“We Didn’t Start the Scanner” …
a three-minute history of cognitive neuroscience sung to Billy Joel … with lyrics so you can sing along!
Winner of the ‘ICN Brains on Film’ Competition 2012 at University College London.
Music and film by Jake Fairnie and Anna Remington.
Source: neurons.wordpress.com
“What is it about animation, graphics, illustrations that create meaning?”
— Tom Wujec
Diffusion spectrum MRI image of the human brain showing three dimensional grid structure of white matter tracts. From Wedeen, et al (2012).
This is the first time I’ve seen one of these connectome maps overlaid on a brain image. Context is everything!
Source: neuroimages
Nothing is easier than to familiarize one’s self with the mammalian brain. Get a sheep’s head, a small saw, chisel, scalpel and forceps (all three can best be had from a surgical-instrument maker), and unravel its parts either by the aid of a human dissecting book, such as Holden’s Manual of Anatomy, or by the specific directions ad hoc given in such books as Foster and Langley’s Practical Physiology (Macmillan) or Morrell’s Comparative Anatomy, and Guide to Dissection (Longman & Co.).
Source: ebooks.adelaide.edu.au
Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)
Quoted in James Gleick, The Information: a history, a theory, a flood (2011), which I am greatly enjoying
Frederick Bartlett was there first. In 1917, the British psychologist began reading his undergraduates a made up folk tale about a river battle involving Indians from “Egulac.” A few days later, he asked the students to repeat the story. To Bartlett’s surprise, the tale had been utterly transformed in the telling. While the subjects routinely omitted irrelevant details, they almost always inserted a didactic moral. In other words, they misremembered the story until it made sense. Based on his research, Bartlett concluded that the standard view of human memory – it’s a vast repository of stable facts – was completely wrong. “Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces,” he wrote. “It is an imaginative reconstruction.
Source: Wired
One of the first watercolors for the book! Unlocking the Right Brain will features images made with a mix of traditional and digital techniques.
Quite a lovely brain illustration! Even better, the type in the book will be printed letterpress!
— Visual Turn
Source: rightbrainbook
Why Aren't We Smarter Already? Evolutionary Limits On Cognition
We put a lot of energy into improving our memory, intelligence, and attention. There are even drugs that make us sharper, such as Ritalin and caffeine. But maybe smarter isn’t really all that better. A new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, warns that there are limits on how smart humans can get, and any increases in thinking ability are likely to come with problems.
— ScienceDaily
Source: sciencedaily.com
Human Brains Unlikely to Evolve Into a 'Supermind' as Price to Pay Would Be Too High
Human minds have hit an evolutionary “sweet spot” and — unlike computers — cannot continually get smarter without trade-offs elsewhere, according to research by the University of Warwick.
— ScienceDaily
Source: sciencedaily.com
What we learned is that when it comes to the brain and cooperation, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts,” said Fortune, of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “We found that the brain of each individual participant prefers the combined activity over his or her own part.
It takes two: Brains come wired for cooperation, neuroscientists discover (via wildcat2030)
If vertebrate “brains come wired for cooperation,” as reported in this research, why is it that students so often resist working in groups? The answer is simple: schooling and other mechanisms of our culture have taught us to prefer to behave independently rather than cooperatively. Most teachers reward individual effort and discourage cooperative behavior, and our students come to expect this as normal. So your cooperative activity is going against the conditioning your students have received for the past dozen years or so. It’s going to take a lot more than one activity in one course in one semester for students to unlearn what they have been taught, even if they originally may have been predisposed for cooperation.
(via infoneer-pulse)
Source: sciencedaily.com
We ‘see’ through one eye at a time
A study indicates that humans gather visual information by shifting attention to one eye or the other, while the brain combines the incoming visual information so that the mind thinks it sees with both eyes at once.
“Maybe there are binocular neurons in the brain” — neurons that take in and collate information from both eyes — “that also know which eye that information is coming from and can feed back to that eye,” University of Minnesota researcher Peng Zhang said.
TV commercials are annoying. TV commercials for insurance companies are annoying squared. TV commercials for Progressive Insurance featuring the ever-perky Flo character are annoying cubed.
