Brilliant Blog

We concluded our Top 50 Brain Teasers post with the challenge:

We are working on improving several sections of our website, especially our Resources section. It will look much better in a few days. Our first step has been to re-organize our Neuroscience Interview Series, and below you have how it looks today.

During the last 18 months I have had the fortune to interview over 15 cutting-edge neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists on their research and thoughts. Here are some of our favorite quotes (you can read the full interview notes by clicking on the links): 

	“Learning is physical. Learning means the modification, growth, and pruning of our neurons, connections–called synapses– and neuronal networks, through experience...When we do so, we are cultivating our own neuronal networks. We become our own gardeners”- Dr. James Zull, Professor of Biology and Biochemistry at Case Western University. Full Interview Notes.
	“Exercising our brains systematically is as important as exercising our bodies. In my experience, “Use it or lose it” should really be “Use it and get more of it”.- Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg, neuropsychologist, clinical professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine, and disciple of the great neuropsychologist Alexander Luria. Full Interview Notes.
	"Today, thanks to fMRI and other neuroimaging techniques, we are starting to understand the impact our actions can have on specific parts of the brain."- Dr. Judith S. Beck, Director of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research, and author of The Beck Diet Solution: Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person. Full Interview Notes.

 

	“What research has shown is that cognition, or what we call thinking and performance, is really a set of skills that we can train systematically. And that computer-based cognitive trainers or “cognitive simulations” are the most effective and efficient way to do so.” - Dr. Daniel Gopher, Director of the Research Center for Work Safety and Human Engineering at Technion Institute of Science. Full Interview Notes.
	“Individuals who lead mentally stimulating lives, through education, occupation and leisure activities, have reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s symptoms. Studies suggest that they have 35-40% less risk of manifesting the disease”- Dr. Yaakov Stern, Division Leader of the Cognitive Neuroscience Division of the Sergievsky Center at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, New York. Full Interview Notes.
	"It is hardly deniable that brains enchant Japanese people. We love brain training. Dentsu, the biggest advertising agency, announced the No.1 Consumer-chosen 2006 Product was game software and books for brain training."- Go Hirano, Japanese executive, founder of NeuWell. Full Interview Notes.
	“Elite performers are distinguished by the structuring of their learning process… It is important to understand the role of emotions: they are not “bad”. They are very useful signals. It is important to become aware of them to avoid being engulfed by them, and learn how to manage them.” - Dr. Brett Steenbarger, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, SUNY Medical University, and author of Enhancing Trader Performance. Full Interview Notes.
	“We have shown that working memory can be improved by training...I think that we are seeing the beginning of a new era of computerized training for a wide range of applications” – Dr. Torkel Klingberg, Director of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Karolinska Institute. Full Interview Notes.
	“Training is very important: attentional control is one of the last cognitive abilities to develop in normal brain development...I can easily see the relevance in 2 fields. One, professional sports. Two, military training.” Professor Bradley Gibson is the Director of the Perception and Attention Lab at University of Notre Dame. Full Interview Notes.
	“I don't see that schools are applying the best knowledge of how minds work. Schools should be the best place for applied neuroscience, taking the latest advances in cognitive research and applying it to the job of educating minds.” - Dr. Arthur Lavin, Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at Case Western School of Medicine, pediatrician in private practice. Full Interview Notes.
	“Cognitive training rests on solid premises, and some programs already have very promising research results. Some of the most are promising areas are: neurofeedback, which as a whole is starting to present good research results, and working memory training.” - Professor David Rabiner, Senior Research Scientist and the Director of Psychology and Neuroscience Undergraduate Studies at Duke University. Full Interview Notes.
	"The practice of gratitude can increase happiness levels by around 25%, and this is not hard to achieve - a few hours writing a gratitude journal over 3 weeks can create an effect that lasts 6 months if not more." - Professor Robert Emmons, Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Positive Psychology and Professor of Psychology at UC Davis. Full Interview Notes.
	"What was very surprising was that there was also a clear benefit in auditory memory, which wasn’t directly trained. In other words, people who were 75-years-old performed auditory memory tasks as well as average 65-year-olds, so we can say they reversed 10 years of aging for that cognitive ability." - Dr. Liz Zelinski, Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California Andrus Gerontology Center. Full Interview Notes.
	"Parenting, mentoring, teaching, and mass media are examples of the cultural systems that humans have developed to help young people master the knowledge and skills they need to survive and thrive in complex environments." - Dr. Robert Sylwester, author of The Adolescent Brain: Reaching for Autonomy and Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Oregon Full Interview Notes.
	"I would say that a crossword puzzle is not a form of cognitive training. It can be stimulating, but it is not a form of structured mental exercise that has been shown to improve specific cognitive skills." - Dr. Jerri Edwards, Associate Professor at University of South Florida's School of Aging Studies and Co-Investigator of the influencial ACTIVE study. Full Interview Notes.
	“It seems clear that there are important skills that can be trained, that make for a better and more successful human being - such as the ability to defer gratification, sequencing, emotional intelligence, improved working memory, vocabulary, and processing skills. However, the type of assessments used today to measure schools' performance don't focus on these." -Eric Jensen, founder of Learning Brain Expo. Full Interview Notes.

