While g, the general intelligence capacity identified by Charles Spearman, is critical, it is not the only psychological factor that goes into determining your intelligence. Indeed, Spearman never intended it to be viewed as such. He left open the possibility for specific mental skills to vary from task to task. Two people with the same high g, he reasoned, could still show variable performance in, say, music and French.
It’s not enough to simply have the intelligence, we have to apply it. And, naturally, some people are better at applying it to some tasks than others. Spearman, who liked to keep things alphabetically simple, called this extra variable ‘s’ for specific intelligence.
In this model, g is the raw power, the size of the engine. But s measures how well this power can be channelled into each action. A four-wheeled Ferrari is impressive on the road but in the sea? Not so much. In that (admittedly crude) example, the Ferrari has a high g and a high s for driving, but a low s for swimming. It can’t use its high-performance engine that way. It’s still a sleek, beautiful and powerful car. It still has a high g in the water. But it sinks.
The introduction of specific s factors means intelligence emerges from a hierarchy of diverse mental abilities. This is important for the idea of cognitive enhancement, and how it could be achieved, because it suggests more than one way to increase someone’s ability. The first way, in theory, would be to target and increase the overarching g. As g is based on a natural capacity, that seems a pretty large challenge. The second possibility is to intervene to improve one or more of the s-factors – to change how the brain accesses and uses that capacity. And that seems more do-able.
Probably the most well-known architecture of intelligence splits the influence of g into two measures of cognitive ability: crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence, as its name suggests, is the crunchy stuff deposited in our heads over years. It’s the knowledge, the dates and lists of kings and queens. Did you know the capital city of Cameroon is Yaoundé? If not, then I have just slightly increased your crystallized intelligence, provided you remember it of course. Memory and recall are important for crystallized intelligence, and understanding and manipulating numbers too. Most of all, crystallized intelligence is vocabulary – having, using and making sense of words.
Fluid intelligence, also well named, is the cognitive processing we tap to solve a problem. It’s the ability to reason, to make connections, and to make use of the crystallized knowledge. It’s the detective work – analysing the clues and making deductions.
Just like with the exam scores that pushed Charles Spearman towards the discovery of g, levels of crystallized and fluid intelligence tend to correlate tightly. It’s unusual to find a person with very high levels of one and very low levels of the other.
Some psychologists break g down into an additional third output: spatial awareness, including navigation and the ability to hold and manipulate visual imagery in the mind. This kind of intelligence is more common in men than women. Women get their own back by having better short-term memories.*
Not all scientists accept the idea of g as dominant general intelligence. The most high-profile challenge came from the psychologist Howard Gardner in the 1980s. He took the specific intelligence idea to its logical extreme and argued specialist abilities were the driving influence on cognitive performance. Indeed, he said, s was so important that the effect of g was small and need not exist at all. S alone mattered and, without general intelligence to tie types of specific intelligence together, each of these multiple intelligences could be individually high or low. More fundamentally, Gardner claimed each specialism was a different type of intelligence. There were multiple types of intelligence a person should be assessed for, he said, not just one.
Some of these different types of intelligences that Gardner outlined look similar to what we think of as aspects of Spearman’s general intelligence. Two, for example, are called logical-mathematical intelligence and visual-spatial intelligence – these reflect what seem to be standard cognitive skills, and the kind already measured by IQ tests.
But Gardner also introduced less conventional types of intelligence, from musical intelligence, interpersonal intelligence and naturalistic intelligence to bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence and mental searchlight intelligence.
What are these? Bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence is attributed to people who are especially skilled at using their body to convey ideas and feelings. They are aware of their presence within physical space, rely heavily on their sense of touch and have good motor skills and hand-eye coordination. Dancers and athletes, the theory says, show high levels of this type of intelligence. Gardner’s mental searchlight intelligence is the ability to scan lots of sources of information at once, to make sure nothing is missed or missing. Naturalistic intelligence is sensitivity to the animal and plant kingdoms, such as shown by gardeners and zookeepers. People who are clever in an interpersonal way are sociable and good mixers and enjoy helping others.
It’s a compelling idea and in many ways the theory of multiple intelligences paints a reassuring portrait of humanity. We all have something we are good at. We’re all equal. Teachers and educators love the idea of multiple intelligences because it makes every child clever in their own way. It offers a comforting view of the world, similar to seeing the chaos of romantic love and relationships through the rose-tinted lens of ‘someone out there for everybody’. This appeal has helped make the idea of multiple intelligences well known. But as scientific theories go it’s controversial and pretty flimsy.
