Cognitive Labs

Fear Improves Scores, say Rice University researchers, in a study involving women.

Women who were exposed to chemicals from fear-induced sweat performed more accurately on word-association tasks than did women exposed to chemicals from other types of sweat or no sweat at all. The study was published this month in the journal Chemical Senses.

"It is well-documented in the research literature that animals experiencing stress and fear produce chemical warning signals that can lead to behavioral, endocrinological and immunological changes in their fellow animals of the same species, but we wanted to see if this applies to humans as well," said principal investigator Denise Chen, assistant professor of psychology at Rice.

For the study, Chen collected samples of sweat from research volunteers who kept gauze pads in their armpits while they watched videos of horror movies and nonthreatening documentaries. The sweat samples were then stored in a freezer until needed for the study.

Next, Chen had 75 female students between the ages of 18 and 22 respond to 320 pairs of words that flashed for three seconds each on a computer screen. For each pair, the participants had to press a key to indicate whether the words were associated with each other (for example, arms and legs) or not (arms and wind). Some of the words were associated with threatening or fear-related topics, like weapons.

Each participant had a piece of gauze attached above their lips so that they were exposed to either chemicals from sweat or none at all during the tests. Chen compared how the chemicals from sweat impacted the speed and accuracy of participants' results on the word-association tests.

When processing meaningfully related word pairs, the participants exposed to the fear chemicals were 85 percent accurate, and those in either the neutral sweat or the control (no-sweat) condition were 80 percent accurate. "The subjects in the fear condition were six percent more accurate, which is a statistically significant difference," Chen said.

When processing word pairs that were ambiguous in threat content, such as one neutral word paired with a threatening word or a pair of neutral words, subjects in the fear condition were 15 to 16 percent slower in responding than those in the neutral sweat condition, and this difference was statistically significant. Chen's theory is that the chemicals from fear-induced sweat prompted subjects to be more cautious.

The research participants were not aware of the nature of the smells, and the smells did not differ on the intensity or pleasantness ratings.

"We demonstrated that in humans, chemical signals from fear facilitated overall accuracy in identifying word relatedness independent of the perceived qualities of the smells," Chen said. "The effect may arise from a learned association, including greater cautiousness and changes in cognitive strategies."

"Human olfaction is a young, vibrant field," Chen said, noting that the behavioral study of this subject is still in the early stage. "Olfactory receptors were discovered in the early 1990s. We now know that olfaction involves hundreds of receptors."

Results like these from Chen's behavioral research and studies from other labs form an integral part of a multipronged approach to the understanding of human olfaction.

Coauthors of Chen's study included former Rice undergraduate students Ameeta Katdare and Nadia Lucas, a Rice Century Scholar.

Eureka Alert

26 years ago Walter Alvarez and colleagues at UC-Berkeley proposed the (then) far-fetched idea that a killshot (or two) had wiped out the dinosaurs. I recall reading about it in Astronomy magazine, sitting in the lanai, while a gecko 'barked' and walked across the ceiling, a kind of nanosaur. The thesis, that there was satellite evidence of an impact crater off the Yucatan and possibly, traces of irridium in the proper strata of the earth's crust was advanced.

Today, the dinosaurs of industry are similarly exposed to killshots from nano-startups, what we termed a couple of years ago as nanoglobals. Why is this?

1. Mobility of labor. Innovators are everywhere. (When I post this, it will be read by people in Eastern Europe, Asia, and India, almost immediately.)
2. Cost of development/barriers to entry. The costs are very low, while the demand for cleverness and innovation is high. This will lead to a great many innovative high-quality products that may be able to compete head-to-head or bypass antecedents
3. Mental Barriers. Without the baggage and constraints on thinking common to any bureaucracy, nanoglobals won't say "We've always done it that way." Instead, they'll just do something else entirely and most people will know about it after the fact.
4. Thriftiness. Nanoglobals adapt virtual network structures from the beginning. As a result they can compete imediately on a price/cost basis and do without the 'burn rate' phenomenon which puts a fixed time frame on a company's existence.

