Cognitive Labs

In Korea, so many people have the Alexa toolbar that the company (Amazon) issues a disclaimer about Korea origin website traffic.

Well, now you can get your own Cognitive Labs Toolbar.

Get it here
Support us, support our mission, track your mind, track the web.

New game on Game Central....Sudoku! Exercise your brain, but first, create a cognitive baseline so you can track your cognitive performance. You can do this by taking our free test. Sudoko is a puzzle game that is sweeping the world.

From Wikipedia:


Sudoku (Japanese: 数独, sūdoku), sometimes spelled Su Doku, is a placement puzzle, also known as Number Place in the United States. The aim of the puzzle is to enter a number from 1 through 9 in each cell of a grid, most frequently a 9×9 grid made up of 3×3 subgrids (called "regions"), starting with various numbers given in some cells (the "givens"). Each row, column and region must contain only one instance of each number. Completing the puzzle requires patience and modest logical ability (although some puzzles can be very difficult). Its classic grid layout is reminiscent of other newspaper puzzles like crosswords and chess problems. First published in the United States, Sudoku initially became popular in Japan in 1986 and attained international popularity in 2005.


Enjoy!!!! and let us know how you do.

Obviously we are changing the basic design herein and this is going to be changing more...

  
B(rad Pitt), (J)ennifer Aniston, and ASTEROIDS

"The chances of successfully navigating through an asteroid field are approximately 7,640 to one," said 3PO.
Han Solo: "Never tell me the odds."


Individual Neuronal Memory? Here is a thought-provoking piece by CalTech/RNI connected people.

...Even a casual reader of fan magazines can recognize pictures of Halle Berry or Jennifer Aniston, no matter how the stars are dressed or wearing their hair. Now a surprising study suggests that individual brain cells can do the same thing.

The work could help shed light on how the brain stores memories, an expert said.

When scientists sampled brain cell activity in people who were scrutinizing dozens of pictures, they found some cells that reacted to a particular famous person, landmark, animal or object.

In one case, a single cell was activated by different photos of Berry, including some in her "Catwoman" costume, a drawing of her and even the words, "Halle Berry."

The findings appear in a part of the brain that transforms what people perceive into what they'll eventually remember, said Dr. Itzhak Fried, a senior investigator on the project.

The findings do not mean that a particular person or object is recognized and remembered by only one brain cell, Fried said. "There is not only one cell that codes for Jennifer Aniston. That would be impossible," Fried said.

Nor do they mean that a given brain cell will react to only one person or object, he said, because the study participants were tested with only a relatively limited number of pictures. In fact, some cells were found to respond to more than one person, or to a person and an object.

What the study does suggest, Fried and colleagues say in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, is that the brain appears to use relatively few cells to record something it sees. That's in contrast to the idea that it uses a huge network of brain cells instead.

It's surprising that an individual neuron would react so specifically to a given person, said the study's other senior investigator, Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology. "It's much more specific than people used to think."

Charles Connor, who studies how the brain processes visual information but who didn't participate in the new study, called the results striking.

Nobody would have predicted that conceptual information relating to Aniston, for example, would be signaled so clearly by single cells, said Connor, who works at Johns Hopkins University.

The "really dramatic finding," he said, is that a single brain cell can respond so consistently to completely different pictures of a given person. "That will surprise everybody," Connor said.

The part of the brain the researchers studied draws heavily on memory as well as signals from what the eye sees, so the result may illustrate how memory is represented in the brain and how it relates to visual signals, he said.

He noted that in one participant, one brain cell responded both to Aniston and to Lisa Kudrow, her co-star on the TV hit "Friends."

"That's a tantalizing glimpse at how neurons represent concepts like membership in the cast of `Friends,' and could lead to much more extensive studies of how conceptual information is organized in human memory," he said.

The researchers tested eight people with epilepsy who'd had electrodes placed in their brains so that doctors could track down the origins of their seizures. The electrodes monitored the activity of a small fraction of cells in a part of the brain called the medial temporal lobe.

The researchers kept track of which cells became activated as the participants looked at images of people, landmarks and objects on a laptop computer. One participant had a brain cell that reacted to different pictures of Aniston, for example, but was not strongly stimulated by other famous or non-famous faces.

Oddly, when that participant was shown photos of Aniston paired with actor Brad Pitt, from whom Aniston later separated, the brain cell didn't respond.

"I don't know if it was a prophetic thing," Fried said.

Game of the Day - take a mental break and get a workout on an old family favorite now brought to the web. It's a virtual Simon. Rather than replacing the 'C' batteries just come to our website...

Primate Art Therapy?

Last week we made a reference to Planet of the Apes. Today, Congo the chimp's paintings were auctioned for $26,000. It would be interesting to get behind the eye of Congo and understand what he perceived. Picasso had a painting by Congo in his studio.

New MemCast (Podcast)...reporting on the Stanford study presented today in The Nation's capital....great things happen on the Farm.

