Cognitive Labs

Scientists assert that guiding eye movements impacts how people think.


What if our thoughts were actually controlled by our eyes?

By occasionally guiding the eye movements of participants with a tracking task unrelated to a primary investigative problem in a recent study, researchers boosted their chances of problem-solving success. Stimulated groups outperformed the control group at solving the defined problem, demonstrating that "it is now clear that eye movements reflect what we are thinking, and they can also influence how we think," said researcher Laura Thomas.

In addition to providing insights into problem-solving, the results have implications for how psychologists think about cognition.

"Earlier researchers found a link between eye movements and problem solving, but they could not directly show that the former can precede or affect the latter," Thomas added.

"They couldn't go further than saying cognition affects eye movement pattern. They're very close to it but they cannot argue more than that. We went a step further and said eye movements are actually influencing cognition and this is the way to prove it."

Just thinking about a task apparently activates structures in the brain normally associated with completing a task. So it could be that there is a matrix after all.

Labels: eyemotion, eyes, matrix, research, tracking

The World Beyond Alzheimer's - Cognitive Fitness reaches the boardroom.

Even business tomes such as Business Week in the piece below are targeting the cognitive revolution. Cognitive enhancement could indeed be a source of competitive advantage for companies that decide to make it so. While not necessarily common in the corporate world, various military information systems depend on operator cognitive sharpness - such as the latest iteration of sonar in the U.S. Navy, which scans the operator for signs of fatigue at the same time it sends sharp audio pulses across the seascape.

Our testimonials include many programmers who credit our exercises with boosting their ability to code at a much faster pace, real estate pros who close more trumpesque deals, and amateur and pro traders - whose avocation requires cognitive fitness and instantaneous reading of multiple data sources.

What of averting Alzheimer's through a combinatorial approach? (1)the right kind of speed-enhancing exercises (2) the right personal mix of memory compounds (3) partioning and uploading of memory into a digital substrate, then re-population of memory into new brain tissue or asynchronous storage unit - o.k., the latter is not possible yet...

That's just a few of the business examples. Welcome to the brave new world.


Boosting Our Gray Matter - Business Week, 8/20/07

Bright idea or not, brain enhancements may become as available—and compulsory—as software updates

There's a famous scene in the sci-fi film The Matrix where the heroine, Trinity, learns to fly a helicopter by uploading instructions straight to her brain. Neuroscientists would love to master that trick so they could help patients suffering from brain injuries and diseases.


In fact, in animal experiments, scientists are already tackling all aspects of brain repair and enhancement, using electronic implants and biological techniques to boost memory and other functions. A few labs have even given human test subjects the ability to control a computer cursor with their thoughts.

There's no telling how today's research will change the world of work in 10 or 20 years' time. But once the tools and techniques are perfected, there's little question competitive individuals will get swept up in a race to expand their brain capacity. As that gets under way, it's destined to overturn today's paradigm of cubicled executives laboring on laptops, palm devices, and cell phones, besieged by constant software updates.

Perhaps the electronically augmented executive in 2025 will be able to absorb whole new fields of information by beaming it, Matrix-style, straight to circuits in his modified cortex. But even this scenario probably understates the workplace revolution that lies ahead. If you think Wi-Fi, BlackBerries, blogs, social networks, and Second Life are changing the way we work, wait until you see what enhanced cognitive equipment can do.

Medical scientists today spend little time dreaming about enhanced humans. They're too busy aiding the ill or injured, trying to reverse the ravages of Parkinson's disease or struggling to help patients cope with anxiety or depression. But where demand exists, supply follows. "Anything for therapeutic purposes has the potential to be used for the improvement of normal people," says Arthur L. Caplan, professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

This prospect raises some troublesome ethical issues. Many people are put off by the notion of physically bettering the brainthe root of thought, personality, individuality, and human nature itself. And some ethicists question the wisdom of handing new brain tools over to society so that privileged individuals can exploit them to get even further ahead of everyone else.

Other scientists don't see the harm. If the cost of advanced brain technologies drops quickly and the surgical risks become less dire, people may request brain chips as casually as they receive a shot of Botox. And if that enhances their performance, then customers and clients are bound to share in the benefits. "Don't we want our medical interns and pilots to have optimal brain function?" asks James J. Hughes, a professor of health policy at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. "Wouldn't that be an obligation of the job?" It's a good question for our grandchildren to ponder, with their medically enhanced minds.

Labels: blackberry, business week, cognitive fitness, learn to fly a helicopter, matrix, trinity

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 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