Cognitive Labs

The U.S. and Iran are often in the news with bluffing and posturing on both sides.

There is a long history of Imperial animosity between the West and Iran, since the end of WWI obviously and before that, excluding the Medieval period where Iran was a member of various Islamic empires, the bluffing and posturing was frequent between the rulers of the Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire, large-integrated empires, both of which were greatly weakened by Muhammad and his followers and eventually eliminated.

In the fourth century, the Emperor Shapur II referred to the Roman Emperor as his servant and 'overseer of the Western provinces who serves at our pleasure.'

In response, the Roman Emperor's ministers claimed that Shapur was beholdened to the "Lord of the Universe" and that the ruler of the world was too busy to respond to any entreaties from princelings and other local rulers of no import.

Ocasionally warfare flared in Mesopotamia, a buffer zone between the two empires.
In 260, the aged emperor Valerian was captured and held in captivity in Persia until he died. After which, his skin was stuffed and kept in the palace as a momento.
This giant rock carving, like Stone Mountain, Georgia or Mt. Rushmore, sits above the most well-traveled highway in Iran (the Silk Road) so that everybody would see the Roman Emperor's submission......

Here it is.

Our host is supposed to able to load balance.

Hope so. Looks like we're gonna need it.

:-)

Memorytv (Memory TV) take favorite images and enjoy a memory game, scientifically-validated. Here's the current list of exercises.

Labels: alzheimers, brain, cognitive_labs, memory_test, memorytv

Our last visitor was Disney Worldwide Services in Burbank, CA just a few milliseconds ago.

News Corp (NY IP address) also visited recently.

State of Colorado, State of California, Kaiser Permanente, Oracle, and so forth in the past hour

It's an E-ticket.

I picked this photo of Mahatma Gandhi off of myspace. It was linked into from an MIT webserver.

Photoshop it, and then it's done.

You've got a Gandhi memory exercise.

We're over 100 people on memorypix (just started)

Pictures in American History? Read the perspective of Patrick Cox, a professor of history at the University of Texas-Austin.

They play a key role in our perception.

We are pleased to offer a new kind of memory test, which is: m e m o r y p i x.
This is in the alpha state. but if you want to comment on it, please do.

This has a Hollywood-flavor to it, a hurricane, and even the Governor of California. The object of the test is to press the spacebar when you see an image you have already seen   and thereby test your short-term total recall ability.

You also have to be fast. Press the spacebar as quickly as you can after you realize you have already seen an image. At the end, you'll get a score. You'll want to maximize accuracy, number correct, and keep reaction time (in milliseconds low)

Mr. Schwarzenegger is the 1st governor in the U.S. to appear in a memory test, which naturally, was grown in California just like a Valencia orange.

Sorry, no surf boards in this test, or surf-riffs from the Ventures (wipeout) or Beach Boys. But, they are coming, along with Maverick. There's no reason a test can't be rock-solid scientifically plus have some MP3's interlaced in it.

Tunes + Memory = Awesome Combo

Work your Memory and Have Fun!

This will shortly be registration-only, so take advantage of this sneak preview.
It's also patent-pending. Send us feedback at memorypix@cognitivelabs.com.

If you want something really boring, don't try the jackalope test. Jackalopes are frequently seen grazing in herds in the "4 corners" area of the U.S. Residents of the area, determined conservationists, have successfully kept their existence secret.

Try our test from Space.com or LiveScience.com's community boards. I emailed the company about offering our test. Think it's a good fit?

On Memorial Day (U.S.) - remember those who served, men and women. On Memory TV, look at the Civil War pictorial - it might remind you of Ken Burns' work. Like his work, it utilizes images from the National Archive. In the 60's you'll see some classic photos from that decade.

Disable your pop-up blocker, first.

Or just exercise your memory

Towering competence comes from training in specific ways...assert researchers

Experts who specialize in studying the phenomenon of expertise argue phenoms are made, not born.

The researchers have asked a college student to spend hundreds of hours memorizing random numbers. They’ve interviewed a surgeon about how he wields a scalpel. They’ve parsed a golfer’s putt from his brain to his fingertips.

Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University, is among a group of researchers who want to know why some people become experts and others never get beyond amateur.

They’ve studied chess players and pianists, software designers and dart players. What they are finding is that superstars are made, not born. And the experts, Ericsson says, practice in a way that commits the "how" of what they do to memory.

For example, expertise at the free throw line does not come from simply lofting a basketball 1,000 times. Instead, the shooter must create a memory of exactly what to do to make the ball go in the hoop.

