Cognitive Labs

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If you know about Cognitive Labs tests, your already using the leading provider of speed-of-processing exercises, now shown to be far more effective than any other memory improvement strategy.


Short Mental Workouts May Slow Decline of Aging Minds, Study Finds

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Ten sessions of exercises to boost reasoning skills, memory and mental processing speed staved off mental decline in middle-aged and elderly people in the
first definitive study to show that honing intellectual skills can bolster the mind in the same way that physical exercise protects and strengthens the body.

The researchers also showed that the benefits of the brain exercises extended well beyond the specific skills the volunteers learned. Older adults who did

the basic exercises followed by later sessions were three times as fast as those who got only the initial sessions when it came to activities of daily living, such as reacting to a road sign, looking up a number in a telephone book or checking the ingredients on a medicine bottle -- abilities that can spell the difference between living independently and needing help.

Experts said the federally funded study is a call to action for anyone who has ever worried about developing Alzheimer's, dementia and similar disorders. Americans spend billions of dollars each year on their physical well-being, but there are no comparable efforts to keep people mentally agile and strong.

If anything, the study suggests, there is a bigger payoff to mental exercise, because the brief training sessions seemed to confer enormous benefits as many
as five years later. That would be as if someone went to the gym Monday through Friday for the first two weeks of the new year, did no exercise for five
years, and still saw significant physical benefits in 2012.

The researchers divided the volunteers into four groups, including a control group that received no training. A second group was trained in reasoning skills
-- being asked to spot the pattern in the sequence "a, c, e, g, i," for example -- every other letter of the alphabet. A third group was taught memory
skills, which involved remembering word lists and using visualizations and associations as memory aids. A fourth group was given exercises to speed up mental
processing -- being asked to identify an object flashed briefly on a computer screen while fighting off distractions.

Each of the groups being trained had 10 sessions, each lasting an hour to 75 minutes, and each session presented progressively more challenging problems.
Compared with the control group, those who got memory training did 75 percent better on memory tasks five years later, those who got the reasoning training
did 40 percent better on reasoning tasks, and those who got the speed training did 300 percent better than the control group.

Researchers noted that mental skills can sometimes compensate for physical disabilities: Knowing how to figure out directions and find a new route on a map,
for example, could allow someone to retain mobility even after their night vision deteriorates to the point where driving on certain roads becomes difficult.

The study tracked 2,802 healthy adults from diverse backgrounds who were, on average, 73 years old. Although it did not examine the effects of mental
exercise on people who had begun to show signs of Alzheimer's or other brain disorders, previous studies have pointed toward the conclusion that anyone can
benefit.

"People think education is for people who are already educated," said Michael Marsiske, one of the researchers. "This kind of training works no matter where
you are in society."

"If you think you have come to a time in your life when new learning is impossible and there are no benefits of continuing mental activity, the study shows
that for a large number of people that this is not true," added Marsiske, a clinical and health psychologist at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

The participants in the study ranged from age 65 to their early 90s, but Marsiske said the findings apply to people in their 50s or even younger. Mental
skills acquired earlier in life persist well into old age, he said.
"I don't like to play my son's video games, but I keep telling myself to challenge myself," said Marsiske, 41. "What I personally take away from the study
is, if you challenge yourself to do some new learning, something that isn't easy at the start, it can have dividends."

The study did not indicate that mental training can hold off all cognitive decline permanently. Rather, as is the case with physical exercise, strengthening
the mind appeared to slow decline.

Sherry L. Willis, the lead author of the study and a Pennsylvania State University professor of human development, said those who had the training also
reported greater confidence in their ability to solve everyday problems, and this was especially true of the group that got the reasoning training. In
performing daily functions, people who got the speed training along with a handful of follow-up sessions significantly outperformed those who did not get
such training.

The results, being published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, are heartening, but Willis and Marsiske cautioned that the biggest
challenge lies ahead, in getting people to apply the findings to their lives. Whether it is encouraging people to eat right or to exercise, they said, the
hardest part is not getting them to start doing the right things but getting them to keep doing the right things.

"It's just like physical exercise -- when we are approaching the new year we will buy a pass for the gym and go fervently in January and then slack off,"
Willis said. "Mental exercise is the same way. It has to be consistent, and it has to be challenging. Just like you have to keep increasing the weights at

the gym to make it challenging, you have to do the same with mental activity."
To reap the benefits, Willis said, people need to get outside their comfort zones. For someone who likes to solve crossword puzzles, it is important to make

sure the puzzles get harder with time -- or to start playing chess. Someone who hates to play games, she said, should find something else that stretches the
mind. Mental activities do not have to involve expensive toys; everyday life can offer a variety of mental challenges. Finding a friend who can join in a new
activity can be a powerful motivator, she added.

