Think Faster, Focus Better and Remember More: Dr. Michael Merzenich (Transcript)

This boy is able to control operations and thought. He has his elaborate cognitive abilities but they’re still in a period of very rapid development. Many years going forward, he will become more and more complex in his mental operations and his ability to control movement.

You see — he’s controlling an incredibly complicated movement, in this case, in fact multiple movements simultaneously. There’s no question at this age that there’s a person there, a unique individual. We know if we talk to him and got into things with him, we would see that he was unique pretty much in the world. You would not have seen anyone like him, no one that has his — quite his array of abilities, his knowledge, his operations in the world. Every one of us is unique, everyone is special, everybody has an individualized repertoire of capabilities and all of that comes through brain change. All of that comes through the specialization of the machinery of our brain. Our brain literally changes itself in ways that — specialize itself that account for this incredible differentiation, person by person.

You might notice that he’s bouncing a soccer ball in his head and you could probably guess, just by knowing that fact, where he’s from. So he’s actually from Sao Paulo, you guessed right, and in Sao Paulo, about 40% of boys of his age have this ability. You could go out into Sunnyvale or Redwood City or some place around here and you’d have trouble finding a boy that can do this, run and bounce a ball on their head. And if you found one, they’re probably from Sao Paulo. And that’s all another way of saying that we are very much shaped in our special abilities by the culture into which we just happen to have been born.

Now we happen to have been born more or less recently and culture has evolved a hell of a long way before we arrived and most of what we actually do, most of the hours of everyday, apply to skills and abilities that didn’t apply, didn’t exist a thousand years ago. Many didn’t exist a hundred years ago. Our brains are different, substantially different in how they’re constructed and specialized for the brain even of our relatively immediate ancestors. Every one of us is shaped by culture and as culture evolves, the individual brain is evolving, in its capacities, in its nature, in its operations and its control, more or less in an undisciplined way because the advance of culture, which you are contributing to mightily in this great institution, is more or less advancing in an undisciplined way from the point of view of — the perspective of the brain.

Brain Plasticity in Three Life Epochs

Now, we’re going to talk about brain plasticity in three life epochs, because it’s not completely constant across life. The first epoch, the brain has actually got to establish the control of its own self development. It isn’t born with that, it doesn’t really have the basis of controlling its own plasticity when it’s born. It has to go through an early period –a special period of plasticity in order to accomplish that.

In the second epoch, the brain is acquiring its primary skill repertoire. And this applies through childhood and through young adulthood when you’re basically specializing yourself in all of the hard and complicated ways that define you as an individual operationally in the world. And then there’s a third epoch that lasts pretty much to the end of life and through most of adulthood in which the brain is primarily a user of manifold mastered skills and abilities. You’re no longer changing it so much by acquiring new skills, by acquiring new abilities, you’re sort of a crass user of things you long since mastered.

Stage 1

So let’s begin with epoch one, we’re back to Gus. Actually his name is Agustus Canute, representing the complex combination of — in odd mixtures that we have wonderfully in American Society. When you began to create yourself in an early critical period of brain development and what really distinguishes this period is that it’s a period of what you could call “anything-goes” or “always on” plasticity. The brain is continuously plastic and it’s actually shaped by, modified by any input that arrives by any action that the baby makes and there are competitive plastic processes in the brain that changes detailed wiring. And those plastic processes basically help the brain set up the initial forms of its processing machine, and the environmental stimuli are shaping the initial forms of each great brain system’s processing machinery.

It’s easy to demonstrate that, and we’ve demonstrated it in many, many ways. We expose little baby animals across this period to meaningless dumb sound, it doesn’t really matter what this sound is, and the brain quickly specializes to become a sort of optimal processor for the representation of that sound. So we can quickly occupy all of the auditory domain by the representation of any dumb sound you want. It can be a noise, it could be some simple song, or we can set up more interesting competitive processes. For example, we’ve raised animals with the complexity of — the equivalent to raising the animal in a zoo. And actually we did that by getting a tape loop from a scientist that we collaborate with in a university in Zurich, and they literally did collect these samples of sounds of vocalizations of animals and birds in a zoo, in the Zurich Zoo. And we exposed the animals to repertoires of sound in which there are 40 calls of different animals and birds, each created in multiple variations, six or seven or eight or nine different variations.

So an animal, the baby, all these sounds roll by, and in that case, we create a very beautiful auditory cortex, very elaborate, very highly specialized and selective to represent those sounds. Or we can turn that around and raise the animal under conditions in which all of the sound that’s arriving to them is basically undifferentiable. For example, modulated noises, all they hear all day long is “shh shh shh shh shh” noise going by. And what we get is a brain that goes through this period, maturation period, with no specialization, basically a very primitive cortex, that now is very unselective for anything that could have meaning or could bear meaning in the world. The baby’s brain can’t know what’s meaningful, it can’t know what’s useful, it can’t know what sound that is important; it can’t put meaning to any sound. Basically, it has to evolve in its processing and be able to operate selectively to a substantial extent before any of that is possible. And it does this through natural competitive plasticity processes, because the plasticity switch has just turned on, all it takes is exposure and just by exposure, basically the brain sets up initial forms of its processing machinery.

For example, in the auditory domain in human infants, initial primary sound processing specialization is for the baby’s native language. It doesn’t matter of course if the baby is born into a family that speaks Tagalog or English or Bantu or whatever, it doesn’t matter. The brain can’t care, doesn’t care, can’t know and it can’t be initially about any of that language meaning anything because from the perspective of the brain, it can’t mean anything. And in fact, the baby has actually been exposed on the average to 4 million to 5 million words, before it struggles to put meaning to the first one when it’s about nine months of age. Massive exposure has to occur.

And in fact, in order to accomplish the initial specialization of the processing machinery so that it can interpret and sort those sounds of its native language, it has to be exposed to at least a half a million of them. Massive exposure has to occur, massive change has to occur. Beautiful specialization occurs in every baby’s brain just by being born into the presence of all of this complex sound flowing by. We know that it doesn’t matter to the baby what the speech actually is because we can study language development in cultures in which babies — in which parents incessantly talk to their babies and we can contrast that to cultures in which parents don’t talk to their babies as a matter of a cultural strategy.

So for example, in East Africa, there are two groups; one group doesn’t believe the baby is worth talking to until they have their first birthday. And at their first birthday, they have a big ceremony, the mother takes the baby off her back and now the baby is part of the community and they begin talking to the baby.

And in the adjacent culture, the Masai, they jabber at their babies incessantly. They absolutely believe that it really matters that they talk to their babies incessantly and continuously. So comparative linguists have gone to these two groups and said, “How different are they? Are these babies that have not been directly talked to substantially backward in their language development from babies that have been talked to incessantly?” And the answer is, there’s not a measurable difference between these two groups, okay?

Because in order to establish basic phonemic competency what is required is merely exposure, it can’t have meaning, speech can’t have meaning. Now, I’m not recommending you don’t talk to your baby. If you have one, by all means, talk to it. But understand that these plasticity processes do not strictly require it. This early cortical specialization is critically enabling to the development of working memory and selective attention. You have to differentiate the representation of things in the world before you can operate on it in ways that can render it to memory. You have to be able to create selective processing before selective attentional processes can operate on it to control selection, okay?

Modulatory control processes that are enabling plasticity in the basis of behavioral outcome also mature across this period. At a later age, the brain is going to make an evaluation of the consequences of its action. And it’s actually going to control plasticity so that plasticity is only permitted when the brain interprets it to be good for it, okay? And it has to mature the systems that are going to evaluate outcome before it can establish that control, first, very primitively, but that initial primitive control is established across this early period of infancy.

