Brilliant Blog

Infant Pathways to Language

Methods, Models, and Research Directions

• Edited by John Colombo, Peggy McCardle, Lisa Freund

The behavioral and brain sciences are faced with important new challenges at the beginning of the new millennium. The enormous progress in cognitive neuroscience, and the importance of genetic factors and gene-environment interactions in shaping behavioral functions in early childhood, have both underscored the primacy of early experience and development on brain development and function.

The contributors to this volume discuss different paradigms and approaches in infant language and cognition, pushing the frontiers of research by innovatively combining methods, introducing new measures, and demonstrating the use of technologies and measurement approaches that can inform the study of word learning and categorization, gaze, attention, gesture, and physiological functions. The volume offers a blend of theories and empirical evidence to support, refute, or modify them. Most chapters examine the link between theory and methodology, and their appearance together in a single volume serves to inform and engage multiple disciplines, to engage everyone to think across disciplines and paradigms, to embrace the integration of creativity and science as the field continues to study in greater depth and with innovative measures and approaches, the infant pathways to language

This volume is derived from presentations and discussions from a workshop, sponsored jointly by the Merrill Advanced Studies Center, University of Kansas, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Bethesda, Maryland.

ISBN: 9780805860634

Published September 05 2008 by Psychology Press.

Perspectives on Cognitive Task Analysis

Historical Origins and Modern Communities of Practice

• By Robert R. Hoffman, Laura G. Militello

This volume is the first comprehensive history of task analysis, charting its origins from the earliest applied psychology through to modern forms of task analysis that focus on the study of cognitive work. Through this detailed historical analysis, it is made apparent how task analysis has always been cognitive.

Chapters cover the histories, key ideas, and contributions to methodology of a number of communities of practice, including: Sociotechnics, European Work Analysis, Naturalistic Decision Making, Cognitive Systems Engineering, Ethnography, Human Factors. Further, integrative chapters focus on the purposes of cognitive task analysis.

It is shown how all the various communities of practice are living in the same scientific universe, though are in many ways distinctive in terms of their key concerns and main theories. It is a historiography of task analysis, and the people who invented task analysis. It is also an explanatory primer on what cognitive task analysis is all about and what it can do.

Perspectives on Cognitive Task Analyis will be of value to professionals in allied disciplines who might come to rely on cognitive task analysis in their system development programs. It will be invaluable to students who need to know what task analysis and cognitive task analysis are really all about. For practitioners of cognitive task analysis, this volume is a major presentation of what their scientific universe is all about.

ISBN: 9780805861402

Published September 05 2008 by Psychology Press.

Handbook of Child Language Disorders

• Edited by Richard G. Schwartz

The Handbook of Child Language Disorders provides an in-depth, comprehensive, and state-of-the-art review of current research concerning the nature, assessment, and remediation of language disorders in children. The book includes chapters focusing on specific groups of children (SLI, autism, genetic syndromes, dyslexia, hearing impairment); the linguistic, perceptual, genetic, neurobiological, and cognitive bases of these disorders; and the context of language disorders (bilingual, across dialects, and across languages). To examine the nature of deficits, their assessment and remediation across populations, chapters address the main components of language (morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) and related areas (processing, memory, attention, executive function such as reading and writing). Finally, even though there is extensive information regarding research and clinical methods in each chapter, there are individual chapters that focus directly on research methods.

This handbook is a comprehensive reference source for clinicians and researchers and can be used as a textbook for undergraduate, masters, and doctoral students in speech-language pathology, developmental psychology, special education, disabilities studies, neuropsychology and in other fields interested in children's language disorders.

ISBN: 9781841694337

Published September 04 2008 by Psychology Press.

Welcome to the 186th edition of the Carnival of Education, the weekly virtual gathering of dozens of bloggers to discuss all things education.

Q: Why do you say this edition is "brain-based"?
A: Because the Q&A frame we are using is inspired by how Chris at Ouroboros recently hosted Encephalon Brain and Mind blog carnival. (Is classic Greek making a comeback?).

Q: As educators, what inspires us to do what we do?
A: Tracy suggests, "Hope for the future".

Q: And what may happen in the future?
A: Eric proposes that the field can learn much about how athletes train their minds and bodies to maximize performance.

Q: What should not happen in the future?
A: Dave hopes we stop the Textbook Insanity, killing trees to create books not everyone uses.

Q: What comes first, subject or learner?
A: Bogusia has "switched sides". She now centers her teaching around her students, to make sure they appreciate the beauty of the subject.

Q: How do you know if something is developmentally appropriate? 
A: Science Goddess is still waiting for more of us to visit her blog and answer (btw, the visit is worth if only to admire her blog spectacular design).

Q: Should Social-Emotional Learning be part of academic curriculum?
A: Daniel introduces us to the research supporting that view.