Its social and political appeal rests on how it spreads performance and ability (and, tacitly, value) around. But for this to be true, then each of its various types of intelligence should be truly independent of each other. People who are good at logic puzzles should not be any better at spotting patterns, say, than someone who is not. People who are skilled at musical instruments should have no advantage when it comes to spatial awareness.
Most studies suggest the opposite: good and bad performance on separate tests of these so-called multiple intelligences tends to bunch together, in the same way Spearman found academic grades did more than a century ago. The same people still tend to do well on most of the tests of Gardner’s different types of intelligence, and the same people tend to perform poorly. Despite the theoretical attempt to pull the skills and abilities apart and spread the results across the population, the data puts them back into sticky clumps and hands them, fairly or not, more to some individuals than others.
Still, the popularity of the idea of multiple intelligences – all shall have prizes! – has spawned a series of imitators, most of which, in scientific terms, are little more than fashionable labels. Entrepreneurs write and sell books on business intelligence and managerial intelligence. There is spiritual intelligence and existential intelligence and moral intelligence and sexual intelligence and leadership intelligence. There is people intelligence and cultural intelligence and narrative intelligence and creative intelligence. There is even a dark intelligence, made up of an unholy trinity of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy.
One thing many of these claimed types of intelligences have in common is the way they are presented as an alternative to ‘conventional’ intelligence, as measured by IQ tests. They are sold as more reliable indicators of human ability and potential, or at least a more useful guide to how someone will succeed in work, relationships and society. That is especially said to be true for emotional intelligence. We hear a lot about emotional intelligence, usually in the negative – ‘oh, yes, he’s academically bright, but he isn’t emotionally clever’.
Emotional intelligence is a real thing and it has a legitimate scientific foundation. But as part of the push-back against what is seen by critics as the tyranny of IQ tests, emotional intelligence has also been twisted and turned into a conceptual woolly blanket used to comfort people who believe they can’t do mathematics.
Probably the greatest reason why emotional intelligence is so well known is the 1995 book of the same name by the psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman. The subtitle is, ‘Why it can matter more than IQ’. The blurb on the back says the book ‘redefines intelligence’.
Goleman’s book highlights emotional intelligence and other rival intelligences as important abilities (which they are), with a role in human performance (which they could well have). But it also goes further and explicitly positions them as superior measures of mental and cognitive abilities, different from and more important than IQ (which they’re not).
This attitude is common and it feeds on all those fears of IQ, typically presented as an elitist establishment idea and a private members’ club that turns away people at the door. Rival intelligences, their inventors claim, are more inclusive, more open and – crucially – more malleable and changeable. For what use are ideas like business intelligence and sexual intelligence if they cannot be increased in exchange for the price of a book, DVD or conference ticket?
Rivals to IQ also trade on the idea they are more relevant, they measure separate and different abilities, which, although they are called intelligences, are more useful to have than ‘intelligence’. They are presented as independent of ‘academic’ intelligence – it doesn’t matter how you did in tests and exams at school or if a teacher or friend was once rude about your brain power, you can still make something of yourself.
That’s true and admirable, and of course if people can learn to improve their business, managerial, creative, sexual, people, narrative, cultural, spiritual, moral and existential skills and awareness, then they are more likely to do well, to achieve their goals. But it’s misleading to present these opportunities and abilities as distinct from IQ, or general intelligence, even more so to present them as rival forms of intelligence.
When Howard Gardner first introduced his multiple intelligences, he admitted he used the word ‘intelligences’ rather than skills or abilities because it would draw more attention. In Daniel Goleman’s book, he wrote that:
There are widespread exceptions to the rule that IQ predicts success – many (or more) exceptions than cases that fit the rule. At best, IQ contributes about 20 per cent to the factors that determine life success which leaves 80 per cent to other forces . . . My concern is with a key set of these ‘other characteristics’, emotional intelligence . . . No one can yet say exactly how much of the variability from person to person in life’s course it accounts for. But what data exists suggest that it can be as powerful, and at times more powerful, than IQ.
