Cognitive Labs

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With the brainy users of this site, FireFox continues to climb in usage with a full 27.78% share of users so far this year, compared to 63.3% for IE. Last year's share of browser was 4.95% for FireFox, 85% IE.

2006 detail.....
Microsoft Internet Explorer 63.30%
Firefox 27.78%
Safari 4.46%
Netscape 2.41%
Opera 1.36%
Mozilla 0.54%
WebTV Internet Terminal 0.05%
WebTV Plus Receiver 0.03%
Konqueror 0.03%
Blazer 0.01%
Danger Web Browser 0.01%
Microsoft Pocket Internet Explorer 0.01%
PSP (PlayStation Portable) Internet Browser 0.01%
Unknown 0.00%
ACCESS NetFront

who refers people to cognitivelabs.com? it's a good question? lots of people just bookmart it - with furl or delicious, or some of the others. digglicious is an interesting combination of digg and delicious....

Kotaku has put together a short brief of a couple of articles on evidence for the positive impact of games.

wife/girlfriend/mother start that annoying harpy talk, complaining about your lack of attention given to anything but your level 59 Undead Rogue, refer her to this Globe And Mail article. It’s almost proof-positive that learning a second language is for suckers (okay, not really) and that video games are the only education you need.

You’ll appear even smarter when you quote the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience which "shows [that] the elderly lose the ability to power up brain regions, such as the frontal lobe, needed to focus on a task" an area that video game experience helps develop.

Or drop this reference from the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, which states that "video gamers consistently outperform their non-playing peers in a series of tricky mental tests".

original reference: Globe and Mail

Since we talked about birds the other day...a very interesting report appeared in today's New York Times . It seems that with many people, increasing age makes it difficult for them to care for pets such as birds - in particular parrots who often live to be over 80 years old. But a foundation in Arizona is helping by taking in wayward birds that otherwise would not be cared for.

The May issue of Harvard's Men's Health Watch reports that mental decline is one of the most feared consequences of aging, but cognitive impairment is not inevitable. Here are some ways you can help reduce your risk for age-related memory loss:

(notice some reference to (neurogenesis)

• Get mental stimulation: Brainy activities stimulate new connections between nerve cells and may even help the brain generate new cells. Read, draw, take classes, and explore new hobbies.
• Get physical exercise: Exercise increases the number of blood vessels that bring blood to the region of the brain responsible for thought. It also spurs the development of new nerve cells. In one study, for every mile a woman walked each day, her risk of cognitive decline dropped by 13%.
• Improve your diet: A reduced-calorie diet has been linked to a lower risk of mental decline. Also remember your Bs: folic acid and vitamins B6 and B12. These can help lower homocysteine levels. High homocysteine has been linked to an increase risk of dementia.
• Improve your blood pressure: High blood pressure in midlife increases the risk of cognitive decline.
• Improve your cholesterol: High levels of LDL ("bad" cholesterol) increase the risk of dementia, as do low levels of HDL ("good" cholesterol).
• Avoid tobacco: According to one study, smoking doubles the risk of dementia.
• Don’t abuse alcohol: Excessive drinking is a major risk factor for dementia. If you choose to drink, limit yourself to two drinks per day.
• Protect your head: Moderate to severe head injuries early in life increase the risk of cognitive impairment.
• Build social networks: One study linked frequent social interactions with a 42% reduction in dementia risk.

Parrots can say things like "Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum" but can they really learn speech? Wes and I have recently seen a cockatiel chirp back at an auditory memory test that, the bird thought, was talking to it. This was fascinating and hilarious.

Now it seems that birds and other amimals may be able to learn speech, but are frustrated in a Kafka-esque way, or perhaps, like Aslan the Lion their natural utterances such as roaring contain more meaning than we think. Here's more...

WASHINGTON - The simplest grammar, long thought to be one of the skills that separate man from beast, can be taught to a common songbird, new research suggests.
Starlings learned to differentiate between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature. It took University of California at San Diego psychology researcher Tim Gentner a month and about 15,000 training attempts, with food as a reward, to get the birds to recognize the most basic of grammar in their own bird language.

Yet what they learned may shake up the field of linguistics.