Please remember that you can download a Whitepaper Here, based on eleven of these interviews.

Have an stimulating read...and feel free to suggest who else we should add to our list of future interviewees.

A very promising cognitive training study was presented last week by Helena Westerberg at the annual meeting of the CNS: Cognitive Neuroscience Society held in San Francisco, and Dr. David Rabiner brings us the highlights.

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The study was conducted with a general adult population, rather than adults diagnosed with ADHD, as was the case in previous published working memory training studies,

The study was a randomized, controlled trial of working memory training conducted with 55 younger (20-30 years old) and 45 older (60-70 years old) adults. Participants were randomly assigned to receive 5 weeks of active Cogmed Working Memory Training or a placebo training intervention. In the active training group, the difficulty of the working memory training tasks continually adjusted to match the individual's performance. As a result, individuals were consistently challenged to perform at their highest possible level. In the placebo training group, the difficulty level remained constant across the training period such that improvements in working memory were not expected to occur.

Results indicated that active training was associated with significant gains in non-trained working memory tasks; particularly noteworthy is that participants who received active training also reported improved attentional performance and cognitive functioning in their daily lives. This was true for both younger and older adults. For the most part, these gains were maintained 3 months after training ended.

The poster presented at the conference provides information on all measures used in the study as well as a graphical presentation of the results. You can view it at www.helpforadd.com/Westerberg.pdf

You will probably need to adjust the image size to properly view the poster.

--- Dr. David Rabiner is a child clinical psychologist and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. His research focuses on various issues related to ADHD, the impact of attention problems on academic achievement, and attention training. He also publishes Attention Research Update, a complimentary online newsletter that helps parents, professionals, and educators keep up with the latest research on ADHD. Cogmed is a major sponsor of Attention Research Update. 

Embodiment, Ego-Space, and Action

• Edited by Roberta L. Klatzky, Brian MacWhinney, Marlene Behrmann

The majority of research on human perception and action examines sensors and effectors in relative isolation. What is less often considered in these research domains is that humans interact with a perceived world in which they themselves are part of the perceptual representation, as are the positions and actions (potential or ongoing) of other active beings. It is this self-in-world representation that we call embodiment. Increasingly, research demonstrates that embodiment is fundamental to both executing and understanding spatially and interpersonally directed action. It has been theorized to play a role in reaching and grasping, locomotion and navigation, infant imitation, spatial and social perspective taking, and neurological dysfunctions as diverse as phantom limb pain and autism. Few formal ideas have been put forward, however, to describe how selfrepresentation functions at a mechanistic level and what neural structures support those functions. This volume reports on the 2006 Carnegie Symposium on Cognition, which brought together the contributions to these issues from a group of researchers who span perspectives of behavioral science, neuroscience, developmental psychology and computation. Together they share their findings, ideas, aspirations, and concerns.

