Sending your brain back to school

(Note: This was my most recent ChristianWeek column)

Back to school success: Does self-discipline beat intelligence? What about a good night’s sleep?

by Denyse O’Leary

A perennial question ... especially as some of us head back to school: Are we born smart? Do we achieve smarts? Does bitter experience thrust smarts upon us?

Unfortunately, some researchers into the sources of intelligence seem to be looking for something that isn’t actually there — a specific genetic inheritance, mechanism, brain wiring diagram, or excess of cells that guarantees exceptional intelligence. But life is seldom as simple as that. Not surprisingly, research results can be confusing or contradictory as a result.

In a recent edition of Scientific American Mind (September 3, 2008), Hoppe and Stojanovic write,

No one is sure why some experiments indicate that a bright brain is a
hardworking one, whereas others suggest it is one that can afford to relax.
Some, such as Haier—who has found higher brain metabolic rates in more astute
individuals in some of his studies but not in others—speculate one reason could
relate to the difficulty of the tasks. When a problem is very complex, even a
gifted person’s brain has to work to solve it. The brain’s relatively high
metabolic rate in this instance might reflect greater engagement with the task.
If that task was out of reach for someone of average intellect, that person’s
brain might be relatively inactive because of an inability to tackle the
problem. And yet a bright individual’s brain might nonetheless solve a less
difficult problem efficiently and with little effort as compared with someone
who has a lower IQ.

Got that? There is, however, some really useful take-home information from their article: When researchers examined the final grades of 164 Grade Eight students, together with their acceptance or rejection from a prestigious high school, they found that “scholarly success was more than twice as dependent on assessments of self-discipline as on IQ.”

Students with more self-discipline—meaning that they would sacrifice short-term fun for long-term gain—were more likely to improve their marks during the school year than those who wouldn’t sacrifice fun. By contrast, a high IQ did not predict a rise in grades.

Obviously, this won’t surprise an experienced teacher or a mature parent. But it bears repeating all the same: Modern neuroscience is not overturning millennia of experience; it is filling out what the other disciplines already tell us. Our brains are very plastic organs, and paying attention determines the areas in which they develop. Like our bodies, brains must be exercised effectively to achieve our goals. That is why self-discipline is as important to brain exercise as to body exercise.

That’s also why I am skeptical when I hear jocks claim that they “can’t” pass Math or English because their specialty is throwing touchdown passes. If they paid as much attention to the Math lecturer and the English prof as they do to the coach and the trainer, they would likely get the marks they need to play for their school. Our brains are generalists, by necessity. We make them into specialists by our choices.

Now, about sleep: Does “lights out” matter? Why not stay up all night gabbing with new friends? Here’s one reason why not: Modern neuroscience shows that, contrary to older theories, our minds/brains are not passive while we sleep. In fact, Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen (Scientific American Mind, August 7, 2008) relate a fascinating German experiment in which researchers taught subjects to solve a math problem by a long, tedious procedure. Subjects practiced the procedure 100 times. Then they were sent away and told to come back 12 hours later, to try it another 200 times. But the researchers had not told the subjects that there is an easy math shortcut to the problem. The researchers knew precisely when a student figured out that shortcut, because problem-solving speed suddenly increased.

Note this: Subjects who got a night's sleep between the two sessions were more than two and a half times as likely to figure out the shortcut! Fifty-nine percent of those subjects who slept discovered the trick, but only 23 percent of the others did. When we sleep, our minds organize solutions to problems, and we need to give them a chance.

The apostle Paul compares the Christian life to an athletic contest (1 Corinthians 9:24). That makes a lot of sense when we keep in mind that our brains have many of the same needs as our bodies.

The difference between thinking and consciousness

The Mindful Hack has often featured stories about the difference between the brain as an organ and the mind as your immaterial self. But there is also a distinction worth making between thinking and consciousness.

A recent post "Neuroscience: Yes, we do think while we are asleep. And we solve problems too" indirectly helps us understand that distinction. Let's look at one of the experimenets again:

In a 2004 study Ullrich Wagner and others in Jan Born's laboratory at the University of Lübeck in Germany elegantly demonstrated just how powerful sleep's processing of memories can be. They taught subjects how to solve a particular type of mathematical problem by using a long and tedious procedure and had them practice it about 100 times. The subjects were then sent away and told to come back 12 hours later, when they were instructed to try it another 200 times.