Q: Why is NYC's city's graduation rate for ELLs so low?
A: Mary Ann shows that 45.5 percent in grades 8-12 were newcomers, who have to learn the language and the culture on top of the academic curriculum. (Note: I added "in grades 8-12" as a correction, to reflect Mary Ann's full quote accurately).
Q:  Now, are newcomers really motivated to learn and succeed?
A: Joanne responds that work is the motivator for low-income and working-class Mexican-American students, who want an education so they can get decent jobs, live in a safe neighborhood and drive a car that starts reliably.

Q: Who is the person behind Eduwonkette?
A: Jennifer Jennings, unmasked.

Q: Is college a waste of time and resources?
A: Dana reminds us that the goal of liberal arts education is to "enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom". Hence, she disagrees with  the thesis from Charles Murray's last book that asks for the substitution of the current system for a system of certification tests, modeled after the CPA (certified public accountant) test.

Q: Is the book Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism, by David Whitman, any good?
A: Carey likes much of the thought-provoking analysis and the focus on instilling self-discipline, but is turned off by the "paternalism" word.

Q:What does "paternalistic" really mean in this context?
A: Michael suggests "authoritative".

Q: Will Google revolutionize education by letting everyone write and access authoritative content for free?
A: Probably not. At least not with the knols initiative, Ben says.

Q: What does lifelong neurogenesis and neuroplasticity mean?
A: Let me show you these informational resources on the brain, begs Laurie.

Q: Is physical exercise  that important for lifelong learning and brain development?
A; It is. Exercising the body is exercising the mind, says Adrian.

Q: Is the US school funding system the most rational one?
A: Jim replies probably not, which may result, in Illinois, in a boycott and lawsuit.

Q: How old are you in Jupiter years?
A: Cherish doesn't know, and doesn't even what to know. But  she shows us how to calculate it (Government-Issued Warning: "All you need are the following: your age in earth days, the mass of sun and the distance between the planets and sun. And Math!")

Q: Is there really something called "egocentric spacial transformation"?
A: Indeed, Pascale assures us. Also called mental self-rotation. You can put the concept to practice with this brain teaser.

Q: Where do returning military veterans go and get their college education?
A: Darren is happy to report that Sacramento State is one good option.

Q: Why will 50% of today's teachers have left the profession 5 years from now?
A: Travis summarizes a number of reasons and offers recommendations to lower turnover.

Q: What happens in a typical First day of the school year?
A: Mister Teacher shows us.

Q: What does "The Road to heaven is Paved with Good intentions" mean?
A: Andrew provides an example.

Q: How can we improve South Carolina-Australia bilateral relations?
A: Technology can help improve communications among educators and students, says Pay.

Q: Is that Sales Rep your best friend?
A: Tweenteacheer, whose New Interactive Whiteboard will be delivered with a significant delay, warns us not to think so.

Q: How will video be integrated in classroom instruction?
A: First of all, by allowing educators use YouTube Videos, suggests Carol.

Q: Any new cool way to motivate my students?
A: Easy, says Larry. Use a game like Mia Cadaver’s Tombstone Timeout to create, within seconds, your private “virtual room” where only your students compete against each other.

Q: Has Open Court Reading been found to be effective ?
A: Matthew reports that Open Court doesn't have the research needed to qualify inclusion in the WhatWorks Clearinghouse.

Q: Can informal learning activities support school work?
A: Matt invites us to play Football. Sorry, soccer.

Q: Can you suggest other informal activities more closely aligned with academic standards?
A: Steve (the Mentos Geyser Experiment guy), has a few DIY ideas to improve science education.

Q: Does homeschooling make sense?
A: Suzanne reviews  Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense by David Guterson.

Q: Who is Marva Collins?
A: An inspiring school pioneer, Christine tells us.

Q: Can teachers walk on water?
A: Many do everyday. But asking them to walk across bricks as a team-building exercise may be going too far, says Betty.

Q: How can I contribute to future Carnival of Education editions?
A: Easy! Submit your posts using this form this handy submission form.

Have a great day!

As promised in my previous post on Neurogenesis and Brain Plasticity in Adult Brains, I will now list some interviews, video, articles, and books that go hand-in-hand with these fascinating topics we are discussing. Please comment below if you have favorite additional resources!

NEUROGENESIS

MIT news – Picower researcher finds neuron growth in adult brain

Society for Neuroscience brain brief – Adult Neurogenesis

BRAIN PLASTICITY

Neuroscience for Kids – Brain Plasticity: What Is It?

Society for Neuroscience brain brief – Brain Plasticity, Language Processing and Reading

Brain Science Podcast – Ginger Campbell interview with Norman Doidge, MD, discussing Neuroplasticity, and his book The Brain That Changes Itself

CBD Radio – Interview with Norman Doidge

Carol Dweck discussing "growth" versus "fixed" mindsets

Wired Science – Mixed Feelings – how the human brain can change

THE ADULT BRAIN

Brain Science Podcase – Ginger Campbell discussion of Elkonon Goldberg's book The Wisdom Paradox

Oregon Health & Science University – Brain Awareness – The Adult Brain

PBS – The Secret Life of the Brain – The Adult Brain

McGill University has an interesting timeline that traces the discovery of neuronal growth in adult brains. This is part of The Brain from Top to Bottom, "An interative Web site on the human brain and behavior"

EXERCISE

Brain Science Podcast – Ginger Campbell interview with John Ratey, discussing Exercise and the Brain and his book Spark

Johy Ratey speaking at Authors@Google

CREATIVITY • INNOVATION • CHANGE

Creatively Speaking – Sir Ken Robinson on The Power of the Imaginative Mind

Sir Ken Robinson's TED Talk – Do schools kill creativity?