That’s not true. As we’ve seen, the data, where it exists, shows a strong link between IQ and a person’s life course, at least in terms of their achievements. The stranglehold of Spearman’s positive manifold on mental ability means emotional intelligence, and indeed any kind of intelligence that truly flexes the brain, must link to most of the other kinds, including those measured by IQ tests. Measure one kind of intelligence and you get a pretty good guide to how well people perform on others.
Take bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence. It’s about as far as one can get from the pencil-and-paper impression of IQ. But the correlation with scores on standard ‘academic’ measures of intelligence is still there. Tests show how well someone can mentally control how they move their arms and legs, and how they judge speed and movement, and even how they kick a ball, can also indicate their broader mental skills. Say hello to the intelligent footballer.
When I used to watch a lot of the sport in the 1990s, there weren’t any intelligent footballers. Well, there must have been, but they didn’t tend to make themselves known. It’s not hard to see why. Poor old Graeme Le Saux, the one-time Blackburn Rovers, Southampton, Chelsea and England defender, was targeted from the terraces for being a bit of a clever clogs (and for reasons that always escaped me, homosexual) simply because he had a couple of A-levels and read the Guardian.
As television money and foreign talent swarmed into football, so the game filled with sophisticated and urbane continentals who could speak several languages and – shock – ate pasta. ‘He’s got a good football brain’ was added to the list of commentator-friendly attributes affixed to these foreign types who could lift their head up and pick a pass under pressure rather than booting the ball into the crowd.
Tactics and roles evolved. While former players asked to analyse matches had once been able to speak in that weird mix of past and present tense only footballers seem to use – ‘I’ve seen him running and he’s crossed it in and I just hit it’ – today they are expected to demonstrate knowledge and insight. The bar has been raised so far that in 2013, the former top-flight attacking midfielder Paul McVeigh published a book titled The Stupid Footballer is Dead: Insights into the Mind of a Professional Footballer. Cynics of the subtitle please note: the book extends for 160 pages.
It might not be the same as sitting an IQ test, but playing high-level football – or any team sport – demands plenty of cognitive ability. Each player needs to observe, think and react quickly, and accurately make and test mental plans. Sports psychologists use terms like visual anticipation, knowledge of situational probabilities and strategic decision making to describe these skills, which can sound specialist and relevant only to their sport. But as we’ve seen, mental ability doesn’t usually work that way – people who are good in one regime are usually pretty useful in others.
Certainly, there are plenty of outstanding all-round sportsmen and women, which itself shows impressive cognitive flexibility. There are footballers who excel at cricket and golf, and racing drivers who are expert skiers. (Few took it as far as Max Woosnam, the English sporting polymath who won a doubles tennis title at Wimbledon, scored a maximum 147 break in snooker, made a century at Lord’s Cricket Ground and captained Manchester City football club.)
With a little imagination, terms and language of sports psychologists can translate to describe mainstream mental skills that apply in the wider world: spatial attention, divided attention, working memory and mental capacity – all combined with the ability to change strategy and inhibit responses. Another way of describing this group of cognitive tasks is executive function. And good executive function is useful way beyond the sports field.
In the summer of 2007, scientists in Sweden recruited dozens of players from the country’s elite football leagues to test their intelligence. Coaches at several clubs, from the top and a lower division in the men’s and women’s sport, were asked to nominate two of their defenders, two midfielders and two strikers to spend forty minutes sitting a series of mental tests. They weren’t IQ tests – the tasks didn’t analyse language skills – but the questions were standard psychological measures of executive function. In one puzzle, called Design Fluency, the footballers were given sixty seconds to find as many different ways as they could to join all of the dots in a square with a single continuous line.
The tests were anonymous, so we don’t know which footballers were volunteered by their coaches (perhaps those who played poorly in the previous game?). But to give an idea of the calibre of player involved, those who started games in the Swedish top division that season included Henrik Larsson, the former Celtic and Barcelona striker who played in three World Cups, and Stefan Thordason, who scored one of the best goals I have witnessed live, for Stoke City in a cup match at Charlton Athletic.
The results of the study were clear: all the footballers did better on the mental tests than the average person would, and the top division players scored in the top 5 per cent of the population. What’s more, the performance on the cognitive tests seemed to predict future success on the pitch. The smartest players scored or helped to create the most goals in subsequent seasons.
The scientists were so struck by the results they suggested football coaches might be missing a trick by focusing only on physical ability and technical skill when they assess and recruit young players. A quick thirty minutes of pencil and paper tests, they suggested, alongside the shuttle runs and free-kick expertise, could be a useful way to predict which youth players will make the grade. The stupid footballer may not yet be dead, but he’s being pushed aside by more intelligent team mates.