And from the end of the critical period, forward to the end of life, cortical plasticity is powerfully gated. Now we have on and off switches, mostly off, and only going to allow change under control of working memory, and as a function of selective attention, and as a function of the brain’s own assessment of behavioral outcomes. So we have a really amazing thing in the early evolution of the brain. It’s born in the world without the ability to control its plasticity. It evolves to a point, in its control machinery, and it evolves to the point in this representation of the details of the things in the world where it can begin, in primitive ways initially, to actually control its own self-development which is an amazing thing.

Stage 2

Now that carries us to stage two, when an older brain is going to control its own plasticity as it masters skill after skill in a learning context. I’d like to talk about the way the brain accomplishes this by this simple example. So here, we have two beautiful children, they happen to be my other two grandchildren. And we see that they’re using this tool, this tool is a lever that has a scoop on the end. You can see that this child in this relatively primitive control of the tool has a fulcrum set relatively near the scoop. So this is the conservative position but it doesn’t give you much — very effective control of this tool because you know that — well, you have to move the fulcrum out to really have the freedom, degrees of freedom that would really give you a sophisticated control, right? But first you learn in this way.

You see that this child has been working at using this tool for a while but she’s still not very accurate. And you can also see that she’s still using an alternative strategy. Now, she’s going to use this tool thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of times. And ultimately, she will become sophisticated like this user. She’ll be able to control the tool basically with the fulcrum set back and with high levels of agility. Now, this is not a trivial accomplishment of the brain when you think of the control that would be required to manipulate this tool — well let’s think about that a little bit.

Now the course – what the objective of this — use of this tool is to dip it into this — to introduce it into this substance. This substance can have lots of resistance or little. It can — when it’s loaded, it can be heavy, it can be light and has to be brought upright without losing the load to the mouth which is out of view, right? And then it has to be dumped successfully, right? So this is not a trivial undertaking.

Now, all of these require relatively fine dynamic control, in the control of the movements and muscles, postures of the fingers, right? This is a pretty complicated thing and that can only be accomplished with relatively sophisticated feedback that’s coming from the skin, receptors in the skin that are measuring the forces and the pressures dynamically and from joints and receptors that are deep in the fingers and then the muscles and joints of the hand and the arm and so forth. A beautiful level of sophisticated control has to be mastered, actually, to manipulate this simple tool.

Now, actually when you train a brain at a task like this, anywhere you look at the representation of the surface of the hand, the arm, receptors that come from deep in the arm or hand or fingers, where you look at the representations of that relate to any aspect of this behavior, you see specialization. You see the brain is actually specialized for the mastery of the skill or different aspects of the skill, brain region by brain region. The plasticity it’s seeing is actually massive.

Now the brain’s strategy for accomplishing this specialization is very simple, it has a great trick. All it does is evaluate the success of an attempt, and on the basis of the evaluation of a successive attempt, when the attempt is a good one by its evaluation, it says, “Save it. Save that one, that was a good one.”

Now what does save it mean? It means that it strengthens all of the connections, the myriad connections that contribute backward in time to that successful attempt. And what it’s doing in effect is giving — and those changes in the strengths of connections produce iteratively through thousands and thousands and thousands of attempts lead it to on a beautiful path of progression towards perfection.

Now, how does it evaluate the successive attempt? Well, it has two simple strategies. The first is hedonic, it wants the food — the food itself as a reward. So it’s working for the food. The second is more sophisticated but it’s more powerful and important to the brain. It actually creates a model of a good attempt in memory. This child has watched people used this tool and she knows what this tool use is about. She’s actually created a model in her brain of successful tool use and she’s evolving the model by her practice in its use. And that model itself is being slowly elaborated and perfected in her brain and basically she’s evaluating the success of each attempt against that model. So she’s actually holding the model in memory and she’s evaluating her performance against that remembered ideal. And by that strategy you have mastered, thousands of basic skills and abilities that define you operationally as the human that you are, the highly skilled and elaborately skilled human individual that you are.

Now progressive experienced induced plasticity has also created something in a sense even more sensational, it’s created you. The embodied person that you are is a product of brain plasticity within your lifetime. And that’s occurred because every time the brain is recording information, it’s recording it in the context in which it occurs. It’s associating things that occur nearly simultaneously in time and that’s a basis of building a model of the world. You’ve constructed your model of the world. You’re constructing the association of relationships between things in time. Not just in the present moment but on the basis of the prediction of what comes next, just like the Google Search Engine, you’re making all kinds of predictions to what goes with that, what comes next, right?

Now, with every thought, with every action, with every perception, with every movement, there’s an association that always occurs and that association is to the source. And the source is you. Billions and billions and billions and billions of times a year, the brain is making that association. It’s making it in an individual way that relates to the complex information that’s being fed from every environment and that’s individuating you, the person that you are by this massive self-associative process. Because that information is coming powerfully on a heavy schedule, everyday, from the receptors of your skin, the creation of the person you are, that self referenced creation, is embodied. It comes to the limits of your height of course, but it’s basically a product of these plasticity processes in your brain.

Now, brains don’t always develop in a powerful way and in fact it’s very easy to screw them up. And you can screw them up by giving them bad genetic history, you can screw them up by giving them a bad childhood, and of course we do that massively, culturally. We give millions and millions – billions of children in the world a not very adequate childhood. And of course there are hundreds of millions of children in the world, at least, that have a bad genetic history. And one of the important things to understand about this plasticity process, that it’s in there, it’s a resource in a brain as long as an animal is alive.

So when the animal is young, we can screw the brain up genetically or we can screw it up by giving it a bad childhood and we can fix it. And we can fix it by driving it in a corrective direction. And this is a very important way that we’ve tried to use brain plasticity for good. We’re basically trying to use this incredibly powerful resource which is what it is, to drive brains in positive or corrective directions.

Now here’s a dumb little experiment, meaningless, now that I looked at this slide, but it illustrates my point, if you understood what the hell this means. We’re looking down on a little piece of the auditory hearing cortex. This is how it represents sound frequency, low frequency toward the blue, high toward the red. And here’s an adult that’s been raised in a bad environment, basically in the presence of continuous modulated noises, it’s matured so that it has no real representation or resolution of frequency that’s worth a damn. Yes, we just trained its littermate, and the littermate looks like normal. In fact it’s easy to make the littermate super-normal.

And here’s another littermate that hasn’t been trained that says the same age, now match with this. We’ve done this experiment in many forms. This is a very simple experiment to do. You’re not stuck with the limitations of childhood necessarily, it can be quite complicated to train a brain to catch up but you’re not stuck with it. Now, in the same way we’ve done experiments like this in rats that are near the end of life and their brain is turning crappy just because they’ve lived too long, or let’s say lived to a ripe old age. And in a whole series of physical and functional ways, their brains had looked dysfunctional. They have very poor control of inhibitory processes in the brain. They respond very sluggishly dynamically. They have very poorly correlated actions, which means that they’re operating very precisely and with great confusions, and you see this expressed behaviorally in a whole variety of ways, you see it expressed in their elemental neurology.

We can make the brain of an animal near the end of life that is greatly impaired in almost everyway look like an animal that’s in the middle of life, physically, functionally, chemically, because his brain plasticity processes are substantially reversible. That’s what I’m going to begin to talk about. I’m going to begin to talk about how we use brain plasticity for correction. And in experiments like this, we know that we can improve the fidelity or accuracy of representations in the cerebral cortex or other places in the brain. We know that we can improve the power, the strength, the reliability of cortical representation. We know that it can increase the coordination of cortical representations, and coordination is critical because from coordination comes reliability and functional control of systems.

We can increase the complexity of natural complex signal feature representation in all kinds of ways. We can increase the noise-immunity of cortical representations basically by increasing the way activities occur as correlated responses in populations. We can increase the speed, the detailed completeness or the syntax of cortical operations. And we can do that in any level of operation in the brain.

