Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain (24 page)

To an onlooker, it seemed impossible. In fact, Yaakov Stern, the cognitive reserve researcher at Columbia University who was running the experiment, was initially unsure if older people could learn the game at all. But learn they have.

And the study had a hidden agenda. One-third of the participants would function as the control group and would not play the game, another third would learn and play the game, and the last group would be told while they were playing the game to “shift focus” and concentrate solely on the activity of the spaceship or, alternately, the asteroids.

What’s interesting about this game—and why Stern selected it for his study—is that it has already been shown to work, through a combination of concentration and switching that concentration to train the brain to focus. And, even more important, that increased focus has carried over to the real world. Young military aviators who trained on the same game in Israel did better when they were flying actual airplanes.

The major problem with much of what is sold as brain training is that it has never been shown to work in the real world. People get better at the training game, but that improvement does not necessarily help them remember, say, why they went to the store when running an errand. As Stern says, researchers are now looking to “find an intervention that generalizes, that helps people cope with aging.”

At fifty-four, Stern is in the thick of middle age. The hallway outside his office is lined with black file cabinets, data from the dozens of studies he is overseeing. His job involves frequent travel, lectures, students, and, in his spare time, teaching his daughter how to drive. He is, as many of us are in midlife, fully engaged in just about every possible direction. But even as he navigates all that with outward ease, Stern conceded that his own brain now needs more help.

“I have to rely on my Palm Pilot all the time now,” he told me. “You know how you used to remember everything really easily? Well, clearly that gets harder. And embarrassing. The other day, I was telling this wise story to the students, and they had to tell me that I had told them that same story the week before.”

Stern laughed at this, but he’s committed. His family has a long history of Alzheimer’s, and he’s determined to find a way to combat the disease. In particular, he wants to develop surefire techniques to buffer the brain against the assaults of normal aging and dementia. Stern and many others believe that such a buffer, or brain reserve, can arise innately from a lucky set of genes, but it can also be developed throughout life, from anything that helps the brain stay flexible and strong, such as education or even complex leisure activities, jobs, or perhaps even certain video games.

One hope is that if we could build stronger brains, we could at least push serious mental decline down the road a few years. Statistics show, for instance, that if the onset of Alzheimer’s could be delayed for only five years, many of those who have the disease will die of something else, at least saving them from devastating years of dementia.

With his video game study, Stern wants to find a way to boost our brain reserve and make it stick. That means not just perfecting one skill or another, but instead improving how the brain operates overall and coordinates thoughts. Such coordination, often called executive function, goes beyond simple memory and is the specialty—again—of our elite frontal cortex.

It’s these coordinating skills that the Space Fortress game sharpens because it forces players to multitask and shift their focus within the context of the game. A number of studies show that if you want to improve certain athletic prowess—say, your tennis game—it’s best to focus on one particular skill, but only within the context of a whole game, a test of both focus and coordination.

As Stern explained it, a tennis coach might say, “Okay, today we’re going to play but we’re going to concentrate on your forehand. We know that kind of training works, and in this game, Space Fortress, when players shift emphasis while they are playing, they are getting that training in attention, focus, and coordinating abilities. And they are perfecting those skills in a real situation, not in isolation.

“A real-world analog to this game would be when you are driving and talking on the phone,” said Stern. “As we get older we often don’t handle those situations so well, those dual tasks that take attention and focus. We can lose that.”

Stern wants to teach older brains to keep that focus, or, if necessary, get it back. And the way to do that, he believes, is to teach them to be more efficient, to more easily tap into their most powerful focus-enhancing frontal cortex. Studies by Stern and others have shown that many of those with high levels of reserve—who appear to be protected from aging or disease a bit better than others—seem to use their brains in just this way.

“It’s like a Mercedes and a VW,” explained Stern. “You have to push down on the accelerator more to get that VW going, and when you get out on the autobahn, an old VW will peter out at seventy miles per hour. But the Mercedes will start up with less of a push and keep whizzing along easily. Those people with cognitive reserve are like Mercedeses. Their brains are more efficient. And it’s not just IQ. It’s not just something you are born with. It can come from lots of things.”

The question is, can we find specific ways to build this ability. Can we take a VW brain at middle age, when Stern and others think we may have to start all this, and morph it into a Mercedes brain—with a video game? Or can we take a Mercedes that’s a bit past its prime and return it to its autobahn days?

“We don’t know yet but I hope so,” Stern told me, adding that the only way to find out is to do long-term, serious studies to figure out what stimulates a brain in a way that makes it stronger, to “find out what really works and how.”

When we’re thinking about how to keep a brain on track as we age, however, there’s a bit of a rub: We’re all pretty stimulated already. We live and work in complex, multitask worlds, with CNN blasting, and economic crises to worry about. We’re
already
quite enriched.

Can we find any add-on training program that has a prayer of busting past the bustle of our daily lives and pushing our brains even further to maintain or return to better habits?

At a recent meeting of cognitive scientists, Michael Merzenich, who has developed a new brain-training system of his own and is one of the leading proponents of this brain-training idea, fairly bellowed at his colleagues. “I can improve anyone,” he said, his face growing red as he spoke at the cognitive scientists’ meeting in Washington, D.C. “Anyone!”

Now a professor emeritus at the University of California at San Francisco, Merzenich is not one to be taken lightly. One of the pioneers of neuroplasticity, he has often been ahead of the curve. Nearly thirty years ago, he showed how a monkey brain reassembles itself after injury. A member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, he invented a system that uses sounds to help some dyslexics. He holds fifty patents.

