Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance (15 page)

After learning the word, mentally construct a sentence using it. As an alternative, try using the word in a sentence at some time during the day. Admittedly, this isn’t always practical. Take my word for today:
scrutator.
“He answered the scrutator’s questions” doesn’t quite blend as smoothly into most conversations as “He answered the investigator’s questions.” In such instances, instead of using it in a sentence sometime during the day, simply incorporate the word into a written sentence.

Word exercises become even more challenging when you compose a short narrative incorporating as many words as possible from those you’ve learned during a week. This is easiest when the selected words share a common theme. One way of guaranteeing this is to subscribe (at no cost) to
www.Wordsmith.org
, a website that e-mails a new word each day to subscribers (informally referred to as linguaphiles: lovers of words). The site features a weekly theme that dictates the choice of words for that week. Using that site will make it easier for you to incorporate all or at least most of the words you’ve learned during the week into a short paragraph. Whenever you incorporate the newly learned words into a narrative, you’ll be engaging those parts of the brain concerned with imagination—a vast and interconnected network that defies any attempt to establish firm boundaries.

After several months of collecting and writing new words in your journal, you’ll be able to dip into the list at odd moments and mentally compose sentences and narratives containing as many of the words as you can manage. Finding and learning new words can be done anytime and anywhere a dictionary or computer is available. Best of all, everything that you’ve learned about the word will be entered into longterm memory. Each time you page through your word list, your memory for the listed words will be strengthened.

In order to learn a new word, it’s necessary to spell it correctly. In an age of spell-checkers, finely honed spelling skills seem less important to some people than in earlier times. But there are more important reasons for enhancing your spelling prowess than simply limiting your dependence on not-always-available spell-checks. Spelling engages and stimulates several language-related brain areas and circuits. And spelling forces you to focus and mentally “see” the word prior to speaking it or writing it down. Finally, learning new words brings about brain changes according to the degree of difficulty involved in spelling the word: the greater the difficulty, the harder the brain has to work, as measured by greater brain activation.

If you’ve ever watched contestants competing in the National Spelling Bee, you may have observed on their faces a look of effortful strain whenever they’re asked to spell words in which the pronunciation provides little information about the correct spelling, such as
céilidh
(pronounced KAY lee), referring to a traditional Gaelic social dance in Ireland, Scotland, and Atlantic Canada. Words like that are difficult because the contestants must activate a different part of the brain in order to spell an irregular word correctly. With a regular word, for example
scan,
the sound corresponds closely to the arrangement of the letters. Words like
céilidh
or
yacht,
for which the sound does not closely match the spelling in English, activate areas of the brain that process word meaning, such as the frontal and parietal lobes, which process printed text. Regular words, in contrast, preferentially activate part of the superior temporal lobe devoted to the spelling of words in which the sound corresponds closely with the letters.

In Jeffrey Blitz’s documentary movie
Spellbound,
a parent of one of the finalists in the National Spelling Bee offers this formula for correctly spelling either a regular or an irregular word: “Start by learning the meaning of the word, the language of origin, and the root of the word. Use the word in a sentence, repronounce the word, and review the meaning of the word. Then spell the word to yourself, match it with the sound that you’re going to make when you speak it. After repronouncing the word one last time in your head, spell it slowly out loud.”

Spellbound,
as well as Myla Goldberg’s 2001 novel
Bee Season,
have sparked intense interest in spelling bees. In 2006, 2007, and 2008, ABC provided live prime-time coverage of the final rounds of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. As a result of this keen interest in spelling, adults now want to be included in the fun and competition. The National Adult Spelling Bee is held yearly in Long Beach, California. The rules are similar to those of the Scripps Bee except for the age of the contestants. Anyone older than sixteen (the cutoff point for the Scripps Bee) is eligible to travel to Long Beach, pay the ten-dollar entry fee, and compete.

I was curious about the backgrounds of the winners of the 2006 and 2007 National Adult Spelling Bee, so I contacted them. Did their proficiency start in childhood, or later in life? While most spelling experts start nurturing their spelling expertise in childhood, Hal Prince, the 2007 winner of the National Adult Spelling Bee, wasn’t especially interested in words or spelling until his early fifties. Since this pattern was so unusual, I asked Prince about his methods:

“First, I went through the dictionary recommended by the Bee page by page. I made a database of words for drilling and also made tapes of the words for listening while commuting or running. I borrowed or bought every book about words that I could find and went through them to find words that looked interesting.”

I asked Prince if he attributes his success to a “gift” for spelling? “While I think I do have a facility for words and spelling, I suspect it’s more like a top 10 percent rather than a top .01 percent. Mostly, it’s just a matter of being interested in words and taking the time to study them.”

Prince’s intuition closely matches the findings of psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, who conducted a mail survey of the finalists of the 2006 National Spelling Bee: “The main finding is that the amount of solitary study is by far the best predictor of success at the spelling bee competition,” according to Ericsson.

While you don’t have to enter a spelling bee to get the benefits of learning words and sharpening your spelling skills, a bee provides structure and serves as a motivator. If you’re interested in joining or starting an adult bee, you can contact Justin Rudd, the founder and organizer of the National Adult Spelling Bee Championship, which is held in May in Long Beach, California ([email protected] or
www.adultspellingbee.com
). Before engaging at the highest levels you might want to try your luck with a local spelling bee. Local bees take place in coffee shops, bars, and performance centers across the country (they started in Brooklyn, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon). In addition to individual efforts, adult spelling bees also include team events, usually three people to a team.

