There’s so much that has been said about the brain over the years. But two things are in fact true. First, it’s possible for the brain to change. It can improve itself based on your normal life experiences. The second thing is that brain training does work. When you spend some time undergoing brain training games, you will see improvement very soon.
One woman, in particular, has somehow managed to live through this experience. Caroline Williams, the author of a new book titled “My Plastic Brain” spent almost a year trying out a number of tests to improve her brain. First of all, she identified the areas she wanted to improve like anxiety, attention, creativity, and navigation.
After that, she started to expose herself to new techniques that were all designed to improve one or more aspects of her brain. It was a crazy experiment to start with because it was self-administered. This means that it was open to personal biases. There was also no scientific way of measuring improvement. However, Williams told an online news outlet that she went in without expectations. It could work or not, but she just had to try.
Before she went to the lab for the training, Williams had to establish how serious her brain issues were. The first thing was attention. She took a few tests and realized that her attention levels were very low. The tests to improve attention were deceptively simple and Williams had to sit in front of a screen where faces kept coming up. All the faces were male except for one female called Betty. Williams had to press a buzzer when a male face came up but not when Betty showed up.
This test was designed to achieve two things. First, it was brain stimulation. You want your brain to be awake all the time by focusing on the images coming up on the screen without blinking. The second goal was paying attention. What made this even more interesting was the nature of the task at hand. It’s easy to pay attention to things that intrigue you as a person. But boring things like sitting in an empty room staring at strange faces on a screen does have a way of making you space out.
This test pushes the participants to engage their brain even in boring tasks. This means getting in the zone where your brain is super active and super attentive. Caroline says that even though this test was done about two years ago, she was able to learn something. She can easily tell when her brain is super active or attentive and when she has spaced out. This helps her refocus. It’s not clear if this experience can be generalized to other people. But even then, it does provide a clear idea that the brain can be trained to improve on its weaknesses and all we need is perhaps better brain training technology.