Arnold Wasserman interview on SMARTBoard Lessons/PD to Go Episode 131 – Design & Innovation (interview begins about 1/2 into the podcast)

Laurie Bartels writes the Neurons Firing blog to create for herself the "the graduate course I’d love to take if it existed as a program". She is the K-8 Computer Coordinator and Technology Training Coordinator at Rye Country Day School in Rye, New York. She is also the organizer of Digital Wave annual summer professional development, and a frequent attendee of Learning & The Brain conferences.

BusinessWeek covers a best practice in a topic of growing importance: how large companies can retain older workers in productive ways beyond a set arbitrary retirement age.

Issue: Retiring Employees, Lost Knowledge (Business Week)
A pilot program at American Express gives soon-to-be retirees less work and more time to pass along their expertise to younger generations

- "Before long, the group made an important discovery: Not only would a huge number of employees become eligible for retirement in the next five to 10 years, the company had done little to retain the wealth of institutional knowledge they would be taking with them. From the intricacies of key client relationships to mainframe computer languages no longer being taught in school, many experienced workers possessed critical know-how that, if lost, would be costly—if not impossible—for the company to replace."

- "These parameters helped shape the American Express phased-retirement program, an initiative launched in pilot mode during the first quarter of 2008. Rather than retiring and leaving the company at once, participants gradually give up their day-to-day responsibilities, while replacing some of their free time with activities like mentoring and teaching master classes to their successors. In addition, they get more time out of the office doing whatever they want—be it planning for life in retirement or doing charity work. The phased retiree continues to receive a portion of his previous salary, benefits as usual, and the company in turn gets to hold on to some of its most valuable employees a year or more past traditional retirement age."

Comment: beautiful initiative. For an increasing number of workers, there is no real hard reason why retirement must happen at some arbitrary date, be it 60 or 65. American Express is looking for a win/ win arrangement, including coverage of very important health benefits.

For context on how older workers can remain productive in areas where they have accumulated significant experience, let's revisit some of the notes of my recent conversation with researcher Art Kramer:

Alvaro Fernandez: In any case, your study reinforces an important point: older brains can, and do, learn new skills.

Art Kramer: Yes. The rate of learning by older adults may be slower, and they may benefit from more explicit instruction and technology training, but, as a society, it is a massive waste of talent not to ensure older adults remain active and productive.

Another recent study we conducted, this one still under review, is titled Experience-Based Mitigation of Age-Related Performance Declines: Evidence from Air Traffic Control. It deals with the question: “Can Age Itself Be an Obstacle for someone to perform as an Air Controller? And the Answer is: age itself, within the age range that we studied, is not an obstacle. Our results suggest that, given substantial accumulated experience, older adults can be quite capable of performing at high levels of proficiency on fast-paced demanding real-world tasks.

PS: reader Catherine just helped us see and fix a typo in this post...thank you, Catherine!

Here are the dates and locations of some upcoming events where I will be presenting. Please introduce yourself if you are attending!

>> September 4-5th, San Francisco, CA: several Brain Health Promotion sessions, at the American Society on Aging conference.

>> October 11th, San Jose, CA: The Science and Practice of Brain Fitness, at San Jose State University's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. (Information here).

>> October 23rd, Pocatello, Idaho: Cognitive and Emotional Training for Healthy Aging, at the Idaho Conference on Health Care. (Information here).

>> November 1st, Berkeley, CA: The Science and Practice of Brain Fitness, at UC-Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. (Information here).

>> November 7-9th, Dubai: Global Agenda Councils Inaugural Summit in Dubai, organized by the World Economic Forum. (Information here).

>> November 17th, New York City: The Emerging Brain Fitness Field: Research and Implications, at New York Public Library.

>> December 5th, San Antonio, Texas: The Emerging Brain Fitness Field: Overview of Research and Tools, at the International Council on Active Aging conference. (Information here).

As always, I will share the main take-aways via this blog. I hope to meet some of you down the road!

There were a few interesting research papers presented at the last  American Psychological Association conventions around the theme:

Playing Video Games Offers Learning Across Life Span, Say Studies
Skills Transfer to Classroom, Surgical Procedures, Scientific Thinking (press release).

Probably the most interesting study was that of 303 laparoscopic surgeons, which "showed that surgeons who played video games requiring spatial skills and hand dexterity and then performed a drill testing these skills were significantly faster at their first attempt and across all 10 trials than the surgeons who did not the play video games first."

