Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.
—Albert Einstein
After all of that pondering on the nature of time and consciousness, I’m ready to get my teeth into something a bit more solid. I’d prefer it if that solid thing wasn’t math, but there we are. For my last challenge, I have set myself the task of finding out if it is possible to improve on what I have long assumed to be a basic part of my brain's makeup: I just don’t have a “numbers” kind of brain. If there is any basic function of my brain that is going to be tricky to override, I think this might be it.
It's almost certainly going to be worth the effort, though. Mathematical ability is linked to the capacity for logic and reasoning—and the mental gymnastics needed to think about abstract things like geometry might just feed into my burgeoning sense of physical space. And anyway, being rubbish at math has proven to be quite embarrassing in my line of work, not least when I was an editor at New Scientist a few years back.
The tagline of New Scientist magazine is “For people who ask why.” And that pretty much describes everyone who works there. These are the people who as kids would annoy their teachers by asking questions about everything in between mucking about. The sub-editors are no exception, plus they have an almost pathological need for stuff to be grammatically, literally, and factually perfect. Their job is to point out anything that is ambiguous, wrong, or deeply implausible, as a last line of defense before the magazine goes to press. When I was a newbie freelancer, I was terrified of them: I’d imagine them as a pack of hyenas, cackling over my beautifully crafted words and picking out all the juicy bits. In reality, they aren’t like that at all; they’re generally lovely—especially the late John Liebmann, chief sub at the time I worked there. He was so keen on getting things right that he would stop himself midsentence to correct his own facts or grammar. It would take ages for him to get his point across, which could be frustrating when you were battling a deadline, but when he did finish a sentence, you could be damn sure he was right.
It was during a conversation with one of the other sub-editors that number skills got added onto my wish list of brain improvements. I was working on a graph to go with an article I was editing, and Sean, the sub, had come by to question my figures. My response didn’t go down terribly well. “Errr, okay. Let's have a look. I’m a bit rubbish at math….” Sean looked at me incredulously. “What? And what are you doing about that?” he asked. I was a bit taken aback. “Um, nothing really,” I mumbled. “I just don’t have a numbers kind of brain.” He stared at me for a moment and then finally shook his head. “I just don’t get how you can know that and not do anything about it.”
It was the first time that I’d been challenged on my assertion that I just don’t have a head for numbers. I’d always just assumed that you either “get” numbers or you don’t. In my mind, I don’t have the kind of mind that computes numbers, and, as a writer and editor, I was pretty much okay with that. You can’t be good at everything—and I could get there in the end with enough time and a calculator. And I always asked someone to check my sums for me afterward.
At the risk of sounding defensive, it's not as if I’m the only one who thinks this way. By one estimate, around a quarter of people have such an aversion to math that they give up even trying, and panic in situations where they have to do math under pressure, like when trying to work out a tip when the waiter is standing right there.1 At its worst it can turn into something that researchers call “math anxiety,” which sounds like a proper diagnosis but isn’t; it's just a more scientific-sounding description of the “aaargh, I can’t do this” feeling so many people get when given a numerical problem to solve. And this definitely sounds like me. I can almost feel the mental shutters come down when I see any kind of sum. Most of the time, I don’t even try. I just reach for my calculator, even for the simplest arithmetic.
It wasn’t always like this. When I was an eleven-year-old, math was embarrassing for a different reason. My math teacher, Mr. Griffiths, would ask a question and stare intently at the class, fingertips on the bridge of his nose, as he strode around the classroom, waiting for an answer. Eventually, when the silence got too much for him, he’d come to me for the answer. He’d say something like, “Come on then, Caroline, put them out of their misery.” I’d usually know the answer, although sometimes I’d pretend I didn’t so as not to seem big-headed. I was pretty good at math back then.
Soon afterward, though, my number sense seemed to float away. I don’t know how or why. All I know was that I stopped being top of the class in math and started slipping a good way down toward the bottom. Ever since, I’ve pretty much opted out of the whole thing, and by and large I’ve gotten away with it. But since math underpins most if not all of the science I report on, and comes up more in everyday life than I would like, I would really like to be good at it again.