"I get the information from people thinking out loud," says Ericsson, 58, a citizen of Sweden and a resident of the United States for 30 years. In June, Ericsson and co-editors Neil Charness, Paul Feltovich and Robert Hoffman will publish a 900-page academic book on the subject, The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.

Here Ericsson discusses the research, and its populist notion that almost anyone can be a star if they are willing to work hard and smart:

You’ve been called the ringleader of the "expert performance movement." What is that?

I started to do this work trying to understand how people could improve their memory. As I saw the tremendous effects of training on memory performance, I got interested in looking at people who were experts at other things. I was asking if those people who were successful in virtually any domain had done something to be that successful.

What happened with your work on memory?

Good memory was believed by many to be something you were born with. The way we started was allowing a particular college student room to improve. He was given random digits, read one per second. An average person can easily get seven, kind of like a phone number. Eventually that first subject was able to reproduce 82 digits.

He could memorize 82 numbers while someone read them aloud, one number per second?

Yes. It took him 200 hours to learn. We didn’t teach the subject anything. He figured it out for himself. You have to have all sorts of groupings . . . groups of four, maybe threes. He was a distance runner. He encoded them like they were running times.

So how does that apply to other expert performers: athletes, musicians, chess players?

For experts, they encode things meaningfully. Chess players, if you show them a chess board, they can encode it in long-term memory. You build up these structures that allow you places to put things (for retrieval).

Structures? Do you mean structures in the brain?

Think of it as someone sitting at a desk and getting something and putting in a drawer. When you need it, you go to the place it should be. With long-term memory, you have addresses for information, like a desk drawer.

So memory enhances expertise. You also talk about 'deliberate practice.' Can you explain that to me?

Deliberate practice is to repeat what you’re doing so you can correct it. Experience does not improve performance. Some amateur golfers can play at the same level for 30 years, and they don’t automatically get better. Once people reach some acceptable level, they seem to get stuck there. In order to keep improving, you need to structure your training around specific goals. If you are a golfer, you don’t just stand there and hit balls as hard as you can.


Do you mean that practice, or experience, isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be?

Not all experts are performing at consistently high levels. Stockbrokers who invest in the market are not necessarily more successful than average individuals. Psychotherapists who have extensive training and experience are not more successful than those with much less training. We’re really not interested in socially defined expertise. We’re interested in expert performance where people can consistently do things at a superior level. Then we can start asking, what are they thinking when they’re successful, and how is their developmental history different?

So what do you do, say, if you’re a golfer, to get better?

You decide you want to change something. You pick out a club and decide to hit a ball to a specific spot. You are not hitting the ball to the hole but hitting the ball to an aim point. You are setting a goal. You evaluate whether you achieved that goal. If not, you make corrections. You have to develop these cognitive structures.

Isn’t that just the same thing as practice makes perfect?

That idea of finding the mistakes and correcting those is the key. You figure out ways to adjust aspects to improve performance. As you get better, you primarily need to know what you should have done. One of the examples I give is, if someone misses a volley when you’re playing tennis, it’s not like you stop the game to talk about the 10 things you did that made you miss the shot. It might take a while in the match before you get another shot like it. If you’re working with a tennis coach, who can throw you balls in the same way, you get as much opportunity to improve on that shot as you would in three months of play.

So feedback, or coaching, is key. In what way?

Look at playing chess. If you can beat everyone very easily, how can you become a better chess player? People who become very successful chess players, they re-create games played by experts to see why these other players were picking these moves. If you find you pick the same move as they did, then you’re playing as well as them. If not, then it’s a clue that you’re not doing something right....

here's our myspace page.

It's myspace.com/cognitivelabs

you can register for cognitivelabs.com or get linking code right from our space.
-enter your email address, hit submit, and you're a member.
-if you're a member of cognitivelabs already, no need to register over there.
-if you're a myspace member, send people our way if you think fighting memory loss is a good idea, or if you just support a healthier brain

Gary Small, Professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience at UCLA, argues that Lifestyle Changes May Improve Cognitive Function And Brain Efficiency

Couple this with the recent Alzheimer's and Dementia article by Dr. Ashford and Stanford colleagues, Wes formerly of UCLA, on cognitive screening and the suggestion that we are at the cusp of a new age of being able to identify impairments earlier AND

the work of people like Mike Weiner at UCSF/UC Berkeley who is heading up an ambitious and rigorous effort to be able identify the earliest cases of Alzheimer's with MRI and we have the beginnings of a California gold rush in cognitive science, and, humbly, this website which is signing up people from all over the world left and right.

