As Dr. Gary  Small, Direc­tor of UCLA’s Mem­ory Clinic and Cen­ter on Aging, said in an interview, “Our study ‘Your brain on Google: Pat­terns of cere­bral acti­va­tion dur­ing Inter­net search­ing’ (Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Geri­atric Psy­chi­a­try 2009;17:116–126) showed that Inter­net savvy older adults had sig­nif­i­cantly greater neural activ­ity search­ing online com­pared with inter­net naive con­trols.

“Our fol­low up of this study showed that after one week of search­ing, there were sig­nif­i­cant increases in brain activ­ity in the pre­vi­ously naive subjects.”

From Transcript: Dr. Gary Small on Enhancing Memory and the Brain By: SharpBrains, Nov 1, 2011.

Gary Small is author of The Memory Bible: An Innovative Strategy For Keeping Your Brain Young.

Related book: The Sharp Brains Guide to Brain Fitness: 18 Interviews with Scientists, Practical Advice, and Product Reviews, to Keep Your Brain Sharp, by Alvaro Fernandez, Elkhonon Goldberg.

But cognitive health and ability is vital at any age, and crucial for life success and creative thinking.

Using the web may be helpful, but it is a relatively unstructured activity compared with brain training games or cognitive fitness training, such as the programs from Posit Science and Lumosity described below.

Although there are plenty of dubious programs online, these two companies seem to have some of the best scientific confirmation and user testimonials, at least from my research.

Combating decline

A review article on brain training technology in a 2009 issue of Scientific American Mind quoted Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, about how the article author’s cognitive abilities will change (along with the rest of us):

“You’re going to slowly decline in operating speed. Your brain will become noisier and noisier in its processing.”

“Age-related cognitive decline, Merzenich says, is a combination of physical changes and negative brain plasticity. A way to combat that is “to train regularly using any of an increasingly wide range of software products designed expressly for the purpose, says Merzenich, who founded Posit Science, which makes one such package.”

From article: Brain Trainers: A Workout for the Mind, by Kaspar Mossman.

n her Health Section article in the Los Angeles Times (“Healthy holidays, with our gift ideas“  December 12, 2011), Melissa Healy writes:

“Research tells us that for brains as for muscles, it’s either ‘use it or lose it’ — those who are intellectually engaged are less likely to show signs of dementia.

“One of the most affordable, engaging and demonstrably effective sources of brain-training games is Lumosity, produced by the San Francisco-based Lumos Labs. Lumosity’s online games exercise a variety of cognitive skills, including working memory, spatial perception, attention, speed and mental agility.

“They have great graphics and give subscribers excellent feedback to ensure progress. Plus, these games really are undergirded by strong research…

“Other games can be purchased on CD-ROMs, including brain-fitness programs from Posit Science that focus on auditory and visual processing — cognitive skills that directly affect reaction time and working memory.”

Posit Science

The Posit Science site lists research studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Journals of Gerontology and other academic publications. The site also has free brain performance tests.

Testimonials include these two:

Sueann Mark, PhD, found out that she had breast cancer. Chemotherapy saved her life, but it also took a toll on her mental abilities. She was suffering the effects of “chemobrain,” a condition associated with chemotherapy that results in decreased mental function. “I had the attention span of a 2-year-old,” says Dr Mark. “I couldn’t remember appointments, where I put things and I had trouble finding the right word.” Dr. Mark says she started to notice changes just a couple of weeks into the Posit Science training. “My attention span was getting longer. I could read through entire articles that a couple of weeks ago I couldn’t get through. Knowing that I was exercising my mind and reactivating it was really comforting to me.”

As a physician by training, Dr. Greg Robinson, 53, could always count on a sharp mind and keen memory. So when HIV-associated cognitive impairments first developed in his early forties, the contrast was pronounced. “I had short term memory problems so that I couldn’t remember lists of things beyond two or three,” recalls Robinson. “I had difficulty remembering names and getting a hold of common words.” At the end of the training, Robinson was amazed by “the tremendous positive benefits.” His memory returned, his dexterity, his faculty with numbers—all of the cognitive impairments he experienced before were gone or greatly reduced.

