Richard Nantel

Over dinner with a dear friend, Tanja, and her family last Sunday, she mentioned that she had recently come across a collection of her parents’ vinyl musical LPs. Listening to these old recordings, she was surprised to discover that she remembered all the lyrics to songs she hadn’t heard in decades. Tanja likely heard her parents’ musical recordings many times while she was a child. The repetition forged strong neural bonds that made these memories stick over time.

I’m a bit envious of people like Tanja. Clearly, she has a great verbal memory. Mine is poor but improving through practice.

Neuroscientific research indicates that the human brain is highly adaptable. Stress your brain to do new things, such as learning a new language, and it will soon adapt. Learning a third language will be easier than learning the second. Stressing your brain with these demands is apparently healthy.

A recent CBC news story reported that bilingualism may delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

I wrote a post this week on the Absorb LMS blog about a memorization technique called spaced repetition. You can read it here. If you’re cramming for an exam, learning a new language, starting to play a musical instrument, or just looking for ways to keep your brain nimble, consider structured memorization techniques.

After helping my 75-year-old mother move out of the home where she and my father lived for 35 years, and sorting through a generation of broken toasters, no longer non-stick skillets, and 20 year-old bank statements, I’ve decided to get rid of non-essential stuff in my life.

In sorting through everything, I realized how fervently I immersed myself into a hobby years ago. For about 15 years, I was obsessed with fly fishing. The result of this obsession is more than a hundred books on fishing strategy, storage bins of feathers to tie flies, and bamboo culms and specialized tools to build rods. I dove very deeply indeed into the world of catching fish on a fly.

When it came to learning about fly fishing, I was most definitely in the flow. Time would stand still while I was sanding a strip of bamboo or tying a fly. At night, I’d lay in bed visualizing myself on a cool trout stream outwitting the largest and smartest trout. Read the rest of this entry »

For the last six weeks, I’ve been learning about brain plasticity theory. This has been a life-changing experience for me. Research showing that the brain can significantly change itself through learning is exciting, inspiring, and life-affirming. The promise that exercising your brain through new mental challenges can help keep Alzheimer’s disease and dementia at bay is immensely motivating.

There’s a dark side to brain plasticity, however. Research indicates that, whereas learning forges new neural connections and brain health, routine and lack of mental challenge make your brain less plastic. Less plasticity means it becomes harder to learn new skills. Research also suggests that lower levels of brain plasticity make you more rigid in your thoughts, less innovative, and less creative.

Learning keeps our brains flexible. Learning affects our brain as yoga affects our body’s joints, muscles, and ligaments. A brain subjected to an existence of routine and lack of stimulation creates a brain that can’t touch its toes.

This has significant repercussions for workforce learning. Keeping someone in the same job position doing the same tasks for years may make it much harder for a person to learn new job skills later, especially if that person does not pursue mentally challenging activities outside of the workplace.

What all this suggests is that there are significant benefits in providing an environment for your workforce that encourages learning, even if the tasks being learned aren’t applicable to a person’s job.

What could this look like?

• A library. Every brick and mortar organization should have a library. This doesn’t need to be elaborate, just a bookshelf with stimulating reading materials people can borrow and to which they can donate books they have read.

• A quiet room with sudoku, chess boards, and crossword puzzles. Give them a peaceful place to escape from the barrage of e-mails and phone calls they normally deal with.

• Language courses. Bring someone in once a week to teach a language, or purchase online or DVD-based language skills courses.

• Lunchtime Tai Chi classes. Apparently, Tai Chi has a positive effect on the area of the brain responsible for focus and concentration.

• A sound-proof room with a keyboard. Research indicates that learning to play a musical instrument provides a marathon workout for the brain.

The world’s best employers have for years been providing their employees with an exercise room or have been subsidizing their gym memberships. These companies know that fit employees are more productive, have a more positive outlook, and are less likely to call in sick.

Brain plasticity theory now suggests that providing team members with mental challenges will create a workforce capable of easily learning new job skills.