ISBN: 9780805862881

Published August 13 2008 by Psychology Press (formerly published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).

Great article in the UK's Sunday Times yesterday: Pump up those little grey cells, listing a variety of free or inexpensive brain health-related resources.

We are honored (even honoured, I'd dare say) that they started the list with our complimentary Brain Fitness 101 e-Guide:

- "The science behind some of the more outlandish claims for computer games that are supposed to improve your cognitive powers, is a matter of debate. However, you don’t need to pay £20 to give a game a try. The internet features a host of websites that can stretch your imagination and improve your mental prowess in a range of skills. Some are expensive rip-offs, but many are free, as our guide to the best of them shows."

- "Begin by downloading the Brain Fitness 101 e-guide by Sharp Brains, available free at tinyurl.com/6nlz9j. The guide gives a good overview of how mental exercises keep the brain on top form."

Some other great resources they outline include the superb article "Is it worth going to the mind gym?" in New Scientist, a memory test set up by Edinburgh University and the BBC. There are many more stimulating resources offered there (not necesarily brain/ cognitive training, but stimulating anyway), so go take a look. 

Article: Pump up those little grey cells.

Picture above: Image of pyramidal neurons in mouse cerebral cortex expressing green fluorescent protein. The red staining indicates GABAergic interneurons. Source: PLoS Biology, via Wikipedia. 

A few days ago we published the first and second installments of this Peace Among Primates series, by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky. Today we publish the third and final one.

Peace Among Primates (Part 3)

Anyone who says peace is not part of human nature knows too little about primates, including ourselves.

--By Robert M. Sapolsky

Natural born killers?

Are there any lessons to be learned here that can be applied to human-on-human violence—apart, that is, from the possible desirability of giving fatal cases of tuberculosis to aggressive people? Can human behavior be as malleable—and as peaceful—as Forest Troop’s?

Any biological anthropologist opining about human behavior is required by long-established tradition to note that for 99 percent of human history, humans lived in small, stable bands of related hunter-gatherers. Game theorists have shown that a small, cohesive group is the perfect setting for the emergence of cooperation: The identities of the other participants are known, there are opportunities to play games together repeatedly (and thus the ability to punish cheaters), and there is open-book play (players can acquire reputations). And so, those hunter-gatherer bands were highly egalitarian. Empirical and experimental data have also shown the cooperative advantages of small groups at the opposite human extreme, namely in the corporate world. 

But the lack of violence within small groups can come at a heavy price. Small homogenous groups with shared values can be a nightmare of conformity. They can also be dangerous for outsiders. Unconsciously emulating the murderous border patrols of closely related male chimps, militaries throughout history have sought to form small, stable units; inculcate them with rituals of pseudokinship; and thereby produce efficient, cooperative killing machines.

Is it possible to achieve the cooperative advantages of a small group without having the group reflexively view outsiders as the Other? One often encounters pessimism in response to this question, based on the notion that humans, as primates, are hard-wired for xenophobia. Some brain-imaging studies have appeared to support this view in a particularly discouraging way. There is a structure deep inside the brain called the amygdala, which plays a key role in fear and aggression, and experiments have shown that when subjects are presented with a face of someone from a different race, the amygdala gets metabolically active—aroused, alert, ready for action. This happens even when the face is presented subliminally, which is to say, so rapidly that the subject does not consciously see it.

More recent studies, however, should mitigate this pessimism. Test a person who has a lot of experience with people of different races, and the amygdala does not activate. Or, as in a wonderful experiment by Susan Fiske, of Princeton University, subtly bias the subject beforehand to think of people as individuals rather than as members of a group, and the amygdala does not budge. Humans may be hard-wired to get edgy around the Other, but our views on who falls into that category are decidedly malleable.

