Cognitive Labs

Want to read about a 500-person study conducted over the Internet? The study showed that cognitive speed can be improved! A web-based toolset was used in the Cognitive Labs' research

Released: Spring 2005 at the Society of Neuroscience annual meeting.

Scroll down and read it.

Labels: coglabs, neuroplasticity, neuroscience, research

Bruce Eisner covers this new test in his mindware forum - a 'tech crunch' of mindware.

We also developed another test which gives you a view of earth from afar while you are training your brain, and some other variations on the theme.


You also will be able to read about our most recent publication (Journal of Psychiatric Research) when it is released shortly. A preview is now available on PubMed. The study is a refereed scientific paper by Stanford researchers on the use of Cognitive's speed-of-processing based technology in detecting cognitive impairment, and - in fact, screening people who are APOEe4 positive based on the ultra sensitivity of the test. The test linked to above is one of the instruments in the paper. What exists is much more than a simple game, but your entree into successful cognitive enhancement over the web, with enormous potential impact.

Labels: eisner, neuroscience, web

Here is an interesting piece on gene expression from the Allen Neuroscience Gateway, commenting on research completed at UC-Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. You may access the gateway simply, from the Cognitive Labs' site brain.com. The subject (drosophila) is a fruit fly.

Labels: allen, berkeley, drosopilia, genes, lbl, neuroscience

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.
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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

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

I am putting together a "top ten developments on the brain" for 2006, a retrospective on a year in which Cognitive Labs grew by almost Herculean proportions, as if by the studied, dispassionate efforts of an "invisible hand" of mythical sapience. But before we get to that...

The credit for the growth goes to you, dear reader, who have decided, time and again, to return to this humble stall for a sampling of the day's catch, intrigued and expectant of what might be found in the nets, laid out to dry in a Meditteranean sun.

Let us hope, you and I, as we journey into the sunset of this year together, a gentle wind at our back filling our sails, that we will find further discoveries in the coming year, enchanted isles where pieces of the puzzle that can be considered neuroscience are assembled with the care of an archaeologist resurrecting potsherds, gradually bringing us into a more holistic understanding of the world, nee the universe in which we live, gently floating on the majestic molecular breeze that fills the hallowed spaces between the stars.

Labels: archaeologist, cognitive, neuroscience, stars

In the future, you may be able to control a robot with just your brain. Researcher Rajesh Rao demonstrated his brain-powered robot at the Brain-Computer Interface Conference in Whistler, Canada last week.

A human operator is able to control the robot by looking through two 'eyes' affixed to the front of the robot which display the robot's field of view on a computer monitor. A specially wired electrode cap is worn by the operator, who then sends commands to the robot to perform specific activities simply by thinking them.

Currently, only high-level simple commands are recognized; however, Rao believes that with deeper integration into the brain of the operator, increasingly complex commands will be possible.

Right now, the "thought commands" are limited to a few basic instructions. A person can instruct the robot to move forward, choose one of two available objects, pick it up, and bring it to one of two locations. Preliminary results show 94 percent accuracy in choosing the correct object.

Objects available to be picked up are seen by the robot's camera and conveyed to the user's computer screen. Each object lights up randomly. When the person looks at the object that he or she wants to pick up and sees it suddenly brighten, the brain registers surprise. The computer detects this characteristic surprised pattern of brain activity and conveys the choice back to the robot, which then proceeds to pick up the selected object. A similar procedure is used to determine the user's choice of a destination once the object has been picked up.

"One of the important things about this demonstration is that we're using a 'noisy' brain signal to control the robot," Rao says. "The technique for picking up brain signals is non-invasive, but that means we can only obtain brain signals indirectly from sensors on the surface of the head, and not where they are generated deep in the brain. As a result, the user can only generate high-level commands such as indicating which object to pick up or which location to go to, and the robot needs to be autonomous enough to be able to execute such commands."

Rao's team has plans to extend the research to use more complex objects and equip the robot with skills such as avoiding obstacles in a room. This will require more complicated commands from the "master's" brain and more autonomy on the part of the robot.


Press release: University of Washington

Labels: brain, interface, neuroscience, robot