Cognitive Labs

A new study of 3000 European men aged 40-79 evaluated the impact of Vitamin D on cognitive performance and found a significant improvement on information processing, particularly as individuals aged, when they received a plethora of vitamin D.

The main sources of Vitamin D synthesis include sunshine and certain oily fish. Information processing and speed may have a variety of health-related implications...

Labels: 3000, d, fish, oil, speed, SunShine, vitamin

 
by Nobel prize winner Haldor Laxness

There is truth to the myth that some creatures of the sea can sing, such as fish, so there is more to the meme than the fantabulous vocalist mermaids of Greek myth, the sirens. Two researchers, Roderick Suthers and Tobias Riede believe that singing originated in fish and gradually was adopted - and perfected - by birds.

"Babies go through several phases of learning before they fully speak such as babbling, one word, two words, etc. -- and so do songbirds," Riede told Discovery News.

Riede, a researcher at the National Center for Voice and Speech, explained that young songbirds also "babble," producing sub-songs, before they create more varied "plastic" songs and then graduate to bird crooning perfection with their adult songs.

read the article

Labels: bird, fish, laxness, myth, riede, sing, suthers

Cognitive Labs traffic reaches 3 million visitors, and the 18th straight month of increases. We've passed 1 million visits this quarter. Thanks.

Compared with some of the large casual game networks, we're around 5-10% of their traffic-but just focused on the brain-including scientific games-the DNA of a revolution in how you train your mind.

Labels: 3million, arcade, casual, cognitive, dna, fish, real

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