In the early 1960s, a rising star of primatology, Irven DeVore of Harvard University, published the first general overview of the subject. Discussing his own specialty, savanna baboons, he wrote that they “have acquired an aggressive temperament as a defense against predators, and aggressiveness cannot be turned on and off like a faucet. It is an integral part of the monkeys’ personalities, so deeply rooted that it makes them potential aggressors in every situation.” Thus the savanna baboon became, literally, a textbook example of life in an aggressive, highly stratified, male-dominated society. Yet in my observation of Forest Troop, I saw members of that same species demonstrate enough behavioral plasticity to transform their society into a baboon utopia.

The first half of the twentieth century was drenched in the blood spilled by German and Japanese aggression, yet only a few decades later it is hard to think of two countries more pacific. Sweden spent the 17th century rampaging through Europe, yet it is now an icon of nurturing tranquility. Humans have invented the small nomadic band and the continental megastate, and have demonstrated a flexibility whereby uprooted descendants of the former can function effectively in the latter. We lack the type of physiology or anatomy that in other mammals determine their mating system, and have come up with societies based on monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry. And we have fashioned some religions in which violent acts are the entrée to paradise and other religions in which the same acts consign one to hell. Is a world of peacefully coexisting human Forest Troops possible? Anyone who says, “No, it is beyond our nature,” knows too little about primates, including ourselves.

-- Robert M. Sapolsky, Ph.D., is the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biological Sciences and a professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University. He wrote the classic Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress Related Diseases and Coping. His most recent book is Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals. A longer version of this essay appeared in Foreign Affairs. We bring you this post thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine, a UC-Berkeley-based quarterly magazine that highlights ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism.

Interesting recent news:

For more on these news, and commentary:

The Frog who Croaked Blue

Synesthesia and the Mixing of the Senses

• By Jamie Ward

As little Edgar Curtis lay on his porch, he remarked to his mother how the noise of the rifle range was black, the chirp of the cricket was red, and the croak of the frog was bluish. Edgar, like many other people, has synesthesia - a fascinating condition in which music can have color, words can have taste, and time and numbers float through space.

Everyone will be closely acquainted with at least 6 or 7 people who have synesthesia but you may not yet know who they are because, until very recently, synesthesia was largely hidden and unknown. Now science is uncovering its secrets and the findings are leading to a radical rethink about how our senses are organized. In this timely and thought-provoking book, Jamie Ward argues that sensory mixing is the norm even though only a few of us cross the barrier into the realms of synesthesia.

How is it possible to experience color when no color is there? Why do some people experience touch when they see someone else being touched? Can blind people be made to see again by using their other senses? Why do scientists no longer believe that there are five senses? How does the food industry exploit the links that exist between our senses? Does synesthesia have a function? The Frog Who Croaked Blue explores all these questions in a lucid and entertaining way, making it fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in the intriguing workings of the mind.

ISBN: 9780415430135

Published April 18 2008 by Routledge.

Some great new editions of our favorite blog carnivals:

- Encephalon, Forthy-Third Edition: the best of recent neuroscience and psychology blog posts.

- Grand Rounds Volume 4, Number 30: superb overview of the health & medicine blogosphere.

- Carnival of HR #31: great resources for Human Resources professionals.

Here you are have the bi-monthly Digest of our most Popular blog posts. (Also, remember that you can subscribe to receive our blog RSS feed, or to our newsletter at the top of this page if you want to receive this digest by email).

Brain Fitness News and Events

Upcoming Events: I will be speaking at five Health, Education and Gaming events over the next couple of months to introduce findings from our recent market report. Please introduce yourself if you attend any of these events.

Preventing Memory Loss-Special Issue: Congressional Quarterly Researcher, one of the main publications on Capitol Hill, published an impressive 24-page special issue titled Preventing Memory Loss. Highly recommended if you want to be on top of the latest research trends and their policy implications.

Cognitive Health News: Round-up of interesting recent news on the cognitive health and fitness field. Baycrest opens a Centre for Brain Fitness with !10 million investment from Ontario Government. Potential uses for cognitive assessments. New brain games. 

