Drive: Ideas for sustained work. - Page 6

Editor’s note

Drive

For days when you want encouragement to start, practise or keep going.

DriveArt

Artemisia Gentileschi, born in Rome in 1593, was one of the first women in Western Europe to build a successful career as a painter. She painted heroines from the Bible and ancient history, such as Judith and Susanna, as strong women who act, not as decorative figures to be looked at.

Artemisia trained in the workshop of her father, Orazio Gentileschi, a painter influenced by Caravaggio's dramatic use of light, and finished her earliest known painting, Susanna and the Elders, at 17. In 1612 she testified at a public trial in Rome of the painter Agostino Tassi, who had assaulted her; he was found guilty. She then moved to Florence, where in 1616 she became the first woman admitted to the city's Academy of the Arts of Drawing. She later worked in Rome, Venice and Naples, and from 1638 in London at the court of Charles I. Her Judith Slaying Holofernes hangs in the Uffizi in Florence. After her death in Naples, probably in the mid-1650s, she was largely forgotten until the Italian critic Roberto Longhi wrote about her in 1916. In 2020 the National Gallery in London gave her a major exhibition.

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DriveArt

It is often said that Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime, The Red Vineyard. In fact that is just his best-documented sale: the Van Gogh Museum lists several others, and he also traded many works with fellow artists.

The Red Vineyard, painted in Arles in November 1888, was shown at the exhibition of Les XX, an avant-garde artists' group in Brussels, in early 1890. The Belgian painter Anna Boch, sister of Van Gogh's friend Eugène Boch, bought it for 400 francs; it now hangs in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The Van Gogh Museum names other sales too. His first commission came from his uncle Cor, an art dealer, who ordered 19 views of The Hague to help him get started. The Paris paint and art dealer Julien Tanguy bought a painting, and his brother Theo sold another work to a gallery in London. Van Gogh also often swapped work with other artists and, when he was younger, for food or painting supplies. Exactly how many works he sold is not known. He died in July 1890, a few months after the Brussels sale.

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DriveHistory

Harland Sanders was in his early sixties when the first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise opened, in Utah in 1952. At 65, after a new highway took the traffic away from his roadside café in Corbin, Kentucky, he sold it and took to the road, selling his recipe to other restaurants.

Sanders had been frying chicken for travellers at his café and motel on a busy road in Corbin since the 1930s. He was never an army officer: in 1935 the governor of Kentucky made him an honorary Kentucky Colonel. His first franchisee was Pete Harman, who ran a large restaurant in South Salt Lake, and it was a sign painter hired by Harman who came up with the name Kentucky Fried Chicken. Franchisees paid Sanders four cents for every chicken sold. When the café closed, he lived on his savings and a $105 monthly Social Security pension while he drove from town to town. By 1963 there were more than 600 KFC restaurants. The next year, aged 73, he sold the company for $2 million and stayed on as its white-suited public face. A popular story says he was turned down 1,009 times; no reliable record confirms that number.

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DriveMind

A new habit is easier to remember when it is attached to an existing cue: after coffee, after brushing teeth, after opening your laptop.

Psychologists call the familiar routine a cue. Habits form when the same action follows the same cue again and again, until the cue starts the behaviour almost by itself. From the 1990s the psychologist Peter Gollwitzer showed that people who make a specific if-then plan, such as ‘after I pour my coffee, I will stretch for two minutes’, carry out their goals more often than people who simply intend to. He called these plans implementation intentions. The Stanford researcher BJ Fogg calls the existing routine an anchor. Patience helps too. In a 2010 study at University College London, 96 volunteers repeated a new daily habit: half needed less than 66 days before it felt automatic and half needed more, with a range of 18 to 254 days.

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DriveMind

If the target feels too large to start, shrink the first action: one page, one minute, one message, one small piece you can actually do.

Why it works: in a 2007 review of hundreds of studies, the psychologist Piers Steel of the University of Calgary found that people put off a task most when it feels unpleasant and when they doubt they can do it. A tiny first step is less daunting and easy to succeed at. Progress then feeds motivation. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer of Harvard Business School read nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from people doing complex work and found that even small steps forward in meaningful work were the biggest single boost to their mood and motivation. They called this the progress principle.