While many animals can roar, sing, grunt or otherwise make noise, linguists have contended for years that the key to distinguishing language skills goes back to our elementary school teachers and basic grammar. Sentences that contain an explanatory clause are something that humans can recognize, but not animals, researchers figured.

Two years ago, a top research team tried to get tamarin monkeys to recognize such phrasing, but they failed. The results were seen as upholding famed linguist Noam Chomsky's theory that "recursive grammar" is uniquely human and key to the facility to acquire language.

But after training, nine out of Gentner's 11 songbirds picked out the bird song with inserted warbling or rattling bird phrases about 90 percent of the time. Two continued to flunk grammar.

"We were dumbfounded that they could do as well as they did," Gentner said. "It's clear that they can do it."

Gentner trained the birds using three buttons hanging from the wall. When the bird pecked the button it would play different versions of bird songs that Gentner generated, some with inserted clauses and some without. If the song followed a certain pattern, birds were supposed to hit the button again with their beaks; if it followed a different pattern they were supposed to do nothing. If the birds recognized the correct pattern, they were rewarded with food.

Gentner said he was so unprepared for the starlings' successful learning that he hadn't bothered to record the songs the starlings sang in response.

"They might have been singing them back," Gentner said.

To put the trained starlings' grammar skills in perspective, Gentner said they don't match up to either of his sons, ages 2 and 9 months.

What the experiment shows is that language and animal cognition is a lot more complicated than scientists once thought and that there is no "single magic bullet" that separates man from beast, said Jeffrey Elman, a professor of cognitive science at UCSD, who was not part of the Gentner research team.

Marc Hauser, director of Harvard University's Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, who conducted the tamarin monkey experiment, said Gentner's study was important and exciting, showing that "some of the cognitive sources that we deploy may be shared with other animals."

But Hauser said it still doesn't quite disprove a key paper he wrote in 2002 with Chomsky. The starlings are grasping a basic grammar, but not the necessary semantics to have the language ability that he and Chomsky wrote about.

Hauser said Gentner's study showed him he should have tried to train his monkeys instead of just letting them try to recognize recursive grammar instinctively. But starlings may be more apt vocalizers and have a better grasp of language than non-human primates. Monkeys may be trapped like Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa, a man metamorphosized into a bug and unable to communicate with the outside world, Hauser suggested.

Slashdot and the SJ Mercury News today are reporting a 'neural interface' for gaming on the horizon....takes us back to our march 12 post....

A new study shows that younger girls routinely beat boys in timed tasks. That means they should be better on this simple reaction time test - which measures the speed of your brain(working in conjunction with your PC's processor). The real interest in timing comes down to efficiency - this was a strong interest of Andrew Carnegie and other gilded age entrepreneurs and led to the rise of Taylor and his theory of the optimal shovel load (17 pounds) when you are throwing coal into the smelter. In later years both UPS and FedEx used I.E. (such as the Chinese postman algorithm)to map out the best squiggly routes to deliver packages...there was an allowance of everything from turning the key off and getting out of the truck (upsspeak: package car) to capturing your signature with the nifty electronic clipboard to eating a sandwich at lunch (eat faster!). In fact, Tom Hank's character who said "Wilson!" was one of those hated efficiency goons.

Here's a report on the study....

A new study of 8,000 people age 2 to 90 found females handle timed tasks more quickly than males.

The difference is most pronounced among pre-teens and teenagers.

"If you look at the ability of someone to perform well in a timed situation, females have a big advantage," said Stephen Camarata of Vanderbilt University.

The study did not reveal significant overall intelligence difference by gender, however.

"To truly understand a person's overall ability, it is important to also look at performance in un-timed situations," Camarata said. He thinks educators should pay attention to the results at a time when girls are generally outperforming boys in school.

"Consider that many classroom activities, including testing, are directly or indirectly related to processing speed," Camarata and colleague Richard Woodcock write in the May-June issue of the journal Intelligence. "The higher performance in females may contribute to a classroom culture that favors females, not because of teacher bias but because of inherent differences in sex processing speed."

The newly revealed gender gap in processing speed is not related to things like reaction time while playing a video game. "It's the ability to effectively, efficiently and accurately complete work that is of moderate difficulty," Camarata said.

Children in kindergarten and younger process tasks at similar speeds. The difference becomes pronounced in elementary school. On the portions of standardized tests that reflected processing speed, and among those age 14-18 in the study sample, girls scored an average of 105.5 whereas boys scored 97.4.

