The Real Happy Pill Page 14

  In other words, the hippocampus has a list of important functions other than being a memory center, such as controlling our emotions, keeping track of us spatially, and making sure we can find our way around locations we’ve been in before. The more we learn about the hippocampus, the more we realize the importance of this part of the brain. If the hippocampus doesn’t work, neither does the brain.

  There is a reason why I’ve devoted so many pages to describing the hippocampus: it’s the part of the brain that is perhaps most influenced by us moving our bodies. We’ve learned that physical activity leads to the birth of new cells in the hippocampus. The hippocampus gets more energy when blood flow increases, allowing it to function better. Also, the existing hippocampus cells seem to become genetically younger, and the shrinking that occurs with aging can be slowed down, perhaps even turned around. Over the long haul, the hippocampus—and therefore the whole brain—works better and more effectively in people who exercise regularly.

  Those of you who train will notice that the hippocampus is strengthened in several different ways. Aside from your memory improving, you will eventually realize that you’re not as emotional as before and don’t react as strongly to negative events. It might also affect how well you find your way around different places. Moreover, many who train find that they make quicker and better associations—in other words, they think quicker on their feet—which could be due to a strong hippocampus.

  Different types of exercise affect different kinds of memory

  Even if memories are spread out all over the brain, different areas specialize in handling different kinds of memories. The frontal lobe and the hippocampus are important for working memory, as in being able to keep a phone number in your head while you dial it. The hippocampus is also important for remembering places.

  The temporal lobe is key to episodic memory, which is how you remember, say, what happened on Christmas Eve. To a great extent, memories are stored in the same area as they are used, so visual memories are stored primarily in the visual cortex.

  Fascinatingly, it seems that different types of movement can influence the brain’s different areas in a variety of ways. This leads us to wonder if different types of training have an impact on different kinds of memories. For example, it has been shown that word recall is boosted by running, but not by lifting weights. However, weight training appears to be good for associative memory, which is the ability to pair a name with a face. When it comes to remembering where you put the keys, both running and weight training seem to do the trick.

  We can draw two conclusions from studying these effects more closely. First, and most important, if you wish to strengthen your memory, you must be physically active in some way or another. What you choose to do is not important. Second, if you want to boost all your memory areas, from remembering where you’ve set stuff down to the words you’ve read, you should vary your training and make sure to do cardiovascular exercise and weight training. However, if you must choose between the two, cardio should take priority, since it is more beneficial for memory.

  Regular exercise might even influence how quickly you think on your feet.

  That both the hippocampus and the frontal lobe are strengthened by exercise means that physical activity should be able to improve many areas of your memory, and it’s possible that both short-term memory (where you remember stuff for a few minutes or hours) and long-term memory improve. Even if most research has focused on the effects of exercise on short-term memory, physical activity should boost all memory, whether it concerns what happened this morning or something that took place twenty years ago!

  WHAT ELSE IS INVOLVED IN THE REGENERATION OF NEW BRAIN CELLS?

  Besides exercise, things like sex, a low-calorie diet (but not starvation), and flavonoids found in, say, plain chocolate are all associated with an increase in the neurogenesis rate of new brain cells. A decrease in new cells can be caused by stress, lack of sleep, too much alcohol, and a high-fat diet, especially one high in saturated fat found in butter and cheese.

  PHYSICAL TRAINING VS. COMPUTER GAMES

  If you Google the term cognitive training, you’ll get more than ten million results. Most are ads for apps, games, and other products that purport to make your brain more effective. It is certainly a tempting offer, because who doesn’t want to have a better-functioning brain? Training the brain via different methods has, in a very short time, become a multibillion industry; every year more than ten billion dollars in cognitive training games are sold.

  Recently, seventy of the world’s most eminent neuroscientists and psychologists, under the auspices of Stanford University and the Max Planck Institute, decided to see whether there was any merit to these game and app manufacturers’ claims. The experts scoured the scientific studies on cognitive training to find answers to the question of whether games improved cognitive abilities.

  Their conclusion came back in the form of scathing criticism. It was found that cognitive training methods proffered by games and apps do not make you smarter, more focused, or more creative, and you do not improve your memory. You simply get better at playing the game. The same conclusion was found with crosswords and Sudoku, which are often referred to as brain gymnastics. If you work at filling in crosswords, you’ll get better at completing crosswords, but not at anything else.

  By contrast, research has shown time and again that exercise and physical activity can truly strengthen all our cognitive functions. If you’re still on the fence about this, it just means that you haven’t read this book properly! In the race between physical and cognitive exercises, physical exercise wins by a mile.

  THE RIGHT PRESCRIPTION FOR IMPROVED MEMORY

  Ideally, you should alternate between cardiovascular (endurance) exercise and weight training. Most of the research has focused on aerobic training’s effect on the hippocampus, but it looks like some effects on memory can only, or at least mostly, be achieved by training with weights.

