Chapter – 2
Harnessing Adaptability
According to Ericsson, if you are body builder it’s easier
to track the changes in your biceps, triceps. quadriceps, pecs, delts, lats,
traps, abs, glutes, calves and hamstrings.
If you are running, biking or swimming to enhance endurance,
you could track your progress by your heart-rate, your breathing, and things
like that.
But how could you measure your mental advancement? Let’s
say, you have become an expert in algebra or some music instrument?
Difficult, right? Because you can’t develop six-pack on
your forehead.
And, in case you think, there isn’t much going on in your
brain, you are not alone.
But then, make no mistake. There’s a growing evidence of
that suggest that brain muscles expand in response to various sorts of training
just like your muscles and cardiovascular systems in response to physical
training.
The Brains of London Taxi Drivers
It’s not easy to
become a London taxi driver. (And by the way, if you have landed in London for
the first time it’s better to hire a Taxi, as the roads are really
criss-crossed that could even baffle a GPS system.)
You need remember no fewer than twenty-five thousand streets
all within the six-mile radius of Charing Cross. On top of it, you also need to
remember small and big landmarks as well.
Given that taxi drivers have to remember so much information,
these folks have to appear for one of the toughest exams administered by
Transport of London
To master the knowledge of streets, cabbies are known to
spend years driving from place to place, usually by motorbike, taking notes of
places. However, the first step is master 320 runs in the guidebook provided to
taxi-driver candidates. And, they so go around all these 320 places, which fall
within the 6 miles radius of the Charing Cross
Half of the prospective drivers end up dropping out, but
those who have earned their licenses have internalized London to a degree that
Google Maps won’t match up.
And even after earning their license, the cabbies keep
honing and increasing their knowledge of the London streets.
The eventual memory and navigational skills developed by
these taxi drivers is pretty astonishing, and so it comes as no surprise that
psychologists are quite astonished by the minds of London Taxi drivers,
particularly those interested in honing of navigational skills.
Eleanor Maguire, a scientist at University College London
studied the brains of sixteen male taxi drivers and then compared them with the
brains of 50 other males who were non-tax—drivers. She particularly studied the
hippocampus (sea-horse shaped part of the brain involved in the development of
memories). The part of the brain is
particularly used in remembering the location of things.
Hippocampus and Hippocampi
Hippocampi is part of the
Hippocampus that helps in remembering the location of things. A person actually
has two hippocampi, one of either side of the brain. And birds, that store food
at different locations, apparently have 30 percent more hippocampus than birds
that don’t. This means hippocampus is flexible.
Maguire also found that a
particular part of the hippocampus – the posterior or rear part – was larger in
the taxi drivers than in any other subjects. And if one compared the brains of
taxi drivers with that of the London bus drivers it was found that posterior
hippocampi of the taxi drivers were significantly larger than the same parts of
the bus drivers. Why? Because, unlike the Taxi drivers, the bus drivers plied
in the same route over and over again and never had to look for an alternate
route.
The years spent by taxi drivers in mastering the knowledge
had enlarged precisely that part of the brain that is responsible from
navigating from one place to another.
Maguire’s study, published in 2011, is considered to the
most dramatic evidence we have that the human brains grows and changes in
response to intense training.
Adaptability
It’s possible to shape the brain – your brain, my brain, and
anybody’s brain – in the ways that we desire through conscious, deliberate
training.
One study on rats, wherein 112 different genes were turned
on when the workload on a particular muscle in the rear legs of the rats was
sharply increased. The eventual result was that rat’s muscles got strengthened
so they could handle the increased workload. They had being pushed outside the
comfort zone, and the muscles responded by getting strong to establish a new
comfort zone. Homeostasis had been reestablished.
That is how the body’s desire for homeostasis could be
harnessed to drive changes – push it hard enough and long enough and it will
respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do.
However, to keep changes happening you need to keep upping
the ante: run farther, run faster, run uphill. If you don’t keep pushing and
pushing and pushing some more, the body will settle into homeostasis, albeit at
a different level than before, and you will stop improving.
Shaping The Brain
Could it be possible that Einstein was born with
beefier-than-usual inferior parietal lobules which contributed to his
mathematical geniuses? You might think so, but the researchers who carried out
the study on the size of that part of the brain in mathematicians and nonmathematicians
found that the longer someone had worked as a mathematician, the more gray
matter he or she had in the right inferior parietal lobule – which would
suggest that the increased size was a product of extended mathematical
thinking, not something the person was born with.
Bent-twig effect
If you push a small
twig slightly away from its normal pattern of growth, you can cause major
change in the ultimate location of the branch that grows from the twig; pushing
on a branch that is already developed has much less effect.
Building Your Own
Potential
We learn enough to get by in our day-to-day lives, but once
we reach that point, we seldom push to go beyond good enough. We do very little
that challenges our brains to develop gray matter or white matter or to rewire
entire sections in the way than an aspiring London Taxi driver or violin
student might. And, for the most part, that’s okay. “Good enough” is generally
good enough. But it’s important to remember that the option exists. If you wish
to become significantly better at something, you can.
Comments
Post a Comment