Powering up your Brain – Can it be Done?
One beliefabout the human brainthat keeps floating around is that we’re only capable of tapping into some small percentage of its true potential at any given time. No one knows where this idea first came from, but it began circulating at the start of the 20th century. It’s easy to see why this idea would attract us. After all, if we’re only using some small fraction of our brains’ capacity, doesn’t that imply that all of us have some reserve of cognitive potential that we haven’t unlocked? The idea of somehow tapping into these reserves gives us hope that we could reach superhuman cognitive abilities.
Reality,however, tells us otherwise. The brain isn’t cheap to operate. In fact, we know that up to 20 percent of all the energy our bodies consume can be directly attributedto the brain. It seems incredibly implausible that we would have evolved such a needlessly complex organ if we rarely even use it to its full potential. After all, wouldn’t people with smaller, more efficient brains hold a comparable advantage over people with larger brains? In this case, the process of natural selection would simply weed out the inefficient brains over time.
Scientists have also learned that the brain has sophisticated localization of function. Simply put, certain parts of the brain have evolved to take care of specific types of information processing. We may use some part of the brain during an activity more than another, but that doesn’t mean other areas are can’t be used during whatever it is that we’re taking care of. For example, the part of your brain that specializes in processing visual information isn’t very good at handling auditory information processing. It’s rare for the brain to adapt areas of the brain for purposes outside of their original intent, but it can happen.For instance, kids that became blind at a young age or were born this way have been shown to use their visual cortex to process auditory information. This probably explains why some of us who became blind early on went on to developeda keen sense of auditory perception that allows them to navigate without visual information.
Even if we somehow managed to increaseour brain’s usage of less active areas during an activity, it seems like the brain itself is terribly equipped to handle multitasking. A hallmark study conducted in the middle of the 20th century showed how selective attention makes it hard for us to process two separate sources of informationat once. The study revolved around the concept of dichotic listening. The subjects were made to listen to two different messages at once. These messages were relayed to either ear, and the participants were ten told to focus on the contents of the messages. This task was fairly easy for the participants when they needed to focus on a single message butbecame nearly impossible once they were instructed to listen to both messages.
Interestingly, while concentrating on both messages, the subjects centered their concentration on a single message at a time and then jumped to the other. They were often incapable of relaying the content of the messages or even simple things like the sex of the speaker.A study conducted in a similar fashion found that its subjects were unable to identify a word that wasrepeated 35 times during the messages. All this seems to indicate that the brain is terrible at multitasking.
Considering how poorly suited we seem to be at multitasking and gaining access to additional processing power, it makes sense for us to take advantage of our current capabilities. One of the leading minds behind this notion was the American architect, inventor, designer, and theorist Buckminster Fuller. In his book, Nine Chains to the Moon, Fuller coins the term ephemeralization. Heexplains how we could do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” Fuller simply wanted to achieve as much as possible while using as little effort as he could.
Although Fuller originallymeant to apply this concept only to improving production means, We can take his concept to the field of neuroscience. There’s one thing we can all do to make our brains do more with less: gain expertise. Have you ever driven home from the office after a long day at work? You get home, step outside of your car, and suddenly you are overcome by the realization that you have no idea how you got there. How did you manage to drive all the way home safely without being aware of your actions?
In truth, the time you’ve spent behind the wheel has made you an expert in driving. This has resulted in you no longer needing to use lots of brain power to drive. Try to recall when you first started driving. Didn’t you struggle just maintaining a simple conversation while driving?During this time, simple things like right-hand turns probably took lots of effort and concentration from you. Examples like the ones above pop up all the time in studies that investigate differences between novices and experts.
Take chess, for example. The complexity and balance of this game havedrawn some of us to spend the between ten and twenty thousand hours playing and studying the game to reach the rank of grand master.The dedicated people are skilled at the game, making them solve problems faster and better than mediocre and newer players.
A classic study on experts asked chess players from various levels of playto reproduce the positions of chess pieces they saw briefly on a board. Not surprisingly, the expert players accomplished this task far better than other players. However, when the pieces weren’t arrangedaccording to positions that occur in actual games of chess, no group of players performed this task better than the others. It’s estimated that a master of chess recognizes roughly 50,000 separate patterns of pieces on the board. In comparison, good players can manage roughly 1,000 patters.
It’s clear that experts store vast amounts of knowledge relating to a specific topic, but they also organize it in special ways. For instance, when scientists asked both professors of engineering and their new students to group types of problems together, the students often organized them based off visual similarities. In contrast, their teachers grouped problems that dealt with the same principles of physics together. Other studies have even shown that experts approach topics differently. They spend more time trying to understandproblems than novices. These types of differences between experts and novices are common and radically alter how these two groups interpret and utilize information.
Studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, have even shown that experts use their brains less than novices. During assigned tasks, activity in the frontal lobe decreases or even vanishes. This indicates that experts pay less conscious attention to whatever they’re working on.This tells us that once we become very good at something, taking care of that task becomes more automated and requires less of our conscious attention. This is why you can drive your car home without a problem while thinking about it. As we improve at a task, our brain is freed to work on other things
Becoming an expert in something has lots of interesting effects. We become better at interpreting what we see, and our decision making improves drastically. We also become better observers, causing us to catching cues that help us make informed and intuitive decisions. This heightened awareness causes us to become better equipped to make inferences and observation, note whenever something unusual happens, and increases our general awareness.
Given its benefits, shouldn’t we all seek to become experts in our fields of interest? Right now, you may be wondering how you could reach this level of specialization. The truth is that there is no magic trick. Experts don’t stop practicing after they’ve learned something. They keep on repeating the task until it becomes fully automated for them Think about the way you read and speak your native language. Chances are you already possess expertise in lots of areas. What are they?
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