Perhaps surprisingly, a basic understanding of mathematics comes as part of the package for humans, along with most other animals, from monkeys to rats, dogs, and even some fish. The fact that, at the very least, most creatures can tell the difference between “many” and “not so many” suggests that it must be a key survival skill favored by evolution. We humans have the added benefit of being able to manipulate numbers in the abstract to turn vague ideas about numbers into actual quantities. French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene has found that the less accurate, “there or thereabouts” bits of math processing uses visual and spatial brain areas, whereas the exact stuff requires the same areas as language processing.2 So to some extent, being a words person and a numbers person are kind of the same thing. No excuses there, then.
Oxford math professor Marcus du Sautoy also argues that there is no such thing as a non-math brain. Even if you count people with dyscalculia, the math equivalent of dyslexia, which affects around 5 percent of the population, we are all mathematicians, he argues, because mathematics is basically the ability to spot patterns in the world. You might not be good at arithmetic, in other words, but pattern-spotting is such a general skill that there is a lot about math that you can master. Pattern-spotting is such a key survival skill that it has been selected for time and again by evolution, says du Sautoy. “If you saw something symmetrical, it was likely to be the face of an animal, and either you could eat it or it could eat you. Either way, those sensitive to symmetry survived,” he wrote recently in the Guardian newspaper, in an article that pooh-poohed the whole idea of there being such a thing as a non-numbers brain.3 “Similarly, humans with a good sense of numbers could tell whether their tribe was outnumbered or not, which would inform the decision to fight or flee.”
Clearly, though, people do vary in their math ability. We are not all Oxford professors of mathematics, after all. The question of why we differ so much is something that interests Roi Cohen Kadosh, a cognitive neuroscientist also at Oxford University. He studies how these hardwired tendencies get shaped by learning and also how factors like personality, reasoning skill, and attention affect mathematical ability. After hearing my experiences, he suggests that loss of confidence is probably the main problem—as I have heard a few times now, freaking out about not feeling capable of doing something is a sure-fire way to rob the brain of the resources it needs to do it. Could it really be that my conviction that I am terrible with numbers is the reason that I am? And could that be the reason why a recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) found that 54 percent of boys and 65 percent of girls consider math to be stressful.4
If that's the case, then perhaps a bad head for numbers will be easier to turn around than I thought, and it might not even require too much messing with my brain at all.
Roi puts me onto one of his students, Amar Sarkar, who recently did a study into how brain stimulation might help people to get over their math aversion enough to unleash their hidden math genius.5 Amar wouldn’t put it like that, though. When we meet at Oxford University, he is cautious and reserved, and he speaks slowly and deliberately to make it impossible to draw any overhyped conclusions from his research so far. He is particularly keen to underline the fact that what I am doing—trying things out on myself—is not science. “It will be scientifically invalid, but still, an interesting experience for you,” he says. Amar is young and just beginning his scientific career and hasn’t even run the gauntlet of being misquoted many times in the science media, so I’m impressed that he seems to inherently understand that, given the wrong information, a journalist might well claim that he is unleashing people's hidden math genius. So I probably shouldn’t. But it isn’t actually too much of an exaggeration. In a recent study where Amar compared two groups of people—one group with an emotional aversion to math, and the other without—he found that, while the low math-angst group were a bit better at math in real life, the high math-angsters were also pretty good: well above average, as you might expect from Oxford University students, who made up most of the study volunteers. The reason they struggled at math seemed to have very little to do with their actual ability.
Nevertheless, when asked to work out whether a simple sum (for example, 8+2 = 10) was true or false, people who were scared of math were significantly slower. And when they measured levels of the stress hormone cortisol, the math haters had significantly higher levels than their more confident counterparts. But—and this is where it gets interesting—when they boosted the electrical signals in the right prefrontal cortex with electrical stimulation (this is above the eyes, at the top of the forehead, and involved in control of emotional reactions), they found that it not only reduced their cortisol levels significantly but also allowed them to react about fifty milliseconds faster to the math questions. As Lila Chrysikou told me in Kansas, fifty milliseconds is quite a lot to a psychologist—but in terms of using this in real life, the cortisol changes are far more impressive. Lower cortisol means feeling less stressed out, which is something that you could definitely feel. Might this simple intervention, shutting down stress a little bit, really help people love math? Or at least not hate it quite so much?