Get it.

intro by Green Day

Stanford University Researchers are presenting the following research findings at the Alzheimer's Association's International Conference on the Prevention of Dementia in Washington D.C. today June 20, 2005 using Cognitive Labs Cognometer technology, which refers to our entire battery of 11 tests - the same technology used in MemCheck and Memory For Life and also on licensed sites. We are excited to bring this technology to the world so that more can benefit, whether it is on mobile platforms, the Internet, retail, and in clinical settings.

Slower Speed-of-Processing Is Associated with Presence of the Apolipoprotein ε4 Allele

Topic: Clinical assessment

Ruth O'Hara, Kevin Morgan, Helena C. Kraemer, Jerome Yesavage, Joy Taylor, Greer Murphy, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. Contact e-mail: roh@stanford.edu

Presentation Number: O2-05-03

Keyword: APOE, cognition, early detection

BACKGROUND: Detection of preclinical cognitive deficits is important for identifying those at greatest risk for such disorders as Alzheimer’s disease. However, available neuropsychological measures may not be sufficiently sensitive to preclinical cognitive impairment, particularly in high functioning and younger older adults. This study utilizes a battery of computerized cognitive tests (Cognometer) designed to provide a more sensitive measure of age-related cognitive performance by incorporating speed-of-processing components.

OBJECTIVE: To compare performance on the Cognometer battery and on standard neuropsychological tests of 18 subjects with the ε4 allele with that of 33 subjects without the ε4 allele.

METHODS: Fifty-one community-dwelling older adults (18 subjects with the ε4 allele and compared to that of 33 subjects without the ε4 allele) were administered the Cognometer battery, which incorporates speed-of-processing components into measures of verbal, spatial and working memory, attention, and visuo-spatial ability. A brief battery of standard neuropsychological measures including delayed recall, symbol digit and was also administered.

CONCLUSIONS: No significant difference was observed between the two groups with respect to performance on any of the neuropsychological measures. However, with respect to the Cognometer battery, individuals with the ε4 allele were significantly slower in performing all the cognitive tasks, with the exception of the visuo-spatial task. With respect to performance, the two genotype groups did not differ significantly except on immediate memory, with the ε4 group exhibiting increased errors. Overall, the ε4 group was significantly slower in performing all of the Cognometer memory tasks. These findings provide continued support for the negative impact of the ε4 allele on cognition and further suggest that speed-of-processing measures may have the potential to detect subtle cognitive deficits.

Commercial Relationship: R. O'Hara, None; K. Morgan, None; H.C. Kraemer, None; J. Yesavage, None; J. Taylor, None; G. Murphy, None.

Howard Carter and the 5th Earl of Carnarvon

Carter leaned in, holding a candle, to take a look. Behind him Lord Carnarvon asked, "Can you see anything?"

Carter answered, "Yes, wonderful things."

Now Twt'nkh-'mn (literally, the living image of Amon artifacts and matrix are back in the U.S. after 30 years, 1st at the LA County Art Museum (beginning today) to be followed by the Field Museum in Chicago. If you can't get to Egypt, this might be your chance. For now, we are offering a fun way to experience the feeling of an archaeologist (while also getting a mental workout) I never saw any large scarabs running aound on the ground, spikes, or hot coals or Indiana-Jonesesque air darts - BUT saw plenty of bats and mummies and felt incredible heat and silence and presence of antiquity in those underground chambers.


click here!

But you can still play Pharaoh's Tomb here

  
Latin: MARTI PACIFERO and VENUS FELIX
"Mars the Pacifier" and "Happy Venus"
coins of Gordian III (238-244) to finance his Persian war and empress (augusta) Severina (270-274)


Robert E. Hotz of the Los Angeles Times has written a very interesting piece.


HAMILTON, Canada - The invitation curled from her fax machine, a courtly question scrawled above the signature of a man whose name she did not recognize.

"Would you be willing to collaborate with me on studying the brain of Albert Einstein?"

It was signed Thomas Harvey. Sandra Witelson did not hesitate.

She wrote "yes" on the piece of paper and faxed it back.

"It never occurred to me that it might be a joke," she recalled. "I knew that Albert Einstein's brain had been preserved and that it was somewhere where someone was looking after it."

For 40 years, Harvey, a retired pathologist from Princeton, N.J., had been the quixotic custodian of the 20th century's most famous brain.

In 1955, he had conducted a routine autopsy of Einstein after the 76-year-old physicist died at Princeton Hospital. The remains were to be cremated. Harvey, however, decided to preserve the organ responsible for the theory of relativity and the principle of the atomic bomb.

It was not such an unusual thing to do. Einstein's ophthalmologist had removed the scientist's eyeballs and put them in a safe-deposit box. Earlier acquisitive anatomists had preserved Galileo's finger, Haydn's head and Napoleon's penis.

For Harvey, however, more than morbid curiosity was at work. He believed that the slippery worms of Einstein's brain tissue, pickled in warm formalin, embodied some clue to the mystery of intelligence. He held on to that hope through 40 years of indecision.