Well actually, there’s a very large literature in the animal domain in which people have trained adult monkeys to do all kinds of things. Usually macaque monkeys, old-world monkeys, and [indiscernible] have been used repeatedly because brains of all our animal models that are available accessible to neuroscientists, they are the most human-like. Macaque old-world monkeys are smart, they are in a sense on the path to us, not so many million years back and they’re very capable and they can be taught to master simple and complex behaviors. And probably in two or three thousand different forms, scientists across the world have trained monkeys to do this or that simple or complex thing.

So on one level, I might train a monkey to make fine distinctions about simple aspects of stimuli. On another level, I might train an animal in the ways in which they have to master some complex principle of reasoning or some complex principle of manipulating information that changes every time they act or something, it doesn’t matter, all of these experiments work.

Now, what do scientists see when they do these experiments? Well now they go to a halfway, reasonable place in the brain, neurons are specialized for the behavior; they do just the right thing. This is not a particularly difficult experiment. Whatever the behavior, the brain is massively specialized. Every time you acquire a new ability at any point in life, at any age, whatever its nature, you’ve acquired it through brain change. The machine is different, once you’ve acquired it from before; and this is seen in experiment after experiment after experiment.

So our practical goals, that is to say, the goals of Scientific Learning Corporation and Posit Science Corporation, these are these companies in San Francisco and Oakland – Oakland and San Francisco, have been to define the contributions of brain processing abnormalities or limitations to the expressions of developmental adult-acquired disabilities or disease, and with that understanding to employ the brain’s inherent plasticity to drive brain processes in empowering or corrective directions.

Before I say more about that, I want to say that we don’t just train people that are in trouble, we’ve trained hundreds of thousands of children that are doing just fine, and in their case the object is to help them to do better. The majority of children and the majority of adults we’ve trained, they do have problems, and basically we’re trying to drive whatever their condition, we’re trying to drive their brain in an empowering, in an enriching direction, you could say in a corrective direction.

Our major targets have been developmental impairments in language, reading, and cognitive abilities in children, and also in adults who struggle with normal or with pathological aging, so this is universal. Almost every older adult is losing it to some extent and — so that’s a big target, it’s a universal disease as it were. And then some adults have special problems that require or justify special efforts for rescue.

We have also been very interested in — we have elaborate collaborative studies that are being conducted by scientists at Yale and UCSF especially, in which we’ve been addressing problems of psychotic illness. I’m not sure I’ll have time to talk about that but our primary target really has been schizophrenia, both its prevention in individuals at risk for onset and its treatment once you have it – devastating human condition.

We also have been interested in improving the lot of people that have suffered brain injuries, the trauma could be diffused from a variety of causes, it can come from a variety of — it can come from infections, it can come from a bump in the head, it can come from chemical poisoning and chemotherapy, it can come from a lot of places, from oxygen deprivation, a lot of sources. Or it can be acute, it can be localized, as in a stroke — that’s not a “sroke”, that’s a stroke. And then acquired movement disorders, we’re trying to determine whether or not — we know that we can reverse some of these complex conditions. We think that it’s possible — we ought to be able to prevent the onset of something like Parkinsonism if we knew it was coming and so on and so forth. So a whole variety of place in which we’re trying to use this.

I want to talk a little about its uses. First of all, let’s say that we have a child with a learning problem. Well, it turns out that learning problem can be effectively overcome in most children, not all, but in most children with intensive training that targets brain processing accuracy and speed. Now these are key neurological skills that support facile language and reading.

So the average kid that struggles to learn has a noisy brain, probably most often arising from the fact that their native language wasn’t really English or Spanish or Tagalog. Because their brain was noisy, their native English was — native language was actually noisy English, or Spanish, or Tagalog, and the brain processing is optimized for that degraded condition. One of the things that happens in that early condition is that the brain sets time constants that are longer basically because it has to listen longer in order to reliably get the answer right, okay? So it just makes natural adjustments and adjustments are reflected by speed and of course that is reflected by accuracy.

Every important child of course has a resonant access, their brain is still plastic. So the question is, “Can we drive the brain in a corrected direction?” And in most children that’s absolutely achievable. Now before I talk about that I want to talk about another great source of variation in human ability, that’s just as important as inherited differences. And that’s a variation in the richness of environments and in the consequent elaboration of the brain machinery of individual children, there’s tremendous variations in the richness of environments. And actually, in fact, we bring way too much on genetics.

So for example, if we just look at — and this is from a study that was conducted by Hart and Risley more than a decade ago – if we just look at the difference of the environment in language exposure of children that are raised in families that were on welfare as opposed to children that are raised in the homes of professionals. And what we see is this fact there is a 30 million word different in the exposure of children by the time they arrived at the schoolhouse door, that’s a massive difference. And not only is it difference in the quantity of language that the child has been exposed through that’s driven changes in their brain and perfected their language processing machinery and all of its elaborations, but there are big differences in the quality, big differences in the complexity of the language that they’ve been presented with. So they’ve seen language in very elaborate and elegant forms compared with the average kid in which the family has been struggling.

And not only is there a difference in the quality, there’s a difference in the nature of the interactions in language between the child and the adult. So for example, Hart and Risley simply counted the number of times a day in which the interactions of the child were approbations as opposed to the number of times in the day in which the interactions were affirmative, “Stop that shit, Billy. Don’t do that Billy.” Right? That’s an approbation. “Way to go Mary. Nice job Mary.” That’s an affirmative, right?

So when the family is struggling, twice as often as not, the interaction is corrective. In the family that’s doing well, six times to one, the interaction is affirmative. Now who do you think arrives at the schoolhouse door with a good attitude about talking? Right? You can’t shut Mary up, everything about talking to Mary is a bonus, she expects a reward, she commonly receives — and not only that, but Mary is a talker, Mary is smart. Billy is limited. Billy is acting up from the onset. Billy doesn’t want to talk that much, talking to Billy is bad news. And as Billy fails in school which is a high probability he’s going to do, not do too well, not be identified too quickly as being right up there in the front row, you know, how do you think his interactions in language and communications and being called on by teacher, how do you think that’s going to evolve?

Now if you just look at these children going forward — gee, either I had slides out of order or I had left out a slide — if you just looked at these children going forward, and you look at these great divisions of society, and you say, well how are these children going to be different – hi Brett, nice to see you. Brett’s a former doctoral student of mine, nice to see him in the audience. And sorry for the interruption, but he’s an old friend of mine. I lost my train of thought.

Going forward, when these children enter — that’s the way he used to interrupt my train of thought all of the time, you know, so, I’m not too surprise that occurred again. Going forward, when the children enter high school, we know that children from these too great divisions in society are going to be about five years separated in their reading ability. So it’s not good to get off — your brain to get off to a bad and limited start from the point of view of the enrichment of language exposure, right? And you’ll bear the price of that ever after. And the challenge for us has been to actually drive improvements of the operations of the brains enough so we can actually change the slope of those kids that run that low trajectory, that’s going to give them — have them be five years behind before they enter high school, that’s our goal.

So these limitations it turns out can be overcome in most children by intensive training that corrects their neurology. And in this training, children work at highly efficient, computer-controlled exercises. They commonly work for 30 or 60 minutes per day and three to five days a week, and there are nine exercise suites that are chosen from and that some are focused on language abilities which are critical prerequisites for reading success and some focus on reading itself because reading–successful reading is an absolute–absolutely critical for a child to succeed. These are products of Scientific Learning Corporation, the Oakland company.

Exercises are game-like but they’re not games, they’re serious, they’re optimized in their efficiencies, they’re actually directed, targeted to enliven the brain and to drive it progressively in ways that actually will improve the foundation skills that will support high-level language and reading abilities. And then the exercises are constructed so that everything the child does is recorded so that we can reconstruct compliance, progress and outcomes. All of those are continuously monitored and objectively assessed. And what we’re trying to do in training is to bring every child in to a kind of a closed loop environment where we track the progress of the child, and trying to drive every child that’s trained towards proficiency. Proficiency in something like reading, means carrying the child to the 70 percentile.

