Brain Wave

Kraft's hostile takeover bid for Cadbury inspires serious action

BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND - DECEMBER 15: An employee of Cadbury, dressed as a Gorilla which recently featured in a Cadbury advertising campaign, joins workers to show their support for Cadbury as they and their union Unite launch their campaign to protect the company's independence on December 15, 2009 in Birmingham, England. The historic confectioner is facing a hostile bid from food company Kraft. Workers and members of the union Unite held a meeting today and urged shareholders to resist selling up and to keep the compnay in British hands. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images) Content © 2009 Getty Images All rights reserved.

Lambert wasn't the champion, but he might sing 'We Are the Champions'

Reuters reported: "American Idol" runner-up Adam Lambert's performance with rock band Queen on the finale of the TV singing contest this week has the British band thinking about a new front man.

Imagine the "American Idol" runner-up singing, "We Are the Champions."

If that happened, no one could say that runner-up bit the dust.

Will he perform with the right "Body Language"?

Maybe if he has "One Vision."

(Comments are open: what other Queen lyrics apply to Lambert?)

 

Academic Degrees versus Professional Certifications

Charles Murray, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

"Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:

"First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."

"You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.

"Finding a better way should be easy. The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes.

"Outside a handful of majors -- engineering and some of the sciences -- a bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.

"The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree."

(Emphasis added.)

Read Murray's full argument here.

Researchers' view of the brain is changing

A recent column by David Brooks addressed changes in how researchers are understanding the brain; he summed it up in easy-to-understand language:

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

CDC, two universities to conduct research on ADHD among school children

A division of the Centers for Disease Control has awarded two cooperative agreements to universities for research on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder among school-aged children.

The University of South Carolina and the University of Oklahoma received the cooperative agreements from the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.

The population-based research will focus on the prevalence of ADHD among school children; secondary conditions in school children with ADHD; past and present treatment patterns for children with ADHD; and related matters.

Robert E. McKeown, Ph.D., will be the principal investigator at the University of South Carolina; Mark L. Wolraich, M.D., will be the principal investigator at the University of Oklahoma.

Source: CDC press release

University of Missouri researcher testing neurofeedback for autistic children

Playing a video game called ‘Space Race’ that requires nothing more than brainpower to make rockets on a computer screen move forward is more than just fun and games. A University of Missouri researcher is using video games to see if the brainwaves of children with autism can be ‘retrained’ to improve focus and concentration.

“We are trying to awaken their brains. Often children with autism disconnect and we want to use neurofeedback to teach them how it feels to pay attention and be more alert. We want to teach them to regulate their own brain function,” said Guy McCormack, chair of the occupational therapy and occupational science department in the MU School of Health Professions. “The ultimate goal is to lay down new neural pathways and, hopefully, see changes in focus and attention span, social interaction, improved sleep, and appetite.”

Neurofeedback is a way of observing how the brain works from moment to moment. While the children play the video games, their concentration and focus are rewarded by movements on the screen and special sounds. If attention wanes, the rocket on the screen slows, sounds stop and the color changes until more attention is given to the image. As this occurs, researches watch another screen that monitors brainwave activity. The brainwave activity is measured by placing sensors on the scalp.

“The more neurofeedback training given to a child with autism, the more often the correct brain pathways are used and the stronger they become. It’s like a ‘tune-up’ for a brain that is out of sync,” McCormack said. “The brain has a lot of plasticity and, as children continue this training, it becomes engrained and spills into other parts of their lives.”

Neurofeedback technology was designed by NASA for flight simulations. It also is used to help high-powered executives achieve peak performance and to help athletes train their brains to ‘get into a zone.’

“The aim of neurofeedback is to enable children to consciously control their brainwave activity by being rewarded for their ability to focus,” McCormack said. “Neurofeedback can be compared to physical conditioning for the brain.”

McCormack says a body of evidence already exists that has found the use of neurofeedback training helps with other neurological disorders such as traumatic brain injuries, strokes, seizures, depression, anxiety disorders, alcoholism and premenstrual syndrome.

The Sinquefield Charitable Foundation gave $213,511 to fund McCormack’s study of neurofeedback for treatment of autism. The study is being conducted at the MU Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders.