Eventually, it led the soft-spoken Quaker to Witelson, a raven-haired Canadian psychologist with a taste for black leather and red showgirl nails.

She had brains, dozens of them - the largest collection of normal brains in the world.

When Witelson began acquiring human brains, sex was the last thing on her mind.

Inside her walk-in refrigerator at McMaster University here in Ontario, her collection filled three walls of metal shelves. The 125 putty-colored specimens sat in frosted jars and snap-top plastic tubs like quarts of boiled shrimp and wedges of cheese.

Every one posed a riddle that had shaped her research for 30 years: How does the structure of the brain influence intelligence?

A professor of psychiatry and neuroscience, Witelson grappled with such a fundamental mystery by studying a somewhat smaller one: why certain abilities develop on one side of the brain rather than the other.

The two hemispheres of the brain are almost symmetrical physically but can seem to be separate minds when it comes to awareness and mental processing. They even have different problem-solving styles, researchers report. Yet they work together seamlessly to produce a single mind.

By 1977, Witelson was trying to learn why language skills developed on the left side of the brain for all right-handers but on the right side for many left-handers.

To compare the two sides, she needed normal brains — more than anyone had gathered before.

For 10 years, she worked through a network of doctors and nurses, hoping to persuade terminal cancer patients to make a last contribution to medicine. Her research was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

By 1987, 120 men and women had agreed to donate their brains after death. They all submitted to thorough psychological and intelligence tests so that each brain would be accompanied by a detailed profile of the mind that had animated it.

In the prime of life, the cerebral cortex contains 25 billion neurons linked through 164 trillion synapses.

Thoughts thread through 7.4 million miles of dendrite fibers and 62,000 miles of axons so compacted that the entire neural network is no larger than a coconut.

No two brains are identical, nor are two minds ever the same.

With so many well-documented donors, however, Witelson could conduct comparative brain studies on an unprecedented scale.

She could confidently seek relationships between anatomical features and mental capacities. She could also compare right-handers and left-handers, and sort the organs by gender.

In an era when people probe the thought process with scanners, radioactive tracers and super-conducting sensors, Witelson's approach was deliberately old-fashioned.

She measured her brains.

She weighed them.

She cut them up and counted the cells.

She traced synapses, the junctures where impulses pass from one neuron to another in the hidden root cellars of the brain.

Wherever she looked, she discerned subtle patterns that only gender seemed to explain.

"We actually didn't set out to find sex differences," she said. "Sometimes as a scientist, you are doing one thing and you bump into something else."

Controversial Matters

The brains in Witelson's freezer are contested terrain in a controversy over gender equality and mental performance.

Her findings - published in Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet and other peer-reviewed journals - buttress the proposition that basic mental differences between men and women stem in part from physical differences in the brain.

Witelson is convinced that gender shapes the anatomy of male and female brains in separate but equal ways beginning at birth.

On average, she said, the brains of women and men are neither better nor worse, but they are measurably different.

Men's brains, for instance, are typically bigger - but on the whole, no smarter.

"What is astonishing to me," Witelson said, "is that it is so obvious that there are sex differences in the brain and these are likely to be translated into some cognitive differences, because the brain helps us think and feel and move and act.

"Yet there is a large segment of the population that wants to pretend this is not true."

No one knows how these neural differences between the sexes translate into thought and behavior - whether they might influence the way men and women perceive reality, process information, form judgments and behave socially.

But even at this relatively early stage in exploration of the brain's microanatomy, battle lines between scientists, equal rights activists and educators have formed.

Some activists fear that research like Witelson's could be used to justify discrimination based on gender differences, just as ill-conceived notions of human genetics once influenced laws codifying racial stereotypes about blacks, Asians and Jews.

Other experts argue that the physical differences Witelson observed may result not from the brain's basic design but from conditioning that begins in infancy, when the brain produces neurons at a rate of half a million a minute and reaches out to make connections 2 million times a second.

Spurred by learning, neurons and synapses are ruthlessly pruned, a process that continues in fits and starts throughout adolescence, then picks up again in middle age.

"The brain is being sculpted gradually through sets of interactions," said Anne Fausto-Sterling, a gender studies expert at Brown University. "Even when something in the brain appears biological, it may have come to be that way because of how the body has experienced the world."

As Witelson's research helped establish, however, the mental divide between the sexes is more complex and more rooted in the fundamental biology of the brain than many scientists once suspected.

In the last decade, studies of perception, cognition, memory and neural function have found apparent gender differences that often buck conventional prejudices.

Women's brains, for instance, seem to be faster and more efficient than men's.

All in all, men appear to have more gray matter, made up of active neurons, and women more of the white matter responsible for communication between different areas of the brain.

Overall, women's brains seem to be more complexly corrugated, suggesting that more complicated neural structures lie within, researchers at UCLA found in August.

Men and women appear to use different parts of the brain to encode memories, sense emotions, recognize faces, solve certain problems and make decisions. Indeed, when men and women of similar intelligence and aptitude perform equally well, their brains appear to go about it differently, as if nature had separate blueprints, researchers at UC Irvine reported this year.