I just got pinged by ZDnet...the ping reports that Google and J. Craig Venter are collaborating on a searcheable genetic database. There is a concern from some quarters about information and what is released. On the other hand, just based on my own memory, this reminds of talk in 1993-4. Back then, I was working at the venerable UPS and there was a scramble to build and deploy systems to automate shipping. Innovation will just happen. We figured out a way to eliminate international shipping documents over a 8 kbps modem. It was tried out at Dialog (my account) and then at Oracle (the acct. team that defeated FedEx) and at other places, and then became a way to track and ship using html forms. When the corporate IS bureaucracy found out, first, they said it was impossible; then they just hated it. The stealth name for this technology: 'the stanford solution' largely developed by ex-berkeley engineers and IE geeks for about $99 and sweat.) Six months later I was on the ups.com and ups online teams and similar stuff was deployed all over the U.S., but it took years. Some people said that 'package tracking' on the internet was impossible. Because, they said, 3rd parties would know when a shipper was sending something to a consignee. Huge risk of privacy issues and everything else. But, once the technical genie is out of the bottle it is out and it won't go back. We went from corporate reticence to "heck, we don't get this web thing, but if you got the handoff run as hard as you can and do good things" and then we were meeting with Netscape OEM (by the fountains) to talk about putting a tracking button on the browser. That would have been a great deal for Netscape (a buck a month out of 1.2 million pick-up accounts plus a free-hand out from a driver), less good for UPS but who knows? But, our head of sales wanted to make a deal in Redmond that didn't happen. Now of course, you can track anywhere (thanks to a guy who developed 'Internet Tools' back in 96-97)

Anyway, same thing will happen in the genetic and cognitive field. Why? It is already happening now and it is unstoppable. Check out the background. I think MyDNA.com has the same vision and has also seen this evolution of information flows over the years.

According to NIH-researchers who are publishing a new study, brain size is not correlated with IQ, as has been advanced in other studies and often implied by science fiction writers. Rather, agility matters.

London - Intelligence may have more to do with how the brain develops during adolescence than its overall size, researchers said on Wednesday.

Using magnetic resonance imaging, scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland have shown that the brains of children with high IQs show a distinct pattern of development.

The cortex, or outer mantle of the brain, starts out thinner and thickens more rapidly in very intelligent children. It peaks around 11 or 12 years old before thinning rapidly in the late teens.

"We found that the cortex showed a different pattern of development," Philip Shaw, lead author of the research published in the journal Nature, said in an interview.

Children with average IQs had a thicker cortex to start with and peaked earlier before gradual thinning began.

Shaw added that the changes were subtle and what is driving them is a mystery. Why children have a thicker or thinner cortex initially is also not known.

"Brainy children are not cleverer solely by virtue of having more or less grey matter at any one age," said Judith Rapoport, a co-author of the study.

"Rather IQ is related to the dynamics of cortex maturation," she added in a statement.

The scientists discovered the association between intelligence and brain development by taking MRI scans of 307 healthy children and teenagers, aged 5-19, over 2-year intervals as they grew up.

They compared the scans to see how they related to the children's IQ. Very intelligent youngsters had scores of 121-145 while high IQs were between 109-120 and average between 83-108.

The smartest youngsters showed the highest rate of change in the scans. The scientists believe the longer thickening time in the very brainy children might indicate a longer period for the development of high-level cognitive circuits in the brain.

The researchers added that the thinning phase could involve a "use it or lose it" pruning, or killing off, of brain cells and their connections as the brain matures and becomes more efficient.

"That might be happening more efficiently in the most intelligent children," said Shaw. "People with very agile minds tend to have a very agile cortex."

Get Data  on Cognitive Testing, Your Genes, and Finding Out. Wired Talks About Your DNA in the April, 2006 issue.

So is the reverse of the last post also true. Hey, its probably true.

The writer Gene Wolfe wrote three stories:

The Dr. of Death Island. The Death of Dr. Island and the Island of Dr. Death so it is possible for things to go backwards and forwards at the same time.

Children as young as preschoolers approach the world much like scientists: They are convinced that perplexing and unpredictable events can be explained, according to an MIT brain researcher's study appearing in April.