The article mentioned above: Brain Trainers: A Workout for the Mind, by Kaspar Mossman, also mentions a Mayo Clinic study of the Brain Fitness Program by Posit Science.

“Encour­agingly, the researchers found that the software boosted the brain in ways unrelated to the training. Rather than simply learning to parrot back what they had practiced, participants improved their test scores across a range of brain functions, says clinical neuropsychologist Glenn Smith, who led the study.

“People who used the program bolstered their working memory—the system that holds information in mind momentarily in tasks such as dialing phone numbers—and processing speed, two assets that deteriorate with age.”

Posit Science site

Posit Science Brain Fitness Program [at Amazon.com]

Lumosity

A recent Fast Company article notes “over 14 million people in 180 countries either subscribe to Lumosity’s website or have downloaded one of its iPhone apps.”

[From Why "Brain Gyms" May Be The Next Big Business, BY E.B. Boyd, Jun 16, 2011.]

“Your brain, in some ways, is like a muscle,” says Tim Chang, a partner at Norwest Venture Partners, which invested in Lumos Labs. “It needs to be kept in shape.” Lumosity doesn’t feel like mindless, monotonous work. It’s a game, and it’s captivating, Chang says.

“The part that’s very compelling is the more you play, the more you learn about yourself,” he says. “It’s even more compelling in some ways than the gym.”

From Brain-training games are new exercise craze, By Rachel Roubein, USA TODAY 8/24/2011.

The Lumosity site lists a number of testimonials, including:

“Lumosity’s daily training doesn’t take much time. It’s fun, and I can really see an improvement in my ability to think through and quickly understand new processes in my job.” -Alison B., 20

“I do a Lumosity training session daily and feel the BPI gains at work all the time. I’m much more organized, focused and I maintain better attention because of the work I do on Lumosity. I find this site so incredible that I recommend it to everyone.” -Angela B., 32

Lumosity site

~ ~

“I may think in pictures, but first I write everything out in words.”

Brian Selznick’s 2007 novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” – the basis for the new Martin Scorsese movie “Hugo” – “introduced an innovative strategy for blending words and images, interweaving narrative and picture sequences to tell two sides of a single story, in which an orphan, living in a Paris train station at the dawn of the 1930s, forges an unlikely friendship with the pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès.”

The illustration is from the book, and the quotes above are from the article: ‘Hugo’ author Brian Selznick in a ‘Wonderstruck’ mind-set, by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic November 24, 2011.

The article continues:

“When I first presented ‘Hugo’ to Scholastic,” Selznick says of his publishing house, “it was going to have one drawing per chapter and be about 100 pages. But the more I thought about the book, the more I thought it might be interesting to try to tell the story like a movie. That’s when I took out some of the text and replaced it with picture sequences.”

By the time he was done replacing text with image, the book had grown to 534 pages; “Wonderstruck” is even longer, although it was constructed in a similar way.

“I may think in pictures,” Selznick acknowledges, “but first I write everything out in words. So with ‘Wonderstruck,’ I started by writing present tense narratives: There is a boy, he lives in Minnesota; there is a girl, she lives in Hoboken, N.J. I knew I was going to tell the story in pictures but I was just getting down the essence of the plot.”

With “Wonderstruck” out and “Hugo” in theaters, Selznick has begun a new book that relies on the interplay of image and word. …

“I didn’t know how ‘Hugo’ would turn out,” he reflects, voice quiet with remembering. “I didn’t know if anyone would read it — it’s a children’s book about French silent movies — but it was the thing I wanted to make.

“I made ‘Wonderstruck’ in the same state of mind. I’ve always liked stories that connect to something larger, where things are heightened in a certain sense. It’s not magic, exactly; I’m not interested in writing stories that have magic in them, but in stories that feel magical, where there are synchronicities and unusual events. They remind us wonderful things do happen, that the world is bigger than we know.”

Video: “Words vs. Pictures” – on how Selznick works. Also see more info on the Scholastic site.