The note goes further to explain the implications from this research:

"The big picture is that there are several dimensions on which games have effects, including the amount they are played, the content of each game, what you have to pay attention to on the screen, and how you control the motions," said Gentile. "This means that games are not "good' or bad,' but are powerful educational tools and have many effects we might not have expected they could."

Very thoughtful quote. Please note a few elements about the study and the quote itself:

- "video games requiring spatial skills and hand dexterity": meaning, that precise type of videogame. Other types may have other effects on cognition, depending on, as the note says, "the content of each game", defining content as what players need to do in order to succeed at the game.
- "laparoscopic surgeons": it is clear that these are important skills for a surgeon and not so important, say, for an economist. Perhaps more economists should be playing Age of Empires?

-  "are powerful educational tools": yes, and in fact that is the premise of the Serious Games field, but there also an unspoken factor here: efficiency. If the main goal is entertainment, then the more hours of fun, the better. If the goal is a functional outcome (cognitive or real-life), then one would want the intervention that works in the least amount of time. In other words, could a videogame be specifically designed for laparoscopic surgeons to improve the cognitive skills they need most for their jobs, and would that be more efficient than spending X amount of hours playing a variety of general games? Probably, as you can explore in this interview with Prof. Daniel Gopher on cognitive simulations.

I apologize for the long delay in getting back to this column but I have a good excuse. We just recently had a baby, and boy, that takes care right there of the physical exercise need. Between carrying the baby upstairs and downstairs, running to get the baby, getting out of the bed and picking the baby up and putting the baby down a couple of times a night no you need not worry about getting your daily exercise dose in…Now, the majority of the answers to my post on the brain virtues of physical exercise suggests that most people think that the brain benefits of physical exercise are mostly to be understood as complementary effects of a healthy life style.

Is this correct? In my post today I will attempt to answer this question.

First, while generally healthier people seem to have healthier brains, the physical exercise effect on the brain seems to be independent of other things. One of the most important development in neuroscience was when the official dogma claiming that there was no neurogenesis (production of new brain cells) in the adult brain was toppled. Now we know that the brain is “plastic” meaning that, under the right circumstances, the brain can change in terms of both producing new cells and getting more cells connected to each other.

One of the places where neurogenesis has been shown to occur in the adult brain is the dentate gyrus, a strip of grey matter placed deep down in the brain. The dentate gyrus is a part of the hippocampus, the main memory structure, and has been shown to play a role in the forming of new memories. What can the dentate gyrus teach us with regards to physical exercise?

Following a series of extremely thought provoking experiments researchers from the Gage laboratory at UCSD concluded that exercise leads to the production of new brain cells in the dentate. First the researchers found that mice housed in an enriched environment (a larger cage with toys, tunnels, and more opportunity for physical activity, learning, and social interaction than in standard bare cage) have an increased number of new neurons in the dentate gyrus.

The enriched environment is a mice equivalent of not only healthy but good living: leisurely enjoying life, getting both physical and intellectual stimulation, socializing with friends. Now, the fact that new neurons were produced was a big enough news in itself but the Gage group did not stop there. Their next goal was to figure out if neurogenesis was the result of a sum of factors acting together (i.e. the enriched environment) versus a specific effect of individual factor. So, they first dissected the enriched environment in a number of “sub” environments. In their next experiment they placed the mice in a “learning environment” where they had access to a maze, a “physical exercise environment” where mice had unlimited access to a running wheel, in addition to enriched and standard (empty cage) environments. Then they compared the groups in terms of behavioral performance and eventually looked at their brains.

Their conclusion was anything but expected: while both enrichment and wheel running led to improved spatial memory function only physical exercise in a running wheel also promoted neurogenesis and enhanced the survival of newborn neurons in the dentate gyrus.

Bottom line: exercising seems to literally mean “exercising the brain”.

So, in lieu of conclusion, till next I wish you all happy trails (and I don’t mean it as just trails on the paper in a paper and pencil memory task)!

Adrian Preda, M.D. is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior in the UC Irvine School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior. His expertise in human behavior, psychology and spirituality is based on years of experience working as a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, teacher and researcher in a variety of academic clinical and non-clinical settings. He also teaches the UC Irvine Extension class The Mind that Changes the Brain: Wellness in the Second Millennium.
References:

van Praag H, Christie BR, Sejnowski TJ, Gage FH (1999) Running enhances neurogenesis, learning, and long-term potentiation in mice. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 96: 13427–13431

van Praag H, Kempermann G, Gage FH (1999) Running increases cell proliferation and neurogenesis in the adult mouse dentate gyrus. Nat Neurosci 2: 266–270.

Farmer J, Zhao X, van Praag H, Wodtke K, Gage FH, Christie BR (2004) Effects of voluntary exercise on synaptic plasticity and gene expression in the dentate gyrus of adult male Sprague-Dawley rats in vivo. Neuroscience 124: 71–79

Related reading:

- Physical Exercise and Brain Health

- Art Kramer on Why we Need Walking Book Clubs

Schools are beginning to offer an increasing number of courses in social and emotional intelligence, teaching students how to better understand their own emotions and the emotions of others.