Sources: Science Daily and the University of Missouri

Make new ruts, keep the old, one is silver & the other's gold: habits to habitually improve

"[B]rain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

"Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives."

Read the full New York Times article here.

Dyslexia: It's not your brain, it's your language, new research reveals

From an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal:

Studies of schoolchildren who read in varying alphabets and characters suggest that those who are dyslexic in one language, say Chinese or English, may not be in another, such as Italian.

Dyslexia, in which the mind scrambles letters or stumbles over text, is twice as prevalent in the U.S., where it affects about 10 million children, as in Italy, where the written word more closely corresponds to its spoken sound. "Dyslexia exists only because we invented reading," said Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain."

Among children raised to read and write Chinese, the demands of reading draw on parts of the brain untouched by the English alphabet, new neuroimaging studies reveal. It's the same with dyslexia, psychologist Li Hai Tan at Hong Kong Research University and his colleagues reported last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The problems occur in areas not involved in reading other alphabets....

"In this sense, we may regard dyslexia in Chinese and English as two different brain disorders," Dr. Tan said, "because completely different brain regions are disrupted. It's very likely that a person who is dyslexic in Chinese would not be dyslexic in English."

Read the full article here (a subscription might be required).

Memory work increases intelligence, or, in defense of schools that made me memorize verses

New research suggests that the Bible-memorization of my youth made me smarter.

Throughout my growing up years, I went to churches and religious schools that emphasized the memorization of Bible verses. I remember claims that grades improved when one began memorizing the Bible.

It wasn't magic related to the Bible itself, but the religious schools were onto something.

Today new research suggests that memory-training increases one's intelligence, and while the approach outlined in this New York Times article is not exactly the same as the rote memorization of my youth, it certainly indicates the value of the brain exercise that took place when I was trying to store biblical passages in my head.

The new research focused on working memory, "the kind that allows memorization of a telephone number just long enough to dial it," Nicholas Bakalar wrote in the New York Times.

What might be comparable between my Bible memorization and "working memory" could be that I had to learn the Bible verses within a given timeframe and then recite them, thus encouraging me to learn memorization techniques and then forcing me to recall what I had memorized.

Bakalar wrote:

The key, researchers found, was carefully structured training in working memory — the kind that allows memorization of a telephone number just long enough to dial it. This type of memory is closely related to fluid intelligence, according to background information in the article, and appears to rely on the same brain circuitry. So the researchers reasoned that improving it might lead to improvements in fluid intelligence.First they measured the fluid intelligence of four groups of volunteers using standard tests. Then they trained each in a complicated memory task, an elaborate variation on Concentration, the child’s card game, in which they memorized simultaneously presented auditory and visual stimuli that they had to recall later.The game was set up so that as the participants succeeded, the tasks became harder, and as they failed, the tasks became easier. This assured a high level of difficulty, adjusted individually for each participant, but not so high as to destroy motivation to keep working. The four groups underwent a half-hour of training daily for 8, 12, 17 and 19 days, respectively. At the end of each training, researchers tested the participants’ fluid intelligence again. To make sure they were not just improving their test-taking skills, the researchers compared them with control groups that took the tests without the training.The results, published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were striking. Although the control groups also made gains, presumably because they had practice with the fluid intelligence tests, improvement in the trained groups was substantially greater. Moreover, the longer they trained, the higher their scores were. All performers, from the weakest to the strongest, showed significant improvement.

So, this afternoon, while I'm driving my daughter to a doctor's appointment, we're going to play some memory games.

It shouldn't be too hard for her to become more intelligent than her dad.

-Colin Foote Burch

My daughter's progress with neurofeedback; gradually dissolving ADD / ADHD

Today our doctor described my 8-year-old daughter's progress like this: She used to squirm frequently during neurofeedback sessions, in keeping with her attention-deficit diagnosis, but now she sits perfectly still. She's relaxed and focused as she watches a movie during a form of neurofeedback in which the screen will shrink if focus, attention, and relaxation begin to wane.

The net result at home is hard to miss: my 8-year-old daughter doesn't get frustrated with difficult tasks. She approaches them with patience and calm.

-Colin Foote Burch

P.S. To learn how and why neurofeedback works, my wife suggests:

A Symphony in the Brain: The Evolution of the New Brain Wave Biofeedback .