I Tried Touch Typing For a Month

What is touch typing?

Touch typing is the discipline that encompasses a set of techniques that focus on optimal finger positioning on the keyboard in order to achieve maximum efficiency while typing. This, in turn, results in an increase of typing productivity which lessens the time it takes to complete a writing task.

Why should you learn touch typing?

Being agile and fast sliding through the keyboard is a great skill to have if you usually spend time with your computer. It gives you the ability to get things done quickly and with practice it allows you to even match your processing speed with that of typing, which enhances what is described as a flow experience (a period of time when you completely immerse yourself into a task and redirect all of your energy to it, which heightens creativity and happinness).

If you’re into journaling, this could have a significant impact in the quality of your articles as you are able to bring more ideas onto the page and enter this flow state.

Each person is different with their goals, maybe reaching 60 words per minute is a great accomplishment and more than enough to achieve a higher productivity, while for others it could be 100, as an example.

How can I get started?

>Finger positioning

In order to take a step into the world of touch typing all you need to do is open the browser and google “touch typing technique”; there are tons of youtube videos and online resources that teach you finger positioning.

>Try NOT looking at the keys while typing

Another thing you should do is avoid looking at the keys while typing, as this would seriously hold you back from being faster on the keyboard. We should strive to build good habits from ground zero.

>Aim for Accuracy, NOT speed

Once you know how to place your fingers on the keyboard and which finger should go to each key, you have to aim for at least a 95+ accuracy and forget about typing speed.

The reason behind it is that you ought to first eliminate the old neural pathways that led you to adopt a bad typing technique and replace it with good typing habits, which will be the base upon which you will construct your efficient typing.

Think about it this way, if you were to focus of typing fast, in the future you would have reinforced bad typing habits that would signify in you reaching a plateau earlier than if you had followed the right technique and reinforced good typing habits. The time that you spend in the early stages concentrating on effectiveness will save you time in the later stages.

So, once you start hitting an accuracy of 95+ you can start trying to type faster.

There are tons of online webpages that you can use to level up your typing and that measure your typing speed but I personally don’t like the ones designed to compete with other players such as nitrotype; mainly due to the emphasis on speed rather than accuracy, which, in my view, harms good habit building for beginners.

How fast am I going to improve?

One of the most crucial things to understand before beginning to learn touch typing is that in the earlier stages of your learning you’re going to be improving rather slowly and here’s why:

Bad Habits. Your brain is filled with “bad” neural connections.
If you’re reading this article then you’ve probably been practicing typing for ages with the incorrect finger positioning on the keyboard.
Every time you perform a habit (in this case typing with incorrect form) the neural connections associated with this habit strengthen so that it’ll become easier next time to perform the same habit more efficiently, enhancing a faster signaling between the associated neurons.
But what happens when the habit could be improved substantially? That in order to build a better habit linked to a certain activity you’ll firstly have to get rid of the old one, and the more strengthened the neural connections of the old habit are, the greater amount of work will need to be done to get rid of it.
In conclusion, in order for you to type decently with a correct form your brain is going to need more time than one would expect to get the hang of the new finger positioning technique. Thus, the real struggle will be in your technique adaptation, so don’t worry if at first you don’t progress at a fast pace as it is the most difficult stage of the process. This is also the reason why you should focus on accuracy rather than speed, to firstly build the new habit and get rid of the old one as fast as possible.

Once you feel you are used to the correct technique and you get 95+ accuracy percentages you should progressively focus on upgrading your typing speed while maintaining the 95-100 range of accuracy. If at a certain speed you cannot keep in that range then you should slow down a little and keep trying.

Habit Forming and Goal Setting

Simply put, it is better to practice 10 minutes a day rather than practicing 2 hours a day and ending up worn out and without any interest to continue improving.

Without turning this into a habit you will not be able to get rid of your old finger positioning and notice significant improvements in your typing speed.

It is also important to set yourself some micro goals along the way to keep you engaged in the process of mastering touch typing such as increasing accuracy percentages, wpm…

Personal Experience

Before deciding to learn touch typing, I tested myself to see how many words per minute I was able to achieve. My record was at about 45 words per minute (which represented average typing speed). Test was performed on monkeytype.

I decided to learn one of the beginner and correct techniques of finger positioning and focused primarily on accuracy and only typing letters of the alphabet until I hit consistently 75 wpm in the 95-100% accuracy range.

The first day of learning touch typing wasn’t what I expected at all. I overall managed to only achieve 22 wpm due to my brain not being used to the finger positioning technique but, with a little bit more practice I achieved an average of 43 wpm at a 97% accuracy on my first week (each person is unique so values will differ).

Over the next two weeks I was able to get better accuracy so I gradually increased my focus on speed, practicing each day and averaging 60 wpm (which was a game changer for me).

A month went by and I was consistently striking 75 wpm in the desired accuracy range and I decided to switch from monkeytype to keybr to add up symbols and numbers.

Today I’m currently hitting about 80 wpm overall within the accuracy range and I’ve seen significant improvements in my article and in my code writing.

CONCLUSION

It only takes 10 minutes a day for what could potentially save you a lot of time in the future.

Even if you don’t think you’ll use it, it is definitely a skill that should be taken into account and added to our toolkit.

