6 claves para incrementar tu poder mental

Por. Sharon Begley, condensado de Newsweek (http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/01/buff-your-brain.html), January 1, 2012.

(Selecciones del Readers Digest, Febrero 2013, Nm. 867, pginas 36-43) Los estudios cientficos indican que uno puede volverse ms inteligente a cualquier edad. Dejate sorprender! Entrenamiento cerebral para agudizar la memoria, ejercicio aerbico para conservar la sustancia gris, meditacin para afinar las conexiones entre el raciocinio y la emocin ... Todo esto suena muy bien, pero hay algo frustrante en los numerosos estudios que identifican maneras de fortalecer el cerebro: sus alcances son limitados. Si bien es cierto que los ejercicios para agudizar la memoria son mejores para su mente que, digamos, ver reality shows en la televisin, lo mximo que pueden aportarle es un acceso ms confiable a conocimientos que ya estn almacenados en sus neuronas. Si la informacin no est all, ninguna cantidad de entrenamiento cerebral le dir cmo funciona la economa mundial, a qu se debi la Guerra de las Malvinas o por qu es importante el cuadro Las seoritas de Avin, de Picasso. Saber eso quiz no le interese, pero piense en la informacin que podra mejorar notablemente su vida cotidiana: no sera grandioso poder entender y recordar ms de lo que lee y escucha, aprender y retener nuevas habilidades para mejorar sus perspectivas laborales, o conectar fragmentos de conocimiento para saber, por ejemplo, qu le entusiasma a su jefe?

Todos queremos saber ms, entender ms profundamente, dar grandes saltos creativos, retener lo que leemos, ver conexiones invisibles para los dems ... no solo para aprovechar al mximo lo que ya tenemos dentro de la cabeza, sino para ser, en dos palabras, ms inteligentes. Con un mayor poder mental podramos saber de inmediato cundo un vendedor intenta engaarnos, entender los estudios mdicos relacionados con nuestras dolencias, captar el impacto de la recesin en nuestros aportes jubilatorios y tomar decisiones ms inteligentes en el trabajo, el amor y la vida. Una revisin de estudios recientes sobre neurobiologa y ciencias cognitivas revel un hallazgo extraordinario: el cociente intelectual (CI), que se consideraba prcticamente inalterable despus de la primera infancia, puede aumentar o disminuir. Y no solo por uno o dos puntos. Segn una investigacin publicada en 2011 en la revista Nature, el CI puede 62 aumentar la asombrosa cantidad de 21 puntos en un perodo de cuatro aos, o bien, bajar 18 puntos. Cmo elevar su coeficiente intelectual El CI, medido a travs de una batera de pruebas de memoria funcional, habilidades espaciales y reconocimiento de patrones, entre otras, es la suma de una amplia gama de capacidades cognitivas. Una diferencia en CI de 20 puntos "es enorme", dice la cientfica Cathy Price, del University College de Londres, quien dirigi la investigacin. "Si una persona aumenta su CI de 110 a 130, pasa de ser promedio a superdotada. Y si su CI baja de 104 a 84, pasa de ser promedio a estar por debajo de la media". Price realiz su estudio con personas de entre 12 y 20 aos, pero, en vista de los recientes hallazgos sobre la capacidad del cerebro de cambiar incluso a los 60 o 70 aos -la llamada neuroplasticidad-, la experta cree que los resultados son vlidos para todos. "El desempeo en pruebas de CI podra cambiar significativamente en la edad adulta tambin", seala. "El mismo grado de plasticidad [que se observa en adultos jvenes] puede estar presente toda la vida". La importancia de la memoria de corto plazo Aunque esta memoria se considera solo uno de los componentes del CI general, estudios recientes indican que en realidad puede ser la palanca para elevarlo. En una investigacin sobre la inteligencia dirigida por Susanne Jaeggi y Martin Buschkuehl, de la Universidad de Michigan, se adiestr a voluntarios adultos para realizar una difcil prueba de memoria de corto plazo: los sujetos oan pronunciar una serie de letras al tiempo que vean una pantalla de computadora que iba mostrando un cuadro azul en un lugar diferente; luego volvan a or cada letra y tenan que recordar qu posicin ocupaba el cuadro azul en la pantalla. Cuanto ms ejercitaron la memoria de corto plazo, tanto mayor fue su mejora en inteligencia fluida: la capacidad de razonar y resolver problemas con independencia de los conocimientos existentes (la prueba de razonamiento que se us fue la llamada de "matrices progresivas": observar tres configuraciones geomtricas y elegir entre varias opciones la que contina la serie). En junio pasado, los investigadores de Michigan obtuvieron los mismos resultados en nios en edad escolar, lo cual indica que el entrenamiento de la memoria mejora el desempeo en las pruebas de inteligencia y que, por consiguiente, podra ser el recurso ms eficaz para aumentar el CI, "Existe cierta controversia entre los investigadores respecto a si el entrenamiento cerebral puede mejorar la cognicin", dice el neurocientfico Eric Kandel, de la Universidad de Columbia, quien comparti el Premio Nobel de Medicina en 2000 por sus descubrimientos sobre las bases celulares y moleculares de la memoria. "Pero si ejercita su retentiva -por