"If you find that men and women have fundamentally different brain architectures while still accomplishing the same things," said neuroscientist Richard Haier, who conducted the study, "this challenges the assumption that all human brains are fundamentally the same."

Yet, for the most part, scientists have been unable to document such patterns conclusively.

No one, however, had scrutinized as many brains as Witelson.

Detailing Differences

She began by studying the corpus callosum, the cable of nerves that channels all communication and cooperation between the brain's two hemispheres.

Examining tissue samples through a microscope, she discovered that the more left-handed a person was, the bigger the corpus callosum.

To her surprise, however, she found that this held true only for men. Among women there was no difference between right-handers and left-handers.

"Once you find this one difference," she remembered thinking, "it implies that there will be a cascade of differences."

As she systematically analyzed the brains in her refrigerator, she discovered that other neural structures seemed larger or smaller among men, depending on whether the man had been right-handed or left-handed.

They were relatively the same size in women. "The relationships that we were finding were always - and I do mean always - different for men and women," she said.

She narrowed her study to right-handed men and women, still looking for differences in microscopic anatomy between the left side of the brain and the right side. She meticulously counted the neurons in sets of tissue in which each sample measured 280 microns wide - about twice the thickness of a human hair - and 3 millimeters deep.

Staring through the microscope, she was baffled.

"I had the first two patients, and they were so very different," Witelson said. "I kept looking and looking at them, trying to see what the difference could be."

Then she consulted the donor documentation for each tissue sample. "Finally, I saw that one was a man, and one was a woman."

Among women, the neurons in the cortex were closer together. There were as many as 12% more neurons in the female brain.

That might explain how women could demonstrate the same levels of intelligence as men despite the difference in brain size.

"So among female brains, the cortex is constructed differently, with neurons packed more closely together," she said.

Witelson probed deeper. She knew that the human cortex was a sandwich of six layers, each packed with neurons.

She peeled away the sheets of the temporal lobe - a region associated with perception and memory - in several of her brain specimens. She discovered that the increased neural density occurred only on layers 2 and 4, which form the hard wiring for signals coming into the brain.

Then she analyzed the microscopic structure of the prefrontal cortex. There the crowding of neurons was evident only in layers 3, 5 and 6, which carry the wiring for outbound signals.

Just to be sure, she checked left-handed brains as well as right-handed brains. She found the same sex differences when she surveyed her left-handed brains.

Perhaps, she speculated, these neuron-rich layers in an area associated with perception and speech were the reason women scored more highly than men on tasks involving language and communication.

Slowly, she formed a theory: The brains of men and women are indeed different from birth. Yet the differences are subtle. They might be found only among the synapses in brain structures responsible for specific cognitive abilities.

For so long, scientists had championed the idea of larger brains as an indicator of intellect. Witelson, however, gradually became convinced that overall brain size didn't matter.

"One of the things that firmed it up for me," she recalled, "was the case of Einstein."

An Odd Pursuit

By taking Einstein's brain, Thomas Harvey had succumbed to an impulse older than medicine.

Since the days of Hippocrates, philosophers and scholars have been arguing over how the brain houses an intangible human spirit. St. Augustine was convinced that the soul lodged in the fluid-filled cavity of the organ's middle ventricle. Galen, the ancient pioneer of medicine, argued that vital spirits resided in the fourth ventricle.

When modern scientists discovered that intellect could be traced to neural tissues, brains became precious curios. Pathologists collected the brains of gifted musicians, scientists and other notables the way 18th century literary enthusiasts held onto the hearts of poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.

Researchers at the Moscow Brain Institute measured dozens of the most brilliant brains. Vladimir Lenin, the leader of Russia's Soviet revolution, had a brain weighing about 3 pounds, they determined. The brain of writer Ivan Turgenev weighed 4.4 pounds. That of satirist Anatole France was 2.1 pounds.

At Princeton Hospital, Harvey weighed Einstein's brain on a grocer's scale. It was 2.7 pounds - less than the average adult male brain.

He had the fragile organ infused with fixative and dissected it into 240 pieces, each containing about two teaspoons of cerebral tissue. He shaved off 1,000 hair-thin slivers to be mounted on microscope slides for study.

For years, Harvey agonized over how next to proceed. His odd pursuit inspired two books: "Possessing Genius" by Carolyn Abraham and "Driving Mr. Albert" by Michael Paterniti. Through the decades, however, he drifted in obscurity.

Finally in 1985, pioneering neuroanatomist Marion Diamond at UC Berkeley persuaded him to part with four small plugs of brain tissue. Diamond discovered that the physicist's brain had more cells servicing, supporting and nurturing each neuron than did 11 other brains she studied. These unusual cells were in a region associated with mathematical and language skills.

When they published their findings, the researchers speculated that these neurons might help explain Einstein's "unusual conceptual powers."

Critics contended the study was riddled with flaws, its findings meaningless.