So 70% of American children in school aren’t proficient, okay? So it’s a good goal to carry any child that’s below that mark, he’s a good say to the level of proficiency in reading. And we now know more or less because we have this – the largest database that’s collected data from children in the world, in Oakland, data from more than a million children. We now know more or less what it takes in a progression of training to carry a child, wherever they start on a statistical average, to a level of performance efficiency, that’s what we’re trying to achieve. The games are created or the exercises are created in game-like forms that are more or less universal, that is to say they’re not Americans, so that they can be applied anywhere in the world. And increasingly this is a typical game, little snapshot of a game in a space theme, games have these kind of themes that could be acceptable to a child no matter where the child sits and no matter what the language of the child might be, is the idea.

Progress in developing and applying training programs for school-aged children, where we trained about 1.25 million children to date. Nine complex training program suites, four target language abilities, five-target reading. Some are designed for children of young age; some are designed for kids that are in middle school or high school. We have outstanding results in which we can demonstrate repeatedly that we can move children that are not doing so well across the distribution.

And we know that because we commonly collect state achievement test scores, so we commonly evaluate children after they’re trained. And we can see that we are moving them differentially in relation for example to other children in their state or other children in their school district. I looked at the records or talked about the records about three weeks ago with the people at Scientific Learning about a school district in the State of Louisiana, in a parish in Louisiana that was affected by hurricane Katrina. And two years ago, in this school district, the average kid in this school district was the standard deviation — more than the standard deviation below the normal median for the State of Louisiana. You can imagine that that’s probably not doing too well, right? That means the average kid in the school district was below the 16 percentile for the State of Louisiana and the state achievement test.

Two years later, the average kids in these schools where these programs have been provided, have crossed the normal median. Well, that’s called moving against the distribution. That’s exactly what we’re trying to achieve, we’re trying to move children differentially by improving their brain power, improving the speed and accuracy with which their brains are processing information.

Audience: How does this compare to other forms of intervention with a similar number of hours per week or effort involved?

MIKE MERZENICH: Well, you can actually train a child individually. If you were with me, if I was with the therapist for an equivalent amount of time, one on one, you know, I would see results that are not too differentiated from this. The problem is, is that it’s incredibly expensive, right? So I could actually implement this, I could train a specialist to deliver this kind of training substantially, have many of the aspects of it and provable, but it’s just not deliverable. So the technology basically provides a way to deliver it at low cost.

And then we’re better than the therapists because basically what we can deliver is very high throughput. In three or four or five hundred times an hour, we can have a child make decisions that are monitored decisions about let’s say what they hear or what they see or what… how they think, right? So basically we can have the learning cycle occur over relatively shorter period of time. But the advantage of the therapist is they can make, if they’re really skilled, everything be very highly important and momentous for the child. But we can do that too, and there are all kinds of ways that we know how to engage kids so that everything is really important to them in an exercise.

Increasingly, as I said before, outcomes are controlled by therapists in schools by customizing training to achieve assured academic proficiency. So we’re trying to close this loop. You got a kid that’s at the 10th percentile, you do this, this, this, this and they should be at level of proficiency, right? Increasingly this is a control process.

And then of course training, we know in a variety of ways, actually corrects impaired brains. When you look at a brain that’s not doing too well –so these are 20 boy and girl scouts earning a merit badge at San Mateo County and they’re in a reading task in which they’re judging whether words rhyme or not. And these children can all read and this is an area where you know that what they see orthographically in a printed text is associated with what they hear.

Here are 20 failed readers and you can see that 20 of 20 lack this response. This area in the lateral frontal cortex is actually associated with reading accuracy; recognition ability in reading is associated with the strength of activity in this region. You can see that there’s little or no activity in these 20 children here. And now we train the children, and what’s seen in this kind of experiment, in this case 17 of the 20 children acquired a response in this region and you can see a much more strong and coherent response in this more anterior region. Remember 17 of 20 isn’t 20 of 20, but it’s most of the children that are trained and that’s typically of what we see. And you can see this activity in this region, it’s quite strong. It turns out that region is active in the child that’s really initiating –just initiating the orthographic to sound correspondences. And we know that in this early period that area is activated and then this action basically moves up into this zone, so this is, like — these are children that are acquiring this skill and ability and that’s confirmed by later experiments.

And we’ve done these longitudinal brain imaging experiments using language, skills and memory, and attention, and other abilities, and we see the same thing. We see a recovery of normal brain; we see the brain corrected in children basically that need the correction. So that leads me to epoch three in which people are users of mastered automatic skills and abilities, and these are healthy people on the decline just like many of you. I see people in here that might still be in the—before leading this charge and other people that are well into it, like me.

Stage 3

Okay, so if we look at knowledge, knowledge continues to grow in human individuals until relatively late in life. So here’s a place holder for knowledge, place holder in this case is semantics, word definitions, vocabulary, and you can see that it’s continuing to grow and this is a big statistical study of individuals into their 60s, and then slowly declines. And we could have other place holders for knowledge in which there’s pretty much a continuous growth. You have to be around to accumulate the facts of the world. And the longer you’re around the more you know. Sorry, you younger people, you just don’t know as much as we old people do. It’s temporary but at this point we have the lead.

But look what else is happening to we older people. We have place holders for a whole variety of other abilities, the open circle is reasoning, special visualization, perceptual speed, down – episodic memory down, could be a hundred things that we could measure that are basically declining from our 20s and 30s. Now, this is important for older individuals because in these fundamental operational abilities that we’re really reflecting the performance characteristics of our brains and their dynamics. People in their 70s are in the bottom 20 relative to people in their 20s, so this is a big difference, right? We don’t like this, we older people.

Well, why do we lose it as we grow older? Well, for one thing your brain is older and as it’s older it’s becoming noisier. And noise is the enemy of the brain representing information in a highly resolved and high-speed way. Again, as a function of noisiness the brain has to slow down. And every older brain is slowing down in its operations and thought and the control of its actions. So your body is also older and the brain is all about controlling your actions and it’s not helping the fact that your body in fact in its control is slowing down.

A third thing that happens is that older individuals had spent a lot of earlier life building up the capacity for abstraction. In an older age you rely on that abstraction to get you through your day. You’re not very much dealing with the details anymore. And it turns out that in the details of the representation’s input from the world on what you see and what you hear is information in a form that can be remembered. I can create a form of oral speech by manipulation, by processing, by creating a synthetic form that has no details in it. I can do that just by creating speech from modulated noises. And when I do that, you understand it, perfectly understandable but you can’t remember it.

I can create another form of speech in which every time a little change of variants of the signal comes in I just splatter a little of energy in that moment. It turns out that’s a little harder to — for you interpret it initially but in a few hours you understand everything and you remember it. Because in the translation of information from the brain it’s when you represent the information in the brain in detail with little moments of correlated activity that the brain can actually record it.  And the older brains don’t have much detail; they’re operating at levels of abstraction.

And then the third reason it declines is that generally most people are not good caretakers of this crucial resource. So, what do I mean by that? Well, let’s take a simple example, let’s say that you’re a violin player and you’re sitting in a symphony orchestra. And you’re a professional violinist that has acquired the skill or ability through massive practice, right, which is what it takes to be a professional on this level. You’re a master at controlling the fingers — fingering of your hands and precision and pressures and timing. You’re a master at translating the trends or orthography of music into those movements, confirming it by precise hearing. You’re a master at the accurate listening. And you’re a master at translating your emotions and other aspects of control at your bow hand.