Here's where I find out. Having tested me out and concluded that I fit into the category of a math-anxious person, Amar offers to give me a week's worth of stimulation and a bit of cognitive training, just for fun, to see if it changes anything in not only my scores but also how I feel about math.
I have been stimulated in the brain lots of times now, and it never stops making me feel a bit nervous, especially when Amar tells me that he is going to use a more powerful and long-lasting version called tRNS (transcranial random noise stimulation).
I’m cheered up, though, by the fact that Amar is strapping the electrodes to my head with a lovely bright-blue-toweling sweatband. I comment that it's going to be a fabulous Dire Straits look, then wonder if this will make any sense to Amar, seeing that he was born four years after the classic Money for Nothing video came out; plus he grew up in India, where I have no idea if Dire Straits were even a thing. But he grins broadly and tells me that, although Dire Straits weren’t huge in India when he was growing up, his parents are big fans of stadium rock, and he was raised on the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Dire Straits. I briefly glimpse a less reserved side of Amar as we chat about the joys of dad music, and ponder what Mark Knopfler is up to nowadays.
Then it's onto the familiar routine of baseline tests (pages of basic arithmetic questions that get harder and harder, and I’m not allowed to skip any), plus various measures of my working-memory capacity.
Then he straps me into the brain stimulator and turns on the current. “Do you feel enhanced?” he asks. “No,” I reply. “Should I?” “No,” he says mysteriously, and then I start the test.
Unlike when I was in Kansas, I don’t feel any kind of wonkiness, buzz, or other changes in myself. That might be because when Lila plugged me in, she was turning down activity in the prefrontal cortex, whereas Amar is turning it up. Perhaps it's easier to notice when you lose brainpower, but a bit extra doesn’t necessarily seem that different. I certainly don’t feel like any kind of genius, that's for sure. Even so, I quickly settle into the test, and, once it becomes clear that I can manage the level of mathematics required to tell whether a sum is true or false (for example, 9 x 3 = 27), I relax and start racing through them. It seems to help if I say the sums out loud, so I start muttering to myself whenever Amar leaves the room.
I do the same for the next few days—and on days two and three, Amar gets me to do some cognitive training that, in an experiment he has just finished and which isn’t published yet, has also had some effect on math ability. It's quite fun—I have to pretend to be a worker in a robot factory and have to make various on-the-spot decisions about what to do with robots that come along the conveyor belt: if it has broken arms, press left; if it is red, press right. If it has a yellow light around it, press nothing. I recognize it as taxing working memory plus some of the mental-control skills I lacked back in the early days in Boston, and I am struck by how much easier I find it to make these kinds of fast mental decisions.
In the Betty test, I found it impossible to change my mind about pressing a button once my hand had started moving. Now it's not a problem. Perhaps this is no coincidence: pretty much everything I have done since has been relevant to the prefrontal executive control bits of the brain. Coping with the robot task might be proof that I have gained a small amount of control. Or it might be that I am getting a boost in this area from the stimulation, which I am today using via a rather fetching rubber cap. I later learn that the theory behind this is that training working memory transfers to a skill that needs working memory (math). It's back to working memory again, albeit in a slightly more interesting game format. It's perhaps no surprise. I mention to Amar that executive functions keep cropping up. “Most of your book is executive functions,” he confirms.
After that, I have a whole afternoon to kill in Oxford, so I head to one of the city's many bookshops to look for a math revision guide. Amar isn’t keen on this idea because it adds another factor to the experiment that he didn’t plan for, but concedes that since this isn’t a proper study, and given that I’m only having two robot-factory training sessions—rather than several weeks, as they would in the real study—adding a few minutes of math practice here and there probably won’t make much difference. Amar tells me that sometimes you don’t see transfer for several weeks after training anyway, since it takes time for the changes to make themselves apparent.
