S. politics, voters are not identified as people. They are identified as voting blocs (Blacks, Hispanics, seniors, females, millennials, poor, rich, and so on). Often these groups are pitted against each other (as in “the rich exploit the poor, blacks are victims of white racism,” and so on). What politicians exploit is social identity.

While identity politics is old hat, consumer identity research is in early stages. But you can bet there will be more such research, as advertisers have their own motivations: spend less money through fewer ads, make their ads more memorable, and get you to spend more money.

Source:

Dalton, Amy N., and Li Huang. 2013. Motivated forgetting in response to social identity threat. J. Consumer Research. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/674198

Remember when you were a child and adults seemed to always be saying, "You are too young. Wait till you get older." Or, they said, "You will understand this better when you grow up." Now that you are older, especially if you are my age, people seem to be saying in the politest way they can, "When are you planning to retire?" "We have to make room for younger workers."

Oh, and if you are in the job market, a young person is often told "I'm afraid you don't have enough experience yet." But if you are over 50 or so, they will say "You are over-qualified for this position."

These inevitable put-downs are bad enough. But what you may not realize is that when you accept such judgments of others, you may well impair your performance capability and development. Here, I report research showing that this effect applies particularly to seniors, and that the effect can be counteracted by the right kind of intervention.

A study by Becca Levy (1) showed that seniors can generate a positive self-stereotype that improves memory performance. Moreover, the effect is more readily established if positive priming is done implicitly, that is without conscious realization. In this study they flashed positive-stereotype words on a screen at a rate fast enough to be registered by the brain but below the level of consciousness. Prior studies had shown that it is rather difficult to improve memory performance with explicit priming, perhaps because such priming is superficial relative to what might occur with implicit conditioning. This point is relevant here because much of our age-stereotype processing, both in youth and older age, is subliminal. While consciously we reject the age-related limitations that others imposed on us, repeatedly experiencing the put-downs grinds away at our resistance by unconscious, implicit means.

Here, a computer subliminally presented 90 seniors with words related either to an old-age image of senility or wisdom. Because all people vary a little in their speed threshold for conscious perception of words on a screen (it takes about 125-250 msecs), the view time was adjusted to be just below threshold for each subject. Before and after the priming intervention, three kinds of memory tests were given: 1) working memory immediately after a test, 2) recall immediately after repeat testing confirmed learning, and 3) recall after a delay in which other tasks were performed.

The group that received subliminal stimulation of positive stereotype words had better memory test scores, a higher estimate of their memory capability, and a more positive outlook on tests that measured attitude about aging. Declines were observed in the group that received negative-stereotype word stimulation.

A second study tested young people in the same way, and no such benefit of positive-stereotype conditioning was evident. This may indicate that a person’s pre-existing self-image governs how one responds to priming. Young people have not been pre-conditioned to think their memory is weak because of age.

A related study showed that a person’s explicit belief in their self-efficacy affects their memory performance (2). Typically, as a person ages, the confidence in memory ability declines. But this study aimed to raise confidence in memory ability in 84 people over 50 by a memory training program that integrated a memory skills training class for six weeks, three hours per week, with elements designed to change beliefs about memory competence. The study showed that by emphasizing mastery, verbal encouragement, reduced anxiety, and modeling skills throughout training, subjects became more convinced that they should believe in themselves and their ability to learn how to be more effective learners. And the memory tests bore out that prediction.

Recent studies by my fellow faculty member at Texas A&M, Lisa Geraci and her collaborator, showed that memory confidence can be easily bolstered in seniors and that, once more confident, they perform better (3). Their review of older literature established that negative stereotype priming can make seniors underperform. In their study, young college students and older adults (70 years average) were divided into equal groups that took a mental task that could be readily completed, or was impossible to complete, or given no task. The task items were clusters of five scrambled words that were to be re-arranged into a comprehensible sentence. Neutral words were used that had no priming relevance to age stereotyping. All subjects then took a free recall of a word list they were allowed to study for two minutes. OIder subjects in the task-success group recalled more words and reported less test-anxiety than those in the task-failure group or in the no-task group. No such task effects were seen in the young adults.

So, how can we apply these findings to everyday life outside the laboratory? Obviously, we have to contrive other ways to provide implicit positive priming. Maybe this could come from making more of an effort to improve memory, as my book Memory Power 101 aims to do. When your memory ability improves from using some established learning principles and techniques, you implicitly know it and that would reinforce positive feelings about memory capability. Indeed, this is what "memory athletes" experience. As they practice memorizing, they get better at it, of course, and this must surely have a subliminal effect on their sense of innate capability which in turn helps them reach memory championship-level performance.

Each of these studies makes the point that if you believe you can remember better, maybe you really can, and that in turn promotes positive feelings about the ability to remember. This becomes a self-perpetuating positive feedback loop for success.  Learning capability improves, in large part because of "learning-set" principles, which is a topic for another day. But as these studies I just summarized show, there is a beneficial component from a change in attitude about one's stereotype. So, for both reasons, I emphasize with my students,

The more you know, the more you can know.

Sources:

1. Levy, Becca. (1996). Improving memory in old age through implicit self-stereotyping. J. Personality and Social Psychology. 71 (6), 1092-1107).

2. West, R. L. et al. (2008). Self-efficacy and memory aging: the impact of a memory intervention based on self-efficacy. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition. Doi: 10.1080/13825580701440510.

3. Geraci, L., and Miller, T. M. (2013) Improving older adults’ memory performance using prior task success. Psychology and Aging. 28 (2), 340-345.

