Cognitive Labs

In my former post, that office was located on Brannan Street. This brings to mind an interesting quote:

Early in 1848, employees of John Sutter paid for goods in his store with gold they had found at Sutter's Mill, near Coloma, California. Brannan went to the mill and, as a representative of the LDS Church, he received the tithes of the LDS workers there from the gold they had found in their spare time. Brannan took this gold back to San Francisco, purchased every shovel in the city, and then ran through the streets yelling, "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!"
Brannan opened more stores to sell goods to the miners (his Sutter Fort store sold US$150,000 a month in 1849)

Labels: brannan, gold, sf

Third Age is a good resource of information on everything you need to know as you maintain an active life - finance, lifestyle, relationships, and health. You can read about games for your brain in Jacqueline Marcell's blog, as well as lots of practical advice. Third Age is based in Boston, with a South of Market office in San Francisco - not too far from where one of our old offices was located. The site has 1.5 million + members.

Labels: blog, elderrage, marcell, sf, soma, thirdage

A posting of Irritation at 2dorks.com




youtube. Here's a good one:

Labels: 2dorks, irritation

A new study in Seattle has examined the effectiveness of Human Growth Hormone as an aid to sleep. HGH drops sgnificantly in the 30's and 40's as part of the aging process. Scientists speculate that the decline in HGH is one of the factors causing insomnia and poor quality of sleep often observed as individuals age.

HGH, responsible for growth spurts in children, was administered to a group of subjects at the University of Washington's Sleep Research Group. Recipients of the substance scored 5-7% higher in tests of cognitive function than individuals in the control group, while also experiencing longer, more restful sleep.

Labels: hgh, human_growth_hormone, memory-test, rest, sleep

World's first spam email...sent to every ARPANET address on the West Coast. (1978)

Labels: spam

Yahoo! Health has a feature on simple tips to prevent a weakening memory and Alzheimer's - from "mind games" to diet and exercise...

Labels: alzheimers, health, simple, tips, yahoo, yahoo_image

Using Transitive Inference, the Cichlid species of fish (related to a popular aquarium species) is able to deduce information about their environment logically.

(LiveScience.com) Fish have the reasoning capacity of a 4- or 5-year-old child when it comes to figuring out who among their peers is "top dog," new research shows.

Stanford University scientists made the discovery—said to be the first demonstration that fish can use logical reasoning to figure out their social pecking order—by studying fights among small, highly territorial, spiny-finned fish called cichlids, common in freshwater in tropical Africa, including in Lake Tanganyika in central Africa.

Logan Grosenick, a graduate student in statistics, and his colleagues found that a sixth fish could infer or learn indirectly which were the 1st through 5th strongest simply by observing fights among them in adjacent, transparent tanks, rather than by directly fighting each fish itself or seeing each fish fight all four others [image].

This type of reasoning, called transitive inference (TI), is a developmental milestone for human children, showing up nonverbally as early as ages 4 and 5; it also has been reported in monkeys, rats and birds. It allows thinkers to reason that if A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, then A is also bigger than C.

Labels: fish, inference, intelligence, smart, stanford

Invite everyone in the world to join Cognitive Labs. Save your address book as a .CSV or .TXT file, copy, and paste it into our handy form among with your personal invite message...

Labels: addressbook, brain, cognitive_labs, cogworld, export, friends, gmail, outlook, users

"Surely, let me tell you this is the most irritating brain game yet devised."
"Au Contraire, mon Kapitan" - and don't call me Surely. But seriously, this game is demented in its conception. It requires you to simultaneously control a dasher and a horizontal widget, keeping a cueball that moves unctuously from falling precipitously off the edge. Meanwhile, the dasher needs to be maneuvered so as to impel a small, ping-pong ball to bounce off the edges of the boundary, and again off the dasher whilst all the while the cueball moves snarkily toward the edge. To top it off, there's a timer which measures your cognitive effectiveness down to the millisecond. "Upon the outcome of this noble effort," one could argue, "the fate of great nations lies."

Compare it to patting your head and rubbing your tummy, and vice-versa with a stopwatch. Definitively and Incontrovertibly Good for the Brain.

Labels: brain, don'tallmeshirley, game, irritating, irritation, reddit, surely

Just like Elmer Fudd's hair tonic in the Looney Tunes version of the The Barber of Seville, new research shows that Coffee can help balding men regrow their hair or slow the pace of hair loss. Furthermore, in mice, coffee has been shown to enhance neuronal action by accelerating the oscillation of a structure that regulates chemical supplement releases into the brain...