Books:

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

The Hugo Movie Companion

Wonderstruck

~ ~

Visual-Spatial Learners

In her article The Visual-Spatial Learner: An Introduction, Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D. of the Gifted Development Center explains, “Visual-spatial learners are individuals who think in pictures rather than in words.  They have a different brain organization than auditory-sequential learners.

“They learn better visually than auditorally.  They learn all-at-once, and when the light bulb goes on, the learning is permanent.  They do not learn from repetition and drill.  They are whole-part learners who need to see the big picture first before they learn the details. They are non-sequential, which means that they do not learn in the step-by-step manner in which most teachers teach. They arrive at correct solutions without taking steps, so “show your work” may be impossible for them.  They may have difficulty with easy tasks, but show amazing ability with difficult, complex tasks.

Her book: Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual Spatial Learner

The Amazon summary of the book says:
“Do you think in pictures rather than in words? If so, you are not alone. One-third of the population thinks in images… Dr. Linda Silverman coined the term “visual-spatial learner” in 1981 to describe the unique gifts of people who think in images. They get the big picture because they see the world through artists’ eyes… A visual-spatial learner created the computer and the Internet, the vivid displays at the Olympics, and the International Space Station.”

Another creator who combines artwork and text – above is an example from her site – is Marney Makridakis, founder of Artella Land, an online creativity community for “inspiring artists, writers, and creative spirits, and supporting them in following their dreams…catalyzing unawakened creative inklings and inspirations to come alive and passionately thrive.”

Marney says, “I wrote and illustrated my first full-length story, ‘Lov is Flafey and Spots’ when I was five years old. I continued to write throughout my life but I didn’t really do any art again until I was in my mid-twenties, when I learned that art and crafts were excellent conduits for emotional healing.

“I was naturally attracted to paper arts and simple watercolor paintings, and once I began combining words and art together as an art form, I was in heaven. I found the process of making words visual, and making art narrative, to be a very liberating and dynamic form of artistic expression.”

Learn more about her products and programs at Artella Land or Business Bohemia.

~ ~

Most of us try, with varying degrees of success. Here is an excerpt from a new article in The Atlantic about what is going on.

If Multitasking Is Impossible, Why Are Some People So Good at It?

By Derek Thompson, senior editor at The Atlantic

“Multitasking means screwing up several things at once,” somebody once said, wrongly. In fact, we don’t do many things at once, ever. We do many things in quick succession. And some of us are very good at it

Everybody multitasks. We have conversations while driving. We answer email while browsing the Web. It’s hard to imagine living any other way. What would be the alternative, removing the seats from your car to ensure you only drive alone? Block every website not named Gmail? A world of constant single-tasking is too absurd to contemplate.

But science suggests that multitasking as we know it is a myth. ”Humans don’t really multitask,” said Eyal Ophir, the primary researcher with the Stanford Multitasking study. “We task-switch. We just switch very quickly between tasks, and it feels like we’re multitasking.”

***

In 1946, the world was introduced to history’s first general-purpose electronic computer: ENIAC, nicknamed the “Giant Brain.” At the time, the word multi-tasking did not exist. It first appeared in a magazine called Datamation in 1966, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the following sentence: “Multi-tasking is defined as the use of a single CPU for the simultaneous processing of two or more jobs.”

Over the next 65 years, computers have become multitasking wizards, with the ability to download movies while playing music while running complex programs and executing a million other functions we take for granted, yet in 1946 would have seemed like magic. Meanwhile, the people operating these wondrous machines have not gotten any better at multitasking over the last 60 years. If anything, we have gotten worse.

In The Shallows, a book about memory and the Internet, Nicholas Carr said the Web was changing the way we think, read and remember. Humans are hunters and hoarders of information. We seek, we find, we remember. If the Internet is helping us seek and find data, it is hurting our ability to absorb and retain it. Before the Internet, the theory goes, our attentions expanded vertically. With the Internet, our focus extends horizontally, and shallowly.