The study also found that boys consistently outperformed girls in identifying objects, knowing antonyms and synonyms, and completing verbal analogies. The researchers say that debunks the popular notion that girls develop all communication skills earlier than boys.

This focus and reaction time trainer has become pretty popular. It has an elementary simplicity - you can see what the task is (clicking on dots) and it gets harder as you are pushed for more time and go through the cycle. It is coded totally in javascript and throws up a little alert box at the end with your score. It doesn't rely at all on PC-software, no DLLs - the only function that is called is the clockspeed - and that could come from anything with a chip and any kind of interface - it could even be a chip-enriched toaster with a handle you push down.

Why choose the picture? In Egyptian the word for rejuvenate literally was "to make green" and is transliterated in English letters as s -w -dj (no vowels, like Hebrew) and could have been pronounced sowage, sewege, or sewage. The symbol is a reed bundle - and it was connected to the post inundation time when everything was green - it also ties into the seasons and the concept of planting.

With exercise, we make our brains 'green' and revitalized amidst an oasis in the desert.

George Lucas' imagination foreshadows heavy funding by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)in artificial limbs. Remember the sulphurous duel between Anakin and Obi Wan in the latest Star Wars Installment? Remember back a few years earlier to Anakin's duel with Count Dooku on Geonosis? That's when he got a new arm...



from livescience.com...Work on artificial arms that would be controlled by the human mind is ramping up thanks to a helping financial hand from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

DARPA announced in February that it would pour $55 million into a prosthetic arm research project to be led by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. The work will be spread among more than two dozen institutions.


Today, the University of Utah announced a $10 million contract, as part of the overall project, to develop a "peripheral nerve interface." The implanted device would relay nerve impulses wirelessly from what’s left of a limb to a computer worn on the person’s belt. From there, the signals would be routed to a bionic arm and back to the remainder of the amputated arm, where they would then flow naturally back to the brain.


Researchers at the university have already developed a pill-sized array with 100 tiny electrodes. Now they'll seek to improve on the arrays so they can be implanted in up to four of the major nerves in a patient's residual arm. Each electrode would communicate with a small number of fibers within a nerve.


"Imagine an artificial arm that moves naturally in response to your thoughts, that allows you to feel both the outside world and your own movements, and that is as strong and graceful as an intact, biological limb," said bioengineer Greg Clark, the University of Utah's principal investigator on the project. "That's what our researchers, teaming with others around the world, are setting out to achieve."

Over the next four years, other scientists will build a next-generation mechanical arm designed to work like the real thing.Existing prosthetic limbs can typically manage just one movement at a time.

"The new arm will take the signals that go to all the different arm muscles at once, and all the person has to do is think about natural movement and the arm will respond in a natural way,” Clark said. "We're basically listening in on what the nervous system would be telling the natural arm, and translating that into signals that will move the artificial arm in the same way."

UC Irvine researchers have asserted the existence of differential wiring in the brains of men and women, impacting perception and reaction. A cluster of neurons processing input such as fear and aggression links to separate cognitive functions.

In men, the cluster integrates with brain regions connected to responsiveness to external stimuli, such as the visual cortex and an area that coordinates motor actions.

In women, the neurons communicates with brain regions linked to internal regulators, such as the insular cortex and hypothalamus. These areas tune in to and regulate women's hormones, heart rate, blood pressure, digestion and respiration.

"Throughout evolution, women have had to deal with a number of internal stressors, such as childbirth, that men haven't had to experience," said study co-author Larry Cahill of the University of California Irvine. "What is fascinating about this is the brain seems to have evolved to be in tune with those different stressors."

The finding, published in the recent issue of the journal NeuroImage, could help researchers learn more about sex-related differences in anxiety, autism, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Ad: Get Test Code for Your Site | Try a Memory Pic Beta

The scans also showed that men's and women's amygdalas are polar opposites in terms of connections with other parts of the brain. In men, the right amygdala is more active and shows more connections with other brain regions. In women, the same is true of the left amygdala.

Scientists still have to find out if one's sex also affects the wiring of other regions of the brain. It could be that while men and women have basically the same hardware, it's the software instructions and how they are put to use that makes the sexes seem different.