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DriveMind

Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to change with experience. It rarely happens overnight: each time you practise something, the connections between the nerve cells involved grow a little stronger, until what once felt hard starts to come more easily.

The idea goes back to the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb, who proposed in 1949 that when one nerve cell repeatedly helps to fire another, the link between them grows stronger. It is often summed up as ‘cells that fire together wire together’. Brain scans later showed such change on a larger scale. A 2000 study found that London taxi drivers, who spend years learning the city's streets, had a larger rear part of the hippocampus, a region involved in finding the way, than people who did not drive taxis, and the difference grew with years in the job. In 2004 German researchers scanned volunteers before and after three months of learning to juggle: areas that process moving objects had grown slightly, and they shrank back once the practice stopped.

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DriveMind

People usually remember material better when they study it in several sessions spread over time than when they pack the same hours into one sitting. This spacing effect, first measured by the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885, is one of the most reliable findings in memory research.

Ebbinghaus experimented on himself. He learnt lists of meaningless syllables such as “WID” and “ZOF”, so that nothing he already knew could help, and recorded how many repetitions each list took. When he spread his repetitions over several days, he needed fewer in total than when he crammed them into one day. Later studies found the same pattern with words, facts, foreign vocabulary and physical skills. One explanation is that a review after a gap makes the brain work to recall something it has half forgotten, and that effort strengthens the memory; the psychologist Robert Bjork calls such useful struggles “desirable difficulties”. In 1972 the German science journalist Sebastian Leitner turned the idea into a box of flashcards reviewed at growing intervals, and today's flashcard apps work on the same principle.

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DriveMind

Trying to recall what you have learnt, without looking, fixes it in memory better than reading it again. Psychologists call this the testing effect: each time you pull a fact out of memory, it becomes easier to find the next time.

The idea is old. Francis Bacon noted in 1620 that reading a text ten times while trying now and then to recite it teaches it better than reading it through twenty times, and William James made the same point in 1890. The best-known modern test came in 2006, when Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke at Washington University in St. Louis had students read short prose passages and then either reread them or write down all they could remember. Five minutes later the rereaders did better. Two days and a week later, the students who had practised recalling remembered clearly more, even though the rereaders felt more confident. Rereading feels easy because familiar text looks known, and that ease is easily mistaken for learning. Flashcards, practice questions and writing a summary on a blank page all use the same effect.

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DriveMind

When two tasks both need conscious attention, such as writing an email and following a conversation, the brain usually cannot do them truly at once. It switches back and forth, and each switch costs a little time and makes mistakes more likely. Psychologists call this the switch cost.

The cost was first measured in 1927 by the American psychologist Arthur Jersild, who timed people working through lists of numbers: lists on which they had to alternate between adding and subtracting took longer than lists with one operation all the way down. In 1995 Robert Rogers and Stephen Monsell showed that part of the cost remains even when people know a switch is coming and have time to prepare. It matters on the road. In a 2006 driving-simulator study at the University of Utah, drivers talking on a phone, handheld or hands-free, braked later and had more collisions than when they were not talking. Tasks that are well practised or use different senses, such as walking while chatting, get in each other's way far less, and the size of the cost depends on the tasks and the person.

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DriveMind

Spaced review works best when the gap between reviews fits how long you need to remember something. In a 2008 study of more than 1,350 people, the best gap before a review was about one to three days for a test a week later, and several weeks for a test a year later.

Psychologists including Nicholas Cepeda and Harold Pashler taught volunteers a set of facts, gave them a single review after a gap of up to three and a half months, and tested them up to a year later. Lengthening the gap helped at first, then slowly began to hurt. As a share of the time until the test, the best gap shrank from about 20 to 40% for a one-week wait to about 5 to 10% for a one-year wait. The study followed a 2006 review by the same team that pooled 317 experiments. Timing matters because we forget fastest in the first hours and days after learning, the decline Hermann Ebbinghaus plotted in 1885 as the forgetting curve, and a well-timed review slows it down.