The way kids play and explore suggests that children believe cause-and-effect relationships in the world are governed by fundamental laws rather than by mysterious forces, said Laura E. Schulz, assistant professor of cognitive science and co-author of the study "God Does Not Play Dice: Causal Determinism and Preschoolers' Causal Inferences."

"It's important to understand that kids are approaching the world with deep assumptions that affect their actions and their explanations and shape what they're able to learn next," Schulz said. "Kids' fundamental beliefs affect their learning. Their theoretical framework affects their understanding of evidence, just as it does for scientists."

While previous research had suggested that children do not accept the idea that physical events occur spontaneously, Schulz took that concept one step farther: Would young children accept the idea that physical causes might only work some of the time?

Schulz and colleague Jessica Sommerville of the University of Washington tested 144 preschoolers to look at whether children believe that causes always produce effects. If a child believes causes produce effects deterministically, then whenever causes appear to work only some of the time, children should think some necessary cause is missing or an inhibitory cause is present.

In one study, the experimenters showed children that a switch made a toy with a metal ring light up. Half the children saw the switch work all the time; half saw that the switch only lit the ring toy some of the time. The experimenters also showed the children that removing the ring stopped the toy from lighting up. The experimenters kept the switch, gave the toy to the children and asked the children to stop the toy from lighting up.

If the switch always worked, children removed the ring. If the switch only worked some of the time, children could have removed the ring but they didn't--they assumed that the experimenter had some additional sneaky way of stopping the effect. Children did something completely new: they picked up an object that had been hidden in the experimenter's hand (a squeezable keychain flashlight) and used that to try to stop the toy. That is, the children didn't just accept that the switch might work only some of the time. They looked for an explanation.

Schulz said she believes this is the first study that looks at how probabilistic evidence affects children's reasoning about unobserved causes. The researchers found that children are conservative about unobserved causes (they don't always think mysterious things are happening) but would rather accept unobserved causes than accept that things happen at random.

"We sometimes think that preschoolers are very concrete and work just with what they see," said Schulz, but this research suggests that preschoolers actually have quite abstract beliefs about causal relationships. "Four-year-olds have more sophisticated reasoning than adults tend to give them credit for," she said.

Test your own reaction to a choice, and inhibition test using lights

Loneliness is a major risk factor in increasing blood pressure in older
Americans, and could increase the risk of death from stroke and heart disease, new research at the University of Chicago shows. Scholars found that lonely people have blood pressure readings that are as much as 30 points higher than in non-lonely people, even when other factors such as depressive symptoms or perceived stress are taken into account.

The living-machine interface....will it become reality? Think organic computers or biomechanical prosthetics for the brain that could expand cognitive ability. Ker Than at Livescience reports on another interesting development in neuroscience...

The line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot blurrier. European researchers have developed "neuro-chips" in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together.

The achievement could one day enable the creation of sophisticated neural prostheses to treat neurological disorders or the development of organic computers that crunch numbers using living neurons.

To create the neuro-chip, researchers squeezed more than 16,000 electronic transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto a silicon chip just 1 millimeter square in size.

They used special proteins found in the brain to glue brain cells, called neurons, onto the chip. However, the proteins acted as more than just a simple adhesive.

"They also provided the link between ionic channels of the neurons and semiconductor material in a way that neural electrical signals could be passed to the silicon chip," said study team member Stefano Vassanelli from the University of Padua in Italy.

Read more at LiveScience.com

Try this new sequence from neurogamer . Excercise your brain - try to do the same number of reps in less time.

Scientists at Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hopkins Discuss Non-Medicative Alternatives for ADD/ADHD

The interesting fact in the excerpt from USA Today below is the high percentage of use, the other interesting observation is the substitution of exercise for the drugs and achieving similar results without the chemical intervention....

... About 4 million Americans take stimulant medications for ADHD, including nearly 10% of 10-year-old boys, says Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic.

Nissen and other members of a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel were concerned enough about the drugs' safety last month that they suggested adding a "black box" warning about possible heart risks. Last week, another advisory panel recommended adding label information about the risk of hallucinations. The FDA has not yet acted on those recommendations.