It sounds warm and fuzzy, but it's a trend backed up by hard data. Today, new studies reveal that teaching kids to be emotionally and socially competent boosts their academic achievement. More precisely, when schools offer students programs in social and emotional learning, their achievement scores gain around 11 percentage points.

That's what I heard at a forum held last December by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). (Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of CASEL.) Roger Weissberg, the organization's director, gave a preview of a massive study run by researchers at Loyola University and the University of Illinois, which analyzed evaluations of more than 233,000 students across the country.

Social-emotional learning, they discovered, helps students in every way.

Their analysis reveals that students receiving lessons in social and emotional skills improved on every measure of positive behavior;such as classroom discipline, attendance, and liking school—and were less likely to engage in anti-social behavior, from bullying and fights to substance abuse. Among these students, there was also a drop in the number who were depressed, anxious, and alienated.

What's more, the study showed that the positive gains were biggest among "at-risk" kids, who are most likely to fail in their education. In the era of No Child Left Behind, where schools are rated on how well students score on standardized tests, that's a huge advantage for individual students and schools alike.

Teaching students skills like empathy, self-awareness, and how to manage distressing emotions makes them better learners, says Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin and a presenter at the CASEL forum. He pointed to data showing that when the brain's centers for distress are activated, they impair the functioning of the areas involved in memory, attention, and learning. In other words, because of the way our brains are wired, our emotions can either enhance or inhibit our ability to learn.

Courses in social and emotional learning also make great sense, Davidson argues, because of neuroplasticity—the fact that repeated experiences shape the brain. The more a child practices self-discipline, empathy, and cooperation, the stronger the underlying circuits become for these essential life skills.

These results don't surprise film director and producer George Lucas (of Star Wars fame), whose main philanthropic efforts focus on schools through the George Lucas Educational Foundation. (Editor's Note: Daniel Goleman is now conducting a great series of audio interviews, including one with George Lucas on Educating Hearts and Minds: Rethinking Education.)
Lucas sees social-emotional learning as vital to the future of education. As computers take over teaching raw knowledge to kids, teachers will have more time to help students with motivation, cooperation, and other elements of emotional intelligence. "Anybody who's an adult, working in the adult world, realizes that your ability to encourage other people, form groups, and get the best out of everybody is the secret to success," says Lucas, who I interviewed at the forum.

Lucas argues that learning must consist of more than just assigned reading and lectures. Instead, we must embed social and emotional lessons into the educational process, for example, by assigning students to work with others and grading the group on teamwork and emotional relationships with each other, as well as their individual achievement. "These are the things, ultimately in the real world, that are the main factors in getting hired and getting fired," says Lucas.

Research supports these observations. For example, when Claudio Fernando-Araoz, head of research for the executive recruitment firm Egon Zehnder International, looked at CEOs who had succeeded and those who had failed, he found the same pattern in America, Germany, and Japan: Those who failed were hired on the basis of their drive, IQ, and business expertise, but were fired for their lack of emotional intelligence. They simply could not win over, or sometimes even just get along with, their board of directors, or their direct reports, or others on whom their own success depended.

And yet, these human skills—how to get along, how to cooperate, how a group can exhibit emotional intelligence—are absent from the standard academic curriculum. As initiatives like CASEL—along with similar organizations, such as the Committee for Children and the Open Circle Program—spread social-emotional learning curricula to schools, I think we'll see more and more hard evidence that these programs are helping students succeed.

-- Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., is the author of the bestsellers Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence. His website is www.danielgoleman.info. Goleman’s full conversation with Daniel Siegel can be heard as part of the audio series Wired to Connect: Dialogues on Social Intelligence, available through More than Sound Productions.

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.

We are hosting here at SharpBrains the next editions of several great blog carnivals. If you blog about these topics, please submit your best recent posts using our Contact Us form:

- August 27th: Carnival of Education.

- September 9th: Carnival of Biogerontology.

- September 17th: Carnival of HR.

Enjoy the  weekend!

Good article on the August edition of Military Officer magazine:

Mental Floss (August 2008) (link opens a PDF-life document, you can read the text by Zooming In).

My 2 favorite quotes, both by Dr. Molly Wagster, chief of the Neuropsychology of Aging Branch, National Institute on Aging (NIA) in Bethesda, Md:

- "Certainly as we age there are declines with brain functions and cognition. But there's evidence that the aging brain can adapt and change more than we ever thought".

- "We don't know how it happens or how long changes last, but even in the face of these unanswered questions, there is the chance to maintain our cognitive function".

Let me add a  reflection: who among us won't be tomorrow one day older than he/she is today? The good news about the "aging brain" doesn't only refer to adults over 70!

To explore these concepts in more depth, you may enjoy visiting our Neuroscience Interview Series.

