The Real Happy Pill Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Anders Hansen

  English Translation © 2017 by Skyhorse Publishing

  First published by Fitnessförlaget, Stockholm, Sweden

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Lisa Zachrisson

  Cover photo credit: Lisa Zachrisson

  Illustrations by Lisa Zachrisson

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2298-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2299-6

  Printed in China

  For all its material advantages,

  the sedentary life has left us edgy,

  unfulfilled. CARL SAGAN

  Dedicated to:

  Hans-Åke Hansen (1940–2011)

  Vanja Hansen & Björn Hansen

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD—Exercise your brain

  1. Your changeable brain

  2. Run away from stress

  3. Improved concentration

  4. The real happy pill

  5. Jog your memory

  6. Train yourself to be creative

  7. The growing brain

  8. Healthy aging of the brain

  9. The Stone Age brain in the digital age

  10. The right prescription for the brain

  AFTERWORD

  MINI GLOSSARY

  REFERENCES

  INDEX

  THANK-YOUS

  FOREWORD—EXERCISE YOUR BRAIN

  Make two fists and join them together side by side. This is the size of your brain. It weighs about the same as a carton of milk. Imagine something this small containing everything you have ever felt and experienced. All your personality traits. Everything you have ever learned. All your memories—from your first, faint mental images of a summer vacation when you were three; through your childhood and teenage years; to your current, grownup life where you are now reading these very words.

  Everything is stored in that lump, which is the universe’s most complex structure that we know of and which consumes no more energy than a light bulb. Whoever isn’t fascinated by the brain can’t be intrigued by much more.

  While we’ve known for some time now how the body’s other organs work, the brain has remained a mystery—up until now. Thanks to recently developed research tools, our knowledge has made great leaps these past decades. We have begun to understand, in detail, how the brain functions; today, few call into question that we don’t merely have a brain, but that in fact we are our brain.

  However, just because brain research has given us a biological glimpse at human characteristics doesn’t mean that your fate is sealed and unchangeable. Studies have brought to light just how fantastically malleable the brain can be, not only in children but also in adults. New brain cells develop constantly. Connections are created, and connections disappear. Everything you do, down to every thought you have, modifies the brain a little bit. Your brain is more akin to modeling clay than china.

  So how do you shape this “modeling clay”? Well, there are few things as important for your brain as moving your body. Not only do you feel better when you’re physically active; your concentration, memory, creativity, and resistance to stress are also affected. You’re able to process information more quickly—so you think faster—and become more adept at mobilizing intellectual resources as needed. You have access to an extra “mental gear” to help you focus when things get hectic around you and to stay calm when your thoughts start racing. In fact, physical activity even seems to increase your level of intelligence.

  Doesn’t that sound strange? After all, if we want stronger arms, we train our arms, not our legs. The same should to apply to the brain: if we want a brain that functions better, surely we ought to train with crosswords, memory exercises, and other brain gymnastics? As it turns out, that’s not true. Research clearly indicates that memory exercises, Sudoku, and crosswords don’t come close to boosting the brain in the same positive way as does engaging in regular physical activity. Surprisingly, the brain seems to be the organ that benefits the most from our being in motion.

  In this book, I’m going to show you the huge impact exercise and training have on your brain—and explain the reasons why. Some of the results are noticeable immediately—as in, right after you’ve been for a walk or a run—while others require regular training for at least one year to take effect. I will also describe what you need to do specifically to achieve the outcomes and mental advantages that research has shown physical activity provides—benefits that amount to no less than a mental upgrade. Enjoy!

  Anders Hansen

  1. YOUR CHANGEABLE BRAIN

  The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around

  THOMAS A. EDISON

  Imagine that you’re sitting in a time machine and you’ve cranked the year back to 10,000 BC. The machine starts clanging, and suddenly you’re hurtled thousands of years back in time. You nervously step out of the capsule and look around you. A group of people dressed in animal hides are standing there, and they seem surprised to see you.

  What is your first impression of them? That they’re primitive “cave dwellers” who, at best, might be able to hunt down an animal and kill it but are otherwise unable to show any hint of advanced thought? It might be easy to reach this conclusion, but in fact you and they are very much alike. Of course, they don’t speak the same language, and they have a completely different set of experiences, but overall they function quite similarly to you. They possess the same cognitive abilities and feelings you do. We humans have not changed all that much, really, over the past twelve thousand years.