  Train before or while learning something.

  Don’t go all-out—a walk or a light jog is all that’s required.

  Train regularly. Of course, you can improve your memory with a single workout, but just like the effects on many of our cognitive faculties, our memory improves much more if you’re patient and keep up your training over several continuous months.

  6. TRAIN YOURSELF TO BE CREATIVE

  The moment my legs begin to move my thoughts begin to flow.

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  The widely-known Japanese author Haruki Murakami has books that have sold millions of copies around the world. He can line up his many prestigious literary awards in a long row, and his name is regularly put forward for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Anyone who wonders where Murakami gets his inspiration need not look further than the title of his 2008 autobiography, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. In the book, Murakami describes his creative process in detail: When he is writing, he gets up at 4 a.m. and works until 10 a.m.; then he goes for a ten-kilometer run after lunch and follows that up with a swim. He spends the rest of the day listening to music and reading. He goes to bed around 9 p.m. He follows this routine seven days a week for six months, until the book he is working on is finished. To get things done, Murakami needs the physical strength he gets from training, which he considers as essential to the writing process as his creativity.

  Murakami is far from alone in having discovered the immeasurable effects exercise can have on one’s creative energy. There is a slew of authors, musicians, actors, artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs who have borne witness to how they use exercise to become more creative.

  IDEAS JUST TUMBLED OUT AFTER A RUN

  Exercise’s effects on creativity was one of the reasons I became interested in how the brain is influenced by physical activity. I often had good ideas after I’d been out for a run or after a game of tennis. At first I thought it was just a fluke, or perhaps I had simply become more alert. But it happened time and time again, and the effect
was so tangible in the hours after my exercise that I began to wonder if the workouts were actually making me more creative. When I found out about the studies on creativity and physical activity, it became clear that what I was experiencing wasn’t just because I felt happier and more alert.

  Boost your creativity with a walk

  Many highly creative people have testified to how exercise has worked wonders for their creativity. It is said that Albert Einstein discovered the theory of relativity while on a bike ride. Beethoven, one of the greatest musical geniuses who has ever lived, composed three symphonies despite going deaf in his forties. He often took a break during the day, during which he went on long walks for inspiration. Charles Darwin took hour-long strolls around his home at Down House—on a loop he called his “thinking path.” It was during a period of extended rambles that Darwin developed his groundbreaking work on the origin of species, perhaps the most important work ever in the field of biology.

  A more current example is Apple’s late cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs, who held regular walking meetings because he felt they were more productive than meetings that took place around a conference room table. He seems to have inspired many of Silicon Valley’s elite, such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, to do the same.

  DIFFERENT TYPES OF CREATIVITY

  While these anecdotes on exercise’s beneficial influence on creativity are revealing, they’re lacking in hard evidence. Before we can claim that physical activity can get you to think outside the box—and how you can best achieve this—we need to find out what creativity is, and how you test for it.

  For anything to be deemed creative, it needs to be both new and meaningful. Copying someone else’s work isn’t particularly creative. Besides, what is created must fulfill some purpose or function, because a pointless invention isn’t very creative, either.

  In the study of innovation, a distinction is often made between two kinds of creativity: divergent and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking is the classic brainstorming: coming up with many different solutions to a problem by thinking broadly and using plenty of associations. A typical test for divergent thinking is called the Alternative Uses Test, which is based on word association. For example, you’re given a word like brick, and, while being timed, you must come up with as many uses as you can for a brick—to build a wall in a house, to use as a paperweight or a doorstop. It isn’t just the number of answers that is important, but also how detailed those answers are and how different they are from one another. Preferably, the answers should be unique and not repeat what other test subjects have already mentioned. However, completely unrealistic answers, like using the brick to build a space rocket, don’t count.

  This test might sound simplistic, but it has been shown to reflect a person’s level of creativity very accurately; and I can attest to the fact that this experiment is not simple, especially when time is monitored. The big advantage of this test is that it measures creativity only, and not IQ; people with high IQs don’t do better than others. In fact, they often get stuck when they do this test.

  Convergent thinking is almost diametrically opposite to divergent thinking. Here, it’s not a matter of brainstorming a variety of solutions, but of quickly arriving at one answer—the correct one—which often boils down to a common denominator. An example would be that you are given three words, and you must quickly find what they have in common. Let’s say the words are Central Park, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Empire State Building—what all these have in common is that they are tourist attractions in New York City. In other words, there is just one correct answer, or a few; the rest of the answers are wrong. Convergent thinking emphasizes speed and logic more than divergent thinking and is more taxing on the brain. Nevertheless, convergent thinking is important for creativity, in artistic as well as scientific endeavors.