Why do we think we’re so good at something that doesn’t exist? We compensate for our inability to multitask with a remarkable ability to single-task in rapid succession. Our brains aren’t a volley of a thousand arrows descending on an opposing army. Our brains are Robin Hood. One man with one bow firing on all comers, one at a time.   [Continued]

~~~~~~

Here are some of my archive posts on the topic:

Multitasking – or optimal performance

Divided attention spans and creativity

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Leonardo da Vinci

“We tried to make something much more holistic and simple.” Steve Jobs

Commenting about the iPod, Steve Jobs said “Look at the design of a lot of consumer products — they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple.”

Michael Gelb is the author of 12 books on creativity and innovation including How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day, which is the basis for a new online course he will lead.

Continued: Thinking Like Leonardo Da Vinci.

“One of the things that I teach people is to not live in their mind, but to stay very engaged in the moment and stay engaged in action.

“When you can train people to do that, it becomes very easy for them to stop listening to this [their head] and all the negative stuff up ‘here’, and to really just keep staying in action and producing results.”

Continued in Marie Forleo on Living in the Moment.

Erin Brockovich commented about the famous Hinkley, California vs PG&E lawsuit featured in the movie (starring Julia Roberts) and using her dyslexia:

“I can still go through all 634 plaintiffs. I learned to do that because of my dyslexia. I had no real coping skills; I could not read and comprehend in my brain the way a lot of you do.

“So I learned most of everything in my life by memorization, and it paid off for me in Hinkley.

“I can be on page 550 and stop and go, “Wait a minute, that’s not what they said on page 69,” and go back and find the exact thing, because as I’m scanning, I’m memorizing.”   [commonwealthclub.org Q & A, February 22, 2001]

Brockovich became Director of Environmental Research, Masry & Vititoe Law Offices.

Take It From Me: Life’s a Struggle But You Can Win by Erin Brockovich

~ ~

Anthony Hopkins in "Thor"

In their Dyslexic Advantage site post Dyslexic Actor, Anthony Hopkins – Thor Interview, Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide quote from a Biography Channel profile that Hopkins, due to his dyslexia, “preferred to paint and play the piano rather than making friends at school.”

Hopkins recalls: “I was lousy in school: a real screw-up, a moron. I was antisocial and didn’t bother with the other kids… I didn’t know what I was doing there. That’s why I became an actor.”

The Eides note Hopkins is distantly related to poet W.B. Yeats who also had dyslexia, and comment, “Hopkins’ work exemplifies dyslexic strengths with the music of language, social and nonverbal perception, seeing from multiple perspectives, and personal memory.”

Continued (with quotes by Henry Winkler, Richard Branson and others) in my Creative Mind post Dyslexia and Creativity.

His program, The Lefkoe Method, is based on overcoming beliefs that impact our self-esteem, anxiety, confidence, fear of public speaking and other challenges.

Based on working with many clients, he finds that “getting rid of a limiting belief is a lot easier to do than finding the relevant beliefs in the first place.”

In a recent post on his blog, he notes the number of beliefs affecting a problem or issue can vary.

“Some patterns like phobias can be eliminated by getting rid of one belief and one conditioning.

“One client had a fear of small bugs, insects, or rats. It was totally caused by one conditioning: Fear associated with being touched by small insects or animals. When that was de-conditioned, the fear was gone.”

Many problem behaviors or patterns share a lot of the same beliefs, he says, so overcoming a set of beliefs can improve our mental health and life in a variety of ways.

“If you eliminate all the beliefs that usually cause a lack of confidence,” he writes, ‘you also will be eliminating all the beliefs that cause several other problems, such as procrastination, social anxiety, fear of rejection, seeking approval, perfectionism, high levels of stress, and the critical ‘little voice’ in our heads.”

Continued in his article How To Find The Beliefs Underlying Your Problems.

You can try The Lefkoe Method for free at ReCreate Your Life.

The ‘inner critic’ image is from a related article Practical Strategies for Shifting the “I’m Not Enough” Gremlin, by Laura West.

~ ~

“Artists must be poor and sacrifice their well-being for their art.”

“Artists are ‘bad’ at marketing.”

“Artists should accept the solitary life and find solutions on their own.”

“You can’t be a mother and a successful artist.”