  By contrast, your lifestyle has undergone immense transformation in only one hundred years, and if you look back twelve thousand years, the degree of change is unbelievable. You live in material comfort and make use of technical tools the likes of which your ancient predecessors could not conceive of in their wildest dreams. You exist in entirely different social environments. You probably meet as many fresh faces in a single week as they would over the course of their entire lifetime.

  There is also another fundamental difference between your way of life and that of your ancestors: they move considerably more than you do. Taken in historical context, they are not alone in doing this. Over millions of years, our ancestors were significantly more physically active than we are today, and the reason is simple: throughout most of human history, it has been necessary to be physically active to procure food and to survive. Consequently, not only is our body built for movement, so is our brain.

  One hundred years might seem like an eternity—let alone twelve thousand years—but from a biological perspective, it’s no longer than the blink of an eye. Evolution often requires considerably more time before big changes appear in any species, and this applies to us humans, too. Our brain hasn’t changed significantly, whether in one century or over twelve thousand years. Despite the enormous transformations
we have made to our lifestyle that have removed us further and further from the life we were designed for, our brains are still living in the savanna—where our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived many years ago. That is true especially when it comes down to how much we move. Even though we don’t need to hunt for our food and can now order our groceries online, our brain still runs more efficiently if we live a little more like our ancestors did—when we move our bodies.

  EXERCISE AND TRAINING PRODUCES A MORE EFFICIENT BRAIN

  I’ve read thousands of studies over the years, and if I had to pick one that fascinated me the most, one that not only changed my view of medicine and health but also, to a certain degree, my view of life in general, it would be the study in which the brains of about one hundred sixty-year-old human test subjects were examined by MRI.

  MRI—Magnetic Resonance Imaging—is nothing short of a technical miracle for brain researchers; it is a tool that has truly opened us up to another world. Today, thanks to MRI, we can “lift the lid” and look inside the cranium to get a picture, in real time, of how the brain works while we think and perform different tasks, at no risk of injury to the person being examined.

  The goal of this one specific study was to understand the effects of aging on the brain, because our brain, just like our skin, heart, and lungs, gets old. But how does it age, really? And are we doomed to go through the aging process with no means of influencing its course, or are we able to alter it in any way, perhaps by engaging in regular physical activity? This is what researchers began to suspect after animal trials demonstrated that brains of caged mice that ran on a wheel, compared to those that didn’t, tended to age slower.

  For the study’s authors to answer these questions, the sixty-year-old participants were split into two groups: in the first, the subjects took regular walks a few times a week over the course of one year; and in the second, the people met as often as the other group but performed easy exercises that did not elevate their heart rate.

  The test subjects’ brains were examined by MRI prior to the onset of the study, as well as one year after the study, whether they were in the group that took the walks or did the easy exercises.

  To track the participants’ brain processes, these MRIs took place while the subjects were performing a concurrent set of psychological tests. The scans revealed how different parts of the brain were being activated and exposed how areas in the temporal lobe worked together with areas in the occipital lobe and the frontal lobe, in what appeared to be a sophisticated network.

  However, the most telling revelation lay not in the results per se, but in the contrast those results showed between the study’s two test groups.

  The participants who walked didn’t just get in better shape over the course of the year; they also developed a more effective brain. The MRIs showed that the connections between the lobes had strengthened, most notably between the temporal lobe to both frontal and occipital lobes. In short, different sections of the brain were better integrated with one another, which in turn meant, quite simply, that the entire organ functioned more efficiently.

  Somehow the physical activity (i.e., the walks) had had a positive impact on the brain’s connectivity pattern.

  When the data from the sixty-year-olds’ tests were compared to that of tests performed on younger subjects, it was impossible to reach any other conclusion: the brains of participants who had been physically active appeared younger. They did not look as though they had aged during the year; instead, they seemed to have become biologically stronger, the most striking effect being the connection between the frontal and the temporal lobe, which is in fact the area of the brain that tends to be most affected by aging. Seeing improvement in that area indicated that the aging process had stalled.

  In addition to yielding measurable results, more importantly those regular walks made a real, practical difference. Psychological tests showed that the set of cognitive functions called executive control or executive function, which among other things include the abilities to take initiative, plan, and have attentional control, showed improvement in the group of test subjects who walked.

  Simply put, this discovery means that the brain works more efficiently in people who are physically active, and that the detrimental effects of aging can be halted or even reversed to make the brain more energetic.