So I totally surprised myself by laughing out loud when I looked up at the TV and caught part of this commercial. Even with the sound off the gag still worked. I was still laughing when I typed a search into YouTube to locate the commercial. Yes, I went looking to watch a commercial purely for its entertainment value, even though the commercial franchise is one that makes my hair stand on end. In this case, that was part of the gag.
Producers know a large number of TV viewers turn the sound off for commercials, and work hard to make the video communicate the message even without an audio track. Since TV commercials are usually created by a storyboard, it is often the case that the commercial IS the visuals, and that the audio is secondary. This is the case with most Flo commercials, since the audio consists mostly of banal chit-chat between Flo and her customers (or so I’ve been told). With the exception of commercials based on jingles — which saw their heydey 50 years ago and are used today almost exclusively when a radio buy is also part of the advertising campaign — few commercials today rely on audio to carry the message. TV is a visual medium (gee … ya think?), but even more importantly, we live in a visual world where advertising competes for space in our kaleidoscopic visual field across broadcast TV, cable, print and outdoor advertising, Internet, and increasingly on mobile devices.
I’m sure advertisers think in terms of devices, demographics, markets, and all the rest, but one of the reasons visual advertising is so seductive is because of how our brains work. The visual cortex is the largest system in the human brain, and it is not just a mental home theater system. It is deeply connected with systems throughout the brain involved in cognition, emotion, and motor activity. The visual system is a highly complex and adaptive system, not designed simply to accurately reconstruct the visual characteristics of the external world (strictly speaking, everything the eye sees is “external,” even when it is part of our own bodies). If that is all the visual system was required to do, it would not require nearly as much horsepower as it does. Instead, the visual system actively constructs the world it sees from immediate sensory input combined with prior experience in an elaborately choreographed dance with other brain systems to create a meaningful interpretation of what is seen. If you have ever struggled to make sense of an optical illusion, you have experienced the power of the visual system to perform its ultimate task of interpretation. Seeing is the easy part. Understanding is hard.
So how did I get sucked in to Flo’s gag? It’s because this commercial is scripted differently from most Flo commercials. Instead of featuring Flo immediately to establish a connection with all prior Flo commercials, the only visual hint in the first 15 seconds of the spot that this is another episode with Flo is the bright white lighting and the studio set with shelves of familiar blue “packages” of insurance, but this time shown at a hazy distance.
Instead the camera observes a scene familiar to anyone who has ever been on a group motorcycle ride: bikes and riders of various descriptions rolling into frame and stopping side by side, as kickstands touch the ground marking the end of a long ride. As helmets are doffed one by one, men and women expose the rider’s badge of honor: wildly unruly helmet hair.
Flo is not seen at all until 0:16 of the 0:30 spot, and even then it is not until 0:18 that the familiar red lips and dark hair clearly establish her character’s identity. Even as she removes her helmet to reveal her perfect makeup and makes a quick glance in the mirror to fluff her perfect hair, her spiky-haired male and female comrades look on with envy. “Perfect hair … every time,” one male sportbike rider — with short but nonetheless disheveled hair — utters with amazement, while a female rider with shoots Flo a “how did she do that?” look from under her own tousled mane.
So I get sucked into the gag because I ride motorcycles, I like looking at motorcycles, and I make an immediate emotional connection as the riders in the commercial enact a scene that’s part of everyday experience for the target audience of this motorcycle insurance commercial. While my emotional system is activated by the connections my mind makes to memories of my own similar experiences, the sight of the lighting and the set begin to recall associations with the series of commercials. My mind unconsciously connects the familiar feeling of satisfaction at the end of a ride with the familiar context of the advertiser and its product.
Helmets come off while one bike in the scene slowly rolls to a stop — notably a bike painted in the sponsor’s signature color blue. I start picking up the set-up and my mind starts to imagine (or more accurately, construct) the possibilities of where this is heading. It is precisely at this point that even though I know I find Flo absolutely irritating, there’s a payoff coming that I know I don’t want to miss. The least satisfying outcome would be to have Flo step up from behind the shelves and engage in chit-chat with her bike-straddling clientele about the virtues of affordable insurance coverage. Better, I might get to see Flo appear from under a helmet as disheveled as her companions, which would certainly be a kick. But before I can even articulate those possibilities, I realize I’m already anticipating exactly what makes this gag so funny. Flo arrives on her own beautiful bike with nary a hair out of place, which is as funny as it is improbable. The reaction shots of the other bikers with their hair standing on end turns my giggle into a belly laugh.