Labels: brain, coffee

During the last ice age, the prevailing winds in North America blew from the East, not the West, as is currently the case. Could it be we are witnessing the start of a climatic shift?

This means that the West Coast of the U.S. was much drier in the past than it is now - particularly the Pacific Northwest. The East Coast was as wet or wetter than it is at present. Much of the central part of the continent - and most areas in the West above a certain elevation, were covered with ice sheets.

Today, for example, this explains the deep aquifer of water still available in the area extending from eastern Nevada to Death Valley - why is it that there are so many springs and aquifers in an arid environment?

The answer: in the ice age, this entire area was ice bound, melting ice created Lake Manley, and percolated into the shales and sandstones. The abundant, but falling underground water in this area is left over from this wetter time.

Read more at Live Science

Labels: aquifer, climate, death_valley, wet, wind

Exercising your mind does pay off - for the first time, scientists have shown that learning slows the build-up in the brain of protein plaques and tangles that are the signature of Alzheimer's disease.

Although the study was conducted in mice, it does reinforce the idea that, in humans, maintaining an active mind may help delay or even prevent Alzheimer's disease.

"This has shown for the first time that using your brain can protect you physically," said Kim Green, co-lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine. "We show that when you do this, it causes changes in the brain, and these changes are protective."

"It's an interesting study, and part of what it does is advance the notion that mental exercise has a protective effect against Alzheimer's," said Dr. Gary Kennedy, director of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City.

According to the Alzheimer's Association, about 4.5 million Americans have the brain-robbing disorder, a number that has more than doubled since 1980. Many more suffer from cognitive impairment, which could be a harbinger of Alzheimer's.

Many experts believe that Alzheimer's is caused by a steady accumulation of amyloid plaque proteins in the brain.

Previous studies had shown that "mental exercise" could delay the onset of the disease, but the proof came only in the form of memory and other cognitive testing measures.

The study involved hundreds of "transgenic" mice -- mice that had been genetically altered to develop human Alzheimer's disease.

Mice in a "learning" group were allowed to swim in a tank of water until they discovered a submerged platform on which to stand. This training took place four times a day for one week at two, six, nine, 12, 15 and 18 months of age. The other group of mice swam in the tank just once before their learning and memory skills were tested and their brains examined.


Mice up to 1 year old in the learning group developed 60 percent less of the proteins that form plaques and tangles compared to mice in the non-learning group, the researchers found.

"The sort of learning we gave the animals was fairly mild, yet it still had a big effect," Green said.

However, by 15 months of age, the learning mice had declined and were now physically and cognitively identical to the non-learning mice.
Text Continues Below

Can these findings be extrapolated to humans?

"We do find a lot of similarities, but clinical data also backs up what we've shown in this study," Green said.

"I think it's reasonable to extrapolate," Kennedy added. "The recommendation certainly is to keep your mind active."

"Think of the brain as a computer," Kennedy continued. "Alzheimer's degrades the hardware, and education enhances the software. The brain is also a muscle, and conditioning may protect it."

Green and his colleagues hope to use the information to one day develop a drug for the disease.

"We want to identify exactly how learning influences pathology and identify a novel drug target," he said.


The study is appearing in the Jan. 24 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

Labels: alzheimers, brain, learning, neuroscience, uc-irvine

Yes it's true. Cognitive Labs has attracted a couple of domain parkers.
If you mis-type one letter in the URL you get this...

http://www.cogitivelabs.com/

I hope it's worthwhile for them. Also, a competitor has purchased a similar typo and it goes to their site.(sorry, no free publicity)

It's an interesting phenomenon. I heard that one company just received some $80 million plus in Venture Capital funding based on this principle - betting on people to make a mistake or be confused (which is probably axiomatic).

With Google, type in "Gogle" and you will be redirected to the real thing.

However, two steps away "Ggle" and you see this - a "for sale" sign.

In the future, this may become an area for Donald Trump-style no money down real estate speculation, or worse the "rich dad, poor dad" phenomenon. If there was a way to securitize the future interest in the value of a domain name, it could lead to some interesting arbitrage possibilities.

For reddit, reddt is redirected to the home page, but "redditt" leads here

Labels: confused, domain_parking, ggle, kiyasaki, trump

Nerve Conduction Velocity is one of the accurate objective measures of mental performance. The less time it takes to perform a specified task within a controlled system, the more efficient the system is. Through targeted exercise, it is possible to enhance the speed at which cognitive tasks are performed. As the individual engages in a variety of tasks with measurable performance, particularly with reversals and unexpected stimuli, the brain becomes more effective and better able to process complex information. Improvement and regular practice can lead to a sustained level of performance and prevention of cognitive decline.