And he has now moved on to the older brain, which he
insists
can be trained to act like a more efficient brain if only we would try hard enough. Several years ago, Merzenich started a company, Posit Science, and developed a system that he says can push the brain, not just to adapt, but, in areas where we experience loss, to get it back to where it was years earlier. He believes he can turn back the clock in our brains.

At middle age, our brains have learned to handle our world with ease—and the hope is that we can keep them at that level as we age. Merzenich, for one, thinks it’s possible.

“Strategies and compensation are good but I don’t think you have to just correct,” he said when I spoke with him recently. “You are not stuck with the deficits you have or the negative changes that occur. You can fix them.”

One might be skeptical about such definitive pronouncements, even from someone as persuasive as Michael Merzenich, but he does have some evidence to back him up. In 2007, Elizabeth Zelinski of the University of Southern California announced results of the first official study of Merzenich’s computer-based training system called Brain Fitness. The study, officially published in 2009, was a kind of randomized, double-blind trial that is the gold standard for evidence. And it found that Merzenich’s form of intense brain training appeared to work.

Performed at centers all over the country, including the Mayo Clinic and Veterans Administration hospitals, the study was based on five hundred adults who were divided into two groups. One group trained an hour a day for eight weeks on Brain Fitness, which meant that the participants sat with headphones on in front of a computer and did a series of exercises set up to fine-tune their brains. The training was largely auditory in that they had to either distinguish between similar-sounding words, like
mat, pat,
and
cat,
or decide if a sound was whooshing up or down. The other group of adults, the control group, spent the same amount of time watching educational DVDs. The study was funded by Posit Science Corporation, but none of the investigators received money from the company.

At the end, those who had the computer training performed better; in fact, they performed like people ten years younger on standard cognitive tests. Those who only watched the movies did not improve.

Over the past few years, we have been inundated with computer-based brain-training games of all sorts, from Nintendo’s Brain Age to Happy Neuron. The industry has ballooned from $2 million in 2002 to $80 million in 2007. But there’s scant evidence that these commercially available games have any concrete effect on our brains at all.

With the Brain Fitness training, at least we have a commercially available program that has been tested. “I started out as a skeptic. I really didn’t believe it would work,” Zelinski told me when I spoke with her. “I think in the end it came out much better than I ever expected.”

Brain Fitness targets several key brain functions. The first is fidelity, or the clarity of the signal that initially enters the brain. The theory is that by learning to better discriminate between similar sounds, the older brain is forced back into the sharper patterns of focusing that it had when it was younger.

“The idea behind this is that there is a dark side to the brain’s plasticity, and that as we age we can stop paying attention, we can stop focusing,” Zelinksi, who was a lead author on the study, said. According to Merzenich’s idea, information coming into the brain as it ages can get fuzzier, not at the level of the actual ear, which can have its own problems, of course, but along pathways leading from the ear to inner-brain regions. If the incoming signals are “noisy,” then the information that’s stored and copied in the brain will also be noisier, more chaotic, less useful. On the other hand, if you can retrain the brain to focus and get the information and the signals sharper to begin with, you will get a more durable memory.

Additionally, the more distinct signals will stimulate the brain to produce the right kind of brain chemicals, the neuromodulators such as dopamine, norepinephrine, and acetylcholine, that help us to learn and consolidate memories—the same ones that tend to decrease with age.

“I tried this training myself and it was very, very difficult,” Zelinski told me. “It forces you to be engaged, to pay attention. But it’s not so hard that you give up and lose focus. This approach really bludgeons the brain to work hard.”

Just when such bludgeoning should begin remains unclear, however. Certainly, what happens to our brain at every age matters, even in the womb. But if we start this neural training at age fifty, say, will it really help us to both find and tie our shoes when we’re eighty-five? Most believe that middle age is a prime time for all this, but that has yet to be proven.

“There may be a timing issue with all this. We just don’t know yet,” said Zelinski.

Merzenich, for one, insists that maintaining or pushing a brain to adopt better habits is a “realistic goal,” and he is convinced we should start down that path before we are too old.

“At middle age we are pretty good at manipulating the information that is coming in. Your brain might not be as fast as when you were twenty, but you have twenty or thirty more years of experience at manipulating information so that the brain can do it pretty efficiently. At middle age, that experience trumps the declines and your brain is operating pretty well for you,” Merzenich said. “But if we are in a job where having a good brain matters, we want to keep it operating at that level. At some age, there is a tipping point, where experience no longer trumps the losses in the brain. That tipping point for most now is probably sometime in our seventh decade. But we want to improve that and, if we can, change the slope of the trajectory.”

To change that slope, though, may take elaborate training and hard work. As we age, we tend to fall into predictable patterns with life and brain activity, as Merzenich says, on “autopilot.”

“It’s not going to work if we keep doing the same thing over and over again,” Merzenich told me. “As we age, we fall into behaviors that are more and more stereotypical and more limited. We are not working as intensely at refining or maintaining the high level of operations of our brains. It’s not just acquiring new information. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not enough.”

To keep a brain from becoming lazy, we might even need training tailored to each brain function, much as we go to a gym and work on our thigh muscles one day and our triceps the next, because, as Merzenich said, “there is no one magic bullet” for the brain and “one Sudoku puzzle” will not be sufficient.

Instead, we have to deal with the aging brain from a number of angles. We have to force ourselves to pay attention—to concentrate at a level of intensity that is, as Merzenich put it, “the stuff of childhood.” And we have to get out of our ruts.