Links I used:

Keybr: https://www.keybr.com/

Monkeytype: https://monkeytype.com/

Dealing with Frustration

How many times have you wanted something and employed all your resources and effort towards it? But nevertheless you failed or didn’t get the results you were looking for?

For me, studying has been one of these areas and the one in which I have struggled the most by far.

Recently, I remember studying hard for exams hoping to get the desired grades so as to be able to make it to the career I’ve always pursued, but simply put, the results I was getting weren’t always ideal for me with respect to the hours I was spending.

But not only that, I was also comparing myself to other people and finding that I wasn’t at the top, and what’s more, people who were getting top grades didn’t spend nearly as much time studying as I did.

Approach life in a different way

Before diving into the philosophy that has helped me a lot to manage frustration and pressure, it is required for me to make an initial statement: “Every and each one of us is different, we simply have different brains affected by our genome”.

Understanding this concept of individual uniqueness is a key step, as its importance is bigger than most people would imagine. It implies that our brain is affected by some external factor we cannot control or decide ourselves (genetics), so that means that we cannot do anything about it. And if we cannot influence it, what is there for us that is within our scope of action?

The answer I’d give to that question comes from Stoicism (the philosophy of stoics), which state that there are two fascets in life: One refers to the things we can control and exclusively depend on us, and the other to the things that don’t a 100% depend on us.

Therefore, we should only focus on the things or actions that depend on us in their entirety.

And what are those things then?

Well, there is only one thing that it is 100000% up to us from the view of stoics, our intentions.

But in my case, I believe effort can add up to the list.

So, everytime you feel frustrated after not getting the results you wanted I want you to ask yourself one simple question: Have you done all that was in your hands to accomplish or reach your goal? If the answer is yes, then you have nothing to worry about, and you should really be proud of yourself. But if the answer is no, you’d probably have to try harder next time.

Self-acceptance

By now everything I’ve failed to accomplish I have come to see it as if I hadn’t been good enough; there’s some part of me that always wants more and more and refuses to accept my own true nature, the nature from which no matter how hard I try I would not be able to escape. The nature which makes me unique and distinct from others, albeit it also impoverishes me in some areas.

Nevertheless, I now see that all this pressure and nonconformism that has been growing incessantly within me is exclusively due to the fact that I have been constantly failing to accept my capabilities, to know myself well; and that implies a profound knowledge of my strengths and weaknesses, as well as accepting them.

I believe the key to dealing with frustration lays fundamentally in the skill of knowing and accepting oneself.

Perhaps if you don’t reach your desired goal despite your efforts, it is because of something that doesn’t depend on you.

Think about it next time.

MY CHESS JOURNEY, THE START

The emergence of the Queen’s Gambit on Netflix has had a tremendous impact on my life. Since watching the show, I reconnected again with chess, and I’ve now come to see it as a beautiful, creative and exciting game to enhance our intellectual capacity and bring it to the next level.

4 Strategic Business Lessons You Can Take From 'The Queen's Gambit'

My background with chess is nearly null, when I was little my father taught me how the pieces moved accross the board and we played a few games together. Nonetheless, I remember hanging my pieces continuously and not being able to beat him a single time. Chess wasn’t a priority for me, and as a kid I ended up losing interest in it, so I kind of parked chess until now.

It’s been like two weeks since I registered on chess.com and started playing a few games, slowly getting back and watching a ton of games, practicing with lots of tactical problems on chessbase and overall trying to look for various ways to improve my level of play.

During my research to find the quickest path towards improvement, I’ve come to understand that the game of chess is divided into three main categories: 1.the opening, 2.the middlegame and 3.the endgame.

1.The Opening.

The only way to improve at the opening phase is to first understand the principles behind any opening, what do you want to look for in the opening, what are you trying to achieve…

Secondly, when you know the basic principles and understand them, you have to start building up your opening repertoire. For beginners, it is recommended to know how to play two openings for black and two for white.

Opening theory is in and of itself a whole world, there are an almost infinite number of variations for each move of an opening, so you could dedicate all of your life to studying opening theory. To what extend each player should know opening theory depends on each player and his ambitions. For me, I prefer to firstly familiarize myself with the most popular and used openings, try to understand their strengths and weaknesses and the reasoning behind their main moves, mainly because I want to have a broader understanding of what are the opening options out there, and then maybe try to work out which one suits best for me and study it in more depth later on.

I’m around 1100 elo at the moment, so I’m still considered kind of a beginner (though I beat bots rated 1400), that’s why I don’t want to firstly focus on a single opening and all of its variations, so after researching about opening theory I found that the best book according to my initial objective is FCO: Fundamental Chess Openings by GM Paul Van der Sterren, where from what I’ve seen it explains the common and best responses of black to white’s first move, as well as from white’s perspective, it gives you an overall understanding of opening theory and shows you the reasoning behind each move (when I read it all I could make a post on the book).

2.The Middlegame.

The middlegame phase is the most creative one, in which each player relies on their instincts, their calculation, their strategy and their plans on the board. This stage is affected by the moves played in the opening, so if a payer finds weaknesses in their opponent’s opening moves and finds a way to punish them, the middlegame is going to be better for the player who exploited the weaknesses.