Those are a few of the kinds of self-limiting ideas and myths that Alyson Stanfield of Art Biz Coach says her membership program Artist Conspiracy is designed to help artists overcome, to achieve more effective marketing and business success.

For more info, see my Inner Entrepreneur post Business Success for Artists – ArtBizCoach Programs.

f we hold certain kinds of beliefs about who we are and what abilities we have – whether we are even capable of being creative, for example – we can seriously limit what we do or even attempt.

In his article Capturing creativity, Psychology Today Editor Robert Epstein declared, “An explosion of creative forces is at hand, and it could make the accomplishments of the Renaissance look like a ride on a stationary bicycle.”

“It’s like my brain is able to instantly organize all my bad thoughts, all in a row, thinks Bob, with something akin to awe.”

But, he continued, “If creativity is so accessible, what’s holding back the flood? When I say to a group of a hundred people, ‘Please raise your hand if you consider yourself to be creative,’ why do only 10 hands go up?

“Why are corporate leaders, government officials, politicians, crime fighters, teachers, and parents all starving for new ideas?

“Why are art, music, and literature in the hands of a tiny fraction of the population–while the rest of us are mere spectators?”

He thinks there are two potential reasons: schooling and myths

“First, our creative potential is virtually shut down by early schooling.

“Teachers are the first to admit this. A kindergarten teacher told me recently, ‘I can’t believe I get paid to have so much fun every day–before the kids get mined.’

“Ruined? ‘Well,’ he said, ‘in the first grade the kids have to work all the time. There’s no more time for fun, because there’s so much they’ve got to learn. They’re not even allowed to daydream any more. It’s a wonder that any of them ever grow up to be artists or inventors. In kindergarten, on the other hand, all the kids are artists and inventors.’”

Epstein continues, “There’s another reason why creativity seems to be in short supply: Myths about creativity are deeply entrenched in our culture. Myths have enormous power to shape everyday behavior, often to people’s detriment.

“When it comes to creativity, myths keep most people firmly shorebound. Only artists have creativity and creativity is rare, we’re told. Creativity is mysterious and magical and divine, people say. It’s in your right brain, the headlines swear.”

But, he concludes, “None of these beliefs is true, not even slightly.”

From Capturing creativity, by Robert Epstein (Psychology Today, the July 01, 1996 issue, last reviewed on October 01, 2009)

Also see posts Robert Epstein on the teen brain, and Does school encourage or limit high ability people?

[Image: Ballard Street cartoon by Jerry Van Amerongen, from creators.com.]

Pursuing a creative career in ‘bad times’

In such “challenging” economic times as now, many people may hold another belief: that being creative as a profession is frivolous or a bad choice.

Social and economic theorist Richard Florida does not agree.

The author of The Rise of the Creative Class is a professor at the University of Toronto, and a magazine article notes “his books explain how artists, musicians, designers, writers or any individuals with jobs where creativity plays a key factor, have superseded the working class as the predominant force in both American and global economies.

“Florida reminds us that, in troubled times, nurturing basic human needs may keep us happy, healthy, and ahead of the curve in life as well as the workplace.

“How is the creative class doing during our current recession? As a whole it is doing just fine. The rate of unemployment in the creative class is something like five percent. Compared to the working class, where the rate of unemployment is 15 percent and for some subgroups over 20 percent.”

[From Richard Florida - the discovery of the creative class, by Daniel Denhardt, SOMA somamagazine.com, Oct. 2009]

Deeply ingrained

In her book Now What?: 90 Days to a New Life Direction, Laura Berman Fortgang writes about the insidious nature of our beliefs.

“I often joke that cotton is not the fabric of your life – your beliefs are! They are woven so tightly into the fabric of your being that they have become truth.”

She explains, “They were probably adhered to you by someone else. Parents, teacher, guidance counselors, bosses, the media, and our own assumptions based on what we heard from these people help to form our expectations for ourselves and our lives.”

And, she warns, these “early messages, experiences, and beliefs that form our opinions and affect decisions that linger in our life later on, despite being outdated and out of alignment with the person we have become.”

Or, I would add, the person we want to be.

Living in the present