A couple of quick notes about our blog:

1- We have just added a Search box to allow you easily find content in our 600+ article archive. Take a look at the top of the right sidebar, and let us know if you have any feedback! Btw, feel free to say Thank You to our reader Luc...whose feedback gave a new impetus to this Search option.

2-  You will also find a button named BOOKMARK at the bottom of all blog posts, including this one. This allows you to easily submit blog posts to the social media sites where you have accounts: Facebook, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.ic.ious, you name it. We appreciate your help in letting more people know about our articles and teasers!

As always, any feedback is welcome.

After about age 50, most people begin to experience a decline in memory capability. Why is that? One obvious answer is that the small arteries of the brain begin to clog up, often as a result of a lifetime of eating the wrong things and a lack of exercise. If that lifetime has been stressful, many neurons may have been killed by stress hormones. Given the most recent scientific literature, reviewed in my book Thank You, Brain, For All You Remember. What You Forgot Was My Fault, dead neurons can’t be replaced, except in the hippocampus, which is fortunate for memory because the hippocampus is essential for making certain kinds of memories permanent. Another cause is incipient Alzheimer’s disease; autopsies show that many people have the lesions of the disease but have never shown symptoms, presumably because a lifetime of exceptional mental activity has built up a “cognitive reserve.”

So is there anything you can do about it besides exercise like crazy, eat healthy foods that you don’t like all that much, pop your statin pills, and take up yoga?

Yes. In short: focus, focus, focus.

Changing thinking styles can help. Research shows that older people tend to have lost some of their ability to pay attention, which fortunately can be improved if they work at it. More specifically, older people tend to have difficulty in ignoring distractions and irrelevant stimuli. Distractions and a reduced ability to focus disrupt the consolidation process that converts working memory into long-lasting form.

In one study of this aging problem, a typical group of trials involved presenting a picture of a face for about a second, a picture of a scene for about a second, then a picture of another face for about a second, and then another picture of a different scene for about a second.  Then after a nine-second delay a picture was presented and the subject was instructed to press a button to indicate whether the stimulus matched one of the previously presented stimuli. In other words, the subject had to suppress the memory of irrelevant stimuli. In this study (Gazzaley, A.  et al.  2005) the investigators went beyond behavioral assessment of the responses, because that kind of thing had been done before.  What they wanted to know was what was happening in the brain during this suppression of irrelevant task. They used functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) imaging over a region of brain that was responsive to the visual images.  What was being measured was the amount of brain activity under conditions when the instructions were to remember a type of image or ignore it.  What they found was that brain activity in all of the young subjects increased when they were viewing scenes they were asked to remember and decreased when presented with an image that they were supposed to have ignored. That is, the brain suppressed its response to irrelevant stimuli.  Many older participants, however, were unable to suppress brain activity when presented with stimuli that they had been asked to ignore.  So what these data suggest is that older individuals have difficulty in ignoring irrelevant or distracting information that is contained in working memory.  But let us not come away with the conclusion that memory deficits in the elderly are inevitable, when in fact in this study nearly half of the elderly showed no deficit. 

In a study at the University of Illinois (Fabiani, M. et al. 2006.), researchers recorded brain electrical responses in young adults and old subjects (65-78) who were passively listening to bursts of sound that contained a base frequency of 500 cycles per second, with superimposed higher frequencies at lower amplitude. Sound volume was adjusted to the hearing threshold for each subject. Sound was presented while subjects were instructed to concentrate on reading a book and to ignore the sound bursts. Four bursts were delivered with variable silent intervals. The brain registered the memory of each burst in the size of the evoked electrical response. The repetition of sound burst was expected to induce suppression of the sound-evoked electrical response to later bursts in the train, while the silent interval was expected to allow for recovery as the memory of a preceding burst decays. By varying the interval, researchers could evaluate the decay process.

Results revealed that the electrical responses persisted longer in older people, but the effects of delay interval were the same irrespective of age. Since age did not seem to affect memory decay, one is left to conclude that the brains of older subjects were less able to inhibit the sound burst distractions. The good news for the elderly is that age does not make you forget any faster. It does, apparently, make you more distractible.

Such studies should probably also be done in children, who I would suspect are more like older people in being less able to inhibit distractions.

A study at the University of Toronto (Grady, C. L. et al. 2006.) used MRI imaging of people while they performed a variety of memory tasks, both during encoding and recognition. They found an age-related increase in activity in brain areas that normally decrease during task performance. This is interpreted to indicate that these areas normally do not respond during a memory task because the brain is paying attention to the task and assigning the memory work only to the parts of brain that need to process the memory. However, another interpretation is that as you get older, your brain has to recruit more help from other parts of the brain. A related finding of the research was an age-related decrease of activity in brain areas that normally become activated during the memory task. The researchers thought that this finding indicated an age-related decline in ability to distinguish task-related demands from those that were irrelevant. It could also be that as you age, the circuits that are normally needed to handle memory are less capable. However you look at it, the findings document an age-related decline in the brain's ability to focus its neural resources on memory tasks. What may be most troublesome to contemplate is that the brain activity-pattern changes showed signs of decline around age 40.