ejemplo, memorizando poemas-, es probable que mejoren algunos aspectos de su funcin cognitiva". Para ser ms agudo, preste atencin Otra funcin cerebral que puede entrenar para aumentar su CI es la atencin, la cual, segn los neurocientficos, es una condicin indispensable para aprender. Slo si presta atencin cuando lo presentan en una fiesta, podr recordar el nombre de la persona que ms le guste. Existen pruebas de que los videojuegos de accin y los de estrategia mejoran tanto la atencin como la memoria. Jugar con ellos puede aumentar su capacidad de concentrarse en los estmulos visuales y sonoros y ayudarlo a recordar informacin. Otro elemento esencial para mejorar la atencin y la memoria es el inters. Si no le importa lo que lee, ve u oye, no lo retendr. Loa hbitos clave para tener un mayor poder mental Vigorizar el cerebro exige esfuerzo, pero lo bueno es que hay medios a su alcance para conseguirlo: EJERCICIO AERBICO. Caminar 45 minutos al da, tres veces por semana, estimula la produccin del factor neurotrfico derivado del cerebro, una protena que contribuye a la formacin de neuronas nuevas, al aumento de conexiones sinpticas y al aprendizaje. Estudios dirigidos por Arthur Kramer, de la Universidad de Illinois en Urbana - Champaign, y por Kirk Erickson, de la Universidad de Pittsburgh, han demostrado que el ejercicio aumenta la sustancia gris en la regin del hipocampo que procesa conocimientos nuevos, en particular la relacin entre los distintos elementos de informacin que conforman los recuerdos complejos. Esto tal vez no eleve su CI, pero atiborrar su corteza cerebral con informacin sin duda lo volver ms erudito. SIESTAS. En un estudio realizado en 2010, el psiclogo Matthew Walker y sus colegas de la Universidad de California en Berkeley descubrieron que una siesta no slo puede restaurar la capacidad intelectual, sino tambin aumentarla. Estudiantes que durmieron una siesta de 90 minutos a las 2 de la tarde luego de hacer una tarea difcil para el hipocampo -aprender los nombres de cerca de 120 personas desconocidas viendo fotos de sus caras- aprendieron las asociaciones de nombre y rostro con ms precisin despus de la siesta que antes, y mejor que los alumnos que no durmieron siesta. "En los estudiantes que se mantuvieron despiertos se produjo un deterioro de la capacidad de memoria, pero 66 al dormir una siesta se restaur esa capacidad a un nivel an ms alto que el que tenan antes de dormir", seala Walker. Los investigadores usaron electroencefalogramas (EEG) -grficos en los que se registran las corrientes elctricas producidas por la actividad cerebral- para hacer una prediccin de ese efecto. El nmero de husos de sueo (un tipo de descargas de actividad elctrica) que los alumnos mostraron en el EEG durante la siesta permiti pronosticar cunto mejorara su capacidad de aprender una vez que se despertaran. Walker supone que los husos de sueo indican la actividad del hipocampo mientras transfiere informacin a la corteza cerebral para su almacenamiento permanente. Es como pasar datos de un dispositivo USB a un disco duro, lo cual, segn el psiclogo, "consolida en la memoria de largo plazo la informacin descargada y deja libre el USB (el hipocampo) para absorber nueva informacin". Cuanto mejor traslademos informacin del hipocampo a la corteza cerebral, ms informacin podremos obtener cuando la necesitemos.