Boost your brain

Labels: alzheimers, boost, brain, nerves, stimuli

We're just starting to build out brain.com, with a collection of links that takes you to interesting brain-related sites and also some of our more popular features.

Including: What's your brain speed score...

Labels: brain, brainspeed, creditscore, memory-test

Taking supplements of folic acid may significantly improve cognitive function in older men and women, according to a study appearing the medical journal Lancet.

The study was led by Jane Durga from the Wageningen University in The Netherlands.

Diminshing cognitive functions such as deterioration in memory, reduced ability to process information quickly, and reduced verbal fluency have been linked to risk of dementia in old age.

Dr Durga and colleagues followed a group of 818 over-50s for three years. Some were given 800 micrograms of a synthetic form of folic acid per day, the rest took a placebo. A synthetic version of the vitamin was used because the naturally occurring form degrades more easily, for example with storage and cooking, and that would make any results less reliable.

The scientists found that the group who took the folic acid improved on all aspects of cognitive functioning compared to the group that took the placebo.

Folic acid is a water soluble B vitamin and is found in yeast extract, green leafy vegetables, for example spinach, in dried beans and peas, some organ meats such as liver, fortified cereals, certain fruit and vegetables, and certain seeds, for example sunflower seeds. It plays an important role in the production of new cells, especially in the spinal cord an embryo, which is why it is important that pregnant women have their reference daily intake (RDI).

Labels: brain alzheimers, folic

The commonly used anesthetic isoflurane can lead to the death of brain cells and the production of amyloid-beta plaque, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease, Harvard researchers report.

Their study appears in the January issue of the Journal of Gerontology, which is devoted to the problems of dementia and delirium. In the United States, delirium accounts for $7 billion per year in hospital expenses and more than $100 billion a year when rehabilitation, institutionalization and long-term care are added to the equation.

The Harvard study raises questions about the safety of isoflurane, which has been used for years for all ages of patients.

"Many people, especially the elderly, who have anesthesia suffer from postoperative cognitive dysfunction, scrambling and delirium that can last six hours or two weeks or months," said lead researcher Rudolph Tanzi, a professor of neurology at the Genetics and Aging Research Unit of the Massachusetts General Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease.

"To me, a big dose of isoflurane mimics a stroke or a bang to the head, and you don't want that as a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease at any age," Tanzi said.

In experiments with cells that had an amyloid-beta protein, Tanzi's team exposed them to isoflurane for six hours.

The researchers found that isoflurane caused these cells to die. "It also caused the cell to overproduce the toxic molecule responsible for the pathology of Alzheimer's disease, particularly amyloid-beta," Tanzi said.

This is a warning, Tanzi said. "Isoflurane may be one reason why the elderly are more prone to cognitive dysfunction following anesthesia," he said.

"Any trauma to the brain induces cell death. Isoflurane now joins that list of insults to the brain that can cause cell death and excessive production of this key molecule in Alzheimer's pathology," Tanzi. "This does increase the risk for Alzheimer's disease."

Tanzi believes that isoflurane should be avoided, when possible. "We don't have enough data yet to ban isoflurane," he said. "But I'm convinced enough that I won't let my mother have it. I would advise any family or friends to stay away from isoflurane," he said. "There is a lot of speculation here, and a lot of work needs to be done, but at this point I wouldn't take a chance."

Despite the findings, one expert doesn't agree that isoflurane is dangerous.

"Most of the studies that have been done have been done in isolated cell types," said Dr. Piyush Patel, a professor of anesthesiology at the University of California, San Diego. "Not only that, but the cells they are using are not normal cells."

Patel believes, however, that the findings are provocative enough that there needs to be further research on the issue. "Studies need to be done in cells that are closer to normal cells, and then in animals," he said.

Moreover, it isn't clear that this same effect would be seen in humans, Patel said. "Isoflurane has had a long history of safety in all aged patients, all the way from premature babies to octogenarians. There is absolutely no evidence right now in human beings that that drug is harmful," he said. "To extrapolate these findings to humans would be irresponsible."

Labels: alzheimers, brain

...Scientists said on Sunday they have pinpointed a new gene linked to
Alzheimer's disease, the incurable brain disorder that is the top cause of dementia in the elderly.

Abnormalities in a gene called SORL1 increased the risk for the disease, and this finding could help scientists develop new treatments, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Genetics.

The researchers looked at DNA samples from 6,000 people from four ethnic groups: Caribbean-Hispanics, North Europeans, black Americans and Israeli-Arabs. They found certain variations of SORL1 more often in people with late-onset Alzheimer's disease than in healthy people.

