Now, I want you to take a look at these two brains.
They look identical…
right?
They’re the same size, have roughly the same number of neurons, the same number of
connections between regions.
But one is smarter than the other.
Why?
Well, the answer may be in those connections.
We used to think bigger brains are better or that each part of the brain does one thing,
but we’re learning that almost everything the brain does relies on a pattern of communication
between brain regions.
And this relatively new look at the brain… has some bizarre similarities to the game
Twister.
So I took my “stockin feet” game in search for an expert in this new way of thinking
about… thinking.
This big picture perspective of how your brain works is called Network Neuroscience – researchers
use images of your brain, like from a brain scanner, to make a map of the major connections
among your brain regions.
Those regions become “nodes” in the network with connections or edges between them--like
stations in network of train tracks.
This wiring of your brain network has different patterns that shift – ALL THE TIME – when
you learn or when you multitask.
And a new theory suggests that how this wiring shifts in response to intellectual tasks – is
the best predictor of intelligence.
“I am Danielle Bassett, I’m an associate professor of bioengineering here at the University
of Pennsylvania and I’m a MacArthur Fellow.”
And to detangle this network approach, I came to U Penn to meet Danielle – she analyses
how these brain networks respond to you doing certain activities – like learning something
new.
“Somebody learns by changing the pattern of connections inside of the brain and those
pattern of connections tells you which parts of the brain are communicating with one another,
so what’s happening as we’re learning is that different parts of the brain are communicating
in ways that they didn’t before.”
And this is where Twister comes in.
“Right foot on yellow – there we go!”
The structure of the game is a simplified way to think of these networks in your brain.
“It's like a network in your brain because different parts of your brain are like us,
so I'm a part of the brain, you're a part of the brain.
You're making three connections to two blue areas and one yellow and I'm making two connections
to two red areas.
As we play the game we're going to change the connections.”
And as a person learns, these connections between brain regions can change: they can
connect and split apart and connect again.
“So this pattern may be illustrative of the connectivity at one particular point in
time But then it would reconfigure”
to form new connections.
"it would reconfigure, it would reconfigure over time as people are learning.”
And a measure of this reconfiguring is called cognitive flexibility
“it’s a capacity to change from one task to another task”
Cognitive flexibility can indicate how smart you are.
The quicker your brain configures and reconfigures its connectivity in response to the changing
needs of a task, the better it works.
The better you are at learning new things, multitasking or quickly switching between
tasks and possibly, higher intelligence.
Recent research suggests that general intelligence depends on this dynamic reconfiguration of
your main networks.
But like most research about intelligence, it raises even more questions.
“I think there’s a lot of components to intelligence and that cognitive flexibility
is certainly one that we associate with intelligence, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that it constitutes,
it certainly doesn’t explain 100% of what intelligence actually is.”
But what we can definitely say is that cognitive flexibility is amazing.
So is there a way to make my brain more flexible?
So I can be a super fast learner or a super multi-tasker.
A supertasker.
“So what we know so far is that people who are very good learners have very changeable
networks.
So their patterns of connectivity change very quickly.
We also know that changeability of the network is related to how positive somebody feels
on a particular day and to the degree to which they have slept well the night before and
had breakfast.”
So if I sleep well, if I’m happier so to speak, if I’m in a positive mood,
“You’ll have a more changeable brain network pattern of connections.”
And other researchers suggest that exercise can boost our cognitive flexibility.
These seem like pretty simple takeaways.
But remember that they’ve come from analysing a huge and super complicated map of the human
brain.
“So I think what we’re doing in neuroscience is try to say it’s not just about single
brain regions, it’s not just about single connections, it’s about the whole pattern,
which is admitting a high level of complexity.
But from that we can gain pretty simple intuitions about what makes a brain network healthy and
what makes it altered and diseased.”
And reconfiguring patterns in your brain takes energy – lots of it!
Certain patterns are hard to achieve, just like how certain configurations are harder
for human bodies to bend and twist into.
So a lot of times we fall back on configuration patterns that take the least energy.
Breaking out of those patterns is often the first step in changing the way you think and
it can even help unleash your creativity.
Thankfully for me, this kind of neural acrobatics is not correlated with my body’s flexibility.