So, what do we do about attention deficit? One possibility is that by keeping our brain working hard as we age, we might reduce this tendency to lose ability to handle memory workload. Think of it like exercise for the brain, which strengthens the neural circuits in the parts of the brain that have to distinguish irrelevant from relevant information in memory tasks and those parts of the brain that have to do the memory work. Another general strategy is to reduce the distractions in our life, at least distractions that are present when we are trying to remember something. Multi-tasking is hard enough to do when you are young. That ability probably declines markedly as you get older. On those occasions when I forget what I opened the refrigerator door for, it is always because I let myself get distracted between the time I decided what I wanted and the time when I opened the door. Obviously, older people (and children) need to work at paying attention, disciplining the brain to concentrate. Second, since they are so distractible, information should be absorbed in smaller, more manageable chunks. By lowering the memory demand, the brain’s limited resources can deal with it more effectively.

--- W. R. (Bill) Klemm, D.V.M., Ph.D. Scientist, professor, author, speaker As a professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University, Bill has taught about the brain and behavior at all levels, from freshmen, to seniors, to graduate students to post-docs. His recent books include Thank You, Brain, For All You Remember. What You Forgot Was My Fault and Core Ideas in Neuroscience.

Sources:

- Fabiani, M. et al. 2006. Reduced suppression or labile memory? Mechanisms of inefficient filtering of irrelevant information in older adults. J. Cognitive Neuroscience. 18 (4): 637-650.

- Gazzaley, A.  et al.  2005. Top-down suppression deficit underlies working memory impairment in normal aging.  Nature Neuroscience. 8: 1298-1300.

- Grady, C. L. et al. 2006. Age-related changes in brain activity across the adult lifespan. J. Cognitive Neuroscience. 18:227-241.

Interesting market news:

Dakim’s [m]Power Adopted by 150 Senior Living Communities ... (Business Wire)

- "Dakim Inc. announced today that its [m]Power® Cognitive Fitness System has now been adopted by more than 150 senior living communities"

- "Users include Sunrise Senior Living, Front Porch Communities, Diakon Lutheran Services, Ecumen, Eskaton, Benchmark Assisted Living, and Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging. Several neurologists and a local Alzheimer’s Association chapter office have also purchased the system."

- “Other products are static. You buy a CD, put it in the computer, and that’s it. People get bored and stop using them. Dakim has found a way to keep people coming back to challenge their ability, and that’s what our residents are doing.” (said said Douglas Edwards, Director of Fund Development for Westminster Gardens in Duarte, California, part of the Southern California Presbyterian Homes)

Comment: senior living is one of the obvious areas where computerized cognitive training (or "brain fitness programs") has a brighter future to complement and enhance existing health and wellness programs in scalable ways, as we covered in our Market Report. We are no longer surprised by the weekly press releases announcing a new "brain fitness center" in community XYZ. Now, what I find interesting is that last quote by Douglas Edwards, which I interpret as a direct commentary on the Posit Science Brain Fitness program, the other leading vendor for the senior living communities market.

For related articles,

- Report Highlights: including our estimate of 400 residential facilities offering these kind of tools by end of 2007

- 10-Question Evaluation Checklist: for anyone considering buying a program

- Build Your Cognitive Reserve-Yaakov Stern: interview with a leading Cognitive Reserve researcher, on the potential value and limitations of computerized "brain fitness programs".

Just read an article on clean tech, including a couple of quotes by Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr suggesting that

"Remember the Internet? Green tech is bigger... This could be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century"

because

"Energy is the mother of all markets".

Well, if Energy is the mother of all markets...who would be the father of all markets?

The Human Brain, perhaps?

So, I may both agree and disagree with John Doerr: yes, clean tech should be bigger than the Internet, and perhaps the biggest economic opportunity in the next 10-15 years...but BrainTech, technologies aimed at helping our brains be more productive and sustainable throughout their lifespans, may become the biggest opportunity of the 21st century. We'll see.

Where does our “Feeling of Knowing” come from? Have you ever felt certain that you knew an answer even though you couldn’t think of it right off? Where does that “feeling of knowing” come from? The answer to this question is the focus of neurologist Robert Burton’s new book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not.

I recently reviewed Dr. Burton’s book on the Brain Science Podcast and last week I had the opportunity to interview him for the show. He explained that one of the origins for his book was his experience with patients with conditions like Cotard’s syndrome (where the patient thinks he is dead or does not exist). What Dr. Burton calls the “feeling of knowing” is so strong that people consistently trust it even when their beliefs contradict the evidence. At first it might seem surprising that this feeling is generated at an unconscious level in our brain, yet the same sort of processing creates the world we see and hear. It is well-known that what we see is not what enters our eyes, but rather a highly processed signal that is actually partly determined by our expectations. We can’t really control what we see, and similarly we do not have any conscious access to, or control over, the “feeling of knowing.” Keep that in mind then next time you can’t convince a friend to change their opinion.

