How (And Why) To Train Your Pre-Frontal Cortex

Dr. Chapman’s Keys For Mental Focus

This is Dr. Sandra Chapman; she’s a cognitive neuroscientist, on a mission to, in her words, further our understanding of:

• what makes the brain stronger, faster and last longer
• what enhances human cognitive capacity, and
• what enhances the underlying brain systems across the lifespan.

To this end, she’s also the founder and Chief Director of the Center For Brain Health, where she has worked on her mission for the past 25 years (clocking up hundreds of peer-reviewed publications to her name), as well as being a professor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at UT Dallas.

What does she want us to know?

Get your brain into gear

When it comes to your brainpower, it is “use it or lose it”, but it is also perfectly possible to use it and lose it.

Why?

Very often, what we are using our brains for is high-strain, low-yield stuff, such as multitasking, overthinking, or overthinking while multitasking. And to make it worse, we often do it without sufficient rest.

This is the equivalent of owning a Ferrari but trying to drive it in second and third gear at once by switching between the two as rapidly as possible. And doing that for 18 hours each day.

Suffice it to say, you’ll be going nowhere quickly.

An alternative “use” of brainpower is low-strain, low-yield stuff, such as having to pay close attention to a boring conversation. It’s enough to stop your mind from doing anything else, but not enough to actually stimulate you.

This is the equivalent of owning a Ferrari but keeping it idling. The wear and tear is minimal this time, but you’re not actually going anywhere either.

Better, of course, are the other two quadrants:

• low-strain, high-yield: consistently using our brain in relatively non-taxing ways that encourage its development
• high-strain, high-yield: here the Ferrari metaphor definitely fails, because unlike cars, our bodies (including our brains) are machines that benefit from judicious regular progressive overloading (but just by a bit, and with adequate recovery time between overloads).

See also: 12 Weeks To Measurably Boost Your Brain

How to do the “low-strain, low-yield” part

When it comes to “what’s the most important part of the brain to help in the face of cognitive decline?” the usual answer is either to focus on memory (hippocampi) or language (various parts, but for example Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area), since people most fear losing memory, and language is very important both socially and practically.

Those are indeed critical, and we at 10almonds stand by them, but Dr. Chapman (herself having originally trained as speech and language pathologist!) makes a strong case for adding a third brain part to the list.

Specifically, she advocates for strengthening the pre-frontal cortex, which is responsible for inhibition, task-switching, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. If that seems like a lot, do remember it’s a whole cortex and not one of the assorted important-but-small brain bits we mentioned above.

How? She has developed training programs for this, based on what she calls Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Tactics (SMART), to support support attention, planning, judgment and emotional management.

You can read more about those programs here:

Center For Brain Health | Our Programs

Participation in those is mostly not free, however, if you join their…

Center For Brain Health | BrainHealth Project

…then they will periodically invite you to join pilot programs, research programs, and the like, which will either be free or they-pay-you affairs—because this is how science is done, and you can read about yourself (anonymized, of course) later in peer-reviewed papers of the kind we often cite here.

If you’re not interested in any of that though, we will say that according to Dr. Chapman, the keys are:

Inhibition: be conscious of this function of your brain, and develop it. This is the function of your brain that stops you from making mistakes—or put differently: stops you from saying/doing something stupid.

Switching: do this consciously; per “I am now doing this task, now I am switching to this other task”, rather than doing the gear-grinding thing we discussed earlier

Working memory: this is effectively your brain’s RAM. Unlike the RAM of a computer (can be enhanced by adding another chip or replacing with a bigger chip), our brain’s RAM can be increased by frequent use, and especially by judicious use of progressive overloading (with rests between!) which we’ll discuss in the high-strain, high-yield section.

Flexibility: this is about creative problem-solving, openness to new ideas, and curiosity

See also: Curiosity Kills The Neurodegeneration

How to do the “high-strain, high-yield” part

Delighting this chess-playing writer, Dr. Chapman recommends chess. Although, similar games such as go (a Chinese game that looks simpler than chess but actually requires more calculation) work equally well too.

Why?

Games like chess and go cause structural changes that are particularly helpful, in terms of engaging in such foundational tasks as learning, abstract reasoning, problem-solving and self-control:

Chess Practice as a Protective Factor in Dementia

Basically, it checks (so to speak) a lot of boxes, especially for the pre-frontal cortex. Some notes:

• Focusing on the game is required for brain improvement; simply pushing wood casually will not do it. Ideally, calculating several moves ahead will allow for strong working memory use (because to calculate several moves ahead, one will have to hold increasingly many possible positions in the mind while doing so).
• The speed of play must be sufficiently slow as to allow not only for thinking, but also for what in chess is called “blunder-checking”, in other words, having decided on one’s move, pausing to consider whether it is a mistake, and actively trying to find evidence that it is. This is the crucial “inhibition habit”, and when one does it reflexively, one will make fewer mistakes. Tying this to dementia, see for example how one of the common symptoms of dementia is falling for scams that one wouldn’t have previously. How did cognitive decline make someone naïve? It didn’t, per se; it just took away their ability to, having decided what to do, pause to consider whether it was a mistake, and actively trying to find evidence that it is.
• That “conscious switching” that we talked about, rather than multitasking? In chess, there is a difference between strategy and tactics. Don’t worry about what that difference is for now (learn it if you want to take up chess), but know that strong players will only strategize while it is their opponent’s turn, and only calculate (tactics) while it is their own turn. It’s very tempting to flit constantly between one and the other, but chess requires players to have the mental discipline be able to focus on one task or the other and stick with that task until it’s the appointed time to switch.

If you feel like taking up chess, this site (and related app, if you want it) is free (it’s been funded by voluntary donations for a long time now) and good and even comes with free tuition and training tools: LiChess.org

Here’s another site that this writer (hi, it’s me) personally uses—it has great features too, but many are paywalled (I’m mostly there just because I’ve been there nearly since its inception, so I’m baked into the community now): Chess.com

Want to know more?

You might like this book by Dr. Chapman, which we haven’t reviewed yet but it did inform large parts of today’s article:

Make Your Brain Smarter: Increase Your Brain’s Creativity, Energy, and Focus – by Dr. Sandra Chapman

Enjoy!