German Lang. Media: Do nothing, it’s good for your brain
Here’s news everyone likes to read at the beginning of a New Year: Doing nothing (from time to time) is necessary to be creative. Ulrich Schnabel summarized for Die Zeit, crediting this as why Newton got his gravity Eureka! daydreaming under a tree, why Kekulé found the formula for benzol (benzene) while sleeping and why Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum” should be translated “I lie in bed thinking, therefore I am”. Today, Descartes would have “no time to develop Kartesianism”, because he would have to check hundreds of emails right after he woke up, Schnabel writes. His point is that leisure time is rare today but is nevertheless needed for best productivity. The occasion for Schnabel’s article is a book from the well-known communication scientist Mirjam Meckel about her own recent burn-out. He raises the topic from the individual to the societal level; quoting the sociologist Hartmut Rosa, he describes the current economic crisis as caused by a discrepancy between a far too fast financial transaction system and the limited business-production and political reaction speed. Velocity is not always ideal, breaks are necessary. The Munich Bank could only be saved by the German federal government, because the stock exchange was closed over the weekend, providing politicians time for intervention (with billions of Euros).
Schnabel cites neurobiologic experiments showing that leisure time is necessary to sort information. Another Zeit article (by Josephina Maier) goes into detail, what the brain does, when the brain is in idle mode. MRI experiments have shown, that the brains of test persons seems to be more active, when the scientists told them to think of “nothing”. Neurologists accept, that there is a “default network” active in such situations, but the interpretations differ, what the brain is doing when it is supposed to be doing nothing. “The brain isn’t just a reflexive organ”, the brain researcher Pierre Magistretti (Brain-Mind-Institute in Lausanne, Switzerland) is quoted. “There are a lot of processes going on, that are not triggered by external stimulations.” Recent findings show, that the default network isn’t well established in children up to ten/twelve years and in Alzheimer patients. The scientists think, that this is a sign, that the default network is involved in the construction of self-awareness – because children as well as Alzheimer patients do not have a fully expressed self-awareness and because the brain regions responsible for the construction of self-awareness overlap with the regions active in default mode.
The neuroendocrinologist Jan Born thinks, that the brain is not in idle mode during leisure times at all. Like during sleep, the brain is just offline, taking advantage of a break to reorganize information, which has been picked up during online phases. Even if it is not yet clear, what is going on in the brain during leisure time, scientists agree, that is a good idea regularly interrupt work with times of leisure.
In his piece, Schnabel explains, why we struggle to accept a certain amount of laziness even on the weekend, where we pressure ourself with “family events” or “work on the relationship”. Laziness is not accepted, because everything should have a purpose. The article (and an additional interview) explains, how we could circumvent to tap into the burn-out-trap and what real leisure means in the words of Helga Nowotny, an Austrian research scientist: ”Leisure is the harmonization of me and what I value in my life.” Which means, closes Schnabel decently, that leisure time could be, e.g., reading an article about leisure time…
Also: Brain enhancement just science fiction?
Some might actually need neuroenhancement
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung published an article about the bioethics of neuroenhancement (“The brain is not a muscle”). It’s not been written by a science journalist, but by Nicolas Langlitz, a medical anthropologist at the New School for Social Research in New York (and a postdoc fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Science History in Berlin until end of 2009, what the FAZ didn’t mention, for some reason). Langlitz comments attack a memorandum of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science, where ethicists, philosophers and psychiatrics weighed about positive and negative effects of drugs interfering with brain performance.
Langlitz criticizes, that the whole bioethical debate about the negative outcomes of pills enhancing brain functions like memory, concentration, calculation, reasoning, and whatever else is based on nothing but the possibility, that such pills might exist in the future. He cites a review of the psychopharmacologist Reinoud de Jongh, where he summarizes the current research on such substances. Whereas patients with cognitive deficits improve their performance with the help of these pills, healthy, normally high performing people tend to loose it when they are on pills. Also: Pills like Ritalin (Methylphenidate) or Modafinil do enhance alertness and concentration, but not necessarily performance in college tests – the brain functions are complicated. “In short: Cognitive enhancers (…) do not exist”, writes Langnitz and argues that this won’t change easily. In his eyes (of a science historian), the bioethical debate is just an ambivalent outgrowth of the hope for and the fear of superpowered brains in a performance oriented society.
Langlitz resumes, that the criticism of neuroenhancement is dispensable, because enhancement of healthy brain functions is still only an idea, “a careless exaggeration of what’s pharmacologically possible”. Therefore, he says, it might be a good idea to be more relaxed with the prescription of the existing “enhancement” drugs, so that deficits of brain performance could be compensated, equalizing different cognitive performances. Unfortunately, he did not give a definition of what he calls deficits of cognitive performance, and I think, this is still a problem in brain research, to define (or to measure) what “normal” performance really is.
- Sascha Karberg