The areas to work on when you are trying to crush the middlegame are: 1.Strategy, 2.Visualization/Calculation and 3.Tactics.

2.1.Strategy.

The ability to create imbalances on the opponent’s structure or position, being able to spot and exploit the opponent’s weaknesses, knowing how to elaborate an attacking plan, knowing how to defend properly when you are potentially under attack, knowing how to deal with different castling scenarios from both players, understanding positional play…

Among all books I’ve seen in my research, one of the most recommended ones that helped a ton of people change the way they looked at chess is How to Reassess your Chess by IM Jeremy Silman, in which it is explained the concept of imbalances (planning, initiative, weak squares…), how to find them and provoke them. I’m surely going to read it, I could make an article on my thoughts and how it has helped me when I finish.

2.2. Visualization.

It refers to the ability of seeing moves on the board in advance and being able to be aware of one’s position after this hypothetical moves have been played in the same mind. It is a crucial ability for every chess player that is looking to improve, because it helps to get ahead of your opponent and have a better understanding of what would happen if certain pieces moved from their squares (would they create discovery attacks? would they cease to protect a piece?…).

To learn chess visualization you could practise with tactical problems, try to calculate what the best moves could be and try to visualize the position in your head before you play the moves on the board. It is important to notice that firstly it is highly recommended to learn chess notation.

Chess notation is like the ABC of chess, once you practice it regularly each day you’ll see that you are able to quickly name the squares perfectly, so that you automate the process and you don’t even have to think about its name, it becomes natural. This helps you have a better understanding of the board’s space and each square, which translates into better visualization skills.

It is also of utter importance just because all chess books are wtitten using chess notation, so if you want to be able to pick up a book and study it, you’ll need to learn chess notation, and the better you become at it, the easier it gets to go through the books. I personally think and I’m in a stage where I find that what could benefit me the most is to be able to play blindfold chess, that way I could study books without a chess board whenever and wherever I liked, and this would have a tremendous impact on my chess visualization and calculation. I’m aware that I want to be able to play blindfold chess starting at the age of 17, it is not that I began at age 4, like some prodigies, but I still want to try it out because it is fun and to see how it ends.

2.3. Tactics.

Tactics goes hand in hand with visualization/calculation, the better you are at visualizing moves on the board, a better tactician you are. I like to see tactics as pattern recognition. There are certain checkmate patterns and overall patterns about a position that give you an advantage over your opponent, be it in material or in position, that you have to get drilled into your mind so that it becomes second nature and the moves come to your head naturally.

I strongly believe that working on pattern recognition is the best way to improve at calculation and develop your instincts over the board. I’m a huge believer of the approach presented by Axel Smith and Hans Tikkanen on the book The Woodpecker Method, a book filled with like a thousand problems that has the goal of providing the reader with the material for his self-learning and sharpening of pattern recognition. The goal is to first establish a period of four weeks in which you are going to complete as much problems from the book as possible, and then, let’s say you were able to do 250, you take a rest day and afterwards you have to do the same 250 problems but now in a two week period. You have to keep reducing the time limit by a half until you are able to complete the whole set, in this case 250 problems, in one day. This will help you reduce your blunders, improve your tactical vision and boost your intuition.

I really believe in this method mainly because I’ve had the pleasure of reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, in which the author highlights the importance of habits in numerous scenarios, for example in the instauration of repetitive and deliberate practice in football plays, which transformed a losing team that never won a single match into the winners of the championship.

Repetitive and deliberate practice of the same exercises programs your subconscious mind to be better at that task, in the chess case it helps your intuition and tactical visualization and awareness. It is a tough method that requires commitment and hard work, but it is worth the time.

Tikkanen, an author of the book, achieved three GM norms within a seven-week period thanks to his method.

3.The Endgame.

It is the final stage of a chess match, knowing endgames well will tremendously help you to win many games, be able to draw nearly lost positions and punish your opponent’s mistakes.

The endgame is considered very theoretical, and that is because if you were in the middle of an endgame without knowledge on that particular scenario (let’s say king and pawn endgames), good luck for you in finding how to win or draw the game, it is very difficult to get in the lead in endgames if you don’t know how to play them properly, because there are certain positions in which if each player knows the theory, the match is already decided.

So, from my research I found two books that are best recommended, these are the Silman’s Complete Endgame Course by IM Jeremy Silman, which takes you through different endgames from beginner level to master level, and 100 endgames you must know by GM Jesus de la Villa.

When I finish reading some of the books mentioned above, I’ll provide feedback on how it has helped me improve my game.

PRINCIPLES | RAY DALIO

Amongst all non-fiction books I’ve read, this is unarguably the best in terms of insights and valuable guidance, which has utterly transformed my everyday life, from leading me to pursue my goals with more excitement to enjoying every failure and coming to see it as a unique opportuinty for self and collective growth, it has given me more confidence and open-mindedness, which I all owe to Ray Dalio in fleshing out his principles.

In his superb book he not only taught me and guided me through personally-uncharted territory related to success, but he also shed light on some issues I was having at the time, and gave me the answer to the problem I was facing by identifying the main cause of trouble.