  Take a minute to think about what you’ve just read. Go over it again. If that isn’t enough motivation to start moving, I don’t know what is. You know that you’ll improve your stamina by running and that you’ll develop bigger muscles by lifting weights, but you probably weren’t aware that exercise and training can also bring about changes in your brain—changes that are not only measurable by modern medical technology, but are also extremely important to optimal cognitive function.

  We’re going to examine these changes in more detail later in this book. But first we’re going to look at how the brain works, and then we’ll see how it can be made to operate better.

  YOUR INNER UNIVERSE

  The brain has shown itself to be more malleable than we have previously thought. What you have inside your cranium isn’t some type of advanced computer with genetically preprogrammed functions, destined to develop in a certain way. The brain is far more complex than that. It contains approximately one hundred billion (100,000,000,000) brain cells. Each cell can connect to tens of thousands of other cells, which means that the number of possible connections in the brain totals at least one hundred thousand billion. That is one thousand (1,000) times more than the number of stars in the milky way or galaxies in the universe. To say that you have your own universe inside your skull might sound somewhat New Age-y, but the inner universe is what this is all about.

  Old brain cells die, and new cells are created continuously. Connections are made between the cells and become disconnected if not in use. The strength of those connections changes in time depending on how the brain redesigns its architecture. You can look at the brain as a highly sophisticated ecosystem in a state of constant flux. It keeps changing throughout life, and not only when you are a child or when you learn something new. Each sensation you experience, every thought you have—everything leaves a trace and changes you a little. The brain you have today is not quite the same as the one you had yesterday. The brain is a continuous work in progress.

  It is not the number of brain cells or connections that is key

  Some believe that the amount of brain cells or the size of the brain determines whether a brain functions well. That is not correct. The most telling example is Albert Einstein, whose brain was neither bigger nor heavier than the average brain. Einstein’s brain weighed 1,230 grams (2.7 pounds), compared to 1,350 grams (2.97 pounds) of the average man’s brain and to the average woman’s, which weighs approximately 100 grams (3.5 ounces) less.

  For a long time, I believed that it was the number of connections between brain cells that determined the brain’s capacity, but that’s not right, either. Two-year-old children have significantly more connections between brain cells than adults have. As a child grows, the amount of connections decrease. This process is called pruning, and it’s estimated that up to twenty billion (20,000,000,000) connections disappear every 24 hours from the age of two up to adolescence. The brain weeds out unused connections to make room for the ones that carry a signal. This can be summarized as: Neurons that fire together wire together.

  Every impression and every thought leaves a trace, and changes your brain a little bit.

  But if neither the number of brain cells nor the amount of connections between them determines the quality of a brain, what does? The answer is that when we stay busy doing different things—biking, reading a book, or planning what to have for dinner, for instance—the brain uses a type of program that is called a functional network. You have a program for swimming, another one for biking, and a third for writing your signature. Everything you do is dependent on these networks, which are all basically built by a collection of brain cells that ar
e connected to one another. A program can integrate cells from many different areas of the brain. And for it to run optimally—to enable you to swim, ride a bike, or sign something—it is necessary for the brain’s different areas to be closely interconnected.

  Practice makes perfect—and it makes more agile brain programs

  For example, imagine that you’d like to learn to play a simple tune on the piano. Many different areas in the brain must work together to make that possible. For a start, you’ll need to see the piano keys. A signal goes from the eyes through the optic nerve to the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe. Simultaneously, the brain motor cortex must coordinate the movements of your hands and fingers. The auditory cortex processes sound information and sends it on to areas called the association areas, in the temporal and parietal lobes. The information eventually reaches the frontal lobe, the seat of your consciousness and higher brain functions, and you become aware of what you are playing and can correct any wrong notes you play. All this hub of activity, just to play a simple piano tune!

  All these areas in the visual and auditory centrums, the motor cortex, and the parietal and frontal lobes are part of the brain’s program for playing music. The more you practice, the better you become at it, and the more efficiently the program runs in your brain. At the beginning, it will take a great deal of effort to play the tune. The program is inefficient and awkward and requires that big chunks of the brain be fully engaged in the task. That’s why you’ll experience playing the piano as mentally taxing, and you will need to focus hard to accomplish the task.

  In time, as you continue practicing, it will become easier. Once you’ve put in a tremendous amount of work, you will be able to play the tune while thinking of something different. The brain’s program for playing the tune has now become efficient at transferring information: a repeated signal through the network has strengthened the connection—neurons that fire together wire together. In the end, less and less mental effort will be required, and you’ll be able to play the tune without giving it a second thought.