Tag Archives: brain

Mar24

On Being a Digital Immigrant

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On Being a Digital Immigrant

I went to a lecture yesterday at SRJC by Ofer Zur, Ph.D. on “How the Internet Changes Brains.” He is about 65 now, and he spoke about “digital natives” which are people who grew up with computers, and “digital immigrants” who acquired these skills in adulthood.

Social-Media6logosTen years ago, when I started my business, I knew more than anyone else in Santa Rosa about how to increase revenue for a brick-and-mortar business by using Google advertising. To help these businesses, I used my extensive background in marketing and advertising, and my expertise in media buying, along with my web development skill. The oldest “digital natives” were about 15 and still in high school.

Now, they are 25 years old and they completely understand Twitter, SnapChat, YikYak, Pinterest, Instagram and all the social media channels that have left me behind. There is so much more to know about online marketing and finding the right audience, and I realize I am no longer the best in town. It is time to hire a partner.

Dr. Zur spoke about facing age-related limitations on his recent motorcycle trip to the Himalayas. Being a digital immigrant, alas, is another age-related limitation.

Oct23

The Female Brain

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The Female Brain

The Female Brain“If you only read one book about the brain this year, make it this one,” said Dr. Martin Rossman in his UCTV lecture on YouTube titled How Your Brain Can Turn Anxiety into Calmness. The lecture is so fascinating I have watched it several times — I find his rabbinical speaking style to be soothing and the science to be amazing. He says, “If we can teach the blind to see, we can teach the anxious to relax.” He recommended this book so strongly because, “it saved my marriage.” This from an M.D.!

Louanne Brizedine’s book is written in a very accessible style, even though she is an M.D. trained at Yale and on staff at UCSF. She starts with how, even before babies are born, testosterone kills off half the neurons that manage with emotional communication in the brain of the male fetus. Testosterone kills a huge percentage again at puberty (which is why teen boys don’t talk about feelings) and again later in life. She explains that we all have androgens, which she doesn’t like to call “male hormones” because, well, we all have them. They generate sex and aggression and diminish in both genders with age.

“Her book travels through the human lifespan describing predictable hormone changes and how they affect the brain and behavior. Perimenopause and menopause are explained in detail and strategies for coping are useful. I especially liked Dr. Brizendine’s riff on how society will change when we use this new knowledge.

Women are living in the midst of a revolution in consciousness about women’s biological reality that will transform human society…. The scientific facts behind how the female brain functions, perceives reality, responds to emotions, reads emotions in others, and nurtures and cares for others are women’s reality. Their needs for functioning at their full potential and using the innate talents of the female brain are becoming clear scientifically. Women have a biological imperative for insisting that a new social contract take them and their needs into account. Our future, and our children’s future, depends on it.”

Dr. Brizendine descries in detail how oxytocin drives our “tend and mend” behavior and when it subsides in menopause, it can free us to creative pursuits beyond the boundaries of our own families.

“If you decide to take hormone therapy, keep your blood pressure low, don’t smoke, get at least sixty minutes per week of increased-pulse cardio-vascular exercise, keep your cholesterol low, eat as many vegetables as you can, take vitamins, decrease your stress, and increase your social support.
“The hypothalamus controls our appetite. …they found that changes in a woman’s diet and physical activity, both of which may have to do with changes in her hypothalamus at menopause, are the cause of weight gain.”

Jun5

Attention > Dopamine > Detailed Memory

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Attention > Dopamine > Detailed Memory

Joyfulness seems factory-installed in the young, but can slip away as people get older. Young people easily remember specific times they were happy, and can recall enthusiastic, unconditional love. As we get older, many of us start to ruminate broadly. “I never get a break,” for example. That over-general “tape loop” leads to feeling bad.

Detailed Memories of Happiness

Spanish researchers have reported that aging patients showed fewer symptoms of depression and hopelessness after they practiced techniques for retrieving detailed memories, according an a May 10, 2011 article in the NYTimes Science News. Teaching people to focus on moment-to-moment experiences and to accept their negative thoughts may make them more tolerant of negative memories. The Mindfulness Meditation technique he teaches short-circuits the over-generalization habit that people often develop as a way of dampening emotional effects, according to Dr. Hermans.

Over-generality creates a risk factor for PTSD. “Some people tend to ruminate at a very categorical, general level about how unsafe life is or how weak I am, or how guilty I am,” says Richard Bryant. “If I do that habitually, that sets me up for developing PTSD after a trauma.”

“If you’re unhappy and you want to be happy, it’s helpful to have memories that you can navigate to come up with specific solutions,” Dr. Williams said. “It’s like a safety net.”

The formation of detailed memories is impaired by screensucking according to Nicholas Carr in “The Shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains.” On page 193 he points out that the key to memory consolidation is attentiveness. Storing explicit memories and forming connections between the requires strong mental concentration, amplified by repetition or by intense intellectual or emotional engagement. The sharper the attention, the sharper the memory. This is why arousal is important. When you are afraid or very excited, the memory formation is sharper and more likely to become permanent.

The Web is a Technology of Forgetfuless

Because web browsing fills up short term working memory but does not leave time for deep memory formation, Carr says, “The Web is a technology of forgetfulness.”

Nobel prize winning biologist Dr. Eric Kandel says, “For a memory to persist, the incoming information must be thoroughly and deeply processed. this is accomplished by attending to the information and associating it meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory.”

The influx of competing messages that we receive online overloads our working memory; making it much harder for us to concentrate on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. And, thanks, to the plasticity of the brain, the more we train our brain to be distracted, the harder it becomes to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Our use of the web makes it harder to lock information into our biological memory, and we’re forced to rely more and more on the Internet. It makes us shallower thinkers.