  Give your ideas some legs

  Lately, thanks to these tests, we have scientific proof that physical activity boosts creativity. One of the more elegant studies on the topic was conducted by scientists at Stanford University, in which they asked 176 subjects to perform several different creativity tests. Some performed the tests after having walked, and others did them after resting.

  The study’s title “Give your ideas some legs: the positive effect of walking on creative thinking” provides a clue as to the outcome. Over four out of five test subjects performed better on the tests when they did them while moving about. The differences weren’t insignificant, either. On average, the test results of those who walked while being tested were 60 percent better than those who had not walked, primarily in their ability to brainstorm and generate new ideas. However, convergent thinking (i.e., the ability to find the right answer and/or a common denominator) did not improve. This basically illustrates that physical activity seems to boost idea generation rather than logic. The coauthor of the study, Marily Oppezzo, made the following statement: “We do not proclaim that walks will turn you into a modern-day Michelangelo, but they can help you to get going in the initial stages of the creative process.”

  Movement is more important than environment and temperament

  A shift in one’s surroundings is said to stimulate a different way of thinking. There could be some truth to this, of course, but the Stanford study showed that it didn’t matter where the walk took place for creativity to improve. Some test subjects walked outside around the university campus while others walked inside on a treadmill, where they only had a gray wall to stare at. Despite this, creativity was improved in both those who walked outside and those who walked on the treadmill.

  Walks might not turn you into a modern-day Michelangelo, but they can help you to get going in the initial stages of the creative process.

  To make sure it was the walking that impacting the creative thinking and not the environment, some of the test subjects were pushed around in wheelchairs on the campus walking path. In other words, they were in the same surroundings as those who had walked outside but were not physically active. The result? It was not the environment that affected creativity, because creativity increased much more in the group that had walked on the path compared to the group that had been wheeled along that same path. A change of environment did not appear to have any effect on creativity. What matters is that we walk or run, not where we do it.

  What about temper? Since our mood improves after physical activity, increased creativity could be explained by the fact that those who had trained felt better overall. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Creativity tests that were performed after exercise have shown that even the subjects who did not feel better after the training still performed better on the tests after training.

  Thus, improved creativity is not the result of just feeling better. In other words, getting fresh ideas is linked to physical activity and cannot be explained by extenuating circumstances such as a change of environment or mood.

  Should you run or walk?

  The test subjects of the Stanford University study walked around the campus, but what is optimal for increasing creativity—should you walk or run? Even if it isn’t entirely possible to say for sure, it seems one could postulate that running, or moving in an equally vigorous way, is better than walking. Making a little more of an effort does indeed seem to pay off, but you need to keep it up for at least thirty minutes. Improved creativity expresses itself mainly after exercise, which is obviously an ideal situation. You can brainstorm while walking, but not so much while running.

  How long do we remain creative after moving around? Does it last for the rest of our life? Sadly, no. The creative boost is quite short-lived; it increases anywhere from one to a few hours after exertion, and then it wears off. If we want another jolt of inspiration, we must go for another walk or run, just like Haruki Murakami and his daily runs. However, from a creative standpoint, it is unwise to go all-out to the point of exhaustion, because that will not improve creativity—experiments have demonstrated that people who push to
o hard tend to perform worse on creativity tests after their workouts.

  We do not know why the benefits are so short-lived and why they disappear if we become too fatigued. We know that blood flow to the brain increases when we move around. When the brain gets more blood, it works more efficiently, and cognitive abilities—among them, creativity—improve. However, if we work out to the point of exhaustion, blood flow to the brain decreases instead since blood is now redirected from the brain to the muscles, where it is needed to provide us with maximum performance. Less blood in the brain seems to lead to lesser mental capabilities.

  Perhaps there have been times where you’ve had a hard time thinking clearly when you’ve been exhausted? Be that as it may, it’s important to emphasize that the dip in creativity that follows fatigue is only temporary; nothing suggests that creativity dwindles over the long term due to hard training.

  Make sure to start out fit

  Does everyone who trains become more creative, or is there a catch? Yes, there is, and it’s that you need to be reasonably fit to see good results. Fit people actually perform better on creativity tests if they are done in tandem with physical activity. Creativity doesn’t seem to improve at all in people who are not fit; in fact, it seems that it worsens a few hours after training, at least if the training session appears to be intense. This is probably from the decrease in blood flow to the brain due to exhaustion; even a short run at an unhurried pace can be exhausting for an unfit individual.

  So, if you want to boost your creativity by exercising, you need to make sure you’re in reasonably good shape to see a positive outcome. If you’re not at that point yet but still wish to strengthen your creativity by training, it’s best to walk or jog at a leisurely pace so you don’t drain your tanks completely.