Aiming high in delivering new innovations...


CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts and HELSINKI, Finland, April 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Advancing the vision of mobility while developing real-world applications, Nokia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) today announce the opening of the Nokia Research Center Cambridge. The joint research facility, a collaboration between Nokia Research Center and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), brings researchers and scientists from MIT and Nokia together to develop high-impact research to create the state-of-the-art in communications technologies.

"Our mission is to explore and develop technologies that will be available in the marketplace in five to ten years - not just novelties, but technologies that will see mass market demand from consumers and enterprises," said Dr. Bob Iannucci, head of Nokia Research Center. "With MIT's academic and research expertise, Nokia's mobility and technology leadership, and the fusion of some of the world's brightest minds, the Nokia Research Center Cambridge will provide a platform for delivering compelling new innovations."

The center is currently focusing its research on several projects, each part of a larger vision where mobile devices become elements of an "ecosystem" of information, services, peripherals, sensors and other devices. These projects revolve around enhancing people's lives and productivity by enabling more intuitive interaction between individuals, machines and environments, and range from developing the underlying computer architecture to leveraging and extending the Semantic Web. Although not commercially available today, projects like those underway could likely become real-world applications within the next decade.

Activities in Sacramento in support of Alzheimer's awareness are a focus this week...

I like Wal-Mart. Where else can you get a one pound bag of red vines for a buck? Our local Wal-Mart in Mountain View even gets visited by Marguerite, the Stanford student shuttle. There, economically minded Stanford students mix with Hispanics, Arabs, and people from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China - Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Catholics, Shiites, Sunnis, Protestants, and from just about everywhere else, procuring things on the cheap.

Go to the Wal Mart supercenter in Cody, WY and you'll see how it is the major market for everything in the town. Also, lots of great fossils nearby for palaeontologists.

See Wal-Mart's plans for healthcare.

Surging Longevity is threatening to break the curve carefully plotted out by population ecologists over the past century. As Dr. Ashford will tell you, there has been a 2 year increase in life expectancy every decade since 1900.

What this means is that your chance of living longer, even without radical interventions propounded by individuals like Aubrey DeGrey (cutting down to 1,000 calories per day through caloric restriction) is certain to increase. For me, this soylent-green like scenario is not very fun.

With the reduction of heart disease and cancers in a stepwise fashion - the greatest threat to longevity then becomes Alzheimer's Disease which is closely connected to age. In fact, the greatest risk factor for Alzheimer's is indeed age.(Aricept.com).

Therefore, exercising the brain and body will be key to avert this outcome. Tremendous progress in cybernetics is happening and biomechanical storage (Seagate, anyone?)will eventually let people store memories. There are a number of technical and biological issues to overcome including just settling on a unified theory of memory creation and storage in the brain which would then allow researchers to 'write' memory to a device that could be accessed. You could then google whatever memory you wanted to replay it. It is not known if you could store new memories in the same fashion.

Live long enough, and it may be possible. By then we should have 100 million members.

Some suggestions from the nearby USGS on getting ready for the next tectonic event...

A new study that will appear in the Annals of Neurology concludes one of the largest longitudinal evaluations of diet in connection with cognition. Phys.org reports that the Meditteranean Diet appears to offer promise, that is, a diet rich in olive oil and legumes.

Support cognitive awareness. Get Tools for your site.

Keeping the Brain Fit has now hit the mainstream with the launch of the first mass-market product in this area from Nintendo. Well now, there are other games and tools available - one of the best deals, with the most accessible entertainment along with the most scientifically relevant content is - right here. People seem to agree...and for that, we thank you for your support. Hope you were able to get your taxes in...some people on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. have until tomorrow evening - since today it is Patriot's Day in remembrance of Paul Revere and Co.
I am sure all of the readers of this blog have finished the task long ago, however...

A new study reported in the Social Software Blog ( part of Weblogs Inc )by Marshall Kirkpatrick reports that blogging can help fight Alzheimer's. We agree with this on two fronts (1) It's a great way to connect in an informal, but thoughtful way and keep the brain working and (2) fosters communication all over, while bringing science discoveries and news to everyone....