What the researchers had not told their subjects was that there is a much simpler way to solve these problems. The researchers could tell if and when subjects gained insight into this shortcut, because their speed would suddenly increase. Many of the subjects did, in fact, discover the trick during the second session. But when they got a night's worth of sleep between the two sessions, they were more than two and a half times more likely to figure it out-59 percent of the subjects who slept found the trick, compared with only 23 percent of those who stayed awake between the sessions. Somehow the sleeping brain was solving this problem, without even knowing that there was a problem to solve.

Notice that those people were thinking when they were not conscious. In fact, they couldn't solve the problem when they were conscious, but they solved it after they had become unconscious for a while.

Thinking is the use of mental patterns to assemble information and maybe solve problems. Clearly, we need not be conscious in order to think - although it is necessary to recognize a subject to think about, like the tedious math problem in the experiment.

Consciousness is our state of self-awareness. We may or may not be thinking when we are conscious, though we usually are. Many meditation traditions encourage the meditator to reduce thinking to a minimum in order to reach a profound meditative state.

Neuroscience: Yes, we do think while we are asleep

In "Sleep on It: How Snoozing Makes You Smarter" Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen reveal, "During slumber, our brain engages in data analysis, from strengthening memories to solving problems" (Scientific American Mind - August 7, 2008):

The latest research suggests that while we are peacefully asleep our brain is busily processing the day's information. It combs through recently formed memories, stabilizing, copying and filing them, so that they will be more useful the next day. A night of sleep can make memories resistant to interference from other information and allow us to recall them for use more effectively the next morning. And sleep not only strengthens memories, it also lets the brain sift through newly formed memories, possibly even identifying what is worth keeping and selectively maintaining or enhancing these aspects of a memory. When a picture contains both emotional and unemotional elements, sleep can save the important emotional parts and let the less relevant background drift away. It can analyze collections of memories to discover relations among them or identify the gist of a memory while the unnecessary details fade-perhaps even helping us find the meaning in what we have learned.

Their research is a far cry from earlier theories that the brain shuts down when we are asleep. Apparently, sleep plays an active, not merely a passive role in learning, as a number of fascinating experiments show.

The fact that sleep plays at least a passive role in learning won't be news to anyone who has had to teach students who were up half the night partying and can't now remember their classroom number, let alone the topic we discussed in the last class. But consider this:

In a 2004 study Ullrich Wagner and others in Jan Born's laboratory at the University of Lübeck in Germany elegantly demonstrated just how powerful sleep's processing of memories can be. They taught subjects how to solve a particular type of mathematical problem by using a long and tedious procedure and had them practice it about 100 times. The subjects were then sent away and told to come back 12 hours later, when they were instructed to try it another 200 times.

What the researchers had not told their subjects was that there is a much simpler way to solve these problems. The researchers could tell if and when subjects gained insight into this shortcut, because their speed would suddenly increase. Many of the subjects did, in fact, discover the trick during the second session. But when they got a night's worth of sleep between the two sessions, they were more than two and a half times more likely to figure it out-59 percent of the subjects who slept found the trick, compared with only 23 percent of those who stayed awake between the sessions. Somehow the sleeping brain was solving this problem, without even knowing that there was a problem to solve.

I'm not so sure the sleeping brain did not know there was a problem to solve - the prospect of waking up to another two hundred iterations of a tedious procedure must have set the little grey cells churning, so to speak.

Mind and brain: How do unconscious people know when to wake up?

Spiritual Brain friend David Rice writes to say,

Hey Denyse - I work at the library's circulation desk at the University of MS and noticed a book just lying around entitled "Understanding Sleep and Dreaming" by William Moorcroft. I started leafing through it and noticed this interesting blurb. On page 118 (Box 15 inset) he writes that there was a study done which concluded that when people EXPECT to be awakened at a certain time that their bodies will begin to produce adrenal corticotropic hormone (which tells the adrenal glands to release cortisol) at they time necessary to awaken thus facilitating that awakening process. Others, who were told that they could sleep in, did not produce this hormone if they were awoken BEFORE the time they actually EXPECTED to awaken. Thus the mind appears to have a causal role, non-materialistic, on the bodies preparations for arising from sleep depending on what they mind expects will happen. Provocative no?

Yes indeed. I asked lead author Mario Beauregard about it and he said, "This finding effectively supports the view proposed in our book regarding the causal influence of mind processes on brain/body functioning."

I suspect there are many similar examples out there, but if we are not looking for them we won't notice them.