It's a wonderful time to be working in the field. If you want to hear more about Dr. Weiner's work and volunteer to be in a study, please do so here, or just from our home page. If you live near Stanford, you might want to go there, if you are in SF, consider UCSF. I doubt that Mr. Semel even knows that Yahoo! has anything to do with this, but they do.

A UCLA research study published in the June issue of the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry found that people may be able to improve their cognitive function and brain efficiency by making simple lifestyle changes such as incorporating memory exercises, healthy eating, physical fitness and stress reduction into their daily lives.

"We've known for several years that diet and exercise can help people maintain their physical health and live longer, but maintaining mental health is just as important," said lead investigator, Dr. Gary Small, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. "The UCLA study is the first to show the impact of memory exercises and stress reduction used together with a healthy diet and physical exercise to improve brain and cognitive function."

We just added some image links of places where this blog has been quoted. Another one is LeMonde, Institute for the Future in Palo Alto is another... but we have not added those yet. Mostly globally oriented media properties than here locally...interesting. It's on the right side bar.

Play Cognitive Labs Simon from Google Italy (Italia)

Take a break from bicycling through the hill country of Italy. Work the brain.

Chocolate has been shown in a new study to boost brain power while completing a battery of computerized neuropsychological tests. Chocolate Milk may even be more beneficial. While bearing down on attention-requiring work, such as spreadsheets, imputed interest calculations, your own stock indexing algorithm, programming, or perhaps, programming a new and improved reaction time exercise using javascript or the wondrous actionscript - it might be a good idea to eat m&m's or hershey bars and wash it down with a draught of chocolate milk. Afterwards, you'll need to lift weights and take a brisk walk to avoid the result of excess nutrients (fat).

"Chocolate contains many substances that act as stimulants, such as theobromine, phenethylamine, and caffeine," Dr. Bryan Raudenbush from Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia noted in comments to Reuters Health.

"These substances by themselves have previously been found to increase alertness and attention and what we have found is that by consuming chocolate you can get the stimulating effects, which then lead to increased mental performance."

To study the effects of various chocolate types on brain power, Raudenbush and colleagues had a group of volunteers consume, on four separate occasions, 85 grams of milk chocolate; 85 grams of dark chocolate; 85 grams of carob; and nothing (the control condition).

After a 15-minute digestive period, participants completed a variety of computer-based neuropsychological tests designed to assess cognitive performance including memory, attention span, reaction time, and problem solving.

"Composite scores for verbal and visual memory were significantly higher for milk chocolate than the other conditions," Raudenbush told Reuters Health. And consumption of milk and dark chocolate was associated with improved impulse control and reaction time....


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060524/hl_nm/chocolate_power_dc

Flow is a mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields....

Flow is one of the characteristics of games that can be leveraged to achieve beneficial effects, by immersing the player into the game world.

I thought I would share a couple of interesting examples I have seen:


Electroplankton - Nintendo DS (Japan only)

another Flash game that was on digg is this and represents a Master's thesis in game design...

Here it is Exercise your brain.

called the Internet. It was supposed to do wonderful things for people. And it did. Then the whole thing got out of control. People got away from what was really important.

I just got an email from a top researcher in the field of memory research wanting to know how we get so many people interested enough to sign up for a research study.

It's a good question...

We're not offering anything, we're not paying anything. All we offer is an outlet for people to improve themselves, if they want.

...the point is, we seem to be more effective than expensive radio ads, the newspaper or other traditional media outlets and not just by a percentage basis, it's a complete transformation, a complete change by several standard deviations, if you look at statistically. i guess, in a casual way, without a lot of hype and fanfare, the internet is changing the world after all, for the better : - )

Crossed the 1,120,000 mark at about 8:07 AM. Thanks
Help link 1 billion brains.

Let's hit the 120,000 number today! you can do it by referring a friend - here's a good place to start! our last number update was at 10:57 AM PST 5/23/06

Cap'n Kirk: the man who ushered in the Information Age
Q: How Fast was Spock's Brain?
A: Only cognitive labs knows Spock's (or your) brainspeed

Venerable auctioneer Christie's is set to auction off items from the original Star Trek...(New York) Trekkies will be setting their phasers to "bid" this fall when Christie's holds the first official studio auction of memorabilia from all five Star Trek TV series and 10 movie spinoffs.