So you got me, Progressive, but I enjoyed it, and got a chance to think a little bit about how hard the mind works make sense of the continuous stream of data that arrive at our sensory doors. If our visual system were just for seeing, there would have been no reason to laugh. Laughter is a uniquely human trait, and humor exists only because the human mind is capable of doing more than just seeing — it is capable of understanding.
Neurons: Animated Cellular and Molecular Concepts
This is a really great illustrated (free!) online textbook of sorts that describes the basic neuron, from its anatomy to ion channels and neurotransmitter activity. The 8 chapters listed are:
- Anatomy of a Neuron
- Axonal Transport
- Ions and Ion Channels
- Resting Membrane Potential
- Action Potential
- Neurotransmitter Release
- Postsynaptic Mechanisms
- Removal of Neurotransmitter
Each section has illustrations and diagrams to help supplement your studies! Whether you want to start your foundation in neuroscience or give it a small refresher, definitely bookmark this resource.
Source: fuckyeahneuroscience
Natural brain state is primed to learn | New Scientist
STUDYING for an exam? Begin by thinking your way into a learning state.
Until now, neuroscientists have focused on identifying parts of the brain that are active during learning. “But no one has looked at the preparedness state,” says John Gabrieli at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The idea is to identify before the event whether the brain is prepared to be a learner.”
Gabrieli and his colleagues used functional MRI scanning to monitor the naturally fluctuating brain activity of 20 volunteers and investigate whether the brain enters such a learning state. While in the scanner, each person was presented with 250 images, one at a time, and asked to memorise them. The volunteers were shown the images again 2 hours later - mixed in with 250 new ones - and asked to remember which they had seen before.
Looking through the results, the team was surprised to find that in the moments before individuals were shown images that they later remembered, they had low levels of activity in the parahippocampal place area - a region of the brain that is known to be highly active during learning. “Maybe the fact that this region was less active meant that the deck was cleared - that it was more open for a stimulus to provoke a response,” suggests Gabrieli.
To investigate further, the team attempted to boost subsequent participants’ memory test scores by presenting them with images only when they showed this pattern of brain activity. “There was around a 30 per cent improvement in the memory task,” Gabrieli says.
Original paper here.
This will be a fascinating line of research to follow. What conditions create that state of readiness in the first place? What conditions inhibit it? How could we identify this kind of readiness behaviorially? While it would be premature to draw conclusions about how this applies to classroom practice, it certainly does raise some interesting possibilities about what activities do (or do not) promote this state of readiness.
Source: fuckyeahneuroscience
Working memory: "the bottleneck is not in the remembering, it is in the perceiving"
That quote is probably the most important sentence I have read in a year.
Working memory refers to the number of things a person can actively hold in memory at once, such as numbers or colors. Most people can remember about four things at once, and some can remember more.
MIT neuroscientists have found that the limitations on working memory do not come from limitations on remembering. Instead they come from how many things can be accurately perceived at once. We bump up against limits in visual perception in the process of encoding things into working memory even before we try to recall those things.
It gets better. The study also found that we do not have a working memory, but actually have working memories — two of them — one in each of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The researchers concluded that the typical limit of four items in working memory at once was actually a limit of two items in the working memory of each of the two hemispheres.
“The fact that we have different capacities in each hemisphere implies that we should present information in a way that does not overtax one hemisphere while under-taxing the other,” said Timothy Buschman, the researcher who conducted the study.
I’ve been aware of the limits of working memory, and how this impacts the design of learning content in instructional technology, from research by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer. The two ideas from Buschman’s study, though, raise some interesting additional questions.
What does it mean to balance the cognitive load between the left and right hemispheres? How should the visual design of instructional content reflect this idea? What could be done in content presentation that might increase the capacity or accuracy for visual perception in each hemisphere? How does pedagogy change if we recognize that perception is more important than recall in the capacity of working memory?
We already know that content delivered simultaneously through multiple modalities — such as visual and auditory — can increase the capacity of working memory. Does working memory related to other modalities also function as a dual system? Could this mean we actually have four (or more) distinct working memories that operate as an integrated system?
Education focuses so heavily on recall and pays so little attention to perception. This suggests that we really ought to consider whether we have things backwards.