There is an opportunity here. If the workings of the brain can influence sporting performance, and the workings of the brain can be improved with neuroenhancement, then smart drugs and brain stimulation should be able to help athletes to compete by upping their intelligence. Just like the DIY brain hacking community, plenty in the field of sport are trying it. Physical doping in sport has been joined by brain doping.
The cyclist Tom Simpson died on the Tour de France because he turned off his basic survival mechanisms. The drugs in his system changed the way his central nervous system responded to the physical exertion, to the demands on his physiology. This allowed him to push his body’s performance beyond what the brain would usually allow, with, as it tragically turned out, good reason. Neuroscientists are trying to use their new tools of brain intervention to achieve the same result, but in a safer, more controlled way.
Stories surface from time to time of what is called miracle-strength – mothers who lift cars to save their trapped children and so on. We should be sceptical. Those reports remain unconfirmed and, by their extreme and unusual nature, untested. A definite physical limit restricts what a human body is capable of, whatever the circumstances. But there is also a mental limit. And often the mental limit is set at a lower threshold than the physical limit. To protect us from danger, the brain tells us we are tired before we are. It does this by signalling we are exhausted, that we have reached our physical limit before we have. How else can the winning athlete, who has given everything to cross the finish line, then set off on a sprightly lap of honour?
Sports scientists call this the central governor theory. The central governor likes to play it safe. When the brain senses the body approaching potentially dangerous levels of exertion – heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen demand, muscle fatigue – it sounds the alarm and convinces us we are simply too knackered to continue.
Much of sports psychology and training aims to exploit the zone of what is physically possible even after the central governor tells you it’s not. It’s the pushing through the pain barrier, silencing negative thoughts, getting in a positive mind-set. Doing so is usually presented as a question of motivation, from the Olympic swimmers who listen to music on chunky headphones even as they approach the blocks to my friend who, training for his first marathon, said the hardest part of the long lonely runs in the months before was resisting the voice in his head that said, ‘Look, there’s a bench. Why not sit down?’
In theory, neuroenhancement offers a way to silence this voice, or at least turn it down. By directly interfering with the way the brain works, the threshold of the central governor could be increased, or the muscles could be told to work beyond it. And so electrical brain stimulation could offer a way to push physical abilities and enhance the mental side of athletic performance.
There’s some evidence for this. In 2013, scientists in Brazil found twenty minutes of electrical brain stimulation of the brain’s motor cortex, which controls muscle movement, increased the performance of trained road cyclists on something called the maximal incremental exercise test. It’s the athletic equivalent of testing to destruction. Each cyclist was placed on a static bike, and, as they pedalled, the resistance level was increased every minute. The test finished when the cyclist ‘voluntarily terminated’ the exercise, or because they couldn’t keep up with the required speed of spinning the pedals at 80 revolutions per minute (rpm).
The highest intensity each cyclist could sustain for a full minute before they stopped – voluntarily or not – is called the peak power output. The trial worked: motor cortex stimulation increased peak power output by 4 per cent. That doesn’t sound much but, just like small increases in intelligence, it could be the difference between success and failure in a competitive race.
The technique might help the less committed too. In 2015, another Brazilian experiment tested the same effect on men in their twenties who were merely ‘physically active’ – defined as taking some exercise three times a week. This experiment had a more fearsome name, the time to exhaustion test, and several of the participants never made it as far as the bike. Four of the initial fifteen volunteers dropped out, at least one because he was scared of having his brain Westinghoused. The survivors were given brain stimulation to the motor cortex again (or not) and simply asked to pedal at more than 60rpm at a fixed (pretty tough) level of resistance. When they fell below target speed for five seconds, they were labelled as exhausted.
Without the brain stimulation, the weekend cyclists managed an average of 407 seconds. After the electric current to their brain, they could keep going for more than a minute longer, and on average lasted 491 seconds.
I still had a few months before I was due to return to Mensa, so I thought I would give it a go – to see if I could stimulate my brain to improve my physical performance, before I tried to boost my mental performance. To do so, I bought my own electrical brain stimulator. The device marketed to computer gamers was sold out, but a quick internet search threw up a number of other companies selling their own ready-made versions. I went for the cheapest. It cost $55 and was posted to me from America within a fortnight.