Eventually, Harvey mailed bits of Einstein's motor cortex to a researcher at the University of Alabama, who reported that the cortex appeared to be thinner than normal but with more tightly packed neurons.

Had it simply been compacted by time and storage conditions?

DNA testing revealed nothing. The preservative fluids apparently had scrambled Einstein's genetic code.

Then in 1995, Harvey happened across Witelson's work. He read her research paper on gender differences and neuron density in the Journal of Neuroscience.

"It was impressive," he recalled. He was even more intrigued to learn about her collection of brains. He was 84, still hoping that his tissue samples had something to teach about the neural geography of genius. To make ends meet, he was working in a plastics factory. Worrying about Einstein's brain, like the years, had become a burden.

Harvey carefully packed it in the back of his battered Dodge and drove north to Witelson's laboratory. "I had the brain in a big jar," Harvey, now 94, recalled.

At midnight, he crossed over the Rainbow Bridge by Niagara Falls into Canada.

Customs officials asked if he had anything to declare. Just a brain in the trunk, he told them.

They waved him through.

Pieces Fall Into Place

Witelson could barely contain her curiosity.

Einstein's brain - so far from ordinary in its intellectual achievement - might reveal a telltale anatomical signature. Size alone certainly could not account for his brain power.

"Here was somebody who was clearly very clever; yet his overall brain size was average," Witelson said. "It certainly tells you that, in a man, sheer overall brain size can't be a crucial factor in brilliance."

For a moment, she was like a schoolchild picking candies from a Valentine's Day sampler. She judiciously selected 14 pieces of Einstein's brain. She took parts of his right and left temporal lobes, and the right and left parietal lobes.

Never had Harvey given away so much brain.

Witelson and her colleagues carefully compared the 40-year-old tissue samples with dozens of normal male and female brains in her collection. She also compared them with brains from eight elderly men to account for any changes due to Einstein's age at the time of his death.

She found that one portion of Einstein's brain perhaps related to mathematical reasoning - the inferior parietal region - was 15% wider than normal.

Witelson also found that it lacked a fissure that normally runs along the length of the brain. The average human brain has two distinct parietal lobe compartments; Einstein's had one.

Perhaps the synapses in this area were more densely interconnected.

"Maybe this was one of the underlying factors in his brilliance," she said. "Maybe that is how it works."

She took it as confirmation of her suspicions about the anatomy of intelligence. If there were differences affecting normal mental ability, they would show up in the arrangements of synapses at particular points in the brain.

Einstein, she was convinced, had been born with a one-in-a-billion brain.

"We suggest that the differences we see are present at birth," Witelson said. "It is not a consequence of environmental differences."

She turned again to the brains in her refrigerator. Wherever she looked, she began to see evidence of how microanatomy might underlie variations in mental abilities.

As she matched the brain specimens to the intellectual qualities of their owners, she discovered that differences in the size of the corpus callosum were linked to IQ scores for verbal ability, but only in women. She found that memory was linked to how tightly neurons were packed, but only in men.

Witelson determined that brain volume decreased with age among men, but hardly at all among women. Moreover, those anatomical changes appeared to be closely tied to a gradual decline in mental performance in men. "There is something going on in the male brain," she said, "that is not going on in the female brain."

Brain Conquers All

Last year, a worried farming couple brought their youngest child to McMaster University Medical Center.

They were no longer certain whether their child was a girl or a boy. The youngster had traits of both, as occurs in about one in 5,000 births. In this child, nature had devised a living test of gender and the brain.

The medical experts determined that the child's body was a composite of normal and abnormal cells. Some had a girl's usual complement of two female sex chromosomes. Many, perhaps due to a mutation, had only one female chromosome and consequently were almost male.

"Which cells got to the brain?" wondered Witelson, who was called in as a consultant. "You have to consider the sex of the brain."

The doctors all suspected the child's brain was masculine. There was no way to know for sure. They could not safely take a sample of neural tissue to biopsy.

Until recently, reconstructive surgery based on a doctor's best guess was the rule in such cases. But in Hamilton, they counseled patience, Witelson recalled.

"We said, 'Let the child's behavior tell us what sex the child is.' "

Given time, she believed, the brain would reveal itself.

We (I) just finished putting the code in place for your Cognitive Labs Toolbar, in partnership with Alexa. Just popped an XML file into our server and when you click on our logo,




this takes you to a download page(on Alexa's servers where you can grab the toolbar and install it. It lets you get a snaphot of the web, like we give you a snapshot of the mind. Plus, it lets you block pop-ups easily and also Google search is embedded in another location. No Google fridge yet but who knows maybe we'll see that next.

Researchers have discovered that the brains of stutterers process words differently, even when they're not speaking.They hope their new understanding of this complex disorder will help to reduce the stigma felt by the roughly three million American's who stutter.

Language Link

While its causes are many, stuttering used to carry with it the stigma of being a "psychological problem." Now, researchers are finding that stutterers' brains process language differently, even when they aren't speaking.