He sees his life as a game, and to level up a character has to evolve and get stronger, learn from painful and uncomfortable situations so that they don’t ever happen again. “I have found it helpful to think of my life as if it were a game in which each problem I face is a puzzle I need to solve. By solving a puzzle I get a gem in the form of a principle that helps me avoid the same sort of problem in the future”. Throughout all his life he has used his own method for evolution, creating his own principles and recording them so that if a similar situation pops up he only has to go back to that categorised principle, thus having more time to focus on more important things. “Collecting these gems continually improves my decision making, so I’m able to ascend higher levels of play in which the game gets harder and the stakes become ever greater”.

Image result for ray dalio graphic — Image extracted from: ttps://medium.com/@minxianglee/the-blueprint-for-process-design-ray-dalios-5-step-process-f9333840ba09

To structure his principles he mainly divides them into two sections:

Life Principles (My takeaways) :

1.It is best to embrace reality and deal with it, understand how it works, what is true and figure out what to do about it in order to achieve your goals. We have to be objective and not let our biases stand in the way of our objectivity, we have to avoid being emotional. (Dreams+Reality+Determination= A Successful Life)

2.Be radically open-minded and transparent with you and with people so that there are no misunderstandings in what you are doing. This will allow you to receive more honest feedback from other people, have more meaningful relationships, speed up your learning and improve your effectiveness.

3.Pain+Reflection=Progress. Most people celebrate small successes excessively, and when harsh realities or problems arise, they avoid them or pay no attention to them, that is a huge mistake, this brings them no good, because if pain is confronted calmly and with reflection evolution occurs and an upgrade of yourself takes place. Spend more time dealing with problems successfully rather than celebrating. By struggling well you’ll come to see improvement.

3.1.Embrace tough love, honesty and criticism. If you learn to appreciate those, they will give you insights on who you are, to be able to identify your weaknesses, accept them and work to improve them. Acceptance of criticism is especially difficult in humans, that is due to how we are programmed, Ray Dalio refers to this as we have within our own selves a lower-level you and a higher-level you. The first one comprises our emotional side, which involves the amygdala, for instance, controller of emotional responses. When we receive criticism our immediate body biological response is to impose the lower-level you over the higher-level you (logical,rational,analytical side), provoking us to react as we are being attacked by the critic, being difficult for us to see the other person’s view, we instead have to identify the imposal, so if recognised try to replace the emotional side for the logical one. This has helped my a lot in my evolutionary path, especially in triangulating my views with believable people.

4.Triangulate your view with Believable People. As a ceaseless learner you always try to seek out the truth, no matter whom it comes from or the whereabouts because you know that the truth matters way more than any other thing in our decision making, taking into account that effectiveness and efficiency are also key factors to improve our decision-making Ray Dalio suggests us (appart from being open-minded) to meet up or exchange information with more believable people, that is the people whose area of expertise is that of what you are looking for. That is of invaluable importance as these people are going to give you perspectives that you had perhaps never thought of or considered, sometimes they will provide you with the truth, but in any case you will gather precious data, and your knowledge on the topic will broaden, which is key to a better decision-making alongside with being analytical and objective.

4.1. Understand that People are Wired Very Differently. People have different perspectives from each other, basically because they have grown in an entirely different environment, exposed to different stimuli, and with different genes from one another, thus probably not having the same vision of things as you do. This is worth considering because it will teach you how to approach different people, understand their view, and be able to get the most out of them and if you know them well to be able to create an organisation in which each person is suited in the right role, therefore maximizing their potential.

Image result for ray dalio brain — Image extracted from: https://twitter.com/raydalio/status/1046794280340209668

5.Don’t Worry about appearing good, Worry about achieving your goals. One of the most important principles I have applied to my life, I’ll make it more clear with an example of mine. I was training in the football pitch on a summer day, trying to improve my close ball control with both feet, I had to weave the cones in and out, it was the turn of my non-dominate foot when suddenly a group of people passed by the pitch and started watching me. I, instead of taking the cones with my non-dominate foot did it with my dominate one to look good in front of the people, that is a huge mistake because I lost some repetitions with the foot I need to improve the most, my weaker foot. I put looking good above achieving my goals, which I now regret and have learned.

6. Use the 5-Step Process to Get What you Want.

6.1.Have clear goals

a)Prioritize, you can’t have everything you want, you’ll be overwhelmed if you try to pursue an extense amount of goals, that has happened to me, I wanted to learn piano, upgrade my football skills, learn to code, take up calisthenics,become better at chess, read a book a month. It was just impossible! I just ended up doing less work because as the Spanish saying goes “Quien mucho abarca poco aprieta”. I have now prioritized my goals and I’m much more happy and enthusiastic.

b)Great expectations create great capabilities. Don’t set the bar too low, go challenge yourself with big goals that require effort and dedication.

6.2.Identify and don’t tolerate problems. A tolerated problem could appear in a future in which you could make the same mistake.

a)View painful problems as potential improvements that are screaming at you.

6.3. Diagnose problems to get at their Root Causes. Dig in as deep as you can to understand the real reason there was a problem.

i.e. My mum reprimanded me for not making my bed. Why? Because I didn’t make my bed. Why? Because I’m a lazy person. See, that’s the real problem, that is the Root cause.