Setting up was easy. A 9V battery, one of the chunky rectangular ones, fitted snugly inside a white box with a socket on the outside to receive the wire to connect the two electrodes. Each electrode was colour coded, red for the anode and black for cathode, and each ended in a crocodile clip, to be attached to a saline-soaked sponge that would transfer the current to the outside of my head. The switch on the box had three settings: off and then a choice of 1mA or 2mA of current. That’s about enough to light the small standby bulb on your television.
If you take it seriously enough, you can spend lots more – both on the stimulator itself and on bespoke sponge electrodes and ready-made saline solution to soak them in. Professional versions – the types used by research scientists – cost more still. They promise more reliable and controllable current and more accurate electrode positioning, but they all work on the same simple principle.
My budget version came with a couple of pages of instructions that said to chop up a regular household sponge and wet it by mixing a couple of spoonfuls of salt into a cup of water. Placing the soaked sponges in the right place next to my skull and keeping them there was tricky (I had spurned the chance to purchase the special headband) so I rummaged in a drawer until I found some close-fitting headgear. It was a knitted Spiderman hat. Other hats are available.
Where to position the electrode sponges? Unhelpfully, the instructions that came with the equipment said company policy was not to recommend any electrode positions. ‘A quick Google search’, they promised, would provide guidance. Although, the instructions also pointed out, the ‘content or validity’ of these websites could not be guaranteed. This was true DIY brain stimulation – users are advised to ‘research and come up with your own conclusions on how you will use’ the device. It was, the instructions said in bold for added emphasis, ‘in no way a professional medical device’. Avoiding any claims for benefit has, so far, allowed the manufacturers of brain stimulators to avoid regulation.
A warning: should you wish to try brain stimulation for yourself, there are a colossal number of academic studies on brain stimulation that a ‘quick Google search’ throws up. For at least a couple of decades, plenty of neuroscientists have made a career out of scanning the brains of people while they are asked to read or say something, to think of words and pictures, to taste drinks and even while they are sexually stimulated. In this way, neuroscientists have mapped parts of the brain they say are associated with just about every human cognitive function.
A new generation of neuroscientists is now going further and using these maps to investigate brain stimulation. Regions called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the temporo-parietal junction, for example, have been shown in brain scans to be involved in the way we form moral judgements. So, naturally, scientists have tried to stimulate these brain regions to see if it changes how people make these judgements. The left frontal region is known to be involved with language formation, so scientists have tried to stimulate it to see if it helps people say the tongue twister ‘if two witches would watch two watches, which witch would watch which watch?’
Brain scanners are expensive and usually housed in major universities and research centres. That doesn’t guarantee the quality of the research done with them, but it does sometimes help vouch for the credentials of those who carry out the studies. However, as my experience shows, any fool can buy and experiment with their own brain stimulator.
There are plenty of robust and careful brain stimulation experiments accurately written up out there in scientific journals. And there are plenty of misleading studies that have limited statistical power, or are fundamentally flawed. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have yet to identify the part of the brain that allows non-experts with a ‘quick Google search’ to tell the difference.
The scientists who did the endurance bike tests used a Veletron Dynafit ProTM cycle simulator. I don’t have a Veletron Dynafit ProTM cycle simulator, but I do have a Concept 2 rowing machine, which promises ‘the ultimate all-body work out’. A gym I once visited in Cardiff had a sign on the wall: ‘Rowers exercise. The rest just play games.’
I bought the rowing machine when I had kids and realized I would be spending more time than before in the house, and I use it pretty regularly. You pull against a flywheel, so it uses your own effort against you. It’s noisy, but that’s not the biggest annoyance with my rowing machine. The biggest annoyance is the digital display of your performance. You can set it up with a pace boat to race against, but the cold hard numbers are usually enough. Any subconscious, involuntary slowing in the push of the legs or the tug of the arms, and the display screen reacts instantly to show you are weakening, sometimes before the desire to slow down has even registered. And it hurts. When I started to read up online about training sessions and stuff, I saw lots of references to breaking the seven minute barrier, to cover a distance of 2000m. There are web discussions, hundreds of pages long, dedicated to the milestone and how to achieve it.