It's also a great way to spread the word about things like free tools for your site

Just finished Collapse, by Jared Diamond. It takes a geographic perspective on why societies either run out of resources or manage to adapt their practices for sustainability. Looking at Polynesia, Easter Island was completely deforested. 2,000 years ago it had some of the largest palm trees in the world, but wasteful practices led to a competition between chiefs for the largest and most elaborate moai the famed, brooding statues that gaze out to sea. Increasing hunger led to the decline of the chiefs, who could no longer provide for their followers, and were overthrown.

Similarly, in Greenland, Norse settlers didn't adapt sufficiently, pursuing a European lifestyle that eventually led to deforestation, coupled with the onset of the Medieval Ice Age around the year 1400. The Inuit, by contrast, moved in and were able to survive due their flexible hunting skills and ingenuity. In Iceland, however, the Norse adapted sufficiently to make the settlement a success, perhaps because of the greater fertility of the land derived from renewed ash deposits.

Japan appeared to be headed for disaster, but the Tokogawa shogunate enacted a system for forest management that preserved and renewed a scare resource. As a result, up to 75% of Japan's land is today forested, despite having 5,000 people per square mile - an extremely dense population.

One wonders if practices in the U.S. will stand up over a millennium, such as the drawing of water from precious acquifers in Nevada, the assimilation of the Colorado River, and the dependence on the Sierra/Cascade snowpack for all of California's water needs. One or two snowless years (in contrast to this year) will lead to unknown consequences. Perhaps California will have to look at desalination plants as have been deployed in the Gulf (Arabian) States.

This is a hot area. Our last post on the topic was widely posted on about 5,000 blogs including Kotaku. Here, Mike Kenward of Science Business puts a price tag on the wireless human-computer interface of about $5,000. We wonder how quickly these interface devices, which offer potential to aid in recovery from strokes or to assist individuals like Stephen Hawking regain tactile functionality or to narrowcast va RSS to subscribers all over the world on their PC's - will be made into products. For me, I wouldn't bet against some of the companies that have redefined consumer electronics from getting active and making something happen.

South Africa's IOL reports that a study has found that women who consume a 'moderate' amount of alcohol performed better on cognitive tests than woman in a control group. This study contradicts some other recent studies and accepted belief that any alcohol may cause a degree of impairment. It may be that the subjects could avoid outside distraction more effectively because of the moderate intake, but certainly this deserves additional study.

You can start earning from Cognitive Labs immediately by putting a 'memory test' link on your site. This is on top of the social benefit that you, working with us, are helping to create.

People dream of things like eliminating world hunger, fostering world peace, or stamping out disease. Helping others develop awareness of their cognitive health through your evangelism is a small but significant step in the right direction; get the tools and put them on your site. With people joining us all the time, we will make a giant leap forward in developing a deep understanding of the factors affecting brain health and awareness, how to mitigate them, and simultaneously be able to support the needs of more people than ever before through 'extensible' tools that bring power to all of us. Friends, colleagues, relatives - it's in your hands to help them.

Code Shack



Code Shack lets you put memory tests on your site, blog, bulletin board or personal space. If you want to help fight memory loss and promote cognitive health for everyone around the world, these free tools do that!Kind of like UPS Internet Tools at UPS which became a sensation. All sites needed it for package tracking (Lycos, Yahoo, InfoSeek, Amazon, etc.) this goes back to the time (almost) when Yahoo! had a grey screen, so did ups.com; in this case we are dealing with THE BRAIN and brainspeed. Don't forget, we initiated this concept (brainspeed) in 2005 particularly with Natrol (Nasdaq: NTOL) which started a site called brainspeed.com. So, now we're ready to knock the cover off the ball, steroid-free.

Society Altering Technology?


The New York Times is running a series called the DNA Age . A story by Amy Harmon asserts that Genetic testing has entered the mainstream, with parents using it to help make college selection and financial aid decisions, physicians and other caregivers using it to screen for likelihood of various diseases and maladies, and others claiming membership or non-membership in exclusionary social circles based on genetic footprint.

The impact on society could indeed be far reaching. Find out your BrainSpeed.

A Kaiser Permanente Medical Group Study covering 9,000 people who were in their 40's in the 1960's and 1970's has found that those who were obese at the time of their first participation in the study have suffered from Alzheimer's at three times the rate of those who were not obese.

This finding provides more supporting evidence of the need to exercise the body as well as the mind.