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DriveMind

Learning a skill can change the brain's structure, including its white matter: the bundles of nerve fibres wrapped in myelin, a fatty coating that speeds up signals. How much of this change comes from new myelin is still being worked out.

In the brain and spinal cord, myelin is made by cells called oligodendrocytes, which wrap layer upon layer of membrane around nerve fibres; the fatty wrapping makes the fibres look pale, hence “white matter”. In 2009 researchers at Oxford scanned 24 adults before and after six weeks of learning to juggle and found a change in the white matter under an area near the top and back of the brain that links vision and movement; a comparison group who did not train showed no such change. Brain scans cannot see myelin directly, so the strongest evidence comes from animals. In 2014 a team at University College London showed that mice learning to run on a wheel with irregularly spaced rungs made new oligodendrocytes, and that mice unable to make them failed to master the wheel.

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DriveMind

A single session of aerobic exercise, such as a brisk run or bike ride, can raise blood levels of BDNF, a protein that helps nerve cells survive, grow and form new connections. The rise is temporary, and its size varies from person to person.

BDNF stands for brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Yves-Alain Barde and Hans Thoenen first isolated it from pig brain in 1982, and it is especially active in the hippocampus, a region central to learning and memory. In 1995 Carl Cotman's team at the University of California, Irvine found that rats given running wheels made more BDNF in the hippocampus. In people, a 2017 analysis of 55 studies found that blood BDNF was higher after a single session of exercise, with longer sessions giving bigger rises; the effect was clear in men but not in women. Blood levels are only an indirect guide to what happens inside the brain. The findings support a link between exercise and plasticity, the brain's ability to change, without proving that BDNF explains the clear-headed feeling after a walk.

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DriveMind

The Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson showed that experts improve through deliberate practice: focused work on specific weaknesses, usually with a teacher's feedback. The popular “10,000-hour rule” came later, as a simplification of his work; he never claimed it was a threshold everyone must cross.

The rule traces back to Ericsson's 1993 study of violinists at a music academy in Berlin. By the age of 20 the best students had practised alone for about 10,000 hours on average, more than less accomplished students. In his 2008 book Outliers, the journalist Malcolm Gladwell turned that average into a rule. Ericsson objected: the figure was an average, not a threshold; the violinists were still far from masters at 20; the hours needed differ between fields; and only focused practice aimed at improving counts, not every hour spent playing. Practice matters, but later research found its weight varies. A 2014 meta-analysis, which pools the results of many studies, found it explained around a quarter of the differences in performance in games, about a fifth in music and very little in professional work.

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StillnessHealth

Morning light does more than brighten a room: it helps reset the body's internal clock, which times alertness, hormones and sleep. The clock runs slightly longer than 24 hours, so without that daily reset it would slowly drift later.

The signal comes from a third kind of light-sensitive cell in the eye, separate from the rods and cones we see with. These cells, identified in 2002 by teams including those of David Berson and Samer Hattar, contain a pigment called melanopsin that responds most to blue light. They report to the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a tiny cluster of nerve cells in the hypothalamus, at the base of the brain, that acts as the body's master clock. A 1999 Harvard study put the human clock's natural cycle at about 24 hours and 11 minutes. Morning light shifts the clock earlier; bright light late in the evening shifts it later and delays melatonin, the hormone that signals night. The clock's molecular machinery earned Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

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DriveHealth

Exercise snacks, bursts of hard effort about a minute long repeated a few times a day, can improve heart and lung fitness. Running up a few flights of stairs is a typical example. Studies find that if the bursts leave you breathing hard, they help even people who otherwise do little exercise.