The late-onset form, affecting people age 65 and up, represents about 90 percent of Alzheimer's cases. The rarer early-onset form affects people from about age 30 to 65.

Only one other gene, called ApoE4, has been identified as a risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer's. It was identified in 1993.

Several genes are linked with early Alzheimer's, and study of both types might lead to better understanding of how the disease begins and how to tackle it.

Many scientists think Alzheimer's begins with the buildup in the brain of a gooey material called amyloid that clumps together to form plaques. That material stems from a protein called amyloid precursor protein, or APP.

SORL1 controls the distribution of APP inside nerve cells of the brain. When working normally, the gene prevents APP from being degraded into a toxic byproduct called amyloid beta peptide. When SORL1 is deficient, it allows more of the bad amyloid beta peptide to accumulate, fostering amyloid plaques.

Alzheimer's is a complex disease that gradually destroys a person's memory and ability to learn, reason, make judgments, communicate and carry out daily activities. Scientists have struggled to understand the biology of the disease and its genetic and environmental causes.

'PIECE OF THE PUZZLE'

"It's another clue to the way in which this disease comes about, another piece of the puzzle," Dr. Peter St. George-Hyslop, director of the Center for Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of Toronto and one of the key researchers, said in a telephone interview.

"Every time you get a piece of the puzzle and you can relate it to something else in the puzzle, you're that much closer to knowing what the picture on the puzzle is," he added.

St. George-Hyslop said it is premature to say what percentage of cases of late-onset Alzheimer's disease can be attributed to SORL1. ApoE4, which also may be involved in the production of amyloid plaques, has been linked to about 20 percent of late-onset Alzheimer's cases.

"This appears to be the fifth Alzheimer's disease gene, and there are likely to be other important genetic variants that need to be identified before the entire picture is complete," Dr. Richard Mayeux of Columbia University Medical Center in New York, also involved in the research, said in a statement.

The disease first affects parts of the brain controlling memory and thinking, but as it advances it kills cells elsewhere in the brain. Eventually, if the patient has no other serious illness, the loss of brain function will prove fatal.

Researchers from Boston University and the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Jacksonville, Florida, also took part in the five-year study.

Labels: alzheimers, apoe, gene, sorl

...Scientists said on Sunday they have pinpointed a new gene linked to
Alzheimer's disease, the incurable brain disorder that is the top cause of dementia in the elderly.

Abnormalities in a gene called SORL1 increased the risk for the disease, and this finding could help scientists develop new treatments, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Genetics.

The researchers looked at DNA samples from 6,000 people from four ethnic groups: Caribbean-Hispanics, North Europeans, black Americans and Israeli-Arabs. They found certain variations of SORL1 more often in people with late-onset Alzheimer's disease than in healthy people.

The late-onset form, affecting people age 65 and up, represents about 90 percent of Alzheimer's cases. The rarer early-onset form affects people from about age 30 to 65.

Only one other gene, called ApoE4, has been identified as a risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer's. It was identified in 1993.

Several genes are linked with early Alzheimer's, and study of both types might lead to better understanding of how the disease begins and how to tackle it.

Many scientists think Alzheimer's begins with the buildup in the brain of a gooey material called amyloid that clumps together to form plaques. That material stems from a protein called amyloid precursor protein, or APP.

SORL1 controls the distribution of APP inside nerve cells of the brain. When working normally, the gene prevents APP from being degraded into a toxic byproduct called amyloid beta peptide. When SORL1 is deficient, it allows more of the bad amyloid beta peptide to accumulate, fostering amyloid plaques.

Alzheimer's is a complex disease that gradually destroys a person's memory and ability to learn, reason, make judgments, communicate and carry out daily activities. Scientists have struggled to understand the biology of the disease and its genetic and environmental causes.

'PIECE OF THE PUZZLE'

"It's another clue to the way in which this disease comes about, another piece of the puzzle," Dr. Peter St. George-Hyslop, director of the Center for Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of Toronto and one of the key researchers, said in a telephone interview.

"Every time you get a piece of the puzzle and you can relate it to something else in the puzzle, you're that much closer to knowing what the picture on the puzzle is," he added.

St. George-Hyslop said it is premature to say what percentage of cases of late-onset Alzheimer's disease can be attributed to SORL1. ApoE4, which also may be involved in the production of amyloid plaques, has been linked to about 20 percent of late-onset Alzheimer's cases.