Now, what happens if you stop practicing? Well, within two, or three or four weeks everyone around here knows that you’re not practicing. “Why isn’t Sam practicing?” Right? Within a year you’re almost certainly going to have lost your position in the orchestra. Within ten years you’re going to be pretty good violinist but in no sense would you be regard as a professional. On the other hand, if at that ten year hiatus, I said, “Well Sam you can recover.” Or Sam decides that he wants to try to be a professional again. We know he can improve, we know he could reach – drive himself back towards that asymptotic performance. Probably he wouldn’t get so far, but could substantially improve.

You’re not doing — the average person does not understand what it takes to maintain the function of their brain near an asymptotic level of performance, they let it slide. Most of the people in this room are letting it slide. That’s the natural thing to do. And one of the reasons it’s sliding is because you’re not learning very much that’s truly new or maybe here a more — in an occupational sense, more than average, but that’s truly new. To a very large extent we are still using those skills and abilities that we learned long before and we’re applying it to get a new content, and we confuse the acquisition of content for the acquisition of new ability in a fundamental neurological sense.

So, what aren’t we exercising? We’re not exercising the machinery that controls learning itself, that vivifies memory. The modulatory control machinery that underlay the acquisition of all of the ability that defines us is slowly dying.

So, how do you be a good caretaker? Well, you got to eat right, you got to have some exercise and you have to have some social exercise, I can see some of that happening around here, or where they are, but also it’s a good idea to have a little brain fitness. But what is effective? What would you do? So, one of the things you got to address is the fact that all brains are slowing down. So, here we’re just looking at the ability of the brain to operate in time, in fast speed to make the determination, in this case, the task is to identify a little piece of sound and then to recover and identify a separate one in following subsequent time.

So, how often can you do that? Well, a person in their 20s can commonly do that on the average about 20 times in a second. And you can see that by the time you’re in your 80s you’re down to about seven times a second. So, what that translates to about six to eight samples per syllable versus about two samples per syllable. Now, that’s a big difference in how the brain is resolving information in detail, in time. We see exactly the same thing in vision.

Older individuals move their eyes relatively infrequently. A young bright-eyed person is popping the eyes around the subject of interest. And they’re basically taking a series of snapshots and they’re reconstructing what they see in the basis of that series, much sparser encoding occurring in an older brain. And because of that parsing differences of sampling rate, older brains are error-prone, they’re noise-sensitive; it doesn’t take much to disrupt them. They have degraded syntactic or predictive control because information is coming back in prediction so slowly, the have widespread memory or cognitive deficits, they have reduced processing efficiency, and they have lower learning rates. So because information is encoded in a poor way, they can’t record it in memory. And because they’re operating at slow speed, their processing efficiency is poor.

Just like the kid that’s struggling in school, they can’t take in information from the world with efficiency. So, most of what they hear and most of what they see just goes on by. They will forget most of what they see; they forget most of what they hear, just like the kid struggling. Imagine what difference it would make if you could double the rates which people can take in and record and remember information as in childhood, in an older age. So, we train these individuals, we have training that targets language abilities, we have training that targets vision. We’re working on training that targets complex thinking, we use progressive computer-controlled exercises. Again, they are game-like but not games. And they’re optimized in their efficiencies to try to drive changes in brains that are corrected as fast and efficiently as possible.

And then if we look at something like the outcomes of brain fitness exercises, this is from the language training program, we have big improvements of processing ability, that are reflected by big improvements of memory and cognition that are reflected by big improvement of everyday life.

What is the magnitude of this improvement? Well, it turns out that cognitive ability in older individuals by this training takes about 40 hours; translates to improvement of your overall cognitive performance by about 11 years. So, if you’re 70 and you train, on a statistical average you’d be operating cognitively as if you’re 59. And we know we can do better that that. We’re almost certain that we can double or triple that. We want the 70 year old to be operating like a 30 year old. And if we can achieve that, then the young person who is struggling can keep up with that person with greater knowledge, that’s our goal.

Now, actually when you do that you’ll improve processing speed. So, how much? Well, before training people were where they belonged in this large trial. They were about 73 years of age and this is the average speed of processing in this task and after they’re trained, they’re on the average performance ability of a pretty good 20 year old, okay? Now, it’s how to translate these improvements more richly into improvement of every aspect of cognition; that’s one of our goals.

Now, similarly we trained people in vision and we see similar effects. And one of the advantages we have in training vision is that in one of the training components that we studied, a collaborating scientist from the University of Alabama at Birmingham has looked now five years after training these basic skills. And we can therefore know that as a consequence of this training, that if you did this five years before you are more likely to have sustained your independence, about 30% greater probability if you’re older. You’d be in better health, about a thousand dollars a year less in your health expenses in your 70s, in your 80s. You would have had fewer falls or personal injuries; you would have had about half as many driving accidents by sharpening your vision in this way, you’d have about 30% lower incidents of depression and so forth.

So, it’s within your — it’s a good notion to think about brain fitness in adult life. Not just when your older, but in adult life. So, recommended in addition to these eating right, exercise and social exercise, two little words, it’s called the brain gym. Think about it? Think about what you would do? What you could do? What you should do. Think about it for your mother and father; think about it for some older person that you love, as well as the children that you know might benefit from this.

So, we also have these other practical goals, they relate to disease and injury and so forth. I’m not going to talk about them just to say that this is the beginning of a revolution. And the revolution is about using this incredible power that resides within the average human skull. To drive the brain in a useful or corrective direction, okay; highly under-utilized, highly under-utilized in medicine. This will be medicine and it will be medicine that’s much more sophisticated, much more useful than the current media [ph] pharmacological approaches to all of our mental and neurological and psychiatric problems. It’ll be a part of it.

So, finally why I say science is important for you and for Google? Well, access to customized information and richly loading brains with it is a key part of the modern world story – that’s your part. You and the other great players that have created this incredible revolution in the information age. But there’s a second key part.

And the second key part is our capacity to improve brainpower. We have the capacity to make much more out of brains, individuals brains and collectively out of brains that would reflect modern societies or it might include culture. The capacity applies to brains that get off to a bad start, millions of brains get off to good start, most of those bad starts can be overcome, substantially overcome. The brains that run into trouble, well many think disastrous ways — brain to get in trouble, we now believe — I have increasing evidence that it can actually be prevented by strengthening their operations or their devastating expressions can be sometimes reversed or substantially ameliorated and then brains just get older, but brains can be substantially rejuvenated.

Now we’re entering the era of a personal Theory of Evolution, I call it, in which we understand that in a sense, because what we are is a product of where we’ve been and it’s completely under our control, it’s not a hand-off. You were not given the person that you are from some outside agent; it was created in your lifetime by what you did. It is your personal responsibility, you are the shepherd of that flock, you’re the custodian and understanding that — understanding that self- improvement, it means improvement of your brain and understanding how to go about that and do that, contributing powerfully to the growth of personhood. I’m almost done.

We’re living in an era of almost completely undisciplined cultural challenges to the maintenance of the brain and brain health. And you can ask yourself, on the basis of what we understand about this now; how is Google good for you? Good for your brain? And how it might not be good for your brain? And how could you think about the interplay between what could be positive and negative and assure that it’s all positive? And finally, could Google’s contribution to society — societal advance be further amplified by contributing to the advance of this science, that’s delivered out to the billions of individuals who could benefit from it? Ant the answer is of course, “Duh,” right?

So, a fit brain is an invaluable human asset, almost everyone can have one, the effectiveness of Google’s tools for changing the world for the better are limited by how fit brains are, you know that. But fortunately that’s a greatly expansible human resource and we’re working on it. We’re doing our best, we’re piddling in scope, but by damn, we’re trying hard. And I propose that we discover ways to work together to improve human brainpower and the elaborate sources of individualized information that people like you can provide, to guide and shape the richest possible forms of personalized growth, because that’s really what it’s all about.

I think we’re in a transformative period in human history in which we are going to marry an understanding how to basically get the most out of every individual life, and I think we both have important roles to play on that. Thank you.

Question-and-answer session

Host: Thank you Dr. Michael Merzenich. And for those of you who’ve been generous to stick around, thank you and we can still take questions.