The early years are all about learning. Babies’ and toddlers’ brains are in overdrive as they learn to interpret and interact with the world around them.

When they begin attending school, children spend many hours each day learning brain-taxing skills such as math, reading, and writing.

Adolescence and early adulthood require enormous amounts of learning as well, both in school and out. People in this age group learn how to forge deeper personal relationships — no easy task. Also, many young adults enter the workforce, requiring that they learn new job skills as well as life skills for self sufficiency.

For many of us, the amount of learning in our lives drops dramatically once we have established careers and families. Learning is replaced with routine. The demands of work and family limit the amount of time we have to immerse ourselves into learning new skills or subjects. After a long day juggling work and family obligations, most of us choose to veg out on the couch watching TV over studying a foreign language or tackling calculus.

By the time we retire from a lifetime of work, we’re beat. We’ve worked hard, paid off the mortgage, and feel we’ve earned the luxury of sitting back and relaxing. Motivation to tackle something hard is at an all-time low.

But, according to many research studies, just about the worst thing we can do later in life is take it easy physically and intellectually.

According to the Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures 2007, 13 percent of people 65 years of age and older currently have Alzheimer’s disease. In the over 85 age group, nearly 50 percent have this terrible disease.

It’s easy to attribute the prevalence in Alzheimer’s to an aging population and greater longevity. Strangely, though, the rates of other age-related diseases are dropping. Between the years 2000 and 2004:

• Deaths from heart disease dropped by 8 percent
• Deaths from breast cancer dropped by 2.6 percent
• Deaths from prostate cancer dropped by 6.3 percent
• Deaths from stroke dropped by 10.4 percent

In comparison, over the same time period, deaths from Alzheimer’s disease rose by a staggering 32.8 percent.

An increasing amount of research suggests that learning reduces the risk and rate of progression of Alzheimer’s disease. In fact, a number of studies have found an association between Alzheimer’s disease and limited education experience.

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association:

“The data suggest that increased educational and occupational attainment may reduce the risk of incident AD [Alzheimer's Disease], either by decreasing ease of clinical detection of AD or by imparting a reserve that delays the onset of clinical manifestations.”

If information such as this doesn’t create a population of life-long learners, I don’t know what will.

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Increasingly, work in the knowledge economy consists of slicing eight- to 10-hour days into tiny 10-minute segments allocated to a huge number of tasks. We work for a few minutes on one item, sort and respond to a couple of e-mails, take a phone call, work for another 10 minutes on the next task, and repeat the process over and over again.

We pride ourselves on our high level of productivity. Unfortunately, this turbo multitasking does not result in smarter workers.

As scientists continue to make significant progress in understanding how the human brain learns, one fact that is becoming evident is that neural benefits occur through sustained focus on a difficult task. While a person may learn when his or her attention is divided, divided attention doesn’t lead to positive, long-term improvement in neurological functions or abilities.

To make significant improvements to our brains, we need the luxury of time allocated exclusively to one challenging task. The state in which the most significant improvements occur is when you completely lose track of time and are immersed in something.

To achieve this state, you’ll need to close your e-mail, unplug your phone, turn off the radio, and ignore your growing to-do list. You’ll also need to re-order your priorities: choosing to do less in exchange for becoming smarter and better at what you do.

There’s an interesting article about this on the ScienceDaily site: “Multi-tasking Adversely Affects Brain’s Learning, UCLA Psychologists Report.”

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Ever since I began reading about brain plasticity, I’ve started to sound more and more like Oprah and Dr. Phil when speaking to friends and family.

“You have the ability to change.”

“This task is only hard because your brain hasn’t made the necessary neural connections yet.”

“You aren’t doomed to be weak at something for the rest of your life.”

I’m not trying to be a motivational speaker. I’m simply communicating what researchers in the exciting area of brain plasticity are uncovering: that the adult brain is not hard-wired and doomed to live out a fate determined in early childhood. You aren’t necessarily destined to experience declining intellectual abilities in adult and later years.

Scientists are finding ways to change the brain through intellectual exercises. People with poor auditory memory, for instance, can benefit greatly by memorizing poetry. People who are socially clumsy can be given exercises that improve the brain’s ability to read nonverbal clues.