"This appears to be the fifth Alzheimer's disease gene, and there are likely to be other important genetic variants that need to be identified before the entire picture is complete," Dr. Richard Mayeux of Columbia University Medical Center in New York, also involved in the research, said in a statement.

The disease first affects parts of the brain controlling memory and thinking, but as it advances it kills cells elsewhere in the brain. Eventually, if the patient has no other serious illness, the loss of brain function will prove fatal.

Researchers from Boston University and the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Jacksonville, Florida, also took part in the five-year study.

Labels: alzheimers, apoe, gene, genome

A new imaging study shows that when we learn a new action with associated sounds, the brain quickly makes links between regions responsible for performing the action and those associated with the sound.

The findings may contribute to understanding how we acquire language and how we think of actions if we only hear their sounds, say authors Amir Lahav, ScD, and Gottfried Schlaug, MD, PhD, of the neurology department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. Their work is described in the January 10 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

"The findings have implications for understanding many complex processes, such as speech and music performance," says Robert Zatorre, PhD, "and they could encourage research into rehabilitative strategies using sound-movement tasks." Zatorre heads the auditory cognitive neuroscience laboratory at McGill University.

The authors also suggest that their findings provide evidence for the existence of a mirror neuron system in humans. Mirror neurons, first described in monkeys, are active not only when the monkey performs an action, but also when it sees the action performed by others or only hears the sound associated with the action. Some scientists debate their existence and function in humans.

The researchers taught nine subjects with no previous musical training to play a five-note, 24-second song on a keyboard. Then they ran functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans while the subjects listened to the song they had just learned, a different song using the same five notes, and a third song made up of additional notes.

When the subjects listened to the familiar music, their brains showed activity in a network of areas in the frontal and parietal lobes that are involved in the control of movements. The authors note that Broca's area, the human equivalent of the area in the brain where mirror neurons were found in monkeys, was particularly active when subjects listened to music they knew how to play compared with equally familiar music they did not know how to play.

"Mirror-neuron circuits appear to encode and reflect templates for specific actions," the authors say. "This may allow us to comprehend motor acts when they are observed or heard, without the need for explicit reasoning about them." The authors also suggest that the sound-related functions of a mirror-neuron system "might have developed for survival reasons, allowing us to understand actions even when they cannot be observed, but can only be heard, as when we hear footsteps in the dark."

The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, International Foundation for Music Research, and Dudley Allen Sargent Research Fund.

Labels: brain, neuroscience, social, sounds

Scientists believe that the our perceptions - taste, feeling, exist in the brain.

With that in mind, which web address(url) is better - sex.com or brain.com?

The brain is not only our key gadget that we need to maintain, but our filter on reality. All impressions exist in the brain. One day, this will be the direct target for advertisers who can elicit a purchase impulse. In 2006, Sex.com easily beat the $7.5 m paid for business.com in the dotcom heyday, so we'll just have to watch and see.

Labels: brain, sex

The takeaway:

Mnemnonic training does work, if the individuals are 'engaged' and follow a program. Past performance is the most reliable indicator of future success...Adds to the use it or lose it observation with regard to the brain.

O'hara R, Brooks JO 3rd, Friedman L, Schroder CM, Morgan KS, Kraemer HC.

Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5550, United States.

The purpose of our study was to investigate the long-term effect of mnemonic training on memory performance in older adults. Five years after participation in a mnemonic training study, we followed-up 112 community-dwelling older adults, 60 years of age and over. Delayed recall of a word list was assessed prior to, and immediately following mnemonic training, and at the 5-year follow-up. Overall, there was no significant difference between word recall prior to training and that exhibited at follow-up. However, pre-training performance, gain scores in performance immediately post-training and use of the mnemonic predicted performance at follow-up. Individuals who self-reported using the mnemonic exhibited the highest performance overall, with scores significantly higher than at pre-training. Our findings suggest that mnemonic training has long-term benefits for some older adults, particularly those who continue to employ the mnemonic.

here's a referrer---a beautiful mind...

Birds with brains that are large in relation to their body size have a lower mortality rate than those with smaller brains, according to new research published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

The researchers found that birds with larger brains relative to their body size survived better in nature than birds with small brains. This may explain why, for example, birds with small relative brain sizes, such as pheasants (like the one shown above), find it harder to avoid a moving car than those with larger brain size, such as magpies. (Image courtesy of University of Bath)

Research provides the first evidence for what scientists describe as the ‘cognitive buffer’ hypothesis - the idea that having a large brain enables animals to have more flexible behaviours and survive environmental challenges.

This theory was first put forward to answer the puzzle surrounding why animals, including humans, would evolve a larger brain, given the ‘cost’ associated with developing and maintaining a larger brain.