Doctors haven't done many definitive studies about exercise and ADHD, says David Goodman, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. But Goodman says it makes sense that working out would help people cope with the condition. Studies show that exercise increases levels of two key brain chemicals — dopamine and norepinephrine — that help people focus.

"Your cognitive function is probably better for one to three hours after exercise," Goodman says. "The difficulty is that by the next day, the effect has worn off."

If kids could exercise strenuously three to five times a day, they might not need medications at all, says John Ratey, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Ratey is so intrigued by the question that he's writing a book about how exercise can reduce symptoms of ADHD or at least help patients cope.

> New FOCUS and Reaction Time Trainer: Get a faster brain

Seth Shostak gives a play by play of the 8 candidates that could have life. There are eight reasons why there might be life. 8x8 = 64 and the $64 dollar question is whether it exists anywhere outside earth.

Here's our new home plate page, which talks a little about APOEe4 and testing. Straight scientific talk about our programs.

We have not really pushed it, but now is a good time to download the cognitivelabs.com toolbar you can get at SF-based Alexa. It's a good thing to do. Why? It blocks pop-ups, it also allows you to see which sites are getting more or less popular-the 'reality web' if you will. Also, we would like to do some interesting things with the Alexa web crawl. For example, we could find out how fast the web is, how fast the web-operators are, and also how fast they are by location. That last one also involves a mapping ap. To do all this, you need a user base that can make it worthwhile. Luckily we have that. There it is the global brain (or an externally rendered facsimile thereof).

What can you do in 10 seconds? This new exercise will make you work hard to recognize patters and see changes. Act Fast. Submit Your High Score to everybody.

Drug Appears Effective for Severe Alzheimer's Cases
03.23.06, 12:00 AM ET

THURSDAY, March 23 (CogLabs Newswire) -- Aricept, which is typically used to treat mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease, seems to reverse some cognitive and functional deterioration in patients with severe forms of the disease, Swedish researchers report.

The potential benefit of Aricept (donepezil) to treat Alzheimer's patients with severe dementia had not been studied until now. Some 20 percent of Alzheimer's patients suffer from severe dementia; as the disease progresses, they become less able to communicate, less mobile, and increasingly reliant on nursing care.

In the trial, a research team led by Dr. Bengt Winblad, director of the Karolinska Institute's neurology department, assigned 248 Alzheimer's patients living in nursing homes to receive donepezil or a placebo for six months...

>> read more at Forbes

are you a mogul?

play the Tech Mogul game.

Stay clear and focused.

A free game for attention-building where you earn points based on speed. Post on delicious if you've got a bookmarking toolbar. If not, there's a link.

An open-source version of Rubik's cube.

Your genes play a surprisingly important role in determining your risk factors for memory loss. If we go way back into the mists of time, the branching out of the human species from Africa has much to do with likelihood of memory loss. Overall, the most common genetic type is APOEe3, common among people living around the Mediterranean and their ancestors. Another type, APOEe2 is widely distributed among all populations on earth, but is absent in Native Americans. A third type. APOEe4, also has spread throughout the world in all groups but is slightly more common among Aborigines, Lapps, New Guineans, and Native Americans.

While Memory Loss and Alzheimer's can affect people regardless of their genetic type depending on their age and lifestyle behaviors, APOEe4 has been noted by researchers for its greater than average link to Coronary Artery Disease and Alzheimer's Disease. Individuals with the homogenous zygote of APOEe4 represent a substantial percentage of the population around the world and in the U.S. According to researchers, APOEe4 individuals are at greater risk for early memory loss and Alzheimer's, with the disease often going undetected in the brain for decades.

Interestingly, people taking the tests from cognitivelabs.com get first-hand access to some of the technologies used in Stanford research studies of individuals at risk for Alzheimer's Disease.

sources:


Apolipoprotein E (APOE) allele distribution in the world. Is APOE*4 a 'thrifty' allele?