Sally Shumaker, a professor of public health science at Wake Forest University in North Carolina who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said it
pointed the way to a future in which mental training is made widely available.

"I can imagine a situation in which facilities are available in community centers and libraries and aging centers, where people can play some games that are
specifically designed to improve cognitive ability," she said. "People are fearful of cognitive decline, and the idea that a small and simple intervention
can have an impact is pretty compelling."


© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Labels: alzheimers, brain, brain_games, brainspeed, cognitive_labs, jama, wapo

The Brain Works Constantly on Hidden, System-Tray Tasks...




Our cognitive processes keep working at a furious pace even when there is no visual stimuli. The implications for cognitive treatment, education, and entertainment could be staggering.


Researchers at the University of Rochester have found in reality that 80 percent of our cognitive power is cranking away on tasks completely unknown to us. Curiously, this clandestine activity does not exist in the youngest brains, leading scientists to assert that the mysterious functions that absorb the majority of our mindpower are dedicated to subconscious reprocessing our initial thoughts and experiences. The research, which has possible profound implications for our understanding of reality, appeared in a recent issue of the journal Nature.

"We found neural activity that frankly surprised us," says Michael Weliky, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. “Adult ferrets had neural patterns in their visual cortex that correlated very well with images they viewed, but that correlation didn't exist at all in very young ferrets, suggesting the very basis of comprehending vision may be a very different task for young brains versus old brains.”

A second surprise was in store for Weliky. Placing the ferrets in a darkened room revealed that older ferrets' brains were still humming along at 80 percent as if they were processing visual information. Since this activity was absent in the youngsters, Weliky and his colleagues were left to wonder: What is the visual cortex so busy processing when there's no image to process?

Initially, Weliky's research was aimed at studying whether visual processing bore any resemblance to the way real-world images appear. This finding may help lead to a better understanding of how neurons decode our world and how our perception of reality is shaped.

Weliky, in a bit of irony, set 12 ferrets watching the reality-stretching film The Matrix. He recorded how their brains responded to the film, as well as to a null pattern like enlarged television static, and a darkened room. Movies capture the visual elements that are present in the real world. For instance, as Keanu's hand moves across the screen for a karate chop, the image of the hand and all the lines and color it represents moves across a viewer's visual realm essentially the same way it would in real life. By contrast, the enlarged static-blocks of random black and white-has no such motion. Weliky was able to graph the movie-motion statistically, showing essentially how objects move in the visual field.

The test was then to see if there was any relationship between the statistical motion of the movie and the way visual neurons in the ferrets fired. Each visual neuron is keyed to respond to certain visual elements, such as a vertical line, that appears in a specific area of the ferret's vision. A great number of these cells combine to process an image of many lines, colors, etc. By watching the patterns of how these cells fired while watching The Matrix, Weliky could describe the pattern statistically, and match those statistics of how the ferret responded to the film with the statistics of the actual visual aspects of the film.

Weliky found two surprises. First, while the neurons of adult ferrets statistically seemed to respond similarly to the statistics of the film itself, younger ferrets had almost no relationship. This suggests that though the young ferrets are taking in and processing visual stimuli, they're not processing the stimuli in a way that reflects reality.

"You might think of this as a sort of dyslexia," explains Weliky. "It may be that in very young brains, the processing takes place in a way that's not necessarily disordered, but not analogous to how we understand reality to be. It's thought that dyslexia works somewhat like this-that some parts of the brain process written words in an unusual way and seem to make beginnings of words appear at their ends and vice versa. Infant brains may see the entire world the same way, as a mass of disparate scenes and sounds." Weliky is quick to point out that whatever way infant brains may interpret the world, just because they're different from an adult pattern of perception does not mean the infants have the wrong perception. After all, an adult interpreted the visual aspects of the film with our adult brains, so it shouldn't be such a surprise that other adult brains simply interpret the visual aspects the same way. If an infant drew up the statistics, it might very well match the neural patterns of other infants.