6.4. Design a Plan. Find out how to get better.

i.e. Create a morning routine, have healthier habits.

6.5. Push through Completion.

Work Principles: Work Principles are, as I come to see it Life Principles applied to “work”, but I do want to emphasize some of those, especially the idea for success that Ray Dalio has been praising since the first pages of his book.

-An Idea Meritocracy should be applied to every organisation. This is perhaps the most important takeaway of all, I’ll explain myself.

An organisation will be confronting lots of different issues, so it has to work in sync with all the people within it to produce better outcomes, but appart from the economic and growth component, a very important factor also comes into play, this being the well-being or the contentment of the individual in the organisation. To have both of them one needs to seek excellence at all costs and Ray has come up with a system he used to excel and grow from 1 to 17,000 employees, the Idea Meritocracy.

It is too extense to explain it in detail so I will present you with its main characteristics.

1.Have open-minded and transparent people who are willing to always find the truth.

2.Uses methods to know an individual better (what he/she is good at, is he/she a creative person? what are his/her strengths and weaknesses?…) to enroll them into a suitable position to maximize the company’s efficiency end effectiveness.

3.Create an environment in which people don’t hide problems but bring them into the surface, thereby having the chance to always improve and not create a negative environment in which people aren’t sincere with one another, because sincerity is of vital importance in evolution.

4.Transparency is the key, every employee must know what is going on in the company, this will increase trust within the community.

5.When a decision needs to be made bring the most believable people you can, and make sure they don’t usually have similar views with one another so that very different points of view are being considered. Believability weigh your decision-making.

6.It is acceptable to make mistakes but unacceptable not to learn from them.

7.Align the company’s goals with employee’s.

-Look down on your machine from high-up and see how it is working.

Ray sees his company as a machine consisting of people and culture, this machine has the design you have created through years of perseverance and constant improvement, but as new problems arise and new knowledge is acquired your machine has to change, it has to evolve. To do so you need to look down on yourself and your machine every once in a while to see if everything is okay or if there are some refinements that need to be made. We are incredible beings which have the power to look objectively on ourselves, let’s use it to our own advantage!

Image extracted from: https://images.currentaffairs.org/2018/06/dalio1.jpg

Finally I always try to look back on myself, let’s say I wanted to improve my grammar skills. If I’m embarassed of how I was writting back then, that is the signal that is telling me I’m getting better.

If interested in further learning:

-TED ED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXbsVbFAczg

-All Principles Summary: https://inside.bwater.com/publications/principles_excerpt

-Company Culture and the Power of Thoughtful Disagreement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABB1pfi3ZpE

The Brain That Changes Itself

Norman Doidge’s years of discoveries, expertise and intellect mixed up together in this fabulous book, carrier of scientific data of incalculable value all related to our plastic brain.

SUMMARY:

A Woman Perpetually Falling

This chapter initiates us with a wobbler womman who feels like she is going to fall, so consequently she ends up doing so. This womman called Cheryl got help from Paul Bach-y-Rita (a famous neuroscientist) who found the root of the problem, which was on her damaged vestibular apparatus (sensory system that coordinates movement with balance). Thereafter, he created a hat-like machine which would serve as a new vestibular apparatus for Cheryl, capable of sending the right signals to her brain, so that when the hat was put on Cheryl wouldn’t have these falling perception. As time had gone by, Cheryl was beginning to notice remarkable improvements when she took the hat off, she was gaining residual time progressively, meaning that she was able to let that falling feeling fade for a certain amount of time even when the hat was off, until she was able to feel like a normal person with practice, not having to rely on the hat for at least every 6 months. That is the first case we encounter that proves the plasticity of the brain and its ability to change over time adapting itself and rewiring its neuronal connections, we could say that with the purpose of restoring a healthy vestibular apparatus in this occasion.

#Excessive use of gentacimin can lead to hearing loss, ringing in the ears and devastation of the balance system.

Building Herself a Better Brain

Here Barbara, a woman “labeled” retarded discovers how to heal herself. Barbara had trouble with spatial reasoning, understanding relationships between things, logic and she also had a kinesthetic problem (awareness of the position and movement of the parts of the body by means of sensory organs in the muscles and joints) and couldn’t read clocks. She was frustrated also for not being capable of attaching meaning to symbols, due to this all she was working 20 hours a day in her young age in the library, but nothing beneficial came out of it. Until one day, when she read a book from a Russian neuropsychologist named Aleksandr Luria, who tracked the whole process of a soldier’s rehab who had been shot in the brain damaging the left occipital-temporal-parietal region of the brain, and Barbara saw that the effects described by the soldier Zazetsky were the same as hers. Thinking it through she hypothesized that she could have a brain malformation or damage in a certain area from birth. And as Zazetsky did some specific rehab exercises for that brain region in order to improve, so did Barbara.

What Barbara found through massive practice was that she actually was improving so rapidly that she couldn’t believe it. She was now able to read clocks and establish relationships between things and apply logic. Telling us once again that the brain can change through exercise and practice, the more you repeat the specific exercise the better reinforced the neuronal connections will be once the neuronal map is established (although able to change through synapses whenever alterations occur).

#Acetylcholine and dopamine are essential in learning and in the strenghtening of neural pathways.