All of us have strong and weak brain functions. Brain plasticity exercises offer the ability to improve the weak areas. What we all need is a way to identify those areas of weakness so that we can develop a plan to improve them.

What this leads to is a need for the ultimate pretest. Just as the start of a physical exercise program often entails a fitness evaluation by a doctor or personal trainer, a complete evaluation of our brains’ abilities will identify our intellectual strengths and weaknesses.

This could have an impact on how organizations provide training. If a certain skill is proving difficult for learners to master, brain plasticity exercises may be suggested to improve the brain’s ability to learn such skills. Once the new neural connections have formed, learning the actual skill may be much easier.

What could this look like in the real world? People learning to become air traffic controllers, for example, could, perhaps, benefit from exercises that would strengthen their spatial thinking. With those neural connections developed, learning to manage busy airline traffic may be easier.

As Norman Doidge, M.D. writes in The Brain that Changes Itself: “Our weak spots can have a profound effect on our professional success, since most careers require the use of multiple brain functions.”

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In my last post on brain plasticity, I mentioned that many people may soon embrace life-long learning to maintain mental health with the same fervor in which they attempt to maintain physical fitness through exercise.

It turns out physical fitness, brain health, and learning may be closely linked. According to an article in newsweek, people who are physically active have healthier brains and are able to learn more effectively.

This article mentions the result of one study of 259 Illinois third and fifth graders, which measured their body-mass index and put them through classic physical education exercises. The physical abilities of the students were then compared to math and reading scores on a statewide standardized test. The article goes on to say that “on the whole, the kids with the fittest bodies were the ones with the fittest brains, even when factors such as socioeconomic status were taken into account.”

The reason appears to be that strenuous physical activity produces a protein called IGF-1 that “travels through the bloodstream, across the blood-brain barrier and into the brain itself.” One scientist goes so far as to refer to this protein as “Miracle-Gro for the brain.”

We’re always looking for ways to improve the effectiveness of training. Perhaps one of the best strategies would be to incorporate physical activity into the learning plan.

I don’t know about you, but I’m VERY excited about the new theory of adult brain plasticity. Until recently, scientists viewed the adult brain as being hard-wired into areas responsible for different tasks. Injure an area of the brain, and the ability to do something was lost. Even more depressing, every day we age, our mental abilities diminish.

More and more scientists are now dismissing this tired model of the brain in favor of a theory of brain plasticity. Also known as neuroplasticity, brain plasticity suggests that the brain is a much more adaptable organ than we ever thought. Injure an area of the brain, and another area can be encouraged to take over its functions.

In retrospect, this should not be a big surprise. The human body is incredibly adaptable. Force a couch potato to run for 30 minutes, and he’ll suffer terribly. Make him run for 30 minutes each day for a month, and it will then seem to him quite effortless. Travel to a new time zone, and your body will quickly adapt to a new schedule. Lift a heavy weight for a few weeks, and it will feel considerably lighter over time.

One of the most encouraging findings in brain plasticity research is that new neural connections and structures develop by learning new skills. When it comes to aging, the brain, like just about every other component of the human body, is a “use-it-or-lose-it” organ.

According to a recent CBC radio interview (MP3 version) with Dr. Norman Doidge, author of “The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science,” we should be focusing on immersing ourselves into new hobbies or activities every couple of years. [Thanks to Stephen Downes for having provided the links to the radio interview.] Just as our muscles adapt to lifting a heavy load over the span of a few weeks, continuing to do the same brain-taxing activities over a long period of time has diminishing returns when it comes to brain health.

Many adults spend hours each week sweating at the gym, running on treadmills, cycling country roads, and stretching in yoga studios to keep their bodies in shape. As more people learn of brain plasticity and the positive effects of learning on maintaining mental health into old age, we can expect to see people embracing learning as passionately as they have embraced physical fitness.

It’s one thing to learn out of curiosity. It’s something else altogether to learn new skills because your mental health depends on it.

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