Salon.com on "Brain Fitness": Salon.com publishes a mixed article on a software program that, in our view, confuses the forest from the trees.

Health, Wellness and Education

Selected Student Essays: we were glad to receive several great student essays on brain-related topics and selected three for publication-two on Ways to Reduce Alzheimer's Risks and one on Treatment Directions.

Social Connections for Cognitive Fitness: Mental fitness seems to depend in large part on being connected with other people, as shown in a recent study Mental Exercising Through Simple Socializing: Social Interaction Promotes General Cognitive Functioning (Ybarra, 2008) reviewed by Dr. Pascale Michelon.

Science

Peace Among Primates: neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky (thanks to our ongoing collaboration with Greater Good Magazine), shares two installments of a three-part series to reinforce how important culture is in shaping behaviors and overcoming genetic determinism. See installments One and Two.

Brain Books: Your Suggestions?: Last December we launched a stimulating Author Speaks Series to provide a platform for leading scientists and experts writing high-quality brain-related books to share their insights with SharpBrains' readers. Six authors have participated so far. Do you have any suggestions for more books? Let us know...

I will be speaking at the these upcoming conferences: if you are attending, please let me know!

>> Boston, April 28th, 2008: Panel on Latest Brain Research Trends, at the Learning and the Brain Conference.

>> Boston, April 29th, 2008: New Developments in Cognitive Retraining Technology, at the Innovation Institute.

>> Baltimore, May 9th, 2008:  The State of the Brain Fitness Market, at the Games for Health Summit.

>> San Francisco, May 15th, 2008: Cognitive and Emotional Training (Brain Fitness) for Healthy Aging, at the Institute on Aging's seminar on Brain Health Accross the Lifespan.  

>> San Jose, June 9th, 2008: Brain Fitness Trends and Assisted Living Communities, at the California Assisted Living Association Spring Conference.

A few days ago we published the first installment of this Peace Among Primates series, by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky. Today we publish the second installment. Next Saturday, April 19th, you can come back and read the third and final part in the series.

Peace Among Primates (Part 2)

Anyone who says peace is not part of human nature knows too little about primates, including ourselves.

--By Robert M. Sapolsky

Left behind

In the early 1980s, “Forest Troop,” a group of savanna baboons I had been studying—virtually living with—for years, was going about its business in a national park in Kenya when a neighboring baboon group had a stroke of luck: Its territory encompassed a tourist lodge that expanded its operations and, consequently, so did the amount of food tossed into its garbage dump. Baboons are omnivorous, and this “Garbage Dump Troop” was delighted to feast on leftover drumsticks, half-eaten hamburgers, remnants of chocolate cake, and anything else that wound up there. Soon they had shifted to sleeping in the trees immediately above the pit, descending each morning just in time for the day’s dumping of garbage. (They soon got quite obese from the rich diet and lack of exercise, but that is another story.) The development produced nearly as dramatic a shift in the social behavior of Forest Troop. Each morning, approximately half of its adult males would infiltrate Garbage Dump Troop’s territory, descending on the pit in time for the day’s dumping and battling the resident males for access to the garbage. The particular Forest Troop males who did this shared two traits: They were especially combative (which was necessary to get the food away from the other baboons), and they were not very interested in socializing (the raids took place early in the morning, during the hours when the bulk of a savanna baboon’s daily communal grooming occurs).

Soon afterward, tuberculosis, a disease that moves with devastating speed and severity in nonhuman primates, broke out in Garbage Dump Troop. Over the next year, most of its members died, as did all of the males from Forest Troop who had foraged at the dump. (Considerable sleuthing ultimately revealed that the disease had come from tainted meat in the garbage dump. There was little animal-to-animal transmission of the tuberculosis, and so the disease did not spread in Forest Troop beyond the garbage eaters.) The results were that Forest Troop was left with males who were less aggressive and more social than average, and the troop now had double its previous female-to-male ratio.