I had thought of picking up a revision guide a few weeks earlier at home, but I didn’t want to ruin my baseline scores by practicing too early. I had also been thwarted by the full force of my aversion to math. I walked into my local bookshop, headed to the revision guide section, and pulled out a math book aimed at teenagers. I opened it to a random page and…well, the pages might as well have contained images of rotting corpses. I physically recoiled, shoved the book back on the shelf, and found myself walking out of the shop before I realized I had even told my legs to move.
This time, in Oxford, I decide to ease myself in more gently and so pick an exam revision guide aimed at ten-year-olds. That night, on the train to see a friend in nearby Didcot, I have a go, one question at a time, taking it slowly, and being sure to check the answers on the cheat sheet as I go along. It could be that having been zapped earlier that day did something to my brain, but weirdly I find myself actually enjoying it. And every time I get the answer right, my confidence grows. My final score is 96 percent. Not bad at all.
Sure enough, a few weeks later, when Amar sends me my results, they seem to suggest that my skills have indeed improved. On the baseline math tests, where I had to wade through pages of multiplications, long divisions, and the like, my baseline score was 98. After the stimulation and training, it jumped to 106 (see figure 6.1). It doesn’t sound like a big improvement, but Amar seems impressed. “It's an 8.1 percent improvement. For just two sessions, that seems pretty sizeable.” Based on other data, he tells me that a rough estimate for the practice-effect is around 2 percent.
He is, however, keen to point out that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the other 6 percent came from the intervention. “This is a sample size of one, and there could have been any number of reasons that you would want to improve in the second session,” he says. Expectation or regression to the mean (a strange law of statistics that says that a second score on anything will be closer to average than the first, whether you do anything to change it or not) could have played a part.
One thing I hadn’t paid a huge amount of attention to at the time was that, before each sum appeared on the screen, a word with either negative or positive connotations (a “prime”) flashed up briefly in front of me. In a previous study that Amar's is based on, people with high math anxiety were quicker to respond when the prime was a negative word like “useless” or “failure.”6 This result was a surprise: usually, having a boost of positive thinking helps people to do their best work. Instead, with math anxiety, it seemed to resonate with how the people saw their own abilities, which somehow made them perform better when the prime was negative.
Figure 6.1. Numerical operations score.
When Amar repeated this study, he didn’t find the same effect in his sample (he says that it might be because his sample was mixed sex while the original was women only; women are known to be more likely to be math anxious than men). For this woman, though, the negative words didn’t make any difference: my reaction time was more or less the same whether the word was a compliment or an insult.
The fact that negative primes do affect some people suggests that they are working as another kind of unconscious bias. In chapter two, I found that my focus was being tugged toward disapproving faces, while skipping over the happy ones. Practicing doing the opposite, using online training, seems to have done the trick in rewriting that bias. The ultimate aim for math-anxiety training is to do something similar with the way people feel about their math ability. “This will be the really interesting thing…. Can we cause people with high math anxiety to stop benefiting from the negative prime and start benefiting from the positive prime?” Amar says. It hasn’t been done yet, but that's definitely the aim of this kind of research—to make people maybe not love math but at least not have a negative emotional reaction to numbers, whether that be conscious (“I don’t do math”) or unconscious (“Oh, look, I seem to be walking away from the math section of the bookshop rather quickly”). Amar agrees. “Yes. I guess that would be the ideal outcome,” he says, cautious as ever.
While I didn’t show any sign of being affected by the positive or negative words that came before the sums, during stimulation, the speed at which I decided if the sum was true or false increased by two hundred milliseconds compared to baseline. Again, this is more impressive than it sounds. “A two-hundred-millisecond improvement at no cost to accuracy in performance is considered huge. In comparison, the improvement in my math-anxiety paper was just about fifty milliseconds,” says Amar.
