I’m a regular patron of the Beaverton library. I usually work from a specific reading list based on recommendations from friends and colleagues. But I happen to browse the neuroscience section and came upon a title that caught my eye – The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live… and How You Can Change Them. Mmmm… a self-improvement guide for nerds!

It turns out that the author – Dr. Richard Davidson, PhD – was intrigued by the varying emotional responses that people manifest when dealing with all the things that life throws at them. As he entered graduate studies at Harvard in the 1970s, he wanted to establish a scientific basis for describing these variances while developing concrete methodologies that help people lead healthier, happier lives. His efforts helped birth affective neuroscience, the study of brain mechanisms that underlie our emotions.

The book introduces readers to his six dimensions of “emotional style” along with a summary of the research that led to their development. You learn a bit about how the brain works and the differences that show up in varying manifestations of the six dimensions. He talks about the mind-body connection (a topic on which I’ve written previously). And he also talks about the ways in which our brains adapt and change based on the experiences we have and the thoughts that we think. I commend interested parties to read the book and dive into the details. It’s fascinating!

The six dimensions of “emotional style” for which Dr. Davidson found a clear neurological correlate are:

1. Resilience measures the speed with which one shakes off the anger, sadness, or other negative emotion after a loss, setback, hassle, or other bothersome event. He labels the extremes Fast-to-Recover (insufficient reflection on, and learning from, an experience) and Slow-to-Recover (trapped in a cycle of excess rumination).
2. Outlook reflects one’s attitude toward lived experience. One with a positive outlook sustains joyful, interconnected, outgoing, upbeat sensibilities. One with a negative outlook can experience positive sensations intermittently but is unable to keep them going.
3. Socially intuitive people are adept at discerning and interpreting non-verbal communication, such as body language, facial expressions, vocal intonation, etc. They tend to exhibit high activation in the fusiform face area (which deciphers faces), and relatively low activation in the amygdala (which triggers the fight, flight, or freeze response).
4. Self-Awareness provides consciousness of one’s thoughts and feelings; they’re mindful of the messages that their bodies are sending them. This capacity plays a crucial role in empathy for others. Those low in this capability may manifest emotions in their bodies (e.g., anger, stress) yet be completely unaware of them.
5. People who exhibit Sensitivity-to-Context are attuned to their social environment and possess a keen awareness of the prevailing rules and expectations. Those who lack this ability are prone to inappropriate speech and behavior.
6. People who rate high on the Attention scale can sustain focus even in the midst of a gaggle of distractions. They can zero in on a single conversation in a noisy party; they can forge ahead on projects and tasks in the midst of emotional turmoil. They’re also less susceptible to “attention blink,” a heightened response to a stimulus that causes “blindness” to a secondary one in close succession.

Prevailing wisdom suggested that “emotional styles” form early and stay with us throughout our lives. Dr. Davidson and his colleagues disproved this assertion. Sensory experience can rewire the brain. Thoughts and intentions increase or decrease the amount of cortical real estate dedicated to specific functions. And cognitive-behavioral therapy can alter brain activity in fundamental ways.

While Dr. Davidson does not place value judgments on one’s positioning on the six dimensions of emotional styles, he makes the case that certain patterns seem to be associated with better life outcomes and greater happiness. To that end, he practices meditation and encourages others to do so.

• Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) enhances left prefrontal cortex activation which has been associated with Fast-to-Recover resilience.
• An intensive period of mindfulness improves selective attention and reduces attentional blink.
• Compassion meditation has been shown to encourage a Positive Outlook.

Also included in his prescription for happier lives: Pay attention to positive characteristics in yourself and others. Express gratitude. Compliment others regularly.

For those of us who’ve traversed the mid-life mark, it’s easy to see the signs of aging on our bodies no matter how much effort we put into maintaining them! We may fail to recognize that the impact of the passing years is just as prevalent on our brains. If we could catch a glimpse of plaque formation and tangles amid our gray matter, we might get motivated to do something about it – especially those of us who have cared for parents or grandparents with geriatric dementia.

In The Memory Bible: An Innovative Strategy for Keeping Your Brain Young, Dr. Gary Small tells us that it is far easier to prevent the loss of cognitive ability than to attempt to restore it. Fortunately, much like our muscles, our brains are designed to become more effective the more we exercise them. As a case in point, people who engage in mentally challenging jobs or pursuits enjoy a substantive measure of protection from future memory losses.

Dr. Small’s book provides a time-tested prescription for maintaining youthful brains. Here are a handful of techniques he recommends.

LOOK, SNAP, CONTEXT: Look actively at what you want to learn or remember. Slow down. Pay attention. Take in all of the sensory information. Create mental snapshots of memories. Fix them into long term memory by creating vivid and memorable images of the source material. For example, to remember that someone’s name is “Pat,” imagine a giant pat of butter melting on that person’s head! Connect all of these snapshots together into a cohesive story or chain. Use acronyms or other memory devices to help you.

