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Smiling better than antidepressants?

In my recent book, I point out that the ever-adapting brain can take remarkable steps to trick itself into performing better.

Along those same lines, a pair of researchers in the UK are putting up the idea that smiling and sending fewer emails can make you feel happier—much more so than pharmaceutical treatments such as Prozac and other modern "happy pills."

Professor Janet Plant (an environmental geochemist by trade) and therapist Janet Stephenson outline their ideas in a new(ish) book entitled Beating Stress, Anxiety & Depression. I haven't read it yet, but they claim hard scientific evidence to back up what we already know empirically:

The mind is it's own place, and can make a heaven of a hell, or a hell of a heaven.

So the secret to happiness may be just that simple. Smile.

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Restoring cognitive function, cheap and easy

Nature, which is filled with intriguing stimuli, modestly grabs attention in a bottom-up fashion, allowing top-down directed attention abilities a chance to replenish.

So says researchers from the University of Michigan in Cognitive Benefits of Nature Interaction (Psychological Science, December 2008).

They're looking at a side-effect free, zero-cost, readily available therapy to improve your cognitive functioning. All it takes is a walk in the park.

Or an afternoon at the beach. Or a weekend camping. Interacting with nature is the key: escaping, however briefly, the insistent demands of common urban and suburban environments. And there's more to it than just quiet vs. loud.

It's not that the natural environments offer any less stimulation, but it's of a different kind. Urban environments tend to capture attention dramatically and require additional directed attention. Natural environments are as rich, if not richer, but tend to invoke involuntary attention more modestly, allowing directed attention mechanisms a chance to rest and recoup. Interaction with nature improves your ability to perform directed-attention tasks—things you need to concentrate on.

So if you find you're in need of a recharge, get out of the office, and find yourself a spot of nature. It's just what the doctor ordered to improve your cognitive functioning.

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You are what you do

This NY Times piece reinforces a number of themes from my Pragmatic Thinking & Learning book:

• There is no expertise without experience
  
• It takes something on the order of ten years/ 10,000 hours of practice to be expert in a field
  
• Deliberate, thoughtful practice is what makes the difference—not just going through the motions.
  
• Practice doesn't make perfect, but it does make permanent: neuroplasticity will cause your brain to re-wire itself according to what you do.

You may not become what you dream, or what you aspire to be, but you will become what you do.

This weekend is a good time to start...

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Don't overthink it.

A recent article in Scientific American outlines some interesting research on how you might choke up under pressure.

The key to avoiding choking up is not to focus on all the minute details: doing so inhibits the part of your brain that is better suited to that task, and leaves you running in a slower, less responsive, and more error-prone processing mode. But on the other hand, not concentrating at all isn't the answer. That would wreck your performance too.

The key, in a Goldilocks sort of manner, is to find the degree of focus that is just right. Not too much, not too little.

This right balance seems to lie in something like a one-word mantra, such as "smooth" or "forceful." Focusing on a single keyword acts as enough of a cue to activate all the necessary mental programs, but not in so much detail that your CPU bogs down processing it all.

This reinforces the explanation in Pragmatic Thinking and Learning that describes the ski instructor yelling so many directions ("tips up! elbows in! head down!") that you get a brain freeze.

Don't overthink it.

Thanks to Linda Rising for passing this on.

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Science Failure and Cubicle Brain Death

A lot of people have told me that my recommendation for a cool notebook and/or pen is one of the top tips from my new book. Folks keep sending me others that they have found—notebooks in distressed leather, with waterproof paper, with steampunk etched covers, and more.

But this is not just some lame stationery affectation; things like the pen and paper you use, the decorations at your desk, the lighting and ceiling height of your cubicle all have a measurable effect on your cognitive processes. Here’s why.

You may have always heard that you start off with a certain number of brain cells, and that’s all you get. These brain cells might die off, but you’ll never get any new ones. Alcohol and aging can kill brain cells, which makes old age look pretty unappetizing—you’d be left with a lot less brain cells over time.

Fortunately, professor Elizabeth Gould thought otherwise. In a discovery that turned the field on its ear, she discovered neurogenesis—the continued birth of new brain cells throughout adulthood.

But here’s the funny part. The reason researchers had never witnessed neurogenesis previously was because of the environment of their test subjects. If you’re a lab animal stuck in a cage, you won’t grow new neurons.

If you’re a programmer stuck in a drab cubicle, you won’t grow new neurons either.

On the other hand, in a sensory-rich environment with things to learn, observe, and interact with, you will grow plenty of new neurons and new connections between them. A steampunk-etched notebook or a funky new pen is not just inspirational in some abstract way; the increased tactile sensory experience actually encourages growth of new neurons and stronger connections. (For example, Dan North gave me his Retractable Zebra Ball Point at a recent conference. Thanks Dan!)

For decades, scientists were misled because an artificial environment (sterile lab cages) created artificial data. Once again, as I harp on throughout the book, context is key.

Your working environment is a context as well. It needs to be rich in sensory opportunities, or else it will literally cause brain damage.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have any neurons to spare!

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Test-driven Learning

While working on my new book, I came across an interesting idea that extends the popular agile notion of “test-driven development” to learning a new language or a new technology.

As it turns out, just studying something new over and over again doesn’t actually help you remember the material very well. However, if you keep testing yourself by trying to recall the material over and over, you’ll strengthen those connections in your brain.

Try to write a program in that new language you’re studying—-you’ll need to retrieve the key information to do so. Try to explain key parts of that new methodology to a colleague. Keep at the retrieval—-the testing of your knowledge. It’s kind of like “test-driven learning,” but in a good way, not like those horrible social studies quizzes in eighth grade. The idea is to practice retrieval, not input.

You can also take advantage of the spacing effect to make this all more effective.

Cramming, or studying a lot of information in a short amount of time, doesn’t work very well. We tend to forget things along an exponential curve, so spacing out your quizzing reinforces material much more effectively. For example, you might plan on retesting yourself along a 2-2-2-6 schedule: retest after two hours, two days, two weeks, and six months.

But that’s not the most efficient use of your time, especially with a large amount of material. Some facts and ideas will get memorized more easily, and others will need more work. Trying to keep track of an individual memory-decay curve for each fact you’re trying to memorize is too hard to do manually. But, hey, we’ve got this nifty computer that we can use.

Piotr Wozniak developed an algorithm to take advantage of the spacing effect, implemented in the commercial product SuperMemo (there’s an open source implementation available as well). It’s basically a souped-up flashcard program that keeps track of your performance and schedules retests according to an individual decay curve for each item.

It’s a great way to take advantage of the brain’s caching and archiving algorithms.

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