Again, there are a whole heap of caveats to add here. To quote Amar when he sent me my results, “The main thing is that performance on the second session was much better than the first. Of course, this doesn’t mean that it was due exclusively to stimulation. To truly determine whether it was the stimulation, we would need about 120 participants, sixty of whom complete the sessions with real stimulation, and sixty of whom complete the same thing with placebo/sham. If the improvement is greater following real compared to sham, then we can say that stimulation produced the effect.”
We didn’t measure my cortisol levels and so don’t know if I, like the volunteers in Amar's study, would show a lowered stress response after being stimulated. I certainly felt less terrified about the sums in the “after” testing, but that could just as easily have been because I was more familiar with them and knew that I could handle some if not most of them. And getting 96 percent in the revision guide didn’t harm my confidence either.
Figure 6.2. Reaction time in milliseconds before and after stimulation and training. My accuracy score was the same before and after (93.5 percent versus 93 percent), suggesting that I didn’t speed up at the cost of accuracy.
In the end, though, it doesn’t matter whether it was the stimulation or practicing math that made me feel less terrified of the test. As Amar points out, doing math puzzles is a form of brain stimulation. In other words, you don’t need to wire your brain into a battery, but it seems to help.
Whatever starts it off, once that confidence starts to build, it sets up a virtuous circle. And if Amar is anything to go by, it is absolutely possible to get better at math with a bit of effort. On day two of testing, as we head to the testing room, he admits that, until recently, he had a pretty bad phobia of mathematics—something that is not terribly useful if you want a career in science. Thankfully, he tells me, it's not a problem anymore. “What did you do?” I asked, hoping for a pearl of wisdom that will inform what I do from now on. He grins at me as the elevator doors open, and raises his eyebrows. “I practiced.”
Practice, then. That's about as high tech as it needs to be as far as math is concerned. Sean the sub was right all along: I just need to stop being fatalistic about having a “non-math brain” and do something about it. It harks back to the idea of a growth mind-set, which I encountered in the debate about working-memory training. Whether people benefit from cognitive training or not has a huge effect on whether they think it is possible to improve, whatever their current ability. On the other hand, if you don’t think you can do anything about a skill, you probably won’t bother to work on it, and your predictions about being bad at it will come true.
Nevertheless, the stimulation did seem to have an effect, and I’m intrigued to find out what exactly it might be doing to help things along. After my trip to Oxford, I call Roi Cohen Kadosh and ask him. “It's a really good question,” he says, suggesting that no one else knows either. “I can say what we think….
“There are some results showing that we can modify neurochemicals in the brain—some of them are associated with neuroplasticity,” he tells me. “Then we are affecting connectivity between different brain regions with stimulation as well [and] affecting the consumption of oxygen and metabolites.” Is this all happening at once, or does one thing happen first and set off a domino effect of brain change? “It's hard to know,” he says. “Maybe it's all of them working at the same time.”
Then there is the possibility that stimulation gets the brain waves going in a particular frequency that allows for concentrated thought. Setting the stimulator to the gamma frequency of 40Hz, for example, might encourage natural brain waves to follow suit. Gamma waves are at work when we are concentrating hard and pouring all of our mental energies into a taxing mental puzzle.
Whatever is happening exactly, the basic theory is that it makes the region under the electrode more active than it was before. Given that the region being targeted in this experiment—the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex—is involved in regulating negative emotions, it could be helping to do the job more effectively. This would explain why stimulating the prefrontal cortex helps math-anxious types. If they are slower because they are processing an emotional reaction at the same time as trying to work out whether 8 + 6 = 12, a bit of extra brainpower is bound to help—adding more juice just helps the whole process along.
In this case, the key thing is how well you can dampen down the “aaaargh” reaction to get your thinking brain into gear. If you can get rid of that obstacle, it frees up some mental capacity that you can then use to do sums. Unlike most of the hype about brain training and stimulation, it isn’t always about adding capacity—it's about releasing the capacity that you already have, or removing a block that has no business being there.