In a 2019 Canadian study, inactive young adults climbed three flights of stairs (60 steps) briskly, three times a day with one to four hours between climbs, on three days a week. After six weeks their peak oxygen uptake, the standard measure of heart and lung fitness, had risen modestly compared with a group that did nothing. In 2022, researchers used wrist trackers worn by about 25,000 volunteers in UK Biobank, a large British health study, all adults who did no formal exercise, to find short bursts of vigorous everyday activity such as very fast walking or stair climbing. People with about three such bursts a day, each lasting one or two minutes, had a 38 to 40 percent lower risk of dying over roughly seven years. This is an association rather than proof. What counts is intensity: a gentle stroll does not qualify.

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DriveHealth

In a 1990 Boston study, nine frail nursing-home residents aged around 90 nearly tripled their leg strength after eight weeks of weight training. Their strength rose by an average of 174 percent, a sign that muscle keeps responding to training even in very old age.

The study was led by Maria Fiatarone with researchers from Tufts University and published in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association. Ten volunteers living at the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for Aged in Boston, the oldest aged 96, trained their thigh muscles on weight machines at high intensity; nine completed the programme. Besides the strength gain, their thigh muscles grew by about 9 percent and their speed on a heel-to-toe walking test rose by 48 percent. Age-related muscle loss, called sarcopenia, raises the risk of falls, fractures and losing independence, and inactivity speeds it up. The NHS and the World Health Organization advise adults of every age to do muscle-strengthening activity on at least two days a week.

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DriveHealth

A short walk after a meal can blunt the rise in blood sugar (glucose) that follows eating, compared with sitting still. Working muscles pull glucose out of the blood to use as fuel, and they can do this partly without the help of insulin.

Muscle cells take in glucose through protein gateways on their surface called GLUT4 transporters. Insulin normally brings these gateways to the surface, but muscle contraction can do so on its own, which is why movement lowers blood sugar even when insulin works poorly, as in type 2 diabetes. In a 2016 study at the University of Otago in New Zealand, 41 adults with type 2 diabetes tried two plans for two weeks each: walking for 30 minutes once a day, or for 10 minutes after each main meal. With the after-meal walks, the rise in blood sugar after eating was about 12 percent lower overall and 22 percent lower after the evening meal, which in this group tended to be the most carbohydrate-rich meal and was often followed by sitting. A walk is a helpful habit, not a replacement for medication, diet advice or a doctor's care.

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DriveHealth

Delayed-onset muscle soreness, the ache that follows hard or unfamiliar exercise, usually peaks 24 to 72 hours later. It is caused mostly by movements in which a muscle lengthens while working against a load, such as walking downhill or slowly lowering a weight.

Movements in which a muscle lengthens under load are called eccentric contractions. The leading explanation is that they cause tiny damage in the muscle fibres, and the ache comes from the repair and inflammation that follow. The American physiologist Theodore Hough first described this delayed soreness in 1902. The popular idea that it is caused by lactic acid is wrong: lactic acid returns to normal within about an hour of exercise, long before the soreness starts. The pain usually fades within a week. The muscle also adapts quickly, so the same workout causes much less soreness the next time, which is known as the repeated-bout effect. Soreness is therefore not a measure of a good workout, and a session that leaves you pain-free may still have done its job.

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DriveHealth

Humans lack the enzymes to digest many kinds of dietary fibre, so it reaches the large intestine intact. There, gut bacteria ferment some of it into short-chain fatty acids, small molecules that feed the cells lining the colon and send signals to the rest of the body.

Fibre is the part of plant foods, such as whole grains, beans, lentils, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds, that our own digestive enzymes cannot break down. The three main short-chain fatty acids that bacteria make from it are acetate, propionate and butyrate. Butyrate is the main source of energy for the cells lining the colon, and these acids also make the colon slightly more acidic and influence blood sugar, cholesterol and immune signals. Researchers are also studying links between the gut and the brain, but it is too early to treat a bowl of oats as a mood treatment. UK guidelines recommend 30 grams of fibre a day for adults, while most adults eat only about 20 grams.

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DriveHealth

The familiar guideline of about 0.8 g of protein per kilogram of body weight a day is set for whole populations, not tailored to individuals. EFSA, the EU's food safety agency, uses 0.83 g for healthy adults, the UK about 0.75 g and the US 0.8 g: roughly 53 to 58 g a day for a 70 kg adult.