Without getting too bogged down in the details, it’s probably enough to say the only way to achieve it is row like the clappers for the first 500 metres, and then try to keep going, ignoring the physical and mental signals that flood your muscles and brain and tell you for the next 1000 metres you are going to die if you do. At 1500 metres, death loses its sting and the digital countdown of the distance remaining becomes the centre of the universe. With 200 metres to go, about thirty-five seconds’ worth, the universe explodes. Eyes bulging, nose streaming, brain-dissolving agony remains, and a thought bounces around your head and swells to a crescendo: If I Don’t Stop Then I Never Have To Do This Again.
I managed to row 2000m in under seven minutes, just, a few years ago and I have kept the promise I made to myself in that last 200 metres, and never done it again. I wasn’t going to do it now, even with my brain stimulator to help. Instead, I set up a test to row as far as possible in four minutes. It’s a test to exhaustion, or at least it is when I do it.
I would do the four minute trial twice, once with the electric current massaging my motor cortex, and once without. To try to make the comparison a fair one, I asked my wife to help me – to decide on which trial the stimulator would be turned on. I would wear it both times, so I wouldn’t know. I also covered up the screen with some black tape, so I could only see the reducing time. Knowing the distance, I figured, might skew the results by giving me a target to aim for on the second run.
I dutifully dipped my sponge electrodes in my home made saline and found the Spiderman hat. My wife fiddled with the switch and I gave her the four minute warning and rowed as if my life depended on it. A couple of hours and a couple of bananas later, I repeated the test, again asking my wife to turn the stimulator on or off. The second time felt easier if anything, so I was surprised when I unpeeled the tape and saw the results. They were pretty much identical – 1,152 metres on the first and 1,148 on the second. Enough, according to the online charts of performance, to comfortably make the ‘above average’ category but not enough to be rated as ‘good’. I could live with that.
I looked at the stimulator switch; it was set to 2mA. So, the second test had been the one with the help.
‘It didn’t make any difference,’ I said. ‘The electric current. It didn’t make me row any further.’
‘Well, how do you know?’
‘The results, they’re almost the same. It was switched on during the second test and I didn’t do any more.’
‘But what about the first one?’
‘Well, it was turned off, right?’
‘No.’
‘What?’
‘You asked me to choose so I turned it on both times’.
As breakdowns in scientific communication go, this wasn’t up there with the you-use-metric-measurements-and-we’ll-use-imperial-units disaster that saw NASA’s $125m Mars Climate Orbiter fly into the red planet in 2000, rather than around it. But it did mean my effort was wasted. And I didn’t feel like doing it all again.
I decided on a different approach. I would do what good scientists do and try to prove my hypothesis wrong. The idea – brain stimulation could help me row further – could now be easily disproven. I had a target to aim for. If I ripped away the masking tape and the electrodes and went for it unaided, then a longer distance covered would show motivation – aiming to improve on a target distance – had a stronger effect. My brain, my effort, would be stimulated purely by the desire to prove man could beat a machine.
I set up the machine for a third time. I managed 1,134 metres, which might look like a victory for the machine, but the unblinding of the test changed my tactics. With a visible target, I started off too quickly and ran out of energy after three minutes. That’s my excuse anyway. And, of course, such one-off experiments prove nothing. To build a solid case I would need to repeat the routine dozens of times and then average out the results. I’ll leave that to somebody else.
For endurance sports and the effect of cognitive enhancement the early results are interesting, but there’s a long way to go until scientists can be sure of a benefit. So, what about other mental skills in sport, those that rely on ability rather than determination?
William Stubbeman is a psychiatrist in Los Angeles. Tanned and fit, his easy demeanour hides the trauma he sees most days. Many patients view Stubbeman as their last chance. Mavis, for example, was sixty years old and had struggled with bi-polar disorder for most of them. She had been given the devastating shocks of electro-convulsive therapy a staggering fourteen times but with no benefit. If Stubbeman could not help her, Mavis had resolved to kill herself.
Colin had reached that stage already. Only nineteen, depression had such an impact on Colin’s young life that by the time he walked into Stubbeman’s clinic he had already tried to commit suicide.
Both Colin and Mavis walked away from his office, Stubbeman says, fully recovered, after he used magnetic brain stimulation to treat their conditions. That sounds extraordinary, but it’s not the reason I arranged a Skype conversation with him. I wanted to ask about the impact his brain stimulation had on his tennis.
Stubbeman plays a lot of tennis and he has won a lot more matches recently. Much of the improvement is down to a staggering increase in the number of first serves he says he now delivers with unerring accuracy.