 LA MENTE EN BLANCO. Cientficos de la Universidad Tohoku, en Japn, les pidieron a 63 voluntarios que pusieran la mente en blanco a fin de medir su flujo sanguneo cerebral utilizando imgenes de resonancia magntica funcional. Los que mostraron la mayor afluencia de sangre en la sustancia blanca que interconecta las neuronas obtuvieron la puntuacin ms alta en una tarea que exiga generar con rapidez ideas nuevas, segn informaron los investigadores en la revista PLoS One. Como ser creativos estriba en ver conexiones que otros pasan por alto, resulta lgico que el aumento de actividad en la sustancia blanca mientras el resto del cerebro descansa favorece la creatividad. As que guarde su telfono celular y ponga su cerebro en funcionamiento mnimo. CAFENA. Tomar caf podra aumentar su agudeza mental, revela un estudio publicado en 2011 en la revista Nature Neuroscience. Unas ratas que recibieron inyecciones de cafena en una cantidad equivalente a la que contienen dos tazas de caf mostraron una mayor actividad elctrica interneuronal en la zona del hipocampo llamada CA2, segn observaron Serena Dudek y sus colegas del Instituto Nacional de Ciencias de Salud Ambiental, de los Estados Unidos. Y una mayor conectividad se traduce en mejor memoria y mejor aprendizaje. UN SEGUNDO IDIOMA. Cuando una persona habla con fluidez dos idiomas -por ejemplo, el espaol y el francs- y quiere decir algo, en su cerebro se activan los circuitos donde residen ambas lenguas. La corteza prefrontal tiene que intervenir entonces para elegir la palabra adecuada; por ejemplo, hombre u homme? El "ejercicio" que la corteza prefrontal realiza con el bilingismo fortalece otras funciones que contribuyen a aumentar el CI, como la resolucin de problemas y cambiar de foco de atencin, explica Ellen Bialystok, cientfica cognitiva de la Universidad York, en Canad. Incluso podra retrasar por cinco aos la aparicin de la demencia senil. ALIMENTOS Y ESPECIAS CON POTENCIAL BENFICO. Si bien es cierto que una dieta saludable se asocia con un menor riesgo de contraer enfermedades como la diabetes y el mal de Alzheimer, y de sufrir ataques de apopleja -los cuales daan las funciones cerebrales-, no existen pruebas firmes de que los complementos vitamnicos o ciertos alimentos ricos en antioxidantes aumenten la inteligencia. Sin embargo, los cientficos tienen la mira puesta en algunos de ellos. Por ejemplo, varios estudios en pequea escala indican que la crcuma y el jugo de granada podran mejorar la memoria y otras funciones cognitivas.

Buff Your Brain

Jan 1, 2012 10:00 AM EST

Read more. Learn a language. Get some sleep! Sharon Begley reports getting a bigger brain is easierand more funthan you think. Plus, Amy Gross on how how meditation can lead to nirvana. Brain training to sharpen memory. Aerobic exercise to preserve gray matter. Meditation to hone connections between reason and emotion. It all sounds great, but theres something that has long bothered us about the growing number of studies pinpointing ways to buff your brain: they dont go far enough. Sure, exercises to improve memory are better for your brain than, say, watching reality TV, but the most youre going to gain is more reliable access to knowledge already scattered around your cerebral cortex. If the information isnt in there, no amount of brain training will tell you how the Federal Reserve system functions, why the Confederacy lost the Civil War, the significance of Picassos Demoiselles dAvignon, or why Word just crashed. Not to mention the kind of information that could significantly improve your day-to-day life: wouldnt it be wonderful to understand and remember more of what you read and hear (whats the catch with annuities again?), to learnand retainnew skills to improve your job prospects (animated Power-Points!), and to connect bits of knowledge to, say, discern what makes your boss tick. Yet thats what we all wantto know more, to understand more deeply, to make greater creative leaps, to retain what we read, to see connections invisible to others not merely to make the most of what we have between our ears now, but to be, in a word, smarter. By raising our mental game we would be able to pick out the most significant data in a companys annual report, see immediately when a marketer or advertisement is conning us (increase the molecular structure of water to make it healthier for your Siamese fighting fish, as one bottler promises? Dont think so), understand medical studies relevant to what ails us, grasp the significance of the euro meltdown to our retirement savings, and make smarter decisions in work, love, and life.

31 Ways To Get Smarter

As we dug into the latest research in neurobiology and cognitive science for this second annual installment of the Newsweek/Daily Beast guide to being smarter in the new year, one discovery from 2011 therefore stood out above all the others: that IQ, long thought to be largely unchangeable after early childhood, can in fact be raised. And not by a niggling point or two. According to a groundbreaking study published this fall in Nature, IQ can rise by a staggering 21 points over four yearsor fall by 18.