These figures are set so that they cover the needs of nearly all healthy people, about 97 or 98 in every 100, and they assume that the diet provides enough energy overall. Needs are higher in pregnancy and while breastfeeding. An international expert group, PROT-AGE, advised in 2013 that people over 65 should aim for at least 1.0 to 1.2 g per kilo to help protect their muscles. People who train regularly for strength or endurance may benefit from about 1.2 to 2.0 g per kilo. Some kidney and liver conditions call for different amounts, so anyone with a long-term illness should ask a doctor or dietitian rather than rely on an online calculator.

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DriveHealth

In a 2019 study at the US National Institutes of Health, 20 adults ate an ultra-processed and an unprocessed diet for two weeks each. The meals offered the same calories, sugar, fat, salt and fibre, yet on the ultra-processed diet people ate about 500 more calories a day and gained weight.

'Ultra-processed' comes from the Nova system, first proposed in 2009 by researchers led by Carlos Monteiro at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. It describes industrial products made mostly from refined ingredients and additives rarely used in home cooking, such as flavourings, emulsifiers and modified starches: many packaged snacks, sweetened cereals, ready meals and soft drinks. In the trial, led by the NIH scientist Kevin Hall, the volunteers lived at the NIH Clinical Center in Maryland for four weeks, so everything they ate could be measured, and they could eat as much or as little as they liked. On the ultra-processed diet they ate about 508 extra calories a day and gained about 0.9 kg; on the unprocessed diet they lost about the same. Why these foods lead people to eat more is still being studied.

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DriveHealth

Skin makes vitamin D when the sun's ultraviolet B (UVB) rays reach it. At UK latitudes, the NHS says, the sun is only strong enough for this from about late March or early April to the end of September, so autumn and winter sunshine cannot be relied on.

In winter the sun sits low in the sky, so its light passes through more of the atmosphere and most of the UVB is filtered out before it reaches the ground. Vitamin D helps the body control calcium and phosphate, which keep bones, teeth and muscles healthy; a serious lack can cause rickets in children and bone pain from softened bones in adults. The NHS therefore advises everyone, including pregnant and breastfeeding women, to consider a daily 10-microgram supplement in autumn and winter. People who rarely go outdoors, usually cover most of their skin or have dark skin are advised to take one all year, as are babies and young children in most cases. More is not better: adults should not take more than 100 micrograms a day.

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DriveHealth

Exercise sets off chemical signals that tell muscles to adapt, but the repair work, building new muscle protein and refilling energy stores, carries on for hours and days afterwards. That is why rest days are part of training rather than a break from it.

After resistance training, the rate at which muscles build new protein stays raised for up to about two days. Muscles also refill their store of glycogen, the form in which they keep carbohydrate as fuel, and after hard exercise that can take a day or more. Sports scientists describe the pattern with a model called supercompensation, set out by the Soviet scientist Nikolai Yakovlev between 1949 and 1959: fitness dips just after a hard session, climbs back to its starting level during recovery, then rises for a while above it. Train hard again too soon and the next dip begins before recovery is complete; wait too long and the gain fades. Enough food, especially protein and carbohydrate, and good sleep support these processes.

Exercise scienceRead card

DriveHealth

The talk test judges exercise intensity by your breath: at moderate intensity you can talk but not sing, and at vigorous intensity you cannot say more than a few words without pausing for breath. It needs no equipment, so you can use it on any walk, ride or run.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends the talk test because anyone can use it. Research has found that the point where comfortable talking becomes difficult lies close to the ventilatory threshold, the effort level at which breathing starts to speed up sharply, so it is a reasonable stand-in for measured intensity. The NHS and the World Health Organization advise adults to do at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, or a mix of the two. The test is not the same as 'Zone 2', a popular training target, usually a steady and fairly easy effort, that coaches define in different ways: by heart rate, by the level of lactate in the blood or by breathing thresholds.

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Next reading modeStillnessIdeas for rest and attention.