CBS Paramount Television Studios is cleaning out its vaults for the sale, comprising more than 1,000 lots totaling some 4,000 items, to be held from Oct. 5 to 7 in conjunction with the 40th anniversary of the original Star Trek series, Christie's announced on Thursday.

Fans and collectors will have a chance to acquire Star Trek artifacts ranging from models of the Starship USS Enterprise to Capt James Kirk's uniform or Capt Jean-Luc Picard's jumpsuit in an auction where Christie's expects to raise more than $3 million.

Other items to hit the block include props, weapons, prosthetics and set dressings unearthed from five Paramount warehouses. Among the highlights are a miniature of the Starship Enterprise used in visual effects for the film "Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country," expected to sell for $15,000 to $25,000, and a replica of Kirk's chair from the original TV series that was recreated for the 1996 "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" episode "Trials and Tribble-ations," which is estimated at $10,000 to $15,000.

>>more

It's easy to link to Cognitive Labs. Just post a link. Or, read this, which tells you how you can get paid just for linking to our site.

Sims creator Wil Wright backs peaceful games

Games can help your brain, everybody is saying. The SF Chronicle picks up the thread on "peaceful" games and cognitive games, mentioning the upcoming serious 'games' conference.

for a fun brain game try this it also comes in a search-engine flavor.

register for more games here, for free

Get into real brain research in the Bay Area - Stanford or UCSF? - go here.
more than 20 people have signed up just for research so far today
congrats to dr. ashford on his new journal publication on cognitive screening

Congratulations to both Dr. Wes Ashford (Stanford/VA Alzheimer's Center) and Dr. Ruth O'Hara (Stanford University) and all the other authors of the paper published in the scholarly journal Alzheimer's and Dementia.
Here is a list of authors:


J. Wesson Ashford (a), Soo Borson(b), Ruth O’Hara(c), Paul Dash(d), Lori Frank(e), Philippe Robert(f), William R. Shankle(g), Mary C. Tierney(h), Henry Brodaty(i), Frederick A. Schmitt(j), Helena C. Kraemer(k) and Herman Buschke(l)

a Stanford / VA Alzheimer Center, Department of Psychiatry, Palo Alto VA Health Care System, Palo Alto, CA, USA
b Department of Psychiatry, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
c Department of Psychiatry, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA
d Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
e Center for Health Outcomes Research, United BioSource Corporation, Bethesda, MD, USA
f Department of Psychiatry, University of Nice, Nice, France
g Cognitive Sciences, U.C. Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA
h Geriatric Research Unit, Sunnybrook and Women’s College Health Sciences Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
i Department of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
j Department of Neurology and Psychiatry, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA
k Department of Psychiatry, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA
l Department of Neurology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, NY, USA

The paper looks at general screening for Alzheimer's Disease and other impairments and provides an assessment of the fast-growing at risk population. We will provide some additional details later on.

A billion people now are online, 250 million households with broadband, Asia Pacific leads in broadband penetration.

Let's get the billion brains linked up.


WASHINGTON (AFP) - More than one billion people in the world have access to the Internet, with a quarter of them with broadband, or high-speed connections, according to a survey.

The report by the firm eMarketer said the milestone of one billion was reached in late 2005, and that nearly 250 million households had broadband connections.

The firm estimates that of these people, 845 million use the Internet regularly.

The United States is still number one in terms of numbers of Internet users with 175 million, and broadband households, 43.7 million.

In terms of regions, however, Asia-Pacific has the largest number (315 million) and is the largest broadband center containing nearly 40 percent of the world's broadband households.

Latin America was the fastest growing broadband region worldwide, achieving 70 percent subscriber growth, the survey found. But it had just 70 million people online.

Europe had 233 million people online and 55.2 million broadband households. China had 111 million users and 34.1 million households with fast connections.

The report was based on a number of industry surveys and data from the International Telecommunication Union and Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.

Alison Gilmoor of Canadian Broadcasting Corp writes about Tom Hanks, the average guy hero of numerous films and star of the upcoming DaVinci Code. The piece also links to Cognitive Labs' blog in our discussion of the problem of facial rendering in robotic animation.

Website lets you upload photos and watch yourself age.

Fascinating

(this news is 32 minutes old) - Scientists have reached a landmark point in one of the world's most important scientific projects by sequencing the last chromosome in the Human Genome, the so-called "book of life."

Chromosome 1 contains nearly twice as many genes as the average chromosome and makes up eight percent of the human genetic code.

