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 Allen D. Bragdon is the founding editor of Games magazine and the author of many books on enhancing brain function including Excercises for the Whole Brain, Right-Brain Teasers and How Sharp is Your Pencil? With David Gamon he has written Building Mental Muscle, Brain Building Games, Building Left-Brain Power and Use It or Lose It!
Neela Sakaria: Thanks for joining us Mr. Bragdon. Can you tell our readers a little bit more about your background? How did you become interested in the development of the brain?
Allen D. Bragdon: In my early teens I subscribed to Scientific American, looking for material in the behavioral sciences and now, at 71, subscribe to Nature Neuroscience and other journals to track primary source research. Why? At the beginning human behavior was my teen-age "consuming interest." Every teen age boy buries himself in some subject -- perhaps to defend himself against the cacophony of priorities set for him by the institutional authorities, like family, school and older siblings.
My father was a master teacher and student of child psychology. I remember his curing a super-neurotic Cocker Spaniel house pet of a cognitive disability so compelling, the damn dog ran continuously in a circle from the hall to kitchen to living room to hall all day until it dropped of exhaustion. Within a month my dad had converted it back into the lazy sybarite the breed was born to be.
I matured into an era in which the rate of discovery of the architecture and real-time operation of the human brain exploded. For the first time the public felt it had some control over how their noggins propelled them through life. Neuroscience, equipped with new non-invasive scanning technologies, suddenly could open the black box you were born with -- observe and categorize its differences in action. I watched the brain opened for exploration as the last of the uncharted frontiers.
So, in 1997 after 20 years of packaging multi-volume sets of how-to books, inventing Games Magazine and editing a daily puzzle column for the New York Times international syndication division, I decided to start letting the public in on discoveries the neuroscience labs were making about how to keep cognitive performance operating up to specs.
One after another the commercial publishers turned down our first title, Building Mental Muscle. So I started Brainwaves Books and published it myself 1n 1999. It is in its sixth printing with sales exceeding 100,000 copies, excluding book clubs. Learn Faster & Remember More is our most recent book. We thought it was time to cut to the chase.
Neela: You co-wrote LEARN FASTER AND REMEMBER MORE with Dr. David Gamon, correct? How did this collaboration come about and how did it work?
 ADB: Our joint efforts worked very well. David is half my age, a scholar, a superb researcher with advanced degrees in linguistics from UC Berkley and a skilled science writer. I can translate science for the public pretty well and had 30 years experience putting graphically complex books together. He keeps our translation of the research honest to primary source data. We avoid the pitfalls of married life by almost never seeing each other. He is in Oakland and I on Cape Cod. We argue by email.
Neela: You've divided the book into three distinct parts. Can you tell our readers about the structure of the book?
ADB: The three ages of man and woman. Learning is documented to start in the third trimester. The ability to store and retrieve conscious memories doesn't kick in for about three years. Parents need to understand how slowly adult capacities mature. The capacity to plan ahead, for example doesn't kick in fully until well after puberty. So the first section, from birth to college, describes what is possible to understand when.
The middle section covers assaults, accommodations and strategies that are useful to a person in the professional working years to retirement. Among them: stress, substance abuse, depression, effective social interaction, appropriate emotional response, signs of cognitive decline with age. We start by advising readers to marry someone smarter than they are and end, when they reach retirement age, by suggesting they don't retire.
Then, in the third section, non-judgementally called "The Experienced Mind" our primary messages are "use it or lose it" and "yes, you can slow down the natural decline of mental powers with age; and here is how to do it." The trick is to keep your marbles rolling along so your body doesn't outlive your capacity to savor life.
NS: On a personal level, I was extremely excited when I read the passage on synesthesia because I realized there is a name for my word/color associations. Frankly I had no idea that it was a "real" thing or that other people experience a similar phenomenon. After being able to put a label on it from your book, I was able to go on the web and learn more about it.
Can you tell our readers a bit about synesthesia? Have you gotten similar responses from readers who identify something about their own brains as a result of reading one of your books?
ADB: Yes, we have had similar reactions. I received a long, anguished email last week from a reader who suffered an attack of Global Amnesia. Usually they hit after a migraine, and recovery is complete after a couple of days. But it is very scary indeed. Her daughter had read about it in one of our books so she knew what was happening while her mother didn't remember anything at all of what happened to her.