The Pacific Health Research Institute in Honolulu's long term study of Japanese-American men born between 1900 amd 1919 has found a linkage between sustained treatment for high blood pressure and reduction of dementia.....


(CogLabs News) Maintaining high blood pressure treatment may reduce the risk of dementia in old age, researchers reported in the rapid access issue of Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Lead author of the study Rita Peila, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the National Institute on Aging (NIA), said "For every year of hypertension treatment, there is increased protection against dementia."

Some physicians hesitate to treat hypertension in the elderly because of concerns that lowering blood pressure might impair cognitive functioning. However, clinical trials have shown no harmful effects on cognitive function in elderly patients undergoing hypertension therapy.

"Hypertension treatment in the very old -- those aged 80 and older -- protects against stroke, heart disease and heart failure, and now we see that there is no harm -- and perhaps a benefit -- on cognitive function," said Peila, who is also a scientist at the Pacific Health Research Institute in Honolulu.

Researchers analyzed data from the long-term Honolulu-Asia Aging Study on Japanese-American men born between 1900 and 1919. They focused on 848 men (ages 50-65) who had mid-life high blood pressure and were free of dementia at age 77 (on average). Then, at follow-up visits three and six years later, the men had a thorough diagnostic evaluation for dementia and took the Cognitive Abilities Screening Instrument, a well-recognized test of cognitive function in Japanese and Western populations.

Of the 848 men, researchers identified 142 who had never been treated for their hypertension and 706 who were being treated at the age 77 examination. Researchers divided the treated group based on the duration of treatment:

* 195 men were on medication for less than five years;
* 149 were treated from five to 12 years; and
* 362 men were treated for more than 12 years prior to the exam.

Researchers found that each year of treatment reduced the risk of developing dementia during the follow-up period by about 3 percent. Compared with men who were never treated for hypertension, the risk of developing dementia during the follow-up period was:

* 6 percent lower in those treated less than five years;
* 48 percent lower in those treated from five to 12 years;
* 60 percent lower in those treated more than 12 years -- similar to the risk in a control group of 446 men with normal blood pressure.

"We found protection against both Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia," Peila said. "There is more and more recognition that there is a vascular component to Alzheimer's disease."

Long-term hypertension can damage blood vessels of the brain, and the brains of Alzheimer's patients often have tiny blood clots and small infarcts, she said.

While only 7.8 percent of the 848 men were diagnosed with dementia, even those who did not have dementia showed cognitive declines. But men who had untreated hypertension had significantly more cognitive decline than men with normal blood pressure and hypertensive men treated for at least five years.

Moments of Realization and Creativity Occur in the Prepared Mind

Using 2 kinds of instruments, Scientists have detected definitive traces
of "creative insight" or satori ocurring in the brain in real time.

Newswise says that if you’ve experienced the highs and lows of creative thinking, you know that sometimes the creative well is dry, while at other times creativity is free flowing. It is during the latter times that problem solvers often experience so-called “Aha!” moments – those moments of clarity when the solution to a vexing problem falls into place with a sudden insight and one sees connections that previously eluded you.

But why do "Aha!" moments sometimes come easily and sometimes not at all? A new study reveals that patterns of brain activity before people even see a problem predict whether they will solve it with or without a sudden insight, and these brain activity patterns are likely linked to distinct types of mental preparation.

John Kounios, a professor of psychology at Drexel University, Mark Jung-Beeman of Northwestern University, and their research team report their findings in a new paper published in the journal Psychological Science.

"Our previous work showed that the ‘Aha! Moment’ is associated with a specific and unique brain mechanism," said Kounios. "The new study shows that this ‘Aha! Moment’ is the culmination of a process that begins even before one starts working on a specific problem. People can prepare to solve an upcoming problem with a flash of insight by adopting a particular frame of mind for doing so.

The research suggests subjects can mentally prepare to have an "Aha!" solution even before a problem is presented. Specifically, as they prepare for problems that they solve with insight, their pattern of brain activity suggests that they are focusing attention inwardly, are ready to switch to new trains of thought, and perhaps are actively silencing irrelevant thoughts. This shows its possible to prepare mentally to solve problems with different thinking styles and that these different forms of preparation can be identified with specific patterns of brain activity. This study may eventually lead to an understanding of how to attain the optimal "frame of mind" to deal with particular types of problems.