Brain stimulation, then, might not be strictly necessary, but new evidence suggests that it does seem to make a difference. In a recent study, Cohen Kadosh's team (this time not including Amar) found that doing mathematical training improved scores in all of their healthy volunteers, but adding tDCS gave one group a significant boost over the other, who received sham stimulation instead.7
Having had a fair amount of brain stimulation now, I can kind of see why braver people than me think that this is something they could use at home. When you see a scientist dip a sponge into salt water, measure roughly where the right bit of brain is inside your head, pop a toweling headband on top, and then turn on the current, it doesn’t seem out of the realms of possibility to do the same thing at home. It's certainly easy enough to get hold of a tDCS machine, if you have access to the internet and a couple of hundred dollars. So what's the problem with it?
Well, for a start, Amar's study suggests that sometimes stimulation can make things worse. In his experiment, only the people who hate math got any benefit from stimulation, in terms of their reaction time and cortisol level. People who were confident about their ability got worse after a zap to the prefrontal cortex: they slowed down and were less able to keep their cortisol levels at a nice, low, unstressed-by-math kind of level. Both groups, the confident and angst-ridden volunteers, performed worse at standardized tests of attentional control. So you can easily strap a battery to your head, but you might just make yourself slower and more stressed, not lightning fast and confident. “It's not a free lunch,” says Amar. “If you enhance one process, it might come at the cost of another.”
Because most studies are done on large groups of people, and the data all put together, these subtle differences often go unnoticed, says Roi. As a result it has barely been raised as an issue, in science or in the burgeoning home-tDCS market.
It is also possible that the bit of the brain that needs stimulation will change as the learning process happens—something that scientists haven’t even gotten a handle on yet, let alone home users. Roi and his team are looking at whether stimulating the prefrontal cortex is good at early stages of learning—it helps with the control needed to make a deliberate effort to learn, but when a person gets better at the task, and is mostly retrieving information from memory, areas farther back in the parietal lobes might benefit from a boost instead.8
More importantly, Roi says, there is no evidence that using tDCS, or any other form of brain stimulation, every day for months on end is good for you, or even safe. To know that for sure would involve stimulating a group of people every day for months and keeping a very close eye on them.
“I would not run this study,” he says with a wry laugh. “I would not feel good about stimulating my own brain for three months. I am not going to do that for anyone else!”
All in all, there are too many reasons to be cautious, he concludes. “We don’t know who it fits, who is going to benefit from it the most; we don’t know if it is safe to use it for an extended amount of time. Stimulation by itself doesn’t seem to be effective—you need to combine it with cognitive training if you want to induce long-term changes rather than just improving on the task you are doing at the moment. All of these together doesn’t make me say, ‘Hey, you know what? Let's go and do this!’”
I trust his judgment on this—particularly as he says he has been offered lucrative opportunities to put his name to home tDCS but has so far resisted the temptation. “I think that this is not, at the moment, the right approach. We need to know more.”
Instead, Roi lobbies for the regulation of commercially available brain-zapping headsets, which currently don’t come under legislation for medical devices. In the same way that dietary supplements don’t come under drugs regulations as long as the manufacturers don’t make any specific medical claims for them, home-tDCS kits are outside the current regulation. Which means that there is an experiment going on in heads all over the world but one that is not being safety checked or monitored in any way.
And, as a final point on brain stimulation—which also relates to everything I have done to change my brain—there is this basic fact: no one gets to be superhuman. It may be fun for the likes of me to think, “Great, we have this neuroplasticity thing, let's use it,” but the evidence for “cognitive enhancement” is more about ironing out individual differences stemming from genetic differences or what we have learned along the way. It is not going to turn any one of us into a supercomputer (or as it says in one of Roi's papers, it's not going to take us “beyond the species-typical level normal range of functioning”9). In the same way that no matter how much protein I ate as a child, I was never likely to grow to more than five feet tall (the genetic limit for women in my family, it seems), the brain is plastic, but there are limits.
Taking all of that on board, has it been worth the effort of putting myself through these extra math classes when I have a perfectly good calculator on my phone? For me, yes. It has been a huge confidence boost to find out that I have plenty of capacity there, waiting to be used, if only I can get past the initial aversion and start to enjoy the puzzle.