If you’re shy or want to hone your abilities in private before competing, Brandeis University maintains a great site (
www.Spellbee.org
) where you can pit your spelling acumen against an anonymous partner.

Whatever your preference, if you want to focus on spelling as a brain enhancer, you should (thanks to the growing number of Internet resources and the increasing popularity of adult bees) have no trouble finding an opportunity to compete with other enthusiasts for the competitive thrill of correctly spelling
propaedeutic, disembogue,
or
imbroglio.

At this point, after engaging in exercises aimed at sharpening sense memory, general memory, working memory, vocabulary, and spelling, what does one do next in order to put everything together? In search of an answer to that question I spoke with K. Anders Ericsson, a bearded, trim, fiftysomething professor of psychology at Florida State University who has devoted his life to studying the basis for superior performance. Along the way Ericsson became convinced that most of us fail to achieve our more ambitious brain performance goals, not because we lack talent but because we fail to take advantage of our brain’s capacity to respond when pushed to its limits.

While teaching at Carnegie Mellon University, Ericsson and his mentor, Bill Chase, studied the effects of practice on memory for numbers. Their first subject, a student identified simply as S.F., could memorize for later recall around seven digits—a typical phone number. Ericsson then methodically increased the span of numbers to be memorized. “When he got a digit list of a specific length correct, we would give him a list that was one digit longer,” he said.

After practicing for an hour two or three times a week, S.F. was able to reproduce sequences of more than ten digits. With additional practice S.F.’s digit memory increased even more. After several hundred hours of practice, S.F. could remember without error sequences of more than eighty digits at a rate of one digit per second. In order to get a feeling for this, read the following string of digits and then close your eyes and try to recite as many of them as you can:

Unless you’ve previously engaged in digit-memorization exercises, you were able to recite probably about seven digits. This corresponds to S.F.’s best initial effort. But S.F. was able to increase his memory span for numbers by associating them whenever possible with running times for various track-and-field performances. An avid cross-country runner, S.F. encoded 358 as a very fast mile time, three minutes and fifty-eight seconds, just short of the four-minute mile. When the sequence included four digits starting with three (3493, for instance) he encoded it as three minutes 49.3 seconds.

“After deliberate practice, S.F., an average student, was able to recall a longer list of digits than anyone had ever done, even people with alleged photographic memory,” Ericsson told me. “This result with S.F.—which we repeated with other volunteer students, incidentally—exemplifies to me the remarkable potential of ‘ordinary’ adults and their amazing capacity for change when they engage in deliberate practice.”

As an illustration of what he means by “deliberate practice,” Ericsson contrasts the practice methods of professional versus amateur golfers. “Most amateurs participate almost exclusively in recreational play with others. When they ‘practice’ they tend to do things they are comfortable with and can do with minimal control, such as whacking buckets of golf balls at a driving range. Professionals, in contrast, engage in practice activities that require full concentration to improve specific aspects of their performance. Further, they voluntarily choose practice routines in which they initially experience difficulties in order to improve a specific weakness.”

Only by working on improving weaknesses can the expert golfer continue to enhance his or her performance. “The expert golfer’s ability to perceive minute differences and exert control of the ball trajectories does not emerge naturally but through the process of acquiring refined mental representations for perceiving, monitoring, and controlling the muscles involved in the various required movements.”

According to Ericsson: “For the superior performer in any field the goal isn’t just repeating the same thing again and again, but achieving higher levels of control over every aspect of their performance. That’s why they don’t find practice boring. Each practice session they are working on doing something better than they did the last time. Intense solitary deliberate practice is the hallmark of the superior achiever in every competitive field that I have studied over my forty-year career.”

Ericsson suggests two requirements for deliberate practice: full awareness and the avoidance of automated performances. As an example of a fully aware versus an automated performance, think back to when you first learned to drive a car. For the first few months you focused your full attention on learning the fundamentals. But as you became more proficient, your brain no longer needed to focus exclusively on driving and you could engage in other activities such as listening to the radio or talking to passengers. Now, except in emergencies and unusual situations, driving has become automated; you carry it out effortlessly and without conscious awareness of the various components of the driving experience.

Contrast your experience with the experience of a competition race-car driver. In order to become competitive, the driver must remain alert and intensely focused on innumerable variables. His goal is to push himself and his car to the outer limits of performance without risking personal injury or mechanical breakdown. Indeed, his success as a competitive driver will depend on his ability to continuously modify his driving performance in response to rapidly changing conditions.

The race-car driver differs from the everyday driver by virtue of ongoing vigilance and the monitoring of each component of the driving experience—in essence the deliberate practice espoused by K. Anders Ericsson. In contrast to the everyday driver for whom every driving experience is indistinguishable from every other, the competition driver can provide exquisitely detailed moment-by-moment descriptions of each race. Psychologists refer to this as a
flexible memory representation.
A similar combination of attentive awareness and flexible memory can be found among professional musicians like pianist Angela Hewitt, who writes of her own experience:

“In my recording sessions I find that the improvement comes not in endlessly repeating a piece, but in listening intently to what has been recorded and then thinking about how it can be done better. The editing process then becomes an art in itself and requires intelligent musical decisions.”

In one experiment demonstrating the benefits of sustained practice, a group of skilled musicians memorized a piece of music and then, unexpectedly, were challenged to reproduce the same tempo under changed conditions: playing every other note, or playing notes with only one hand, or transposing the music into a different key. While experienced professional musicians had little difficulty meeting these unusual requests, less experienced musicians often couldn’t do it. That’s because the skilled musicians, as a result of their years of practice and performance experience, were able to meet the demands of a new situation by rapidly modifying their mental representation of the music.