It is packed with 3,141 genes and linked to 350 illnesses including cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

"This achievement effectively closes the book on an important volume of the Human Genome Project," said Dr Simon Gregory who headed the sequencing project at the Sanger Institute in England.

The project was started in 1990 to identify the genes and DNA sequences that provide a blueprint for human beings.

Chromosome 1 is the biggest and contains, per chromosome, the greatest number of genes.

"Therefore it is the region of the genome to which the greatest number of diseases have been localized," added Gregory, from Duke University in the United States.

The sequence of chromosome 1, which is published online by the journal Nature, took a team of 150 British and American scientists 10 years to complete.

Researchers around the world will be able to mine the data to improve diagnostics and treatments for cancers, autism, mental disorders and other illnesses.

Chromosomes, which are found in the nucleus of a cell, are thread-like structures that contain genes which determine the characteristics of an individual.

The human genome has an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 genes. The sequencing of chromosome 1 has led to the identification of more than 1,000 new genes.

"We are moving into the next phase which will be working out what the genes do and how they interact," said Gregory.

The genetic map of chromosome 1 has already been used to identify a gene for a common form of cleft lip and palate. It will also improve understanding of what processes lead to genetic diversity in populations, according to Gregory.

Each chromosome is made up of a molecule of DNA in the shape of a double helix which is composed of four chemical bases represented by the letters A (adenine), T (thymine), G (guanine) and C (cytosine). The arrangement, or sequence, of the letters determines the cell's genetic code.

The scientists also identified 4,500 new SNPs -- single nucleotide polymorphisms -- which are the variations in human DNA that make people unique.

SNPs contain clues about why some people are susceptible to diseases like cancer or malaria, the best way to diagnose and treat them and how they will respond to drugs.

Read more about Your DNA and Memory Here

CMP Media and Gamasutra have announced today the 1st serious games summit, in Arlington, VA, based on games for education, training and healthcare.

People are beginning to recognize the therapeutic,educational and psychological benefits from games...

We're rebuilding the engine on gamer-iq - so if (when) you encounter some broken links, we beg your indulgence. We just wiped off some of the hot grease on a shop rag so we could write this post. If you've ever dropped and rebuilt a VW engine, you know there's lots of finicky little parts with pins and springs that have to cleaned, greased, and carefully reinstalled or tapped into place with the soft touch of a surgeon.

AOL plans to release an antimatter to the matter of the hit post-it yourself video site 'youtube.' Why is it popular? "America's Funniest Home Videos" was once a sensation. This is just the same, except you are behind the camera and you are the editor.

The bandwidth being consumed by youtube reminds us of our hi-bandwith internet radio days. Supposedly youtube is spending $1 million per month on bandwidth. In our day, AOL was kicking in about $300,000 per month in free bandwidth for some of the biggest shoutcasters in our network

ref: techcruch via digg.com

In the study of Alzheimer's disease, the smallest steps forward have sometimes led to the most exciting breakthroughs, reports today's SF Chronicle.

In the case of a recent study from Novato's Buck Institute, it's a molecular step forward -- specifically, modifying a single amino acid in the brains of lab mice that could prevent the frightening memory loss and dementia associated with Alzheimer's disease.

While several scientists outside the Buck Institute were reluctant to call the study a true breakthrough, the results "are not a trivial step forward," said Stephen Snyder, an Alzheimer's disease specialist with the National Institute on Aging.

"This opens the door on a field of research. What these guys are showing, basically, is a new universe for us to look into more deeply," Snyder said. "We don't know much about the mechanisms. You could fault these people for rushing to print the study without knowing that, but in the Alzheimer's field, we accept a lot of this because these little incremental things could mean a lot."

Alzheimer's is a debilitating neurological disease that affects 4.5 million Americans, and with the Baby Boomer generation a decade or so away from the at-risk years, scientists have been under increasing pressure to develop treatments for the disease.

There are dozens, even hundreds, of studies being conducted on Alzheimer's at any given time, as scientists reconsider 15-year-old theories that haven't yet led to viable treatments, or spin off into new, untapped realms of brain chemistry research.

In the Buck Institute study, a protein was altered in the brains of lab mice. The mice that received the treatment showed all the pathological signs of suffering Alzheimer's disease -- most notably, a buildup of sticky plaque that scientists believe is related to the disease -- but had none of the memory-loss symptoms or brain shrinkage.

read more

Cognitive Labs will be quoted in National Geographic Kids, in an upcoming issue. The topic will be games, in general. Subscribe to the magazine so you can see it. Thanks to the cool folks at 1up.com.