Audience: Yes, thank you for your presentation. My name is Ron Hughes and I work for Google. I have two questions. First of all, I need to mention I used to be smart and I’m 51 years old, started gaining weight, my doctor cared and about three months ago I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. So, I’m getting sleep — I’m getting treatment for my sleep apnea and I’m getting smarter again. Have you got something that can help me accelerate that process?

MIKE MERZENICH: Yes, I think that you could probably benefit from this kind of form of intensive training because you probably have had some diffuse losses and you want to make the most out of the sort of high-performance characteristics of your brain. So, you’d probably benefit by being trained using this adult training programs. If you write me an email message, you know, I might just send them to you.

Audience: Okay. My second question is, do you know if these tools that you can provide, do know if they are covered by Google’s medical insurance?

MIKE MERZENICH: I have no idea — I have no idea. If not, raise…

Audience: It doesn’t really matter.

MIKE MERZENICH: If not, raise hell.

Audience: Hi. Thank you for that fascinating presentation. Are there any everyday hobbies that we could perform that would…kind of like the software that you’ve mentioned?

MIKE MERZENICH: Yes. That’s a great question. I mean — but it’s complicated because some things that you’d probably do — so, for example, there are some aspects of video game usage and performance –we commonly use video games as controls, and you know we have big effects against video games. But there some aspects of video game performance that requires high-speed advance, high-speed and high accuracy performance, they are progressive that have value. More than that, you know I strongly recommend that people take up activities that engage their brain relatively richly from a perceptual to a complex cognitive level.

Now, what kind of thing would you do to do that? Take up a musical instrument. When you try to master a complex skill or ability like that, that has an orthography or reading aspect, that has a listening aspect, that has a performance aspect that relates to refined movement control. Learn another language, learning another language is another very rich elaborate kind of behavior that engages the brain at every level.

Now, find your own. Find your own behaviors like that that involve some aspect of the control of sensory feedback to guide action that have an aspect of complex operational control, you know? And the second thing I would recommend is, is that you don’t get too far removed from physical reality. You know when you operate this in a young brain, when you’ve developed all of these skills and abilities, you were connected to the flowers and the soil and the dirt and the details. When you learned to read, it was all about the details, right? It was all about learning your letters and then associating the letters and their simple rhyming, and other word forms, and learning your vocabulary, and then pretty soon you’re looking at big abstract bodies of texts and you’re only going to the details when you need to back-check.

And guess what you remember, you remember when you look at the details. So, you can always operate in life by opening your eyes again and actually looking about what’s between you when you go from A to B as opposed to being in never-never land. Actually, the truth is, I moved across the street from my laboratory at the university because my wife was deadly afraid that I would kill somebody if I drove in my car everyday because I’m always in never-never land. But none the less, I can give this advice. Pay attention to the details of life again, right? Be an accurate listener, be an accurate observer. You know, basically be an active — be active in the way you use your vision to take in information in the world.

Audience: So, when you say you’re in never-never land, do you mean like you’re daydreaming a lot?

MIKE MERZENICH: Yes, I am. I’m Mr. Spaced-out. You know, abstracted scientist. So I say this – but I work it — I work at it. So, I’ve been trying to recover the immediacy of life and interactions with the world, myself…

Audience: Yes. I personally… I personally daydream a lot too, so is that something I should try…

MIKE MERZENICH: Yes, yes. Well, that’s a wonderful exercise and that’s another level of exercise for your brain, right? Because you’re actually, in a sense, by going through those mental rehearsals and those cycles the brain is plastic just like it’s plastic if you’re actually acting in the world. But bring yourself back to reality when you’re in reality and try to smell the flower again. That’s what I suggest.

Audience: And also what would you recommend for parents or yourself like to teach their children and help them develop their brains?

MIKE MERZENICH: Well, the same kinds of things. I think that many times parents need assistance, they need an intense efficient course of training, the kind of training that can be provided by software like this. So, I’ve had every older relative in my extended family use it and every one of them has said that it’s helped them. So, you know, I mean, basically you can drive the brain relatively rapidly in a corrective direction and for many older individuals this can be corrective. My mother in-law, at the point that she initiated training was at the 5^th percentile in cognitive ability. She was identified as mildly cognitive impaired. But she had a wonderful result. She was actually driven to the 60th percentile in cognitive performance for her age, totally different person. It can be fabulously powerful as a rescuing strategy. That doesn’t happen in most people. Most people don’t have changes of that magnitude but almost everyone is stronger and has more –is moving into a safer position relative to real problems or the loss of independence and so forth. So, think about that.

Audience:  I had a question. As with many medical advances, your focus initially seems to be on raising performance of individuals with drastically reduced performance. Have you tried this on average or above average individuals?

MIKE MERZENICH: Yes. Actually we’re doing that now. In fact, we’re running a study now in a school district in Kentucky or some place in which we’re trying to determine how children do on their SAT scores. I’m not really sure what the outcome is, but we anticipate that they will be better because we actually looked at children toward the top of the distribution. Now some school districts train every kid, and you see — you see benefits across the board. The biggest benefits are children that sit on the low side of the distribution. But even a child that sits, let’s say, at the 80^th percent –84th percentile at standard deviation above the normal median, you know if you look at 50, 60 kids, there’s significant effect, about 0.5, 0.6 of a standard deviations. So, they moved up into the 90s somewhere, right? So we know that we can impact children all across the distribution. Everybody, at skills that are important to them, can be better. Everybody. We’re all improvable.

Audience: Hi, I had a few points I wanted to ask. You said that the brain continues to learn even until the end of life. Although, towards the end of life, it slows down its learning. So what you’re saying is, it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks; it’s just a little harder.

MIKE MERZENICH: Right.

Audience: The second question was…

MIKE MERZENICH: By the way, one of the problems with older people struggle to learn is because the learning machinery is down-regulated. But the first thing you can do is to up- regulate it. Now how would you do that? Well, if you aggressively reengage the brain in learning, that machinery actually has trophic factors that has factors that control its health and status. And you can absolutely actually up-regulate it again. So you can actually increase learning rates by engaging the brain initially in ways that effectively accomplish that. And that’s part of what we build into the training. We’re not just training these elemental skills and abilities that would make you a more accurate receiver of information. We’re actually trying to change the learning power of an older brain. Because we’re not — that’s part of driving it successfully to correct itself.

Audience: Okay. My second question was, on one of your slides you said it’s possible to change our learned behaviors. I think I read somewhere that some researchers were trying to work with for example sex offenders or pedophiles that had learned a behavior… but that they were trying to relearn to prevent that. Do you believe that it’s possible to remove behavior that the brain has already learned?

MIKE MERZENICH: Absolutely, and there are increasingly compelling examples of it that relate to things like obsessions or phobias. The sex offenders are particularly difficult because that’s a particularly deeply-embedded, very powerfully rewarded behavior from the brain’s perspective so that’s a tough nut. But there are people that are trying to address that challenge and– I think that are making progress in that arena. So I think we’re going to see a much more — I think this is going to apply to the treatment of prisoners and actually Scientific Learning has trained a lot of incarcerated youth in ways that are improving their lot, and so forth. So, we’re going to see more and more inroads into this sort of applications and uses.