Synesthesia is fascinating because powerful sensual realities sound so unlikely to others. Associating a sharp perception by one of the senses with a neutral bit of data such as a number, tone, word or face. Why is a 7 blue or a b-flat ochre or a name smell bad to one synesthete but is differently perceived by another and not perceived at all by those of us without those seemingly quirky mental links? Accomplished memory experts sometimes use that ability to check their phenomenally skilled strategies for repeating back, say, a list of 23 12-digit numbers. When they start to make a mistake in number they recall the false number just may not "smell" right, so they can correct it.
Neela: Can you tell us a few of the key ways parents can help children develop their brains?
ADB: Build confidence. Brains can't take as affective action without it. Don't try to teach a child a concept or model a behavior before the part of her brain has developed enough to understand it. A 2-year-old is unable to feel guilty, for example. It isn't until the 5th or 6th birthday that a child can be responsible to complete a chore with long-term benefits, like watching the family cow in the pasture all day.
A young child's brain is a learning machine. There is little a parent can do to stop it, short of violence. When a young child is learning the structure and vocabulary of its native language she views her parents as laboratory animals. She studies their behavior and picks up patterns. The animals don't teach; she learns in spite of them, almost. Reading to a child is a good thing as much for the sense of security that a caregiver's closeness and attention reinforces as for the sounds and patterns of the words learned with the help of contextual pictures.
A preteen will learn more from peers than parents or teachers. The labels the child adopts for itself are crucial to its future role in life (we are poor, looked up to by others, or brave, or bumbling or dumb). Those self-perceived categories will have more effect on its future than any other single vector, including school grades.
NS: You talk about the ways that teenagers and sea slugs are similar in terms of habituation. Can you explain?
ADB: They both quickly learn to ignore any outside stimulus that does not trigger a primitive need: e.g. available food, threat of physical danger, opportunity to procreate, for example. Touch the gill of the California sea slug Alypsia and it will withdraw. After a few more touches, if nothing else happens, the slug will not bother to withdraw its gill. Ask a teen to turn down the music in his room or turn off the TV, clean up his room or get dressed. Keep asking. Nothing happens. Then tell him his girlfriend is at the door and he is galvanized, instantly into action.
NS: On page 134 you write about a man who was diagnosed with a form of amnesia which prevented him from forming new memories. Did you see the film, Memento?
ADB: I did not see the film. It is always amazing to observe the brain has suddenly turned off one of its take-it-for-granted skills selectively and completely without disturbing others. The opposite of amnesia for new memories is the inability to distinguish between what has happened in the past and what has not. Such a patient, when a new doctor comes to visit him, is likely to rush right up to her and shake her hand or give her a kiss saying how great is is to see her again. The brain has evolved to work at least as hard at IGNORING new data as to remembering it. When part of a circuit breaks, the behavior can be truly unsettling.
Neela: Are you working on any current/future writing projects?
ADB: Yes, but the subject of the next book is still secret. However we are having a great time with a completely new medium. For years we have been devising skill-improving brain exercises, puzzles and tests of competence to publish in our books. They are based, for the most part, on the experimental tasks described by the neuroscientists in their published research results. We develop these mental games when we select a piece of current research to translate for the general reader to help her cope better with the real world. We now are converting those mental exercises from the print medium into electronic code. We are recreating them in a new medium that allows us to impose time frames and moving images. These tools can stimulate the brain circuits we target much more vigorously and precisely. Hence they can improve performance much faster. It turns out that they are a heck of a lot of fun to do compared to print.
Neela: Is there anything else that you'd like to share with our readers?
ADB: The good news is that, anytime during your life, your brain can improve its
skills by growing new cells and connecting dendrites between cells. The bad news is this: like other parts of your body, it will turn flabby if not exercised. Your brain accounts for about 3 percent of your total weight. But it burns about 20 percent of the fuel. So it turns off its hungry neurons if they don't appear to be needed. They actually begin to shrivel so their power is not available when you need them. As you age enough, they finally shut down so you cannot behave normally. The answer is clear; either don't grow old, or keep your brain's circuits as conditioned as your legs arms and breathing. Teach someone something. Learn something new--performing music is ideal. Discussing news and ideas with others keeps your neurons hopping too. Avoid stress. Exercise regularly at least 20 minutes on 3 days a week. Sounds familiar and boring? It is the best possible advice unless you are willing to decline for twenty years until you will be able to take nose drops to improve memory.
Neela: Yikes! On that note, thank you for your time.
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