The Genographic Project, a global five-year study collecting DNA from 100,000 indigenous peoples spanning five continents by some of the world's top population geneticists and other leading experts who are aiming to map the history of human migration via DNA, invites all members of the public to take part. It aims at tracing the genetic lineage of various human populations on the planet - to put it simply, to establish the degree of kinship between the modern peoples. The $40 million privately funded initiative is a collaboration between National Geographic magazine, IBM, and the Waitt Family Foundation charity.

History Since the Last Ice Age

MIT Perspectives on Molecular Evolution

Slower Speed-of-Processing Is Associated with Presence of the Apolipoprotein ε4 Allele - Topic: Clinical assessment - Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Institute of Aging, New York City: APOE Catalyst Conference - presentation by J. Wesson Ashford, M.D.,Stanford/VA Alzheimer's Center, Stanford, CA

The final count was 49 votes for Javascript and 37 Flash! Thanks for voting.

Java script pulls ahead. You can still vote.

Javascript vs. Flash: deadlocked at 18-18. Break the impasse!

We thought we'd break new ground by showing the actual growth rate of the site, which is moving in the right direction and is growing as fast as the redwoods in the backyard with all the rain we've had.



Now public companies have to report everything thanks to S-O (as they should) but small private companies don't really need to. So, here you go. Take a look. Everywhere you go, people around this great land and all around the world are taking tests. Thanks.

Flash leads Javascript, 10-8. We'll keep it open. Answer the survey here.

NEW YORK - Columbia University announced Monday that it has received a record $200 million from the widow of a distinguished graduate and will use the money to build a research center devoted to the study of the brain.

The donation from Dawn Greene and the Jerome L. Greene Foundation is the biggest gift ever received by the Ivy League university.

The Jerome L. Greene Science Center will study such disorders as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, autism, dementia and schizophrenia. It will be led by neurobiologist Thomas Jessell and Nobel laureates Richard Axel and Eric Kandel.

Free Brain Speed Test - Cognitive Speed is Linked to Longevity

What if it were true?




So now you know. Quality content for inquiring minds

But we still don't get to see him do the robot, like the commercial says.

You can check your brain's speed while you're here. It could actually be relevant for driving. Or, play a game. Thanks

Now that the term AJAX is all around us, and no it does not refer to a Homeric or Aenaedic hero or a British dreadnought (HMS Ajax) but basically can be translated as "javascript works". (This definition from paulgraham.com via reddit): so what does that mean for rest of us in day to day parlance?

In looking at casual games around here, our most popular in terms of page views is the 'techmogul reaction game' (javascript) which is very surprising since it is one-D game; it outdoes Flash. Now, the scientific exercises are mostly in Flash (though can be created jscript now); Memory TV is Flash and a variant of a photo viewer; the new pictures with reaction time will also be in Flash but can have a similar duality.

Flash in the Lead 10-8. We'll keep it open today....
Statement: Javascript tops Flash: Yes or No

  

In a startling finding, children with Tourette's Syndrome, often linked to non-social behavior or loss of control, are found to have above normal cognitive control. In fact, the powers of concentration of individuals with this syndrome or mild versions are exceptional and as a result they can become talented musicians, philologists, mathematicians, or coders.

more:

Though the repetitive vocal and motor tics characteristic of Tourette's syndrome may suggest an inability to control involuntary actions at the cognitive level, researchers have now found evidence that young people with Tourette's syndrome actually exhibit a greater level of cognitive control over their movements than their non-affected peers do. The research findings are consistent with a greater need for cognitive control of actions in individuals with Tourette's syndrome, and they offer clues to which regions of the brain may be involved in the generation of the syndrome's characteristic behavioral tics.

The findings are reported by Dr. Georgina Jackson and colleagues at the University of Nottingham, UK in the March 21st issue of Current Biology.

