Accidental Blogger

Two stories from the Scientific American about the human mind – one on how to exercise the aging mind and the other sheds some light on how our mood influences our creativity and focus.

"Use it or lose it" is more than a cliche. Cognitive decline is a universal and inevitable outcome of aging. But researchers have shown that training in three areas – memory, reasoning and speed of processing information can significantly offset the effects of loss of cognitive abilties in older people.  Mental exercises for the elderly need to go beyond the commonly recommended crossword or sudoko puzzles. The mind needs to be challenged into doing things that one doesn’t necessarily enjoy or normally do. In fact, learning new tricks in old age may be the best antidote to the ravages of the aging mind. (They should introduce seniors to blogging.)

"Sherry Willis of Pennsylvania State University led a team of scientists that followed this group of adults, aged 65 and older, still living independently between 1998 and 2004. The seniors came from all walks of life, races, and parts of the country, including Birmingham, Ala., Detroit, Boston and other major cities. They all had one thing in common when the study commenced: no signs of cognitive impairment.

The researchers divided them into four groups of roughly 700 each: three groups that would receive training in either memory, reasoning or speed of processing and one that would serve as a control (with no particular instruction). "We wanted to assess the impact of training not only on mental functions but also on peoples’ ability to perform certain everyday activities," says University of Florida psychologist Michael Marsiske, a co-author of the study.

Toward that end, the seniors in the training groups were broken down into small classes of four or so to receive 10 one-hour training sessions over the course of five weeks. Memory training consisted of mnemonic strategies for remembering word lists or texts, such as associating various words, visualizing them or organizing them in specific ways. Reasoning training taught them how to spot the pattern in a series, such as "a c e g i… ." The researchers boosted the subjects’ processing speed via practice, practice, practice in identifying an object on a screen after increasingly short exposures.

Such training seemed to largely offset the cognitive decline suffered by nearly all of the controls as the years wore on; by the fifth year, significant skill gaps had opened between trainees and their untrained peers. The research holds out hope that simple mental exercise may play a key role in staving off dementia and other cognitive declines that currently afflict at least 24 million people worldwide."

The second study finds that happiness is conducive to creative thoughts, while a cranky or anxious  state of mind helps us to focus. Despite the image of the gloomy but outstanding poet and the morose artist with the magical brush, this finding is not as counterintuitive as conventional wisdom would lead us to believe. When we are happy, we are open to newer ideas. In fact the creative process may be an effective way for a sad person to combat depression – a form of self medication. On the other hand, if your job requires you to focus, a bit of bad mood helps because happiness is distracting. Fear, anxiety and depression have a way of concentrating our minds on a single issue.  So, depending on the nature of the job at hand, productivity could be affected by whether you are humming a happy tune or scowling – and not always in the way you expect.

"Despite those who romanticize depression as the wellspring of artistic genius, studies find that people are most creative when they are in a good mood, and now researchers may have explained why: For better or worse, happy people have a harder time focusing.

University of Toronto psychologists induced a happy, sad or neutral state in each of 24 participants by playing them specially chosen musical selections. To instill happiness, for example, they played a jazzy version of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. After each musical interlude, the researchers gave subjects two tests to assess their creativity and concentration.

In one test, participants in a happy mood were better able to come up with a word that unified three other seemingly disparate words, such as "mower," "atomic" and "foreign." Solving the puzzle required participants to think creatively, moving beyond the normal word associations–"lawn," "bomb" and "currency"–to come up with the more remote answer: "power."

Interestingly, induced happiness made the subjects worse at the second task, which required them to ignore distractions and focus on a single piece of information. Participants had to identify a letter flashed on a computer screen flanked by either the same letter, as in the string "N N N N N," or a different letter, as in "H H N H H." When the surrounding letters didn’t match, the happy participants were slower to recognize the target letter in the middle, indicating that the ringers distracted them.

The results suggest that an upbeat mood makes people more receptive to information of all kinds, says psychologist Adam Anderson, co-author of the study published online by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. "With positive mood, you actually get more access to things you would normally ignore," he says. "Instead of looking through a porthole, you have a landscape or panoramic view of the world."

Researchers have long proposed that negative emotions give people a kind of tunnel vision or filter on their attention, Anderson says. Positive moods break down that filter, which enhances creativity but prevents laserlike focus, such as that needed to recognize target letters in the second task, he says.

As for the myth of the depressed but brilliant artist, Anderson speculates that creativity may be a form of self-medication, giving a gloomy artist the chance to adopt a cheerful disposition."