Audience: Hi, my name is Peter. I’m a doctorate student at MIT. So I have two questions as well. The first one is, you have alluded so far that basically the exercises that these people do to improve their skills are sort of like more immediate — let me see, you didn’t say this but let’s say Sudoku or they’re sort of like game-ish type things, and my question is comparatively, sort of, is deep mathematical thinking more –like what’s the marginal contribution of deep thinking compare to this game-like…

MIKE MERZENICH: Right. Yeah, that’s a wonderful question. In an exercise like Sudoku, any exercise like that is useful especially if it’s a newly — you know, in the period in which you’re acquiring the ability to follow the simple rules that relate to it. Of course, the main thing that your acquiring by such exercises is to master Sudoku. It doesn’t really translate to any significant generalized benefit. And really what you’re trying to do — the question is, what generalized benefit are you seeking? Now if you are seeking improvements in something like deep-reasoning or deep- thinking. In a sense that the strategies have to evolve –first of all, there are two aspects. One is what are the fundamental resources you need to support that? So there comes a foundation of the manipulation of information below that, that has to be in place before you can ever — you can be — It’s like to say, I can’t make complex combinations of information in order to solve complicated problems in anything unless I’m a good — accurate receiver of information, unless I received it, then I can begin to manipulate it.

Audience: So you’re basically saying that…

MIKE MERZENICH: And, but–let me finish. And then, in the deep-thinking aspects itself, those — the rehearsals that you have in your mind as you’re going through the manipulation of these — of symbols and conceptions in your mind, that’s learning, that’s plasticity. Right? Just as if you were—the brain was operating on something that it delivered intrinsically to make a decision about it, it’s the same except now it’s internalized. But it’s the same process. There’s nothing mysterious about it. It’s the same process. And of course you have to exercise it.

Audience: Sure, sure. So the second question is basically from the brief examples that you mentioned, it sounded like what you give to the children is the motivation to do the work, not so much – because everybody can sit down and solve problems but most people find it pointless so they choose to –

MIKE MERZENICH: No. Actually that’s not right. What — you can look at their operations for example in fast time and you can see that they’re operating — in these neurological processes with time constants that are very long. They’re about an order of magnitude longer if they’re substantially impaired from a high performing individual. And their whole brain is operating by processing information with both sort of integration and successive signal processing times. You have to – you have to basically drive the brain, you have to ratchet it over slowly so that it basically can operate at high-speed and high-accuracy. And that basically takes intensive, progressive, directed training. It takes 15, 20 hours of intensive training. And then you have to assure that those elemental processing abilities generalized to the actual operations on orally received speech for example, and so it’s complicated. You cannot drive the brain to make these corrections without substantial aggressive intervention. Okay. And it has to be of a specific form.

Audience: Hi, I have a question that might re-word a little bit the last two questions and formulate my own. You talked about limitations in some of the children that you talked to. I think it was Billy. Some of those limitations are emotional… in basis you know, “Shut up Billy, not now.” So how does this work — how is this work limited by emotion and how does it address emotional factors?

MIKE MERZENICH: Well it doesn’t address them in the level that it could and when you come into these complex issues of correcting behaviors, that’s — it’s especially in young school age children; this is dicey. But one of the things it does do for Billy, is it helps Billy reconstruct a positive-self confidence about their operations in language. So, you know, you can — think of it this way. Billy, everyday, comes on to this exercise and 400 or 500 times in an hour he gets the answers right, and is rewarded, and it’s positive. Right? Everything about it is constructed to rebuild Billy’s confidence in the operations and language. And it does do that. It does do that.

So in that sense, now Billy looks at language not as an enemy but as a, you know, as representing a positive force in his life. When you see the transformation in the kid that can’t read and you carry the kid through a relatively narrow window of time; two, three, four months, and now you have a kid that can read –you know, and the average benefit for children of a high school age in reading by going through this simple training, investing 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 hours, the average improvement is somewhere between two and three years in reading ability, in reading age. And you see a kid that suddenly can read, the transformation is fabulous from the point of view of their — how they look at themselves. They’ve been blaming themselves as a failure for all this — for their entire life. Now, suddenly, the world is open to them and that’s an incredibly powerful compensation, compensatory thing for these children emotionally.

Now you can’t correct every aspect. Finally we are dealing with people that have wounded emotional constructs. For example, schizophrenics, a life of wounding, very little social socialization, very little social control, it’s amazing how well we can reestablish that by intensive computer-guided training.

Audience: But you don’t have to overcome some emotional barrier first to get there or does it happen at the same time?

MIKE MERZENICH: Well absolutely. But one of the things about computers and about this sort of technology approach is that it’s acceptable to a child. Let me give you a simple example. If I had a kid in school and the kid is asked to read, the kid can’t read, the kid is traumatized. They’ll do anything not to be called on. On the other hand if I just have a computer that’s listening to them with scientific learning that has, and it’s evaluating the accuracy of their reading and when they’re interacting with the computer, and the computer is fundamentally supportive, it’s completely different. They want to read. Right? It completely changes the way in which they think about learning, reading, school, trying hard, all of those things are completely changed. A lot of this can be changed and you’re really advantaged in a lot of ways by taking it out of the hands of somebody that’s going to look you in the eye and say, “You’re not doing it,” or, “I’m disappointed with you,” and into the hands of a computer whose basic attitude can never be — can always be in a sense, hidden, always be good.

Audience: Have you thought of partnering with maybe an emotional-based therapy to make maybe even more progress with these children.

MIKE MERZENICH: We have — I mean we are now trying to actually construct social control, emotional control programs. We imagine that and we imagine all kinds of uses for that that relate to people that are struggling and from — but probably primarily initially targeting adults because of the sensitivity of trying to manipulate the attitudes of children.

Host: We seem to have a line that keeps growing, so Dr. Merzenich, like, how do you feel for a couple more questions?

MIKE MERZENICH: Well, I’ll take any, you know…

Audience: Hi doctor. Thank you for the presentation. My name is Mark Jeffe and a fairly recent Google employee but also involved with a non-profit locally called — which is providing support for people with attention and learning differences, and I’m wondering if you’ve had much success with treating ADHD or dyslexia?

MIKE MERZENICH: Yeah, well we’ve trained — I’m not sure how many children that would be formally counted as dyslexic, probably a couple hundred thousand, and we have outstanding outcomes. Most of those children acquire reading ability. And most of those children in time require age level or above level of reading. We’ve looked –there’s a recent study that’s publish by a scientist from the University of Oregon that’s looked at the potential impacts of this training. And the neurological responses and the intentional control behaviors of children are substantially restored, not in every way restored, but substantially restored by this class of accurate listening training again. And in the terms of the elaborate problems that plague children, that limit their learning, it’s still a work in progress.

At Posit Science, I’ve actually been discussing ways to elaborate and complete the intentionally – attentional training that would make that attentional training in children or adults still more powerful. So these are–but we have big effects. The brain actually of a – of a poorly attending child, an ADHD child, when they’re trained, looks like it’s above normal, its potential attentional control abilities. And actually they leapfrog children that are not trained, the normal unintentionally impaired controls. Then we train those children, those controls, and those children are–buck up to a high—still higher attentional control level and so forth so. You’re going to see more and more of this intensive brain science-guided training, brain plasticity based training to drive this kind of improvements in child populations and adult populations.

Audience: You know what — and another quick question is, have you been working in any treatments for addictive behavior like stopping smoking?

MIKE MERZENICH: Only in thought — I mean we’ve met with psychiatrists that are dealing with a variety of obsessions, compulsions, addictions and so forth so we know we have things that are operating in the background, in a more of a fundamental research aspect but we don’t really have anything that we’ve developed that we would — that we have assured benefits that we would promise anybody or practice. But that’s certainly an interest.

Audience: About abstraction, I think like perfect pitch is something that we’ve abstracted out. Where do you feel the appropriate level of abstraction lies? I mean, you sounded like you were saying, “Go back to the roots, go down to the low level, right in from the senses.” But you need abstraction for –

MIKE MERZENICH: Well, in a way perfect pitch is an abstraction and in a way it’s not. People now find that people with perfect pitch actually have constructed a relationship between musical notation and sound representation. That’s in the region not far from the region in which you are making these associations between word sounds and their letter representations. So actually people that don’t have perfect pitch can’t — have not made that construction so that you basically are able to create a valid and relatively accurate relationship identity between these two things, musical notation and sound. So, that’s not an abstraction exactly. You know, that’s a correlation-based integration of activities, you could say.