#Education increases the number of branches among neurons, which drives the neurons farther apart, increasing the volume and thickness of the brain.

Redesigning The Brain

This chapter is full of takeaways and important things to know, so I’ll just make a list: –Michael Merzenich is often praised by lots of neuroplasticians, he is actually the one who created the cochlear implant, the device that allows congenitally deaf children to hear, it does so by replacing the cochlea for the implant turning speech into bursts of electrical impulses which are decoded by our brain and processed like sound in normal people, and our brain is so incredible and plastic that it goes from needing thousands of hair cells to readapt itself and be able to decode from a simple device, that is one of the reasons our brain is so powerful. He has also developed a variety of well-known plasticity-based computer programmes, FastForword for instance has already helped hundreds of thousands of learning-disabled children to improve their cognition and perception. Most of his discoveries were made through the Micromapping Technique, which was based on the usage of microelectrodes inserted on nerve cells, detecting and catching the electrical signal and sending it to an amplifier, which then conveys it to an oscilloscope screen (Oscilloscopes display the change of an electrical signal over time, with voltage and time as the Y- and X-axes, respectively, on a calibrated scale). This technique is still about a thousand times more precise than all brain scans but it is not commonly used because it requires an extremely tedious kind of surgery.

–Wilder Penfield was the one who discovered that motor and sensory brain maps are topographical, meaning that adjacent parts of the body are also adjacent in brain maps, so that the brain maps altogether follow a body-like structure, meaning that maps are not large but small so neuronal connections within a map are closer together.

Each neurons has three parts: The dendrites that receive input from other neurons, the cell body which contains the cell’s DNA and finally the axon which carries electrical impulses toward the dendrites of other neurons, not exactly touching the dendrites because of the space in between called the synapse, used to release the neurochemichals in, called neurotransmitters that bind to the neighbour cell’s dendrites. Having said that the neurons can receive either inhibitory (less likely to fire off) and excitatory (fires off) signals, which depend on the neurotransmitter, the quantity of it and other factors. We previously talked about the rewiral of our brain, neurons rewiring makes reference to the alterations that occur at the synapses, strenghtening or weakening connections. A fun fact about our nervous system is that if we cut off, let’s say a peripheral nerve (a nerve of the peripheral nervous system or PNS) and then the axon of the peripheral nerve reattaches to the axon of the wrong nerve, we feel “false localization”, for example represented by the touch of our index finger, which can be felt on our thumb finger instead of the index. Funny isn’t it?

Here the first cornerstone of neuroplasticity is mentioned, and that is the principle of “use it or lose it”, stating that if an action is not performed for a long period of time the neuronal connections involved in the action will weaken progressively as time goes by, so that the action could be lost. It is also mentioned the reason why our bad habits are so difficult to break, the reason being resides in our neuronal connections for the bad habit, the more repetition of the habit leads to the strenghtening of that neural connections, which are being reinforced so that it would take longer and longer to break or weaken that connections, resulting in the difficulty of breaking a bad habit, and the same principle applies to good habits. That’s why early childhood education is so important to prevent bad habits from taking advantage, and it is also the reason why unlearning is more difficult than learning. Another cornerstone of neuroplasticity is presented in this chapter, the famous phrase “neurons that fire together wire together” stating what we learned before, emphasizing that with repetition strenghtening takes place. “Neurons that fire apart wire apart” and “neurons out of sync fail to link” (If they don’t fire together there’s no link between those neurons). It is of primordial importance to highlight that when a skill is practiced and repeated for a long period of time so as to be at the level of mastery of that skill the brain makes a selection process in which it ceases to use some neural connections used before to perform that skill. It does when neurons become at a great level of efficiency and in order to create more space for different neural connections to take place. Also, when neurons are trained they became more efficient, thus firing more rapidly and increasing our thought speed processing. Some growth factors exist and there was one in concrete that caught Merzenich’s attention, BDNF, which is released from neurons when an activity is performed, it consolidates connections and promotes the growth of myelin (the insulating sheath of neurons that speeds up electrical signaling) and keeps the nucleus basalis from turning off during the critical period allowing for the differentiation of brain maps to take action effortlessly. BDNF is also a plasticity machine itself and when whe have the brain differentiated our body wants stability, hence the closure of the nucleus basalis through the right amount of BDNF release.

##It is thought that the reason for autism is that autistic children have genes that predispose them to autism, and what these genes actually do is help BDNF release to be produced in abnormal quantities resulting in a prematurely closing of the nucleus basalis, leaving the person with undifferentiated regions of the brain. Epileptic people are believed to be affected early in the critical period by white noise (the sound produced by machines, very excitatory for the auditory cortex) which makes some neuronal connections to a massive release of BDNF turning off the critical period prematurely with the big help of the predisposed genes. That’s why human epileptics find that strobe lights at rock concerts set off their seizures.

#A monkey’s hand, like humans has three main nerves: radial, median and ulnar. #Syndactyly is a condition wherein two fingers are fused. #When learning dopamine reinforces the reward while acetylcholine sharpens our memories. #Autism is largely an inherited condition, if one identical twin is autistic there is a 80-90% chance that the other will be as well. #When we are in the critical period our nucleus basalis (part of the brain that is believed to have an important role to sustain the attention by releasing acetylcholine helping our brain to tune in and sharpen memories) is turned on all the time making our brain maps so malleable just by the mere exposure to the world, but when the critical period ends the nucleus basalis only turns on when we exert focus over a thing we want to learn, that’s why if we stay focused we get much more benefit from an activity (i.e. sports drills).