The second, and more surprising, result of the study came directly from the fact that Weliky's research is among the first to test these visual neurons while the subject is awake and watching something. In the past, researchers would perhaps shine a light at an unconscious ferret and note which areas of the brain responded, but while that method narrowed the focus to how a single cell responds, it eliminated the chance to understand how the neural network of a conscious animal would respond. Accepting all the neural traffic of a conscious brain as part of the equation let Weliky get a better idea of the actual processing going on. As it turned out, one of his control tests yielded insight into neural activity no one expected.

When the ferrets were in a darkened room, Weliky expected their visual neurons to lack any kind of activity that correlated with visual reality. Neurologists have long known that there is substantial activity in the brain, even in darkness, but the pattern of that activity hadn't been investigated. Weliky discovered that while young ferrets displayed almost no patterns that correlated with visual reality, the adult ferrets' brains were humming along, producing the patterns even though there was nothing to see. When watching the film, the adult ferrets' neurons increased their patterned activity by about 20 percent.

"This means that in adults, there is a tremendous amount of real-world processing going on-80 percent-when there is nothing to process," says Weliky. "We think that if you've got your eyes closed, your visual processing is pretty much at zero, and that when you open them, you're running at 100 percent. This suggests that with your eyes closed, your visual processing is already running at 80 percent, and that opening your eyes only adds the last 20 percent. The big question here is what is the brain doing when it's idling, because it's obviously doing something important."

Since the young ferrets do not display similar patterns, the 'idling' isn't necessary for life or consciousness, but since it's present in the adults even without stimulus, Weliky suggests it may be what gives subjects an understanding of reality. The eye takes in an image and the brain processes the image, but 80 percent of the activity may be a representation of the world replicated inside the ferret's brain.

"The basic findings are exciting enough, but you can't help but speculate on what they might mean in a deeper context," says Weliky. "It's one thing to say a ferret's understanding of reality is being reproduced inside his brain, but there's nothing to say that our understanding of the world is accurate. In a way, our neural structure imposes a certain rubric on the outside world, and all we know is that at least one other mammalian brain seems to impose the same structure. Either that or The Matrix freaked out the ferrets the way it did everyone else."

This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

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Labels: brain, cognitive, cognitive_labs, matrix, system_tray

Quick,,,last 1o visitors:

Santa Fe, New Mexico, US
Los Angeles, California, US
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Portand, Oregon, US
Løkken, Sor-Trondelag, Norway

don't forget to take a test

Labels: alzheimers exercise brain canada, alzheimers_exercise, cognitive_labs, cogworld, game, global, sitemap

Key Chemical Impacts Memory, Learning, Retention

The chemical neurotrophin-3 appears to stimulate and encourage growth of interconnecting networks of nerves in the cerebral cortex, according to new research at UC-Irvine. When neurotrophin-3 is absent, growth and connections are less robust. This dichotomy may help to explain memory and cognitive decline seen in Alzheimer's patients - and point toward potential treatments. The research will be revealed in Neuroscience, December 1 issue.

Richard Robertson, professor of anatomy and neurobiology, and other researchers from UCI's School of Medicine found that cholinergic nerve fibers grow toward sources of neurotrophin-3 during early development. In experiments with mice, without neurotrophin-3 to direct growth, the developing cholinergic nerve fibers appeared to not recognize their normal target cells in the brain. Because of this, the axon nerve fibers aided by these circuits grew irregularly and missed their specific target neural cells.

This finding, according to Robertson, has significant implications for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. Cholinergic neuronal circuits play a key role in the proper information processing by the cerebral cortex and other areas of the brain. The cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that determines intelligence, personality, and planning and organization, and these actions are compromised by neurodegenerative diseases.

"Studies on the brains of Alzheimer's patients have shown a marked decline in these cholinergic circuits. Our work demonstrates that neurotrophin-3 is essential to maintain the connections to cerebral cortex neurons," Robertson said. "This study shows that a neurotrophin-3 therapy may be able to induce nerve fibers to regrow in the cerebral cortex, which would be beneficial to people with Alzheimer's."

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Labels: alzheimers exercise brain canada, cognitive, cognitive_labs, neurotrophin, uc-irvine

This article from PC World pertains to Microsoft, but we get a little mention at the end.

Labels: brain, cognitive_labs, microsoft, PCworld

On this page you can find tiny code samples which you can copy and paste into your site or forum-giving friends quick access to the games you like. You can even turn people onto a game feed which will tell you when a new game is ready - just like you get news alerts and podcasts. Let's make life simpler. You also will help others exercise from the neck up...