"Stuttering is known to be a very complex disorder, and there has been evidence that language plays an important role in stuttering," explains Christine Weber-Fox, a cognitive neuroscientist at Purdue University. "For example, when children begin stuttering it's not when they're saying their first word, it's when they start combining words, and when language becomes more complex and they're having to formulate more. So we were very interested in knowing the role of language processing in stutterers, even when people who stutter aren't required to speak at all."

Weber-Fox and her team compared the brain activity of 22 adults, half stutterers and half non-stutterers, measuring the activity of brain cells in milliseconds using what looks like a wired-up swimming cap with electrodes that sit on the scalp. The adults were shown two words on a computer screen, and their job was to identifysilently, by pressing a buttonwhich pairs of words rhymed. Some word pairs, like "own" and "gown," were spelled similarly but did not rhyme; some, like "own" and "cone," rhymed but were not spelled similarly, and some, like "own" and "cake," neither rhymed nor were spelled similarly.

"What that forces you to do is say the words to yourself," says Weber-Fox. "In other words if you see the word 'own' flashed on the screen, and then you see the word 'gown' flashed on the screen, you have to as quick as possible say whether they rhyme of not. By doing that we're tapping into some of those same mechanisms that people use when they're trying to formulate speech."


A skullcap with electrodes measures the electrical activity in different parts of the brain.

Weber-Fox found that when the two words looked similar, but didn't rhyme, the stutterers took longer to process the words and answer. "They were overall slower, and just by a little bit, just by a hundredth of a second, but that little bit means a lot when you are talking about brain activity," she says. "The complexity of the task really influenced them or interfered with their processing to a greater extent than it did to people who didn't stutter. The results from the brainwave analysis also showed us that people that stutter maybe performing this task in a different way neurallywe found that their activity over the right hemisphere was greater than the left hemisphere and this is not what we found in our normal speakerstheir responses were more balanced across both hemispheres for this task."

Weber-Fox points out that although language is an important factor in stuttering, there are other factors, including emotion, anxiety and genetics, and its cause can differ for each person and even throughout one's lifespan. She hopes that work like hers will help to remove the stigma of stuttering. "This is involuntary behavior that results from real physiological differences, so I think that that's one thing that's important to keep in mind," she says, adding, "even though it's a physiological response or something that is happening in the brain, that doesn't mean that it's not changeableI think [the research] actually provides a lot of optimism and hope for finding better ways to treat stuttering."

Gen X Memory Loss..That's Impossible.
Not really, you see.
But don't worry. Choose LIFE PIZZA  MEMORY

Don't you hate when people re-post stuff? You've got to read the same banal ideas again. Now that Einstein image is clickable -- sorry about that





More memory tests to more people....

What if everyone around the world had an easy way to test their memory...and find out how they were doing compared to everyone else.

Now they do.

From a company called Cognitive Labs. If you want to use our testing in your site or product, call us, we can private label it for you or create a memory center on your site that can drive traffic.

Now, making the memory archive a searchable index will be a really interesting enhancement we're already at work on...

More memory tests to more people....

What if everyone around the world had an easy way to test their memory...and find out how they were doing compared to everyone else.

Now they do.

From a company called Cognitive Labs. If you want to use our testing in your site or product, call us, we can private label it for you or create a memory center on your site that can drive traffic.

Now, making the memory archive a searchable index will be a really interesting enhancement we're already at work on...

 



We all know the type, the social chamaeleon that is able to detect and subtly imitate the mores of a social target, down to clothing, manner of speaking, and body language.

How susceptible are we to this Byzantine subterfuge?

According to researchers at Stanford and Wired, (which linked to our site from this story, thanks) very much so:

Psychologists and salesmen call it the "chameleon effect": People are perceived as more honest and likeable if they subtly mimic the body language of the person they're speaking with. Now scientists have demonstrated that computers can exploit the same phenomenon, but with greater success and on a larger scale.

Researchers at Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab strapped 69 student volunteers into an immersive, 3-D virtual-reality rig, where test subjects found themselves sitting across the table from a "digital agent"- a computer-generated man or woman - programmed to deliver a three-minute pitch advocating a notional university security policy requiring students to carry ID whenever they're on campus.

The anthropomorphic cyberhuckster featured moving lips and blinking eyes on a head that nodded and swayed realistically. But unbeknownst to the test subjects, the head movements weren't random. In half the sessions, the computer was programmed to mimic the student's movements exactly, with a precise four-second delay; if a test subject tilted her head thoughtfully and looked up at a 15-degree angle, the computer would repeat the gesture four seconds later.

For the other half of the participants, the program used head movements recorded from earlier students, ensuring they were realistic but unconnected to the test subject....

And you thought, blissfully, you had seen the last of Max Headroom, the virtual star of the 80's, perhaps to be reborn.

neuron forest



IBM and researchers in Switzerland are teaming up to create a neural map of the brain and 'unlock the secrets of cognitive intelligence.' I would say this is akin to drilling core samples, finding out the "why" while Cognitive Labs effort is aimed at surface mapping - a snapshot of cognitive reality based on open-source (user supplied) data where anyone can contribute.....

IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer tackles major scientific challenge – scientists to create a complex digital 3D model of the brain

Yorktown Heights, NY and Lausanne, Switzerland, June 6, 2005 – IBM and The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) are today announcing a major joint research initiative – nicknamed the Blue Brain Project – to take brain research to a new level.

Over the next two years scientists from both organizations will work together using the huge computational capacity of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer to create a detailed model of the circuitry in the neocortex – the largest and most complex part of the human brain. By expanding the project to model other areas of the brain, scientists hope to eventually build an accurate, computer-based model of the entire brain.

Relatively little is actually known about how the brain works. Using the digital model scientists will run computer-based simulations of the brain at the molecular level, shedding light on internal processes such as thought, perception and memory. Scientists also hope to understand more about how and why certain microcircuits in the brain malfunction – thought to be the cause of psychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and depression.

"Modeling the brain at the cellular level is a massive undertaking because of the hundreds of thousands of parameters that need to be taken into account," said Henry Markram, the EPFL professor heading up the project. "IBM has unparalleled experience in biological simulations and the most advanced supercomputing technology in the world. With our combined resources and expertise we are embarking on one of the most ambitious research initiatives ever undertaken in the field of neuroscience."

Markram is the founder of EPFL's Brain and Mind Institute, where more than 10 years of research and wet-lab experiments have been consolidated into the world's most comprehensive set of empirical data on the micro-architecture of the neocortex.

Researchers from IBM will use their experience in simulating complex biological systems to help turn this data into a working 3-dimensional model recreating the high-speed electro-chemical interactions of the brain's interior. Running on a Blue Gene supercomputer, the model will be capable of simulating brain processes in three dimensions with a precision never before achieved.

"Blue Gene is by far the fastest supercomputing system in the world, giving scientists access to unprecedented levels of computing power," said Tilak Agerwala, Vice President of Systems, IBM Research. "What really matters is not the power itself, but how it is applied to accelerate innovation and discovery in science, engineering and business."

By using a Blue Gene supercomputer to run experiments in real time, Markram anticipates a substantial acceleration in the pace of brain research. "With an accurate computer-based model of the brain much of the pre-testing and planning normally required for a major experiment could be done 'in silico' rather than in the laboratory. With certain simulations we anticipate that a full day's worth of wet lab research could be done in a matter of seconds on Blue Gene."

The system that will be installed at EPFL will occupy the floor space of about four refrigerators, and will have a peak processing speed of at least 22.8 trillion floating-point operations per second (22.8 teraflops), making it one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The first phase of the project will be to make a software replica of a column of the neocortex. The neocortex constitutes about 85% of the human brain's total mass and is thought to be responsible for the cognitive functions of language, learning, memory and complex thought. An accurate replica of the neocortical column is the essential first step to simulating the whole brain and also will provide the link between genetic, molecular and cognitive levels of brain function. The second and subsequent phases will be to expand the simulation to include circuitry from other brain regions and eventually the whole brain.

As part of the agreement with IBM, some of Blue Gene's time will also be allotted to other ambitious research projects. In one of the projects, researchers from IBM's Zurich Research Lab will work together with scientists from EPFL's Institutes of Complex Matter Physics and Nanostructure Physics to research future semiconductor (post-CMOS) technology such as carbon nanotubes; part of the continuing quest to build smaller semiconductors and microchips.

Elsewhere at EPFL, researchers will use Blue Gene to look at the use of plasmas as a possible method of energy production. Another team will use Blue Gene to research the folding of proteins and their role in the development of Creutzfeldt-Jacob (mad cow) and other diseases.

UCLA/VA Researchers are in the news again with Curcumin's tendencies to delay or even prevent Alzheimer's, so reports Netscape News.

I had posted this blog entry on January 9, 2005....here it is again

The researchers postulate that diet may cause lower levels of Alzheimer's on the Indian subcontinent. However, it is still problematic. To make a complete survey, one would also have to look at the APOEe3/APOEe4 incidence levels which govern predisposition.

To commemmorate the continuing growth of our site, we are pround to bring you games, which have carefully been selected by experts in reaction time and neuroscience, to bring both awareness/exercise value and also entertainment value.

We will next run some people through MRI before, during, and after playing these games and also in the process of taking our MemCheck and Memory For Life tests and exercises.

Here is an interesting game , Mission to Mars, which requires vertical eye/hand coordination and anticipation to complete. Please give it a try

Powered by dylithium crystals, Cognitive Labs is set to announce its brand new game portal, GameCentral.

Unlike our breakthrough (and patent-protected) cognitive monitoring service, these are fun, free games selected by neuroscience experts to expand the range of cognition.

Get outside and throw a baseball around or go for a hike, then get a cognitive baseline, play some more games, and see how your mind is improving.

I'll bet you'll see an effect. We've got Tetris, SpaceInvaders, and even Pharaoh's Tomb.