Tourette's syndrome is a developmental disorder that typically occurs during late childhood and is characterized by the presence of chronic vocal and motor tics. Tics are involuntary, repetitive, highly stereotyped behaviors that occur with a limited duration, typically occur many times during a single day, and occur on most days. Motor tics can be simple or complex in appearance, ranging from simple repetitive movements to coordinated action sequences. Verbal tics may involve repeating words or utterances (palilalia), producing inappropriate or obscene utterances (coprolalia), or the repetition of another's words (echolalia). Understanding the psychological processes and neural mechanisms that give rise to the execution of tics is of considerable clinical importance. A widely held view is that the inability to suppress unwanted movements in Tourette's syndrome results from a failure of cognitive control mechanisms.

In the new work, Dr. Jackson and colleagues studied cognitive control mechanisms in a group of young people with Tourette's syndrome (TS) by assessing the performance of individuals on a goal-oriented eye-movement task. The task demanded high levels of voluntary control and the active inhibition of automatic eye movements. The researchers found that in performing the task, TS individuals are not in fact impaired in cognitive control. Instead, the study showed that, paradoxically, TS individuals make fewer error responses than their age-matched and neurologically normal peers do, while responding just as fast to the task's demands. According to the authors, this finding most likely reflects a compensatory change in TS individuals whereby the chronic suppression of tics results in a generalized suppression of reflexive behavior in favor of increased cognitive control.

When this site got dugg unexpectedly, I am pleased to say that our host performed perfectly and did not have a single fluttering screen - quite impressive.

We just started diggwatcher - a blog that shows you what's number one on digg. Here's the XML feed for your readers....
combined with interesting observations. Also, look for neurogamer, another new site.

Here is the Diggwatcher URL.

The need for activities that can build cognitive focus throughout aging is clear, as a recent study showed that as pilots age, the frequency of crashes goes up.

Staying alert and attentive and maintaining the ability to focus is what we should all strive to achieve.

Three ways that this can be achieved are:

1. regular cognitive exercise (start here)

2. increase physical exercise

3. optimize your diet with 3 categories of items: green tea, blueberries, and fish

An exciting new development this week. Ever since looking at Mars through a small telescope, the red planet has held a fascination....

Google Mars open for business. Virtually inspect the red planet. Play a Mars theme game after you get there. Or try the Mars Puzzle need IE. After Mars, blast your way through the Asteroid Belt....

Google Maps Mars
By BetaNews Staff, BetaNews
Not content with sticking to Earth and the moon, Google is bringing its mapping technology to our nearest planetary neighbor: Mars. In commemoration of Percival Lowell's birthday, Google joined up with NASA to build Google Mars using the most scientific maps of the planet.

"Explore the red planet in three different ways: an elevation map shows color-coded peaks and valleys, a visible-imagery map shows what your eyes would actually see, and an infrared-imagery map shows the detail your eyes would miss," said Google Earth developer Chikai Ohazama. "We hope you enjoy your trip to Mars."

This has 1,200 plays today so far. Try it before the day's out. It's just getting dark in CA.

One clue at the center is the evolution of the brain, perhaps best depicted through the encephalization quotient (EQ) postulated by Lori Marino of the SETI Institute. The EQ is simply the ratio of body mass to cranial capacity. For the dinosaurs, this ratio was far below 1.0 - since their masses were exponentially larger than their cranial cavity. In such individuals, intelligence as we understand it does not exist.

On earth, EQ has tended to increase for some species and flatline or decrease in others. Reptiles, for example, have become no more intelligent. On the other hand, mammals including both apes/hominids and cetaceans have demonstrated adaptability and increasing EQ. Marino shows that environment does not limit the advance in EQ necessary for complex behavior, since some dolphins and whales have EQ's approaching those of modern humans: 5.0 for example where humans are 7.0.

The implication is that intelligence can evolve in surpisingly different environments, though perhaps the basic building blocks do not vary much: carbon, water, complex organic molecules.

Thinking about recent developments on Enceladus, it may be that there are numerous microclimates around the universe (even in this solar system) that share common traits with certain aspects of microclimates on earth - the basic building blocks are present and a range of temperature exists enabling life and sustained reproduction. The fact that two life forms on earth are so similiar yet evolved along a different path so as to be apparently unrelated suggests that life can exist in greater profusion and proximity to earth than could have been imagined. It would seem intelligence and cognitive evolution are closely related, wherever life exists.