This research team’s previous study revealed that just prior to an "Aha!" solution, after there has been work on solving a problem, the brain momentarily reduces visual inputs, with an effect similar to shutting of the eyes or looking away to facilitate the emergence into consciousness of the solution. The new study extends these findings by suggesting that mental preparation involving inward focus of attention promotes insight even prior to the presentation of a problem.

Participants in the new study were presented with a series of word puzzles. Each problem consisted of three words (for example, tank, hill, secret), and participants had to think of a single word that could form a compound or common phrase with each of the three words. Sometimes the problem was solved with a sudden flash of insight – the solution suddenly pops into consciousness and seems obviously correct. At other times, solving such problems is more methodically, and involves "trying out" possible solutions until on the correct one is found (in this case, top: tank top, hilltop, top secret).

In two parallel experiments, participants solved these problems while brain activity was monitored either with electroencephalograms (EEG), which provide precise timing information and approximate anatomical information, or with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which gives a more precise location of active brain areas, but with less precise timing. The researchers focused on neural activity that occurred during the period just before each problem was displayed.
The two brain imaging techniques yielded highly similar results and showed a different pattern of brain activity prior to problems that were subsequently solved with an "Aha!," compared to the pattern of brain activity prior to problems solved more methodically.

Mental preparation that led to insight solutions was generally characterized by increased brain activity in temporal lobe areas associated with conceptual processing, and with frontal lobe areas associated with cognitive control or "top-down" processing. Jung-Beeman noted that "Problem solvers could use cognitive control to switch their train of thought when stuck on a problem, or possibly to suppress irrelevant thoughts, such as those related to the previous problem." In contrast, preparation that led to more methodical solutions involved increased neural activity in the visual cortex at the back of the brain — suggesting that preparation for deliberate problem solving simply involved external focus of attention on the video monitor on which the problem would be displayed.

More than a century ago, Louis Pasteur said "Chance favors only the prepared mind." By this, he meant that sudden flashes of insight don’t just happen, but are the product of preparation. According to Kounios, "We have begun to understand how the brain prepares for creative insight. This will hopefully lead to techniques for facilitating it."

The Journal Psychological Science is published by the Association for Psychological Science (previously known as the American Psychological Society) and is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Mozart and Dr. Seuss provided the inspiration as researchers measured the emotional responses of a Boston Symphony Orchestra performance.

Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart, five members of the orchestra, and 50 audience members were the guinea pigs _ wired with sensors as researchers stationed at two banks of computers backstage collected data about heart rates, muscle movement, and other physiological responses.

"Science has come an awful long way in the last 250 years," Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart told a Symphony Hall audience of about 2,000 parents and young children during a family concert.

The concert consisted of four Mozart pieces, including the Overture to "The Marriage of Figaro" _ celebrating the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth _ followed by two Seuss interpretations, including "Green Eggs and Ham."

Among researchers' questions: Do orchestra and audience members have strong physiological responses, as they suspect, to the conductor's thrusts and dramatic head tosses? Is there much difference between responses at a live show compared to watching on television, as a control group will do later?

"We want a window into the brain," said research director Daniel J. Levitin, a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal. "We want to understand more about how the brain works.

"If the conductor is conveying excitement, we expect to see that in the musicians, and a second or two later in the audience," Levitin continued. "Of course, we might not. It might be that the musicians are not conveying what we think they are. Is the audience taking from this what we think they are?"

Researchers, who will analyze the data over the next few months, say their results may eventually help doctors treat victims of strokes or Alzheimer's disease.

Lockhart, the guest conductor, wore a tight-fitting shirt with electrodes snaking all over his upper body. The sensor on his right wrist popped out of place early in the performance, forcing technicians to reattach it.

Lockhart said the loose sensor was a distraction, but not a deterrent. He's looking forward to being wired up during more challenging pieces.

"A Puccini opera ... something that takes peoples' breath away," Lockhart said. "I'm proud of everything we do, but some music is intended to take you out on a limb, and some music is a little more balanced. People generally don't have incredibly tragic responses to Dr. Seuss, so you're not going to get the full gamut of emotional range."

Overall, he said it was "a good way to start."

Eric Graber, 35, wore a sensor, as did his wife, Lara, and their young son, Sebastia