Impressed by the response to the brain stimulation he was delivering to his most severe psychiatric patients, Stubbeman tried it on himself. He used the same kind of electrical brain stimulation as my kit to activate a brain region under his right temple – the right inferior frontal cortex – which is associated with the visual identification of objects. It’s the same set-up as the US military used to help people find hidden threats. Stubbeman instead visualized a tennis ball, and hitting it to serve an ace, with the ball successfully landing in an imagined three-feet-square target inside the opponent’s service box.
The stimulation was done before, during and after sessions during which Stubbeman hit dozens of first serves. The stimulation improved his serve accuracy by 20–30 per cent, he says. And the effect has lasted ever since.
He tried it on his tennis coach, a former professional. This time, the brain stimulation improved the serving accuracy by 13 per cent on the day; and by a whopping 22 per cent when they returned five days after the stimulation.
Stubbeman knows better than to publicly claim too much for the results of his experiment, presenting them only at a specialist conference, and arguing only the effect deserves wider study in larger controlled trials. As a scientist, he is cautious about the implications. But as a tennis player he says he is sure the brain stimulation has improved his game, and is responsible for him winning more.
Use of a performance-enhancing drug that claimed such a dramatic improvement would surely be banned. But at present, tennis players and anyone else who wants to are free to experiment with brain stimulation as much as they like. In fact, in 2016, a US company called Halo Neuroscience launched a high-end electrical brain stimulation device to encourage them to do so.
The company has packaged the battery and electrodes into a set of funky-looking headphones – no knitted Spider-man hat for them – and distributed them to elite sports stars and teams across the US.
The Halo kit targets the motor cortex and encourages athletes to use them as they practise a specific movement or routine. The company says this will help with motor learning, by making the brain neurons more likely to form the necessary connections. The US ski and snowboard team has been experimenting with the brain stimulators to train its ski jumpers to push off from the ramp. And it says it has seen visible and significant improvements in power output, as well as better control over technique.
Even the best can lose the firm grip they usually have on technique. The golfer Ernie Els has won sixty-odd tournaments, including the British Open and the US Open twice each – one of only six players to do so. He was the first to win 25 million Euros on the European tour and is a former world number one. He is heavily involved with autism charities (he has an affected son) and is generally considered an all-round nice guy. So it’s unfortunate when you Google his name that among the top links suggested is a video clip of Els taking a swing at what is widely described as the worst putt of all time.
Some say it was six inches, others it was a full foot. Either way, it was a stinker. An unflattering camera angle from behind catches the full horror – the ball squirms almost sideways off his putter and doesn’t even graze the edge of the hole.
This moment of ignominy for Els came in late 2015 at an event at Carnoustie, a notoriously tricky golf course on the blustery east coast of Scotland. In a later interview, an admirably upbeat Els tried to explain what went wrong, and offered a lengthy technical explanation of the weight distribution of his putter, how it hung in his hands and how he felt he was struggling to swing it hard enough to even hit the ball. All over a six-inch putt. He was, in other words, thinking about it too much.
To think too much about what you are doing is a cardinal sin in sport. From the footballer put clean through on goal with an age to determine what to do next, to the cricketer trying to remember to shuffle his feet, not move his head, swing his bat and keep his eye on the ball, as it bounces and skids towards him at near 90mph, a focus on thought rather than the instinctual appeal of action has been blamed for generations of high-profile failures on the sports field.
Some sports psychologists argue this collapse under pressure – choking – is inevitable because of the way sports technique is taught. Or because it is taught at all. Conventional so-called explicit learning – put your hands here, move your feet like that, keep your weight on your front foot – is vulnerable, they say, because it leads to conscious awareness of motor skills, and so produces conscious efforts to control what should be subconscious processes. Coaches call this paralysis by analysis.
The alternative is implicit learning, which lets people work out what to do, but without ever being able to explain it. The technique is worked out by their unconscious mind, which then makes it available on demand. Learning to ride a bike is the most common example of implicit learning. We have no conscious awareness of the physical tweaks and shifts in balance, for example, which keep us upright as we pedal along. Equally the best way to learn to ride a bike is not to listen to instruction but just to have a go: the unconscious mind gradually works it out and so you improve.