The researchers compared the brain size, body mass and mortality rates in over 200 different species of birds from polar, temperate and tropical regions.

They found that birds with larger brains relative to their body size survived better in nature than birds with small brains. This may explain why, for example, birds with small relative brain sizes, such as pheasants, find it harder to avoid a moving car than those with larger brain size, such as magpies.

“The idea that large brains are associated with reduced mortality has never been scientifically tested,” said Dr Tamas Szekely from the Department of Biology & Biochemistry at the University of Bath.

“Birds are ideally suited for such a test, as they are one of the only groups of animals for which the relationship between large brains and enhanced behavioural response to ecological challenges is best understood.

“We have shown that species with larger brains relative to their body size experience lower mortality than species with smaller brains, supporting the general importance of the cognitive buffer hypothesis in the evolution of large brains.”

The researchers made allowances for factors which may have accounted for variations in mortality rates, such as migratory behaviour, competition for mates and chick behaviour.

“Our findings suggest that large-brained animals might be better prepared to cope with environmental challenges such as climate change and habitat destruction,” said Dr Szekely, who worked with researchers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain), Pannon University (Hungary) and McGill University (Canada) on the project.

“This is supported by other research which has shown that large-brained birds are more successful in colonising new regions and are better at surviving the changing seasons.”

The research was funded by grants from the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Spain), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Labels: bird, brain

Imagine a "light bucket" window on the universe, a big-aperture, low F-ratio reflector - now insert Google into the mix.

Orion Nebula
see the trapezium...
http://eyepieces.com
ads by Google

Whether or not there is an effort to monetize, they are in a position to create virtual maps and windows into the sky...particularly by getting involved in a public digital mapping of the heavens project.


Google has already planted its flag on Earth, the Moon and Mars. The universe could be next. The Internet search company has struck a partnership with scientists building a huge sky-scanning telescope, with hopes of helping the public access digital footage of asteroids, supernovas and distant galaxies.

"Frankly, I could see the day when they would be our sort of window to the general public," said Donald Sweeney, manager of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, on Friday.

Officials also say Google's technical expertise and vast data processing capacity will be an invaluable help, even for a project that has access to some of the country's leading research institutions.

The 8.4-meter LSST is expected to begin surveying the sky in 2013, from a mountaintop in Chile. Its goal is to continuously scan space, taking a series of 15-second exposures that allow it to cover the sky every three nights.

Officials say the telescope will open "a movie-like window" on nearby asteroids and far-off exploding stars, and help explore the mysterious "dark energy" believed to fuel the universe's expansion.

Google's stature should also bring the project more attention, which could be crucial as the $350 million telescope competes for public and private money.

In that respect, LSST officials may have learned a lesson from projects that have captured broader public imagination, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, said W. Henry Lambright, professor of public administration at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

"If they want to finance this thing and keep it going and maintained, they've got to make this not just the astronomers' telescope, but the people's telescope," he said.

The project has attracted at least $25 million in private donations and a four-year, $12 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Some of the 20 project partners also have supplied money, including about $1 million each from a half-dozen universities, Sweeney said.

Google's involvement hasn't been completely defined yet, Sweeney said. But the company that already offers detailed online maps of the Earth, the Moon and Mars could help analyze massive amounts of data — up to 30 terabytes a night — generated by the telescope.

But Google's involvement raises questions about whether it sees the resulting space images as a cash cow, said Stephen Maran, spokesman for the American Astronomical Society. He said, "Maybe they'll be selling ads next to the Orion Nebula or something."

Officials said there is no clear revenue stream for Google in the project, and said the company also isn't putting up money to help build the telescope itself.

"There is no licensing, there is no quid pro quo here," Sweeney said. "There's no financial incentive to them or to us."

Labels: Google, LSST, telescope

The author has it spot on with all the things you can do with our tests.

In fact, you can even set up your own poll or competition in the Cognitive Labs Communities section, which we made no mention of, but people are starting to sign up. It's your soap box.

some ideas: Repubs vs. Democrats, Vegans vs. Omnivores, Big Mac eaters vs Burger King "Whopper" eaters. By the way, have you seen the commercial where the weird "King" shoots ketchup at Ronald McDonald in a knock-off, I think, of those old "Pardon me: Would you have any grey poupon?" commercials - It's on YouTube.

I saw Ronald McDonald in Chicago walking down Michigan Avenue (July) He went into a Starbuck's (for shame)- they were filming a commercial, and he was taking a break.
Brand dissonance.