A higher IQ can get you more than admission to Mensa and bragging rights on onlinedating sites. IQ, measured by a battery of tests of working memory, spatial skills, and pattern recognition, among others, captures a wide range of cognitive skills, from spatial to verbal to analytical and beyond. Twenty points is a huge difference, says cognitive scientist Cathy Price of University College London, who led the research. If an individual moved from an IQ of 110 to an IQ of 130 theyd go from being average to gifted. And if they moved from 104 to 84 theyd go from being high average to below average. Her study was conducted on people ages 12 to 20, but given recent discoveries about the capacity of the brain to changea property called neuroplasticityand to create new neurons well into ones 60s and 70s, Price believes the results hold for everyone. My best guess is that performance on IQ tests could change meaningfully in adult years too, she says. The same degree of plasticity [as seen in young adults] may be present throughout life. In their recently published study, Price and her colleagues documented how IQ changes are linked to structural changes in the brain. In the 39 percent of subjects whose verbal IQ changed significantly, before-and-after brain scans showed a corresponding change in the density and volume of gray matter (the number of neurons) in a region of the left motor cortex that is activated by naming, reading, and speaking. In the 21 percent whose nonverbal IQ (any problem-solving unrelated to language, such as spatial reasoning) rose or fell, so did the density of gray matter in the anterior cerebellum, which is associated with moving the hand. Although most of us think of motor skills and cognitive skills as like oil and water, in fact a number of studies have found that refining your sensory-motor skills can bolster cognitive ones. No one knows exactly why, but it may be that the two brain systems are more interconnected than we realize. So learn to knit, or listen to classical music, or master juggling, and you might be raising your IQ. Although working on short-term memorybasically, the brains scratch padhas long been considered just one component of overall IQ, recent research shows that it may in fact be the lever that can raise overall intelligence. In one of the biggest surprises in intelligence research, scientists led by Susanne Jaeggi of the University of Michigan found in 2008 that short-term memory may be the foundation of pure intelligence to a greater extent than anyone suspected. They trained adult volunteers on a difficult shortterm-memory task: simultaneously hearing a string of letters and seeing a series of computer screens that had a blue square in different places. The volunteers then had to identify when the spoken letter or the squares position matched that of several screens earlier. The more they practiced and honed their short-term memory, the greater the improvement in the purest form of brain power, fluid intelligencethe ability to reason and solve problems in-dependently of existing knowledge. (The reasoning portion of the test used what are called progressive matrices: seeing three geometric configurations and choosing which of many options continued the pattern.) In June the Michigan team got the same results in school-age kids, finding that memory training boosts pure intelligence, and so may be the surest path to a higher IQ. There is some controversy over whether brain training can enhance cognition, says neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia University, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discoveries about the cellular and molecular basis of memory. But if you

really work on memory by, for instance, memorizing poetryShakespearean sonnets workit probably improves some aspects of cognitive function. Neuroimaging offers clues to just how memory drills might improve pure intelligence. During memory training, brain scans show, several regions (the lateral prefrontal cortex, the inferior parietal cortex, the anterior cingulate, and the basal gang-lia) become more activeindicating that these regions are involved in memory. Whats interesting is that those same regions also jump into action when the brain reasons and thinks. I am cautiously optimistic that were seeing real effects in these studies, says psychologist Jason Chein of Temple University. In his own work, he has found that adults who trained on a complex working-memory task for four weeks saw significant improvements in reading comprehension as well. The key to these kinds of gains is intensive training, says Kandelnot quite the quick brain fix were told can come simply from eating blueberries or drinking pomegranate juice. Instead, intelligence comes from having more neurons and synapses (connections between neurons). The creation of new neurons (neurogenesis) and synapses makes learning possible. The other brain element you can train in order to raise your IQ is attention. Neuroscientists have shown over and over that attention is the sine qua non of learning and thus of boosting intelligence. Only if you pay attention to an introduction at a party will you remember that cute guys name. Effects on attention may explain why stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall help some people some of the time with, especially, recall (hence those drugs popularity among students cramming for a test). Both stimulants raise the brain levels of dopamine, the neurochemical that produces motivation and a feeling of reward, which make it more likely that the task at hand will rivet your attention. Similarly, action-based games such as Space Fortress and strategy-heavy games such as Rise of Nations have been shown to improve both memory and attention switching. Another way to the same end, says UCLs Price, is passion. If you dont care about what youre reading, seeing, or hearing, it wont be retained. While improving your brain takes work, the good news is there are some accessible ways to go about it. Aerobic exercise buffs the brain as well as the quads. Walking 30 minutes a day five times a week stimulates production of BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), a molecule that nurtures the creation of the new neurons and synapses that underlie learning. In neuroimaging studies, scientists led by Arthur Kramer of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have shown that exercise increases gray matter in the region of the hippocampus that processes new knowledge and dispatches it to permanent storage in the frontal cortex. That may not raise IQ pure intelligencebut stuffing your cortex with more information should make you more knowledgeable. If a half-hour walk leaves you tired, good: a midday nap not only can restore brain power to its fully awake best but can also raise it beyond what it would have been without some shut-eye. In a 2010 study, psychology professor Matthew Walker and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, found that a nap may not merely