It’s that time of year for making New Year’s resolutions, and I am inspired to write this on January 1 because good resolutions can result. I never thought about the pain of broken relationships much in the context of learning experience and memory until I ran across a LinkedIn post from writer and speaker Carl Prude Jr. Here is what he posted:

“Resentment and unforgiveness are two of the wardens of relational pain. Whenever we employ them they only make sure that we are constantly reminded of the hurt and smallness we felt from hearing someone's negative remarks. They also make sure that we never see the incident in a forward-moving context - instead, keeping us chained to a low moment in our past. I try to look beyond the circumstances of their comment and evaluate the comment independently - to see if it has any constructive merit. If it was mean-spirited or intentional, I immediately dismiss it and forgive the person who said it.”

Usually when we think about memory we focus on how to strengthen it. But there are times when it is best to forget – as in the case of hurtful things we have endured from other people. Here is a case where nursing the hurt leads it to fester, not heal.

So, how do you teach yourself to forget things you should? This maybe especially hard if your focus has always been to enhance memory.

I have discussed some related ideas for erasing memories in earlier posts on new treatments for post-traumatic stress syndrome. In the next post, I will discuss some recent research on advertising where marketers work hard to erase the memories of counter-productive ads.

But here, I want to focus on erasing memories involving relational pain, like the kind you find among spouses in unhappy marriages, siblings clinging to memories of childhood conflicts, employees who are underappreciated or employers who resent lack of support and loyalty. Of course there are many kinds of broken relationships, but all have one thing in common:

The slights and insults are remembered

and etched in a heart of stone from frequent recall.

The pain will never go away as long as the memory is strengthened by recalling it. Typically, one has to learn to forget the pain, not necessarily what caused it. But how does one learn to forget pain?

In many cases, it is a matter of breaking the bad habit of rehearsing the memory and thus strengthening it. Humans react the same way as Pavlov’s dogs, in that repeating a stimulus, in this case the relational affront, conditions memory of it. Like Pavlov’s dogs, if you could repeat the stimulus without the associated pain, the affront would lose its association with the painful memory. Though our natural instinct is to disengage with people who have hurt us, the cure may require us to find ways to continue engagement under non-threatening circumstances. This is equivalent to repeating the conditioning harmful stimulus without the associated punishment – thus extinguishing memory of the original bad learning experience. This is not easy to do, and is sometimes unwise to attempt.

Nonetheless, the principle is sound. People can use the extra brain power that dogs do not have to review the memory more dispassionately. This demands a more objective analysis of the original painful events. It should begin by examining your own contribution to the event, as I explain in my book, “Blame Game, How To Win It.” People don’t usually say and do hurtful things without some kind of provocation, and it may have come from you. More objective analysis also usually reveals that the affront is not nearly as important as you have made it in order to nurture memory of the affront. Humans have a perverse need to remember and magnify affronts, for it validates their vanity. Saying to oneself, “I did not deserve this affront, my hands are clean” is salve to a wounded psyche. We feel better about ourselves, and superior to the perpetrator. Thus, we make sure we remember the events that bolster our vanity.

Also basic to rational analysis is the recognition that all people make mistakes. We have to put ourselves in this category too, but focusing on the misdeeds of others reduces the perceived need to admit our own flaws. Learning to accept and live with human nature is a hallmark of maturity, and it is no wonder that many of our remembered grievances occurred in childhood when we had not yet learned to understand and accept the weaknesses of others.

Nursing grudges creates the habit of nursing grudges. The cure is to have more self-discipline in breaking of bad habits. I explore this in the above-referenced book. But one example comes from a racial bias experiment I described in which racially biased people were trained to be more accepting by having more emotionally neutral social interactions with members of the opposite race. Humans are hard-wired to be more comfortable in a like social group. That’s why tribalism persists even in most cultures even today.

How does one acquire more self-discipline, which of course is needed to break habits? Well, we could join the military and go to boot camp.  In boot camp, you learn to do things you don’t really want to do. In everyday life, forcing yourself to do what is needed and though not appealing, creates character and self-control. Self-induced practice can include making yourself do such things as:

·         Self-train in small steps. “Life by the inch is a cinch. Life by the yard is hard.”

·         Act as if you already are as you wish to be.

·         Get your act together (pay attention, get off your butt, organize your life, dress and groom well).

·         Always be on time.

·         Do things you know you should, even though you don’t want to.

·         Do the hard things first.

·         Increase, rather than decrease, dealing with people you don’t like.

Finally, it is essential to be more introspective about one’s self-esteem. As I explain in the book, self-esteem has two components, self-confidence and self-worth. The fully actualized person has both. Neither component alone is sufficient to neutralize the false gratification we feel from perverse remembering and magnification of affronts. Generating self-confidence is relatively easy, because it can be earned. So get out and earn it, emphasizing things that seem to work for you and learn what you have to do to build small successes into big ones.

Sense of self-worth is harder to have. At one time or another, all of us have endured neglect, slights, and insults. We may have been used, perhaps even abused. How does one cure a broken spirit? First, I recommended believing in a God who created you, loves you, and values you. Accept that love, pray intently with thanks for it, and ask that it give you strength to be a better person. Second, be more socially active and engage with more different kinds of people one on one. Seek friendship, remembering the axiom that to have a friend one needs to be a friend.

Actualization begins with realizing the importance of caring for yourself. The commandment, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” needs to be thought of more in terms of the italicized words. Ability to love others or forgive affronts depends on one’s self-esteem. Each of us should examine our every thought and action with the question, “Is this really helping me, or is it good for me?”

As I said at the outset, nursing the hurt makes it fester, not heal.

Blame Game, How To Win It is endorsed by media celebrities Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Reverend Robert Schuller. The book is available through Amazon.