Which brings me to logical reasoning—a skill related to, but not the same as, mathematical reasoning. Like math, and indeed nearly everything I’ve been working on, this is not something that comes particularly easily to the human brain. It relies on executive functions (particularly working memory) to keep a deliberate train of thought going long enough to come to a logical answer.
As far as math goes, it was a surprise and relief to find that I didn’t exactly need to change my brain at all—I just needed to realize it was in there somewhere, buried under a layer of brain-sapping low confidence. I am now wondering if this lets me off the hook about improving my logical reasoning skills, too—not only because if my math skills are fine then my reasoning skills probably are, too.
There is no denying that I have always been something of an emotional person (see chapter two). This basic feature of my personality often brought me into conflict with my stepdad when I was a kid because, to him, logic is everything. I’ve lost count of the number of times he told me that there's absolutely no need to get all het up and emotional about stuff—just think it through slowly and logically. If the answer to your problem makes logical sense, then it must be right. It might have something to do with him being brought up by a sergeant major in the military police. Or maybe he's part Vulcan. Either way, it's fair to say that we don’t entirely see eye to eye on the role of emotions versus logic in deciding how to live.
Actually, there is some pretty good evidence that I am at least partly right about the importance of emotions. A particular region of the brain's prefrontal cortex seems to be important for combining emotional information with more logical information, when we make decisions. Studies of people with damage to this part of the brain have shown that, when they are given a choice between two options, and there is no logical advantage to either of them, they struggle to choose at all. When there is no logical reason to choose, it seems, we rely entirely on our emotions to guide us. Without our illogical gut feelings and emotions, we would be lost.10
On the other hand, studies have shown that, when it comes to making rational decisions about the people or issues we love, emotions are no help whatsoever, often leading us to conclusions that are just plain bad for us. I’m reminded of the experiments I did with Amar, in Oxford, where my terror of math left me unable to think about the problem in hand. Allowing your emotions to get in the way can be disastrous for mathematical thinking and probably logical thinking, too. So, it seems that there is no easy answer to the “logic versus emotions” question. Ideally, we all need a bit of both.
Then there are the unconscious biases, which influence even our most logical decisions, whether we like it or not. Researchers at Harvard University's Project Implicit are trying to measure these biases via a series of online tests on their website: projectimplicit.com. These short tests provide you with immediate results on how your unconscious biases might be coloring your decision-making. In my experience, they are quite revealing.
I have always thought myself to be immune to the idea that high-fat foods are inherently bad—logically, I know that a bit of everything is fine in moderation, and I try to make my food choices accordingly. I can’t see anything wrong with eating chips or chocolate if that's what I fancy. According to the Project Implicit test about attitudes to foods, though, I strongly associate words like “shameful,” “disgusting,” and “unacceptable” with high-fat foods like cakes and biscuits, and positive words like “healthy” and “success” with low-fat foods like fruit and vegetables. And while, consciously, I am equally unimpressed by all organized religions, according to the Project Implicit test on feelings about religion, I feel most positive about Buddhism, then Christianity, then way further down the scale are Judaism and Islam. This makes me wonder how much this is feeding into my daily life without me being consciously aware of it. Am I a closet Islamophobe? Have all the headlines gotten to me despite my lefty liberal leanings? And has a combination of my Christian schooling and recent love affair with yoga and meditation pushed Christianity and Buddhism to the top of the list?
Not all of my implicit assumptions are so much of a shock, though. I am pleased to find that I associate women and men equally with the home and the workplace, and have no bias against women in science (this might be because I talk to a lot of psychology researchers, where women are better represented than in other areas of science). And when I took the “attitudes to homosexuality” test I was slightly more likely to associate words like “joyful” and “lovely” to gay people than to heterosexual people.
How much these implicit biases impact on day-to-day thought processes isn’t clear, but research does suggest that, when our beliefs contradict the evidence before us, our minds do backflips to try to make our beliefs stand up. This is why people are susceptible to conspiracy theories even when the evidence is right in front of them. The only way to align the two is to get them out in the open and take a long, hard look at the assumptions you don’t know you are making. I recommend giving it a go—it's fascinating.