Labels: brand, burgerking, dissonance, mdonalds, starbucks, tests

This guy just posted his incredible Brain game performance to YouTube. Where can I get a pair of goggles like that?
the game is here and here's the video:

Labels: boost, brain, matrix, word_shoot, youtube

The Mars rover is getting its aging brain boosted. Scientists successfully transmitted a software upgrade to the rover which should help it stay lucid over the next couple of years, if it retains enough receptivity to energy to make this possible.

The goal is to create greater independence in the rover.

Greater cognitive skills in the area of inspection are a deliverable - scientists had to painstakingly dissect thousands of images just to find the frames they need and decide for the rovers whether to use their arms. The high-tech upgrades should help save time — as much as a day because scientists on Earth don't have to study a rock before sending commands to the robot to use science instruments on it.

Labels: boost, mars, rover

Good way to enter the new year. Just passed Jan. 06 total.

Don't get sand kicked in your face when you're trying to be the smartest guy or gal in the room. Start by boosting your brain...

Labels: beach, brain, gadget, game

Memory and future thought go 'hand-in-hand'

Human memory, the ability to recall vivid mental images of past experiences, has been studied extensively for more than a hundred years. But until recently, there's been surprisingly little research into cognitive processes underlying another form of mental time travel -- the ability to clearly imagine or "see" oneself participating in a future event.

Now, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have used advanced brain imaging techniques to show that remembering the past and envisioning the future may go hand-in-hand, with each process sparking strikingly similar patterns of activity within precisely the same broad network of brain regions.

"In our daily lives, we probably spend more time envisioning what we're going to do tomorrow or later on in the day than we do remembering, but not much is known about how we go about forming these mental images of the future," says Karl Szpunar, lead author of the study and a psychology doctoral student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.

"Our findings provide compelling support for the idea that memory and future thought are highly interrelated and help explain why future thought may be impossible without memories."

Scheduled for advance online publication Jan. 1 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study sheds new light on how the human mind relies on the vivid recollection of past experiences to prepare itself for future challenges, suggesting that envisioning the future may be a critical prerequisite for many higher-level planning processes.

Other study co-authors are Jason M. Watson, a Washington University doctoral graduate now assistant professor of psychology at the University of Utah; and Kathleen McDermott, an associate professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences and of radiology in the School of Medicine at Washington University.

McDermott, principal investigator for the University's Memory and Cognition Lab, where the research is based, suggests that the findings are notable for two reasons.

First, the study clearly demonstrates that the neural network underlying future thought is not isolated in the brain's frontal cortex, as some have speculated. Although the frontal lobes play a well-documented role in carrying out future-oriented executive operations, such as anticipation, planning and monitoring, the spark for these activities may well be the very process of envisioning oneself in a specific future event, an activity based within and reliant upon the same neurally distributed network used to retrieve autobiographical memories.

Second, within this neural network, patterns of activity suggest that the visual and spatial context for our imagined future often is pieced together using our past experiences, including memories of specific body movements and visual perspective changes � data stored as we navigated through similar settings in the past.

These findings, McDermott suggests, offer strong support for a relatively recent theory of memory, which posits that remembering the past and envisioning the future draw upon many of the same neural mechanisms. Previous speculation has been based largely on the anecdotal observation of very young children, cases of severe depression and brain damaged persons with amnesia.

"There's a little known and not that well investigated finding that if you have an amnesic person who can't remember the past, they're also not at all good about thinking about what they might be doing tomorrow or envisioning any kind of personal future," McDermott explains. They comprehend time and can consider the future in the abstract sense (e.g., that global warming is a concern for the future), but they cannot vividly envision themselves in a specific future scenario.

"The same is true with very small children -- they don't remember particularly what happened last month and they can't really tell you much of anything about what they envision happening next week. This is also the case with suicidally depressed people. So, there's this theory that it all goes hand-in-hand, but nobody has looked closely enough to explain exactly how or why this occurs."

In this study, researchers relied on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to capture patterns of brain activation as college students were given 10 seconds to develop a vivid mental image of themselves or a famous celebrity participating in a range of common life experiences.

Presented with a series of memory cues, such as getting lost, spending time with a friend or attending a birthday party, participants were asked to recall a related event from their own past; to envision themselves experiencing such an event in their future life; or, to picture a famous celebrity -- specifically former U.S. President Bill Clinton -- participating in such an event.

The "Clinton-Imagine" task was introduced to help researchers establish a baseline level of brain activity for a cognitive event that was in many ways similar to the other two tasks but did not involve the mental projection of oneself through time. Bill Clinton was chosen because pre-testing showed he was easy for participants to visualize in a variety of situations.