Acquiring Tastes and Loves (Sexual attraction and Love thorugh neuroplasticity)

It is believed that sexuality is itself an instinct, and if we look at the definition of instinct it is defined as a hereditary behaviour unique to a specie which varies little from one member to the next and generally resists change and it has a hardwired purpose, survival. But the human sexual instinct has been somewhat detached from its core purpose, reproduction, differing from the other animals; we have got to this point because of our plastic brain. And there are certain areas that made this transformation possible, the most crucial one’s being the hypothalamus (regulates instinctive behaviours including sex), the amygdala (playing its role in emotion and anxiety) and the hippocampus (short-term memories to long-term process). A thing I did learn through online research was that when we stress there are hormones called glucocortides that are being released in our body, killing the cells in our hippocampus, thus making us less able to transform memories to long-term. So don’t stress out, keep calm and enjoy every moment of your life. The sexual instinct is being shaped from the moment we are born via environmental factors such as our parents influencing us with what we would later be an acquired taste developed by us based on our experiences. If a parent is warm and gentle the child would probably seek out for this qualities later on when choosing an adult mate.

A curious fact related with sexual plasticity is that when adults make use of baby words like “sweetie pie” for instance, to give to the conversation an oral flavor they are actually unmasking old neural pathways partially buried from childhood, so that the person gets a feeling of regression to some old memories which can be either harmful or harmless whether they had good experiences or bad one’s as children (quick note here, it could be use on your favor, so think about it) From here we can conclude that the odds that forms of fetichism, masochism… can be developed during infancy are very high. And the only way of getting out of these forms is by unlearning the associations of neurons once arranged to develop that acquired taste, but this is not an easy task.

Speaking of dissociations we should remark that in live there occur two massive brain reorganizations at two different stages: When we fall in love (oxytocin the neuromodulator is released when making love) and when we begin parenting (vasopressin the neuromodulator is released). All this neuromodulators in presence to change the structure of neurons and connections to allow the individual to perform the task at its best.

##Addictions, either drug and nondrug cause long-lasting effects: When a drug is taken it produces a protein in the body called ΔFosB, as more drug dosis are taken more ΔFosB accumulates in the neurons until we get to the point that this protein turns on and off certain genes, leading to effects lasting even after the drug is stopped, also leaving us with a damaged dopamine system. Cocaine reduces the threshold of our pleasure centers to fire, so that they fire the electrical signals more easily, that’s the reason why we feel pleasure from whatever we do when cocaine induced. #We have two pleasure systems: the excitatory (dopamine-related) and the satisfaction system (endorphines release, related with opiates). #Dopamine likes novelty, imagine a marriage case, both individuals are mutually attracted by each other but their pleasure systems adapt and it is harder to get the same buzz they once got from each other. #From a neuronal perspective, the neuronal process by which we learn is called LTP (long-term potentiation) and the process by which dissociations are caused by unlearning are called LTD (Long-term depression). #Neuromodulators enhance or diminish the overall effectiveness of synaptic connections and bring about enduring change. #Cystic fibrosis, genetic disorder of the lungs and pancreas in which it is produced an abnormal quantity of mucus that clogs the air passages difficulting breathing and leading to digestive poblems.

Midnight Resurrections

Here we are presented with Edward Taub, a behavioral neuroscientist from which extremely useful experiments and experience can we take benefit. Taub’s essential contribution through his patient’s cases has left us with tons of valuable information, taking as an example his training principles which sport athletes apply to their everyday life: the discovery that training is more efficient if done in increments, and work should be concentrated into a short-time, also referred to as “massive practice”(the reason why it is always better to immerse yourself into a foreign country if you want to learn a new language).

Brain Lock Unlocked

This chapter is exclusively dedicated to patients with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). Mainly focusing on their inability to make a worry fade away, keeping on checking things though previously checked lots of times, a switch of task they cannot perform because they are trapped in a sort of loop due to a “glitch” in their brains that can be redirected for the good with the help of neuroplasticity. I’ll explain this with a common example: A patient with OCD leaves home and starts hesitating whether he had locked the door or not before leaving, this patient is going to start worrying more than normal people because of his OCD and is going to check out if the door was locked or not and afterwards he’s going to check again thinking about which way did he/she rotated the key, was it left or right? Did I just checked in vain?

The reason being can be demonstrated looking at brain scans of OCD patients, this brains presenting three main structures with malfunctioning:

–The orbitofrontal cortex which detects the mistake and doubt is generated (sends a signal to the cyngulate gyrus).

– The cyngulate gyrus which triggers anxiety.

–And the caudate nucleus which allows our thoughts to flow from one to the next, is sticky in OCD patients. The three areas are hyperactive in OCD patients and the orbitofrontal cortex and cyngulate gyrus are turned on all the time leading to an increased anxiety even after the mistake is corrected because of the inability of the caudate nucleus to “turn the page”. The soultion found for OCD patients was to shift the caudate nucleus “manually” with focus and resistance to the stimuli,by implementing your focus to another activity, henceforth weakening the old pathway and promoting the formation of a new one.