Audience: I mean it seems like the low level like hearing API has get pitch, and not everyone evolves that.

MIKE MERZENICH: Right. Yes, well let me answer your question in another way. It’s all abstraction. You know there’s nothing real about the activities in your brain. Right? In a sense, it’s all symbolic, right? But it’s a matter of how far you are away from the immediate interpretation, the immediate representation of the details of what’s coming in, you can say, in your operations. So I can — when I take in information in detail, the brain is also by correlation creating abstracted representations of exactly the same thing that are reduced. Right?

And when you’re older, your relying on that second level, that detail-less construction that’s been created by this massive correlation that’s occurred across earlier life and so forth. And you know, you go from a situation in which you’re really connected with the world. You’re really connected with physical reality. How often — how many hours in your day are you really connected to physical reality?

Audience: Not many.

MIKE MERZENICH: Yeah, there you are. That’s what I’m trying to say.

Audience: Hi Dr. Merzenich. Thank you so much for coming and sharing your knowledge. My question’s about, kind of breath, depth and diversity or variety of activities for brain fitness. Is it better, if you want to increase your overall kind of brain fitness, is it better to — or, is there a difference in doing a new activity or learning a new activity versus doing an activity that you are already good at, you’re still, like, for instance the example of deep thinking and mathematical problem solving… and it’s still a challenge but it’s not a new activity?

MIKE MERZENICH: Right.

Audience: And kind of related to that, what if you do a lot of different activities, you’re kind of learning a language, or picking up a new sport, you’re doing a lot of activities, but you’re not necessarily going deep in them.

MIKE MERZENICH: Right. Yes, those are great questions. First of all, the only time you actually change your brain is when it’s serious to the brain itself. So you can train a monkey in a task where it’s like experiments that we’ve done historically, that’s easy for the monkey to solve. A monkey, basically, can do it automatically relatively quickly. Or you can train a monkey to accomplish the same goal but it’s difficult, hard as hell. In the latter case, you see big changes in the brain. In the former case, you see nothing. Right? It has to really matter to the brain. And in a sense it has to be serious from the brain’s perspective.

Audience: Matter meaning that it’s challenging or matter in a sense of like survival or…

MIKE MERZENICH: Well in that case, the monitory machinery in the brain is controlled by the focus of your attention by aspects that you would interpret under which motivation. So the actual power of the neuromodulators that drive change, that enable change, are determined by how serious it is from these perspectives. And so — and that’s reflected by the release of the chemical neuromodulators that are a function of how serious it is.

Now you ask, is it important that you work on behaviors that you’ve already mastered in a sense? As long as you work on the cutting edge, as long as it matters. The extent to which your operations are — in problem solving or –can be done almost on automatic pilot, it’s not very useful. To the extent to which you’re challenging yourself, to continually drive yourself to the limits of your ability, that’s useful. Right? So that’s equivalent to any — again you’re driving the brain progressively to refine its operations. You’re driving changes in your brain when you do that. And then of course, one of the important things is that — you can ask this simple question, “What will go wrong as I get older in the brain across my operations?” So the answer is, everything will.

So if I think about, from the point of view of your brain health, “What do I have to be — what do I have to think about keeping in good step?” The answer is, everything. Right? So I could train you to become an accurate listener, let’s say, and I could look at the improvements in your vision, and they’d be modest. Or I could look at your improvements in how complexly you’re manipulating information and thought, and they would be modest. But if I train you on all three, they’d be powerful and I’d see synergistic relationships between those benefits. So think about engaging yourself relatively broadly. Right? And then think about exercises and a strategy in life that continues to enrich you relatively broadly.

Audience: That’s right, another real quick question. With regards to the kind of fitness programs that have been developed…it sounds like there is performance feedback and if you’re five — you know, bottom 5% or top 60%. Do the people who use this anecdotally, do they — do they sense it? Do they actually — do they actually see in their daily lives, like, my memory recall has gone up?

MIKE MERZENICH: I said that in one of my slides. They do see that. Their impacts in their quality of life that they almost always describe in terms of their — how well they remember, you know, who they remembered at the last party they were at, or, you know, how well they did at the grocery store. All of these things that relate to the quality of life operations, “I feel more confident. I’m doing things I couldn’t do and it’s like I went back and started flying my plane again.” All of these things that relate to obvious real world quality of life impacts, you almost always see that. But described in terms of the individual operational specializations and the things that people are really – are at the center of their life and their life’s interests, they are usually expressed in those terms.

Audience: I have a question from the perspective for maybe like designers or developers. So, for those brain exercises as response, might be interested to be introduced to be in your talk, so like users are very different from each other, they have like different age and very different style of lifestyle. So how much do you need to know about the user like the gender, the age and to design like successful strategies to improve their mind?

MIKE MERZENICH: Yes, that’s a good question and it’s a continual challenge. It’s a challenge to make universal programs that every child will like not so much. The difficult is not so great with six year olds but it’s certainly greater for 16-year olds. And it becomes differentiated across human cultures as you know.

And so, you know, we do the best we can. We make programs that are designed to be universal and universally appealing. We use the models, the best models that come from the world not just in the U.S. We’re trying to make them not be identified as specifically American or specifically American school and the same with adult programs. But, you know, by the time you’re 60 or 70 or 80, you’re really strongly differentiated, right? And men and women have quite different sets of things that are really appealing to them and so forth. So, it’s a real challenge to make one-size fits all exercises. And you know we lean heavily on the gaming industry you could say and the kind of games we know are the most universally addictive or useful. And then we try to make them not games but converted into our training exercise kind of formats. So, but it’s never entirely successful and I think what’s going to happen in the future is that these would be more and more richly differentiated. And with more and more complex consideration for what someone in Tokyo would like or someone in London would like versus someone in Paolo Alto.

Audience: You mentioned in passing the effect of — like brain injury such as chemotherapy or like chemo brain and how this can have an effect on that? Is it similar to the kind of training that you do on older adults in like progressive aging and do you see results better immediately after chemotherapy in like five years out or 10 years out?

MIKE MERZENICH: Right, that’s a good question. Actually, when you poison the brain which is what chemotherapy does for awhile, you have very widespread losses. And the brain is becoming noisier and it’s having problems with resolving signal and it always — it does this — it makes the same adjustment over and over again when it has problems with signal in noise conditions, it just changes its time constants. So, if you just look in such individuals, you see that it’s made this natural adjustments and so it’s representing information less completely again. And so, it turns out that that something that you can almost always possibly manipulate.

Now in order to speed it up again, you have to ensure that you’re maintaining accuracy. So, the training has to be — has to be designed to assure that in whatever domain you’re operating in, you’re improving accuracy and speed. But when you do that, you’d see the same kind of memory and cognitive improvements that you see in a kid population or in a senior population, right?

Now, because the injury is relatively diffused it’s commonly — the losses are relatively widespread so there’s a lot to train to really be back to tiptop shape again. But we found that we can pretty much recover a person that has substantial losses from chemo brain and this is a research being done at UCSF. And again, there’s big quality of life benefits from it. So, I think this is going to be part of the routine treatment of people that have this kind of brain injuries. We see the same thing that people have infected brains. Lime disease would be an example where brain infection can occur. West Nile virus is another, AIDS is the most–probably most common. Ultimately AIDS dementia comes from the infection of the AIDS virus in the brain. Again, the same thing we can see substantial improvements of performance in such brains.

Again, because it’s very diffuse damaged and we see the same thing in individuals from Iraq that have been in the presence of IED explosions which actually create bubbles in the brain; creates diffuse damaged. So, there are common ways that you would approach these conditions. There are also some things that are special about each one of them.

Host: We’re going to stop it there for Mike to questions but please feel free to come up for some informal discussion and thank you again.

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