Comparing images of brain activity in response to the "self-remember" and "self-future" event cues, researchers found a surprisingly complete overlap among regions of the brain used for remembering the past and those used for envisioning the future � every region involved in recollecting the past was also used in envisioning the future.

During the experiment, participants were not required to describe details or explain the origin of mental images elicited by the memory cues, but in post-testing questionnaires most indicated that they tended to place future-oriented images in the context of familiar places (e.g. home, school) and familiar people (e.g. family, friends), which would require the reactivation of those images from neural networks responsible for the storage and retrieval of autobiographical memories.

Conversely, the neural networks associated with personal mental time travel showed significantly less activity when participants imagined scenarios involving Bill Clinton. The reason, researchers suggest, is that participants had no personal memories of direct interaction with Clinton, and thus, any images of him had to be derived from neural networks responsible for semantic memory � our context-free general knowledge of the world. In fact, participants later reported that their mental images of Clinton tended to be less vivid (e.g. "I see Bill Clinton at a party in the White House, alongside several faceless senators").

"Results of this study offer a tentative answer to a longstanding question regarding the evolutionary usefulness of memory," McDermott concludes. "It may just be that the reason we can recollect our past in vivid detail is that this set of processes is important for being able to envision ourselves in future scenarios. This ability to envision the future has clear and compelling adaptive significance."

Post to:

Labels: brain, future_vision, imaging, mind_games, vision

A new study looks at ages and performance on cognitive tests and finds that exercise leads to improved brain effectiveness at all ages - as measured by brainspeed and executive function....

(Urbana-Champaign News Gazette) Older folks may not be the only ones whose brain power is increased by physical fitness, a study by University of Illinois researchers working with Dutch colleagues indicates.

Previous studies, several of them done at the UI, already have provided evidence that regular exercise improves both the brain structure and function of senior citizens, including an increase in the brain's gray and white matter and better performance on cognitive tests.

"Most of the work has focused on older adults," UI kinesiology and community health Professor Charles Hillman said recently.

Now, Hillman, using data from Eco J.C. de Geus at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, is showing that at least some of the benefits may extend to younger adults as well.

De Gues, who studies behavioral genetics, collected an array of data on people age 15 to early 70s. That included information on the physical fitness and cognitive abilities of the participants.

He offered the data to Hillman for examination after the two met at a professional conference. The UI professor studies the relationship between fitness, the brain and cognition.

Hillman, UI doctoral student Matthew Pontifex and kinesiology and community health Professor Robert Motl used the data to look for links between the physical activity levels of the participants, 241 Amsterdam area residents, and the results they posted on a series of cognitive tests.

In line with previous studies, they found that older folks were faster and more accurate on the tests if they were getting regular exercise.

Meanwhile, younger folks, 15 to 39 with an average age of 25, also were faster. But they didn't show a significant improvement in accuracy.

However, Hillman said UI researchers saw improvements among younger adults in both cases in another study where the complication level of the tests was enhanced by forcing the participants to switch tasks in midstream.

"We see both speed and accuracy differences (between fit and non-fit younger participants) in that case," he said.

Hillman said the bottom line is that the studies indicate there may be a link between physical fitness and the health of the brain across the life span. Exercising throughout our lives may have a protective effect against the decline in our cognitive ability as we age, he said.

In particular, the tests were designed to challenge the "executive function" of the people taking them. That's what we use in scheduling, planning, filtering out environmental distractions and multitasking, among other things.

Driving on the highway, keeping track of the traffic around us, looking for an exit sign and sorting it out from the plethora of other signs is the kind of common challenge that taps executive function, Hillman and Pontifex said.

Hillman said the capability appears to be centered in the brain's frontal lobe, the last area to mature and the first to begin declining, which is why kids and senior citizens sometimes have problems with executive function-related tests and tasks.

But earlier studies showed that senior citizens "can return to performance at young adult levels" if they're physically active, Hillman said.

His study using the Dutch data, which appears in the current edition of journal Health Psychology, found both a general cognitive benefit and particular improvement in executive function, in addition to the effect it identified in the younger participants.

The data also included such information as gender and IQ, allowing the researchers to factor those out and isolate the impact of fitness on the cognition testing results.

Hillman wants to explore further how the impact of exercise on the brain differs in older and younger people and the mechanics behind that.

He's also interested in testing even younger participants, perhaps including a study here where kids are tested before and after they go through a directed exercise program.

"We don't know much below the age of 15," Hillman said. "We're working on that."

Labels: brain, brain_games, brainspeed, executive_function, exercise