Pain

Here’s one of my favourite chapters of this book. Pain is a feeling that all of us have experienced at some point in life, but what Doidge encompasses here introducing us to Ramachandran is the Why we feel pain, which systems are involved and dives right into the possibility of blocking pain so that we don’t experience it, which it is in essence what yoggis in India do to be able to walk barefoot in hot coals or nails.

My takeaways here are the following ones:

-Pain is felt because in some way we want to feel it.

-The brain creates a body image from which we feel pain, our body image consists of our muscles, joints, bones, limbs… Through a Ramachandran experiment we now know that our body image can be merged with a piece of furniture!

The experiment recquired a person to place his right hand under a table, Ramachandran would tap the tabletop at the same time he exerted the same amount of tapping pressure to the patient’s hand. As repetition went on the map finally merged the hand with the table, and when Ramachandran pulled out a hammer that was previously hidden showing his harming intentionality to the table, the patient was so frightened that his stress felt like actual pain.

-There’s a pain theory called “the gate theory” which states that we’ve got gates connecting to our pain system and that if we manage to block this gates we won’t feel pain anymore until they are unblocked. There was proof of the possibility of blocking the gates when TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) came in, which can be used to stimulate pain inhibitory neurons that block the gates. It also seemed possible that acupuncture could also inhibit neurons closing the pain gates.

Imagination

Imagination discoveries have been groundbreaking in the world of science among many others; it has been concluded (Pascual Leone being a pioneer) that imagining an act an doing it are not as different as they sound, i.e: when visualizing (imagining) the letter “c” our visual cortex lights up, just as it would be when physically seeing letter “c”. Imagining engages the same motor and sensory programs that physical action does, and I’m going to make it easier with a study done with the help of a large group.

This large group was splitted into two different groups, group A and group B. Both groups were asked to perform the same body weight exercises covering all the muscle groups for a month. But they differed in the way they had to do it. Group A had to imagine themselves doing this exercises on a daily basis until the month got at its end, while group B had to actually do the exercises physically. The surprising results after the experiment were astonishing, group A had increased their muscular mass by a 22% while group B increased it by 30%, only 8% of difference between both groups! This experiments made it possible for top athletes to perform better by using the power of imagination and visualization.

#Our brains are not truly organized in terms of systems that process a given sensory modality. Rather they are organized in a series of specific operators, meaning that the ablest ones are the ones that are in charge of the task or action but our brain is plastic and can rewire itself so that if we were to lose vision, for example, the visual cortex would be taken over by the sensory map, thus we would have a sharper touch sensitivity that would allow us to create a space image of our surroundings even if not disposing of our visual cortex.

Turning Our Ghosts Into Ancestors

This section of the book was dedicated to Mr.L, a patient who had lost his mother when he was 26 months old, summed up with the depression of his father after the mother’s dead, he had to autorregulate and turn off his emotions because a lack of proximity to family. Once he grew up he began having dreams about something lost but spoke about his mother’s death as though the pain did not register but still shocked him. He was married with children but still didn’t love them and all of that was linked to his past. Anyway if you want to know more about the story visit this page:
https://prezi.com/vptghtkfmjfc/ch9-turning-our-ghosts-into-ancestors/

What I could learn and what I consider to be the most important information of this chapter:

-Psychotherapy works by “talking to our neurons”, by shaping our thinking to turn on specific genes.

-Aplysisas’s (snail) molecular procedure from short-term memory to long-term: First protein Kinase A is released from the outer cell, then enters the nucleus of the nerve cell where genetical infomation is stored and turns on a certain gene which in turn changes the neuron ending structure, leading to the formation of new pathways.

I explained the procedure in aplysias because I believe human learning could be somewhat similar. The protein involved could be different in humans but at the end if we give an overall view to the process we can clearly see that is done with a purpose, that of changing the neuron structure so that it can expand to find more neurons and establish new non-existing neuronal connections. Although know that I’m thinking it through learning strenghtens connections but if we make new linkages from things we knew and recent learnings new connections are created.

-We have two types of memory: Procedural memory (Unconscious memory, non-verbal interactions and expressions) and Explicit memory (Helps us organize our memories by time and place with the help of language, developed in 26 months).

Rejuvenation

Here I’ll not make use of the book information but rather from self-learning. For a lot of time it was believed, even when neuroplasticity was discovered that old people’s brains didn’t have the capacity of rewiral or brain reorganization, that at a certain age the brain become fixed but we now know that that couldn’t be more wrong. It is a certainty that as we age we lose neurons but that doesn’t stop the brain to rewire itself, what young and old people need are challenges, novelty, new activities proven to increase cognitive behaviour. It is of crucial importance to be focused when doing that new activity or task, and it is of equally important that the task obliges us to be constantly challenged and to maintain our focus, otherwise it’ll be too boring and we’ll not make the most of it.

And as we now can see from brain scans, lots of old people who practice with cognitive improvement exercises on a daily basis preserve the brains they had when they were 20 years younger, and that is rejuvenation.

Author’s web page:
http://www.normandoidge.com/