Implicit skills are harder to teach, because attention has to be deliberately drawn away from performance. Tennis players, for example, can be taught implicitly to read the direction of an opponent’s serve by being asked to judge the speed and not the direction of the ball. In doing so, they learn to identify and act upon the visual cues that indicate direction, without knowing or being able to explain how they do so. Some coaches get basketball players to sing while they practise free throws, to take their conscious mind off the technical execution of the skill.
These implicit learning methods have one goal in common, to minimize the role of working memory, and so the scope for distracting recall. Electrical brain stimulation might offer a better way to do this. Rather than sideline working memory, why not try to turn it off?
It’s too late for Ernie Els – the technical details of a putting stroke are seared into his memory. But if beginners could be taught to putt without explicit knowledge of club-head weight and swing speed, then would that help? Early results from a pioneering trial of brain stimulation on sports ability at the University of Hong Kong suggest it might.
Researchers from the university’s Institute of Human Performance recruited twenty-seven students with zero experience of golf and gave them a crash course in learning to putt. Their improvement came from implicit learning: the students were left to figure out the best technique themselves, in a series of fifteen- to twenty-minute practice sessions. Each time, the students had to try to hole a six-foot putt. To make it easier, they hit the balls along straight and level patches of artificial grass with no slope or speed to judge.
While they learned the motor skills involved, half the students had their brains stimulated, but not in the usual way of making a targeted region work harder. This time, the sports scientists placed the cathode – the inhibiting electrode – over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area above the left eye strongly associated with (among other things) working memory. The researchers wanted to use the current passed into the brain not to activate the working memory, but to turn it off.
The scientists brought the students back another day, and with no brain stimulation, asked them all to try the putts again. As the scientists expected, the students who had their working memory region inhibited by the electric current in the training sessions holed consistently more – between three and five successful putts from seven – while those who did not receive the brain stimulation managed between two and three. (The students did not know if they received the stimulation or not.)
Their better putting performance, the scientists suggested, was down to a greater amount of implicit learning. Even though the researchers offered no explicit instruction in golf to the volunteers, they suggest working memory still interfered with learning and performing the task. So, switching it off, or at least turning down its power, helped the students learn.
The relationship between intelligence and the ability to learn is a complicated one. Not all learning, as we saw above, requires conscious thought and so applied cognitive power. And learning does not proceed smoothly. I experienced this in my treatment for OCD. Although I was learning to change the way I processed thoughts and handled anxiety, the results emerged in an unpredictable – what scientists call non-linear – way.
The dose was constant, three hours of cognitive behavioural therapy a week, but my response was haphazard, and the benefit – my reduced anxiety and freeing of thoughts – came in jagged peaks, leaps and bounds. I wasn’t being treated, I was being taught. Like when I learned to ski, or tried to play the guitar. Hours of fruitless effort and then, oh wait, now I get it.
It felt like a phase transition, those tipping points of the physical world when small changes really do make a big difference. It’s the kettle boiling the water, the steady input of heat lifting the temperature like a nervous opening batsman through the 80s and 90s until peeeeeeeeep, the magic 100 degrees is reached and all the extra heat in the world won’t budge it higher. That water is going no hotter. All the effort now goes into changing to steam. The shift from 98 to 99 degrees takes as much dose as the shift from 99 to 100 degrees. But the response is totally different; from liquid to vapour and from anxious to calm.
A financial adviser once told me that almost all of the gains he made on money he had invested for clients over a decade came in a handful of days; those sudden spikes, the storms, when the effect is out of the control of the dose. Investors who constantly took their money in and out, he said, would miss out on those.
What if smart drugs or brain stimulation can help people’s brains transit between phases, to find a way to shift cognitive performance to a higher level? That’s certainly the hope of some psychiatrists using neuroenhancement as an adjunct for standard therapy. They want to see if chemicals or a tickle of current can help people to make the kind of mental transition needed to gain more control of harmful thoughts. For this kind of therapy cannot treat mental problems from the outside, it can only help patients find and unlock some cognitive skills already there.
Unlocked. That’s how John Elder Robison describes the release of his emotional intelligence and it’s how I felt when I started to make progress in my own therapy sessions for OCD. The new ability is not planted or encouraged. It is released; just as the steam is released from the water. And, experience shows us, there are many different skills and abilities – phase transitions – that can be released in the brain. We just need to find the right way to give them a little push. For experience shows that if we can dose the brain in the right way, the response can be extraordinary.
* On average, of course.