Sign-up now and see what all the fun is about. Science and Learning doesn't have to be boring.

Our partner Natrol (Nasdaq: NTOL) is a major participant in the National Senior Olympic Games, held next week in Pittsburgh at Carnegie-Mellon.

I am proud to say that our testing and tracking service will be made available to more people that have not yet had a chance to try it.

You really can track your brain's progress. You can buy it here or you can get it on brainspeed.com on a continual basis when you decide to purchase one of their brainspeed cognitive supplements, which have been extensively researched. Natrol's VP of R&D like many of our key friends and advisors has a Stanford and U.C. connection.

We are really excited about the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Washington, D.C., also fast approaching, where some of the research using our tests will be presented.

This relates to brainspeed.com and similar plans for the future, from sports to gamer enhancement. One has to agree with the Governor's statements especially relating to childhood nutrition. This letter appeared in the Weider publications, electronically in RedNova

In Defense of Supplements
SPEAK UP AND PROTECT YOUR RIGHT TO DIETARY SUPPLEMENTATION

THROUGHOUT MY ADULT LIFE I've never missed an opportunity to preach the health benefits of the bodybuilding lifestyle. For me, following this lifestyle means not only working out in the gym on a regular basis but also maintaining good dietary habits. In addition, supplements are essential for safeguarding against nutritional deficiencies and augmenting training performance and its results.

Dietary supplements are of use to everyone, not just athletes. For instance, older people can benefit from multivitamins, calcium and glucosamine. Expectant mothers require extra supplementation as they nurture new life. Even in children, vitamins bolster growth and good health.

However, in the last few years, attempts have been made to limit the availability of many nutritional supplements. It's the nature of government to regulate - whether it's businesses, the workplace, when you should have lunch. Legislation on food supplements isn't necessarily an outright attack on the industry; it's just one more area where officials can say, "Wow! This isn't regulated. Let's go after it and regulate!"

* The issue has been clouded by misrepresentation of some of these products. Too often, dietary supplements are lumped into the same category as anabolic steroids. Possession and distribution of the latter is illegal, and all measures to stem their use should be enforced. Such was the case when I signed California Senate Bill 1444, which sought to tighten the legislation on supplements containing ephedrine-group alkaloids or steroid hormone precursors. Yet to ban dietary supplements such as protein powders, multivitamins, glutamine, etc., is misguided and wrong.

In the state of California, I've opposed attempts to limit the availability of dietary supplements. Many well-intentioned legislators don't understand these products, so they mistrust them, sometimes confusing them with illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

Recently, I vetoed California Senate Bill 1630, which sought to restrict the availability of performance-enhancing dietary supplements in schools. In explaining why I sent back the bill, I wrote (in part): "I am returning Senate Bill 1630 without my signature. The illegal possession and use of performance-enhancing steroids is clearly prohibited, and those existing laws should be strictly enforced to their full extent, particularly given the apparent heightened activity surrounding this dangerous practice. However, this bill focuses on performance-enhancing dietary supplements (PEDS) instead of focusing on ensuring that students participating in high school sports are not engaged in steroids use."

* I told those who supported this bill that obesity rates, particularly among children, are sky-rocketing, as are health-care costs. To show true concern for the health of our children, why don't we pass a law that takes junk food out of schools? Stop allowing the sale of french fries, doughnuts and other unhealthful foods at schools. Replace those products with fruits and vegetables and well-balanced, nutritional meals. That's the right move to protect the health of our children.

* Let me be clear: I believe in the use of healthy dietary supplements. It's wrong to consign them to the same category as anabolic steroids and other illegal substances.

For those of us who live the bodybuilding lifestyle, exercise, sound nutrition and supplementation improve our health and the quality and length of our lives. That's why I'm so energized to fight any attempt to limit the availability of nutritional supplements. A practical and responsible step forward would be educating the media, government bodies and consumer groups on how to distinguish between dietary supplements and harmful illegal substances. In the pages of MUSCLE & FITNESS and FLEX, our mission must be to enlighten the uninformed to the differences between the two and ultimately protect the kind of right America's forefathers wrote into our Constitution: the freedom of choice.

- Arnold Schwarzenegger

The Gov is working to protect dietary supplements

BY GOV. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER | EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Copyright Weider Publications Jun 2005

Through our partnership with Natrol (Nasdaq: NTOL) you can now purchase an exciting nutritional supplement that focuses on the cholinergic system. The unique innovation is combining the highly sensitive cognitive testing from Cognitive Labs, which you know from our cognitivecare.com site, with this new product to create brainspeed.com.

You can now purchase brainspeed at brainspeed.com or on the homepage of drugstore.com.

We hope you will try it, you won't find it in stores yet. But we will certainly notify when it is available at Walgreen's and other locations, in the near future. We will be able to refer you to a store locator for both the web and mobile at that point.

41% of our visitors now register....that's our tops, but we have been getting to .40 sporadically especially 2 days ago, in the last couple of days have been in the high 30's.