“Know thyself” is a theme that has come up time and again as I have been trying to improve my brain skills. If you know what your limits are and why, then you stand a much better chance at tackling any problems at the source.
And so I decided not to pursue logic training. When I started this project, I thought that my emotional circuits were quite strong enough and that what I needed to do was to strengthen the logical circuits to balance them out. Now, though, I’m not so sure. I keep remembering what John Kounios, the creativity researcher I met in Philadelphia, told me about creativity. His research has divided people into two broad groups depending on the way they tend to solve problems. Some people fall into the category of “analytical” problem solvers, who tackle a problem by slowly and steadily working through the options. These people, Kounios found, have relatively more activity in their left hemisphere (it seems there is a smidgen of truth in the “left brain = logic” idea, even if there is way more to it than that). Other people, who Kounios calls “insightfuls,” tend to solve problems by insight and have relatively more right-hemisphere activity at rest. This method of problem-solving is a bit hit-and-miss because they tend to have nothing to show for their efforts until a solution pops into their heads in an “aha” moment. According to Kounios, there is some tentative evidence that these tendencies might be inherited and are quite stable over time, suggesting that we come set up to either be logical or creative types and tend to stay that way throughout life.
In Kansas, I did lots of tests of creativity, and several insight tests, with Lila Chrysikou. Without wanting to blow my own trumpet too much, I came out way above average on all of them. We didn’t measure which side of my brain had more activity at rest, but all the other results point toward me being more of an insightful type than a logical Vulcan.
Do I really want to push myself away from that and toward a more logical mind? That seems like a step too far away from the person I naturally am. There have been parts of my natural state that I have been happy to change (anxiety and distractibility being two of the most obvious), but even though it's probably possible to override my creative bent to get more logical, I’m not sure I want to; I quite like being a writer….
For those wanting to boost their logic skills, though, there is evidence that if you spend a lot of time practicing logic problems (and get the answers right), it will have a physical effect on the structure of your brain. In studies at the University of California in Berkeley, when prospective law students took a crash course in logical reasoning as part of their preparation for their Law School Admission Test (LSAT), their brains gained connections between the frontal and parietal lobes—two regions thought to be important for logical trains of thought—after just ten weeks.11
The volunteers were given logic puzzles every day for ten weeks, which is quite an investment of time in something you are not even sure you want to do—and anyway, when I asked her about it, the lead researcher in this study, Silvia Bunge, wasn’t able to have me in her lab to do the experiments anyway. So I can’t offer any specific advice on whether this works, but anyone who wants to take the challenge can find LSAT revision papers freely available online.
Instead, I found some online tests of logical reasoning of the type that prospective employers use to torture well-meaning graduates, and gave them a go.12 My score came out as middle of the road, average—fine, but not stellar. And you know what? I’m okay with that.
Interestingly, when talking to a friend about my decision to leave my powers of logic well alone, I realized something. If I’m choosing not to train my brain in a given direction for fear of it working too well, it must mean that I am starting to believe that brain override is possible. I started off imagining that I’d find at least some things that couldn’t be changed, no matter what you do, but I have to admit that the brain's adaptability has come through every time. Some of the changes I have made came down to simply changing my mind-set, others to practice, some to embracing what is already there, and some to tackling unconscious biases that I wasn’t previously aware of. But for all the different routes to changing my mental workings, one thing seems to be coming through loud and clear: work on what you want to change, and after a few weeks things will start to happen.
OVERRIDE YOUR RUSTY MATH BRAIN IN FOUR EASY STEPS
- Do some easy math—use pencil and paper; take your time
- Do some slightly harder math—on paper; take your time
- Realize you can do it if you put your mind to it
- Repeat steps 1 to 3 as necessary
INTERVIEWS/CONVERSATIONS:
Amar Sarkar, conversations and interview during lab visit, February 15–19, 2016, and email conversation, March 23, 2016.
Roi Cohen Kadosh, Skype interview, March 4, 2016.