Labels: brain, cognitive_labs, feeds, mental_sharpness, rss, tools, widgets

Scientists in the SF Bay Area have succeeded in analyzing DNA of the homo Neandertalis (Neanderthal). The remains of bones from Europe were airlifted to a lab in Walnut Creek, run by the U.S. Dept of Energy. The scientists conducting the investigation suspect that the tiny differences between homo sapiens and neandertalis, which account for no more than 1/2 of 1% of the genome, was enough to provide the characteristic differentiation between the 2 species, such as the prominent brow ridge of the neandertal and the more slender sapiens. While there is no evidence that there was any intermingling of the species, both species co-habitated until approximately 30,000 years ago.

Background links: article in wikipedia
mitochondrial DNA of the sapiens and neandertalis

Another contribution of man's altered DNA was enhanced cognitive ability, which seems to appear suddenly in the archaeological record.

read more>>

Labels: brain, cognitive_labs, dna, lab, neanderthal, sapiens

CogLabs world, a full-size version of the mini-map on the home page, is now live - where have people been taking tests and exercising their minds?

Now you know, globally. We answer that question with the world's first visualization of real-time cognitive performance across the world.

Keep in mind, this is just a few hundred plots - using all the data results in an endless loop and takes all the processing power of the CPU, so you see a subset of the data. The possibilities in the future are limitless. It's a wonderful time for visual display/Tufte fanatics.

Labels: brain, cognitive_labs, cogworld, global

Global Cognitive Map is here: you can see (courtesy of Asynchronous data) where the people are located who are taking tests. This is a a tiny fraction of test-takers...we are creating a tiny version for the home page and a fuller version inside the site (bigger, as well) for people who want to explore without slowing down the home page excessively. (read more about genes and the brain)

other same day links: google map update - now you will be able to recreate history
and here's another on the National Geographic's effort...

Labels: brain, cognitive_labs, genome, map, national_geographic

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

'Mental typewriter' controlled by thought alone
Fascinating report: (NewScientist) A computer controlled by the power of thought alone has been demonstrated at CEBIT in Germany. As we have speculated here, rapid advances in cybernetics are now ocurring, which will eventually change how consumers interface with computers, while the substructure of how people inter-relate online has continued to evolve quickly. Imagine reaction time that is constrained only by the power and speed of thought without any mechanical components. It would seem we are headed towards an always-connected global brain. With complete integration of components, what is the difference between telepathy and let's say, a WiFi/Bluetooth connection between your computer and your brain, with the computer/device acting as a filter and transceiver?

The device could provide a way for paralysed patients to operate computers, or for amputees to operate electronically controlled artificial limbs. But it also has non-medical applications, such as in the computer games and entertainment industries.

The Berlin Brain-Computer Interface (BBCI) – dubbed the "mental typewriter" – was created by researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin and Charité, the medical school of Berlin Humboldt University in Germany. It was shown off at the CeBit electronics fair in Hanover, Germany.

The machine makes it possible to type messages onto a computer screen by mentally controlling the movement of a cursor. A user must wear a cap containing electrodes that measure electrical activity inside the brain, known as an electroencephalogram (EEG) signal, and imagine moving their left or right arm in order to manoeuvre the cursor around.

"It's a very strange sensation," says Gabriel Curio at Charité. "And you can understand from the crowds watching that the potential is huge."

Learning algorithms
Curio says users can operate the device just 20 minutes after going through 150 cursor moves in their minds. This is because the device rapidly learns to recognise activity in the area of a person's motor cortex, the area of the brain associated with movement. "The trick is the machine-learning algorithms developed at the Fraunhofer Institute," Curio says.

John Chapin, an expert in using implanted electrodes to control computers, agrees EEG sensing technology is advancing rapidly. "There's been a lot of progress on the non-invasive side in recent years," he said.

The German researchers hope to develop a commercial version of the device as an aid for paralysed patients and amputees.

Chapin adds that brain-computer interfaces could have a range of uses beyond the medical. "Signals from the brain give you a fraction of a second advantage," he says. The device could make a novel game controller and be used in other ways. The researchers have even begun testing the machine as a driving aid, as it can sense a sudden reaction and control a vehicle's brakes before even the driver can.

The next stage is to develop a cap that does not have to be attached directly to the scalp. This should make the device easier to use and cause less skin irritation for the wearer.

Labels: AI, CEBIT, cognitive, cognitive_labs, consciousness, mental, mental_typewriter_and_game_controller, typewriter