Attentiveness Produces Dopamine

Leaning to think includes learning to exercise some control over how and what you think, over where we focus our attention. The establishment of attention lead the neurons of the cortex to send signals to neurons in the midbrain that produce the powerful neurotransmitter dopamine. The axons of these neurons reach all the way into the hippocampus, where the dopamine jumpstarts the consolidation of explicit memory.

You need dopamine to learn, and learning is pleasurable. Is this why dopamine sensitive people love new learning experiences? Attentiveness and the dopamine it produces help create specific memories that can be accessed with sufficient granularity to ward off depression.

We can choose where our attention goes and where our energy flows. We can practice mindfulness meditation and choose to remember pleasant experiences rather than ruminating on over-general fears.

May24

The Brain is Plastic

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The Brain is Plastic

No, not MADE of plastic — the brain physically changes when you do the same thing over and over. To me it feels like it creates little grooves in my brain. You have to rest your brain by doing something different — something so absorbing that you are completely diverted from what has exhausted you. You can’t fly an airplane safely and fret about taxes at the same time. You can’t line up a pool shot and plan a marketing strategy simultaneously.

Nobel-prize winner Dr. Kandel, featured on PBS’ show about the brain, is quoted in “The Shallows”:

“The growth and maintenance of new synaptic terminals makes memory persist.” The process also says something important about how, thanks to the plasticity of our brains, our experiences continually shape our behavior and identity: “The fact that a gene must be switched on to form long-term memory shows clearly that genes are not simply determinants of behavior but are also responsive to environmental stimulation, such as learning.”

Learning changes our brain, and continual learning strengthens our “learning muscles.” The more we do something, the better we get at it. But constant pressure can be exhausting.

Two important elements to repair “the little grooves” that we wear into our brains by intense repetition of the same mental activities:

  1. A change of scene and
  2. Doing something different that is creative and absorbing.

How do you relax your brain? Non-verbal play or do you use mental diversions like playing Bridge? What do you think is most effective?

Apr9

What Makes You Feel Nurtured?

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What Makes You Feel Nurtured?

Karen Clark is a business dynamo who guides people to succeed in online businesses. She is also a wife, mother, motivational speaker and school volunteer. She does much more than this, with great enthusiasm and generosity. I have been impressed and grateful for the upbeat, helpful MeetUp meetings she sponsors for small business owners in her community.

One of the problems with high output is burnout. Motivated, energetic people have so much they want to do, and they know that ideas are easy, execution is hard. But it is all about execution. Trouble is, sometimes you execute yourself.

Karen recently asked her Facebook friends “What makes you feel nurtured?” Her friends posted lots of jokes along with useful answers like, “Fires. Rain. Reading for pleasure. Shopping really good music. Eating a little expensive fine food or wine. Travel. Baths with aroma therapy. I bet one of yours is walking.”

Fires and rain could be expanded to spending time in nature. Summer in California lends itself to walking along natural creeks and in county parks. But is this simply generating more things for the To Do List? What is the underlying question?

I, too, have been wrestling with this because I have spent the past seven years building my online business. It is a business school axiom that if you survive seven years, your business will be a success. I guess that means that, technically, I am over the hump and now it is time to throttle back, step back for a moment and take a deep breath.

I have been working so hard that my sense of humor has disappeared and my creativity needs refurbishing. What did I do? Travel to someplace that feeds my soul. What I really wanted was sunshine and warm ocean water, but I am too frugal to spend much so I snapped up a $149 flight to Ft. Lauderdale. Staying in the funky TropiRock where I have to ask at the front desk for shampoo (conditioner not available). I have to sign out a beach towel. This is economy!

Yet I sit on the beach at daybreak and wait for the sun to rise. Minor scratches from gardening in California are healing at twice the normal rate thanks to the sunshine and warm sea. Am I relaxing?

Well, the book I read during the first two days was “Drive,” a management book contending that what people really want is autonomy, mastery and purpose. Karen Clark has plenty of purpose. She has already created, made successful and sold a business. She is currently deeply involved with at least two businesses of her own. I can speak to her mastery of the technical side of what she does, her knowledge is impressive and she is a gifted teacher.

For me, the most valuable information in the book “Drive” was the experiment to see what it took to create symptoms of “generalized anxiety disorder” as defined by the DSM as three of the following symptoms.

  • Restlessness or feeling keyed up or on edge
  • Being easily fatigued
  • Difficulty concentrating or mind going blank
  • Irritability
  • Muscle tension
  • Sleep disturbance

Study participants were instructed to scrub their lives of noninstrumental activities. That is, small activities they undertook not out of obligation or to achieve a particular objective, but because they enjoyed them.

Researcher Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “After just two days of deprivation… the general deterioration in mood was so advanced that prolonging the experiment would have been inadvisable.”

That’s how I had eroded my creativity and energy — by disciplining myself to focus on productive work and to eliminate “noninstrumental activity.” I scrubbed the flow out of my life. And I became exhausted.

So this is the long answer to Karen’s short question. It is not specifically fires or rain or long walks. It is intentionally letting play into your life. Non-verbal play, best of all. Leverage that autonomy to choose play as a restorative. Nurture yourself with noninstrumental activity.

Like reading a fashion magazine, just for fun. No need to commit to a novel. Just break the focus, the intensity, for a few minutes to do something pleasurable. Rub your feet on that silly platform of spools that someone gave you. Accept the cat’s offer to play Mousie. Walk outside for a moment for no reason except that it is a beautiful day. Now that I’ve had a few days off, I see that nurturing myself does not have to be a big production. It is something that is created by a zillion small decisions.

Kinda like beauty or fitness or radiance. You actively choose to nurture yourself with beauty or stretching or music or dance. In the moment, and just for a minute or two. But enough to lift your heart and restore your spirit.