The social consequences of these changes were dramatic. There remained a hierarchy among the Forest Troop males, but it was far looser than before. Compared with other, more typical savanna baboon groups, high-ranking males rarely harassed subordinates and occasionally even relinquished contested resources to them. Aggression was less frequent, particularly against third parties. And rates of affiliative behaviors, such as males and females grooming each other or sitting together, soared. There were even instances, now and then, of adult males grooming each other—a behavior nearly as unprecedented as baboons sprouting wings.

This unique social milieu did not arise merely as a function of the skewed sex ratio (with half the males having died); other primatologists have occasionally reported on troops with similar ratios but without a comparable social atmosphere. What was key was not just the predominance of females but the type of male who remained. The demographic disaster—what evolutionary biologists term a “selective bottleneck”—had produced a savanna baboon troop quite different from what most experts would have anticipated.

But the largest surprise did not come until some years later. Female savanna baboons spend their lives in the troop into which they are born, whereas males leave their birth troop around puberty; a troop’s adult males have thus all grown up elsewhere and immigrated as adolescents. By the early 1990s, none of the original low aggression/high affiliation males of Forest Troop’s tuberculosis period was still alive; all of the group’s adult males had joined after the epidemic. Despite this, the troop’s unique social milieu persisted—as it does to this day, some 20 years after the selective bottleneck. In other words, adolescent males that enter Forest Troop after having grown up elsewhere wind up adopting the unique behavioral style of the resident males. As defined by both anthropologists and animal behaviorists, “culture” consists of local behavioral variations, occurring for nongenetic and nonecological reasons, that last beyond the time of their originators. Forest Troop’s low aggression/high affiliation society constitutes nothing less than a multigenerational benign culture.

Continuous study of the troop has yielded some insights into how its culture is transmitted to newcomers. Genetics obviously plays no role, nor apparently does self-selection: Adolescent males that transfer into the troop are no different from those that transfer into other troops, displaying on arrival similarly high rates of aggression and low rates of affiliation. Nor is there evidence that new males are taught to act in benign ways by the residents. One cannot rule out the possibility that some observational learning is occurring, but it is difficult to detect, given that the distinctive feature of this culture is not the performance of a unique behavior but the performance of typical behaviors at atypically extreme rates.

To date, the most interesting hint about the mechanism of transmission is the way recently transferred males are treated by Forest Troop’s resident females. In a typical savanna baboon troop, newly transferred adolescent males spend years slowly working their way into the social fabric; they are extremely low ranking—ignored by females and noted by adult males only as convenient targets for aggression. In Forest Troop, by contrast, new male transfers are inundated with female attention soon after their arrival. Resident females first present themselves sexually to new males an average of 18 days after the males arrive, and they first groom the new males an average of 20 days after they arrive, whereas normal savanna baboons introduce such behaviors after 63 and 78 days, respectively. Furthermore, these welcoming gestures occur more frequently in Forest Troop during the early post-transfer period, and there is four times as much grooming of males by females in Forest Troop as elsewhere. From almost the moment they arrive, in other words, new males find out that in Forest Troop, things are done differently.

At present, I think the most plausible explanation is that this troop’s special culture is not passed on actively but simply emerges, facilitated by the actions of the resident members. Living in a group with half the typical number of males, and with the males being nice guys to boot, Forest Troop’s females become more relaxed and less wary. (This is so, in part, because in a typical baboon troop, a male who loses a dominance interaction with another male will often attack a female in frustration.) As a result, they are more willing to take a chance and reach out socially to new arrivals, even if the new guys are typical jerky adolescents at first. The new males, in turn, finding themselves treated so well, eventually relax and adopt the behaviors of the troop’s distinctive social milieu.

(To be continued, in a third and final installment, on Saturday April 19th).

-- Robert M. Sapolsky, Ph.D., is the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biological Sciences and a professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University. He wrote the classic Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress Related Diseases and Coping. His most recent book is Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on O