restore brain power but also raise it. Students who took a 90-minute nap at 2 p.m. after a task that taxes the hippo-campuslearning the names of some 120 faces they had never seenretained more than their non-napping peers. Even more surprising, they also learned new face-name pairs better at 6 p.m. than they had before the nap, and better than the non-nappers. In people who stayed awake, there was a deterioration in their memory capacity, but a nap restored that capacity to levels even higher than before the nap, says Walker. So kudos to Nike and the host of Silicon Valley companies like Google that provide nap rooms for employees. EEGs, electrodes that record brain activity, suggest how that happened. The number of bursts of electrical activity called sleep spindlesWalker calls them champagne pops in the brainthat people experienced during their naps predicted how much their ability to learn would improve once they awoke. Sleep spindles, he suspects, indicate activity in the hippocampus that moves information from that region into the cortex for permanent storage. Its like moving data from a USB stick onto a hard drive, which both consolidates into long-term storage the information you offload and leaves you a renewed capacity for absorbing new informationlearning, says Walker. The better we move information from the hippocampus (working memory) into the cortex, the more information we can access when we need it. Even without the midday nap, the brain has a way of carving out its own downtime, characterized by whats called the default-mode networkbasically, brain activity that takes place when youre daydreaming or keeping your mind blank. Using functional MRI, scientists at Japans Tohoku University measured cerebral blood flow in 63 volunteers asked to keep their minds blank. Those with the greatest blood flow in the white matter that connects one neuron to another scored highest on a task requiring them to quickly generate novel ideas, the researchers reported in the journal PLoS One in November. Creativity arises from seeing connections others miss, so it makes sense that increasing the activity in white matter by letting the brain rest in default mode supports creativity. So put away the BlackBerry and let your brain idle. Too hyper to do that? Then go all in with a jolt of caffeine. It might not make you more creative, but coffee can make your mind sharper, as zillions of java addicts will swear. A 2011 study in Nature Neuroscience backs them up: in lab rodents, caffeine strengthens brain connections. Rats given shots of joe comparable to two cups of coffee had stronger electrical activity between neurons in the part of the hippocampus called CA2 than they did otherwise, found Serena Dudek of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and colleagues. Stronger connectivity means better learning and memory. For more exalted cognitive functions, the strategy with the strongest evidence behind it is also the toughest: learn a second language. When a brain that is fluent in two languages chooses between, say, English and French, the cortical circuits that hold both languages become active. The prefrontal cortex must then step in to choose the right wordman or homme?for the circumstances. The prefrontal is also the site of those higher-order functions. The workout it gets in bilingualism carries over, buffing such IQ-building skills as problem solving and attention switching, finds cognitive

scientist Ellen Bialystok of Canadas York University. That workout seems to postpone dementia by five years, she and colleagues reported last February. Brain exercise, not to mention becoming bilingual, takes time, so naturally everyone wants to believe certain foods increase intelligence. After all, eating is easy! But a 2010 analysis of hundreds of studies, done by researchers at the Duke Evidence-Based Practice Center, found that many highly touted recipes for cognitive enhancement are a bust. Supplements containing vitamins B6, B12, or E, or folic acid, did nothing to preserve cognitive function, let alone enhance it. The evidence is hardly better for the fish-, fruit-, vegetable-, and olive-oil-rich Mediterranean diet. Overall, there is not yet rigorous proof that foods high in antioxidants or flavonoids enhance intelligence, but scientists have hopes for a number of exotic foods and ingredients. For instance, some small studies suggest that turmeric, a spice common in Indian cooking, and pomegranate juice may improve memory or other aspects of cognitive function. But that still leaves you with a brain-buffing trifecta. Memory training fueled by caffeine and interspersed with good sleep and aerobic conditioning, computer-based brain exercises to hone attention, and a regimen of reading, watching, and doing broken up by ample mental downtime: it promises to add up to a smarter you in 2012 and beyond.