One implication of this idea is that it argues for trying to be more tolerant of those whose beliefs are different from our own. However, it also has an important implication for brain health. Recently it is has become quite popular to tout programs that claim to improve one’s intuition or ability to access gut feelings. While it might be true that one can learn to become more aware of the emotional signals coming from one’s body, Dr. Burton argues that “gut feelings” or intuition should not be assumed to be true without testing.

This is difficult to accept because the emotional weight of the “feeling of knowing” tends to outweigh our attempts at logical reasoning. However by becoming aware that our intuitions and hunches are generated by the brain, we can also learn to subject them to the same scrutiny that we apply to optical illusions. We can’t control the “feeling of knowing,” but we can become aware of how it effects our behaviors and decisions.

Links:

- Brain Science Podcast #42: Dr. Campbell discusses On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not by Robert Burton.

- Brain Science Podcast #43: Interview with Dr. Robert A Burton. (Note: a complete transcript of this interview is now available.)

- Robert Burton’s new book: On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not.

Ginger Campbell, MD graduated from the University of Alabama School of Medicine. She also has a Master's Degree in Biomedical Engineering and spent several years teaching at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Dr. Campbell has been practicing emergency medicine since 1992. She started the Brain Science Podcast in 2006. Her goal is to help general audiences understand how recent discoveries in neuroscience are unraveling the mysteries of how our brains make us who we are.

If interested in the topic on intuition vs. logic, you may also enjoy this related essay:

- To Think or to Blink?, by Madeleine Van Hecke.

Chris hosts a superb edition of Encephalon, presenting the articles as an engaging and pretty comprehensive Q&A session. If you want to read the answers, to the questions below, by some of the best neuroscience and psychology bloggers, simply visit Encephalon 52: Q&A.

Q: What is the relationship between neurogenesis and depression?

Q: For that matter, is there a relationship between depression and diabetes?

Q: What is the molecular basis of bipolar disorder?

Q: Can brain stimulation make you a better driver?

Q: What is the perceptual defect underlying tone deafness?

Q: What determines plasticity in the visual cortex?

Q: Can we do anything to control our own brain’s plasticity?

Q: Are concepts encoded in single neurons?

Q: Speaking of dear old granny, how are social attachments encoded in the brain?

Q: Should you smoke pot? (Actually: What are the effects of the various active ingredients in cannabis?)

Q: Does culture determine the neural substrates of cognition?

Q: Why do we sleep?

Q: Is there a correlation between the percent coverage of women’s bodies by clothes, and the hours of coverage they receive on television? If so, is that correlation positive or negative?

Again, answers to those questions at Encephalon 52: Q&A.

The article Clumsy kids more likely to become obese adults: study (CBC)...

- "The study was based on tests of about 11,000 people in Britain who were tested for hand control, co-ordination and clumsiness at age seven and 11, and were then followed until age 33."

- "Prof. Scott Montgomery of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and his colleagues at Imperial College London in England said they purposely chose measurements of fine hand control such as picking up matches, rather than those likely to be influenced by participating in sports, such as catching balls."

- "While it is often assumed that the cognitive impairments seen in adult obesity are a consequence of excess weight, that could be putting the chicken before the egg, the researchers say"

...reminds me of Judith Beck's words on how to "Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person"

- "The main message of cognitive therapy overall, and its application in the diet world, is straight-forward: problems losing weight are not one’s fault. Problems simply reflect lack of skills--skills that can be acquired and mastered through practice. Dieters who read the book or workbook learn a new cognitive or behavioral skill every day for six weeks. They practice some skills just once; they automatically incorporate others for their lifetime."

- "That is exactly my goal: to show how everyone can learn some critical skills. The key ones are:"

- "1) How to motivate oneself. The first task that dieters do is to write a list of the 15 of 20 reasons why they want to lose weight and read that list every single day."

- "2) Plan in advance and self-monitor behavior. A typical reason for diet failure is a strong preference for spontaneity. I ask people to prepare a plan and then I teach them the skills to stick to it."

- "3) Overcome sabotaging thoughts. Dieters have hundreds and hundreds of thoughts that lead them to engage in unhelpful eating behavior. I have dieters read cards that remind them of key points, e.g., that it isn’t worth the few moments of pleasure they’ll get from eating something they hadn’t planned and that they’ll feel badly afterwards; that they can’t eat whatever they want, whenever they want, in whatever quantity they want, and still be thinner; that the scale is not supposed to go down every single day; that they deserve credit for each helpful eating behavior they engage in, to name just a few."

- "4) Tolerate hunger and craving. Overweight people often confuse the two. You experience hunger when your stomach feels empty. Craving is an urge to eat, usually experienced in the mouth or throat, even if your stomach is full."

 

A problem like the obesity epidemic is, no doubt, a result of many factors, where chicken and egg are often mixed. What matters, though, is how to set up public health policies and specific plans that take into account the Cognitive dimension: if people cannot regulate their own eating and exercise habits, half the battle is lost.