MINIMIZE STRESS: Stress wears away at our brain fitness and overall memory performance. Avoid overloaded schedules, sleeplessness, ruminating, worrying, pessimism. Rather, set realistic expectations, pace yourself, schedule time outs, shrug things off, laugh, and relax!

TAKE ON HEALTHY CHALLENGES: Stretch yourself cognitively. (Use it or lose it!) Give yourself new mental mountains to climb. Introduce yourself to unfamiliar situations that you’ll have to master. Work on puzzles and brain teasers. And stay connected to the biggest brain teasers of all – other people! Yep – socialization is great for the brain.

EAT WELL: Those unhealthy diets that clog up the arteries in your heart also clog up the arteries in your brain. As such, eliminate processed foods, limit animal fats, and increase consumption of whole grains, fresh vegetables, and fruits. Healthy diets also help control blood pressure which reduces the risk of stroke.

EXERCISE: Physical activity and aerobic conditioning promote brain fitness. Exercise improves executive functioning – making plans, scheduling and carrying out activities, coordinating events, controlling adverse emotional states.

EXPAND YOUR MEMORY POWER: Put effort into writing effective notes; they’ll serve as useful memory aids. Be strategic about where you put things and hold fast to those decisions (e.g., wallet, car keys, bills to be paid). Use daily planning lists and weekly/monthly planning calendars. Place Post It notes where you’ll see them for important reminders. Create good habits that you’ll carry out without thinking much about them. (And avoid grooving on bad ones!) Follow a daily routine.

New York Times science writer Benedict Carey put together a fascinating book entitled How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens. The book provides a rudimentary understanding of how the brain works and covers a large body of research on how to improve its functioning.

As I’ve covered in prior posts, the brain is not a computer. It’s a survival machine that has adapted over the millennia to sense a vast quantity of data, filter out what it deems irrelevant, and embed data and memories in complex, overlapping networks. It may augment sensory data with its own contrivances to fill in any gaps in information. It may access and rewrite memories multiple times, changing the content ever so slightly with each processing. And it may establish relationships between seemingly unrelated pieces of data, intertwining old memories with new ones.

The author is a self-described nose-to-the-grindstone kind of learner. He recalls all the stress and strain of studying as well as the frustration when other students found success with far less effort. So, he was keenly interested to unearth strategies to improve his learning process.

Here are some of the interesting findings from his book…

Memory has two components: a storage strength (how well something is learned) and a retrieval strength (how readily it can be drawn back to mind). The harder we work to retrieve a memory, the greater the subsequent increase in storage and retrieval strength. To that end, distributing one’s study time across multiple sessions supports deeper learning than concentrating one’s effort in a single session.

One downside of concentrated study is the false impression that we’ve mastered the material. We perform well on recall in the immediate aftermath of our efforts, but we have trouble with recall a short time later. And while “cramming” can get us through a test, it has limited efficacy in content retention over time.

Varying the background while learning enhances effectiveness. Music, light, background, colors can positively impact storage and retention. It also helps the brain adapt more readily to a testing environment that’s different from the study environment.

Pre-testing and “pop quizzes” increase the likelihood of performing well on a subsequent test, even if one does poorly on them. They help the brain focus on what’s important when studying.

The standard phases of problem solving include: (i) preparation (working on the problem until the point of impasse), (ii) incubation (ruminating on the problem in background), (iii) illumination (the “aha” moment), and (iv) verification (checking to see that the flash of insight proves true). During incubation, the mind is sensitive to information that might bear on the problem. Input may arrive piecemeal or all-at-one; it may change baseline assumptions about the problem. Time spent percolating often results in substantive breakthroughs and creative insights.

People demonstrate higher recall of unfinished or interrupted assignments than completed ones. There’s something about starting work that gives it psychological weight. It engenders a desire for fulfillment and tunes the mind toward collection of relevant input. It can be thought of as another form of percolating. It suggests a strategy of starting work on larger projects ASAP to build internal commitment and launch percolation… even if it’s just knocking out the small stuff.

Repetition of a specific skill set creates a powerful illusion of mastery (e.g., running scales on the piano). But skills improve quickly and then plateau. A better approach involves varying the content of practice and accepting the slower apparent rate of progress in each discipline (e.g., scales, music theory, repertoire). This interleaving produces stronger, longer lasting results… and works for motor and cognitive skills.

A new frontier of “perceptual learning” exploits the brain’s ability to detect differences in similar looking objects and use those insights to decipher new, previously unseen material. It introduces concepts, ideas, or meaning without detailed explanation and lets the students learn experientially. An example given in the book revolved around identifying works of art by historical period. The subject used randomized collection of flash cards and made impressive strides in knowledge by trial-and-error rather than reading through detailed characterizations of the various periods. The technique has also been used with great success to accelerate the learning curve for new pilots as they acclimate to reading and interpreting gauges on their dashboards.

The final piece to the learning improvement: Get a good night’s sleep. During sleep, the brain is consolidating memories, making connections, and separating the important from the trivial. It clarifies memories and sharpens skills.