In his post You Are a Failure – A Letter To You, Steven Aitchison reminds us to pay attention to our present reality: “Give yourself a break from analyzing the past, stop living there. Come back to the present and show everybody who you are today, not who you were yesterday. You are so much more than what happened to you. The very fact that you are with us today and reading this, whether you feel angry or not, makes your life a success.”

So, can we change our beliefs?

In The Feeling Good Handbook, David D. Burns provides strategies to help overcome self-defeating attitudes, based on cognitive therapy research and practice – a technology for uncovering and revising distorted and self-limiting ideas.

A profile by the Institute of Noetic Sciences notes that Morty Lefkoe “made a series of discoveries that allowed him to help people make permanent changes in their emotions and behavior” using his program The Lefkoe Belief Process, acclaimed by Jack Canfield among others.

To try out The Lefkoe Method, go to ReCreate Your Life where you can eliminate one limiting belief free.

Also see these articles by Morty Lefkoe:
How To Create New Possibilities In Your Life
Everyone Knows You Can’t Eliminate Beliefs Permanently… Are You Sure?

Also see related articles on awareness and beliefs.

developing creativity, creative potential, creative personality type, creative experience characteristics, psychology of creativity, creative mind

How much of our happiness and satisfaction in life is due to circumstance or other people, and how much is it a matter of conscious choice?

In the new movie The Adjustment Bureau (written and directed by George Nolfi, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick), the lives of the main characters, “fated” lovers played by Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, are manipulated by a team of celestial “adjusters” – as film critic Roger Ebert says, “They’re like undercover agents for the higher power of your choice.”

Anthony Mackie, one of the adjusters (he was also a powerful character in The Hurt Locker) was asked in an interview: What do you think of the idea of there being a greater power that knows better than we do and keeps bad things from happening?

His response:

I think the idea of there being a greater power that knows better is completely different than the idea of there being a greater power helping you to find better.

You would be hard pressed to find 10 people in your life right now that are truly happy. Like dip shit happy!

I know two people, I’ve been thinking about it for a week! I know two people. One of them is cuckoo and Cuban. (laughs) And the other one is a school teacher friend of mine, who had an amazing job and was making like seven figures a year and quit to become a school teacher.

Boom! She got a dog, got a house, taught kids. That’s it. And she’s happy. She likes the headaches that these kids put her through.

My other friend, it’s like he’s living the life, he has a girlfriend he has a 76 Cadillac and he has a tattoo now and a job, he’s happy!

But, everybody else I know is just desperately unhappy in one way or another. I think that is because we place too much on faith and not enough on free will. As human beings we have the ability to change any aspect of our lives that we want to, any aspect.

That’s just the way I was raised, I mean my daddy was like if you ain’t happy don’t do it. Every time I go into a governmental office like the Post Office or the DMV, I’m like I hate everybody in here because everybody in there is working to make your life a living hell. Sorry, I went to the DMV this week.

So with that being said I think we place too much power on the unknown and not enough power on the active known right now.

[From The Adjusted Power Of Anthony Mackie, GlobalGrind.]

Also see my Inner Actor post: Emily Blunt on fate and stammering and acting.

~ ~

Author Gretchen Rubin has also commented, “To be happier, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.”

Spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti wrote, “Only the mind which has no walls, no foothold, no barrier, no resting place, which is moving completely with life, timelessly pushing on, exploring, exploding – only such a mind can be happy, eternally new, because it is creative in itself.”

From his book: Think on These Things.

See more quotes by Rubin in my post: Drew Barrymore and Gretchen Rubin on authentic happiness as a choice.

Rubin is author of The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.

In the early 1970′s, I worked as a research assistant at the UCSF Medical Center, Langley Porter Institute, in the laboratory of David Galin, MD, who worked with Robert Ornstein, PhD. … The focus of their research was brain lateralization – the early left brain/right brain stuff.

But they also did some work with Dr. Joe Kamiya, looking at brain activity in meditation.

Continued in post Cognitive Filtering, Meditation, Creativity.