Complex tasks like juggling produce significant changes to the structure of the brain, according to scientists at Oxford University.

In the journal, Nature Neuroscience, the scientists say they saw a 5% increase in white matter – the cabling network of the brain.

The people who took part in the study were trained for six weeks and had brain scans before and after.

Long term it could aid treatments for diseases like multiple sclerosis.

The team at Oxford’s Department of Clinical Neurology used a diffusion MRI which is able to measure the movement of water molecules in the tissues of the brain.

The signal changes according to how many bundles of nerve fibres there are and how tightly packed they are.

Changes in grey matter, where the processing and computation in the brain happens, have been shown before, but enhancements in the white matter have not previously been demonstrated.

The scientists studied a group of 24 healthy young adults, none of whom could juggle.
They divided them into two groups.

One of the groups was given weekly training sessions in juggling for six weeks and was asked to practice 30 minutes every day the other 12 continued as normal.

After training, the 12 jugglers could perform at least two continuous cycles of the classic three ball cascade.

Both groups were scanned using diffusion MRI before and after the training.

At the six week point, a 5% increase in white matter was shown in a rear section of the brain called the intraparietal sulcus for the jugglers.

This area has been shown to contain nerves that react to us reaching and grasping for objects in our peripheral vision.

There was a great variation in the ability of the volunteers to juggle but all of them showed changes in white matter.

The Oxford team said this must be down to the time spent training and practising rather than the level of skill attained.

Dr Heidi Johansen-Berg, who led the team, said: “MRI is an indirect way to measure brain structure and so we cannot be sure exactly what is changing when these people learn.

“Future work should test whether these results reflect changes in the shape or number of nerve fibres, or growth of the insulating myelin sheath surrounding the fibres.

“Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone should go out and start juggling to improve their brains.

“We chose juggling purely as a complex new skill for people to learn.”

Dr Johansen-Berg said there were clinical applications for this work but there were a long way off.

She said: “Knowing that pathways in the brain can be enhanced may be significant in the long run in coming up with new treatments for neurological diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, where these pathways become degraded.”

Professor Cathy Price, of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, said: “It’s extremely exciting to see evidence that training changes human white matter connections.

“This compliments other work showing grey matter changes with training and motivates further work to understand the cellular mechanisms underlying these effects.”

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Myfitbrain brain games

Stanford University researchers recruited 19 undergrads who were heavy-duty multi-taskers — they were at the top of their class in their ability to simultaneously read, watch TV, listen to music, send and receive text messages, check their e-mail and surf the Web — and 22 others who rarely did two or three of those things at once. Volunteers in both groups submitted to a battery of tests.

It turns out the single-taskers do a better job of filtering out irrelevant stimuli compared with the multi-taskers.

To measure this, scientists asked the volunteers to gauge whether a red rectangle had changed its orientation on a computer screen without getting distracted by a bunch of blue rectangles. The more blue rectangles there were, the worse the multi-taskers did on the test. But the distracting rectangles had no effect on the single-taskers’ performance, the study found.

As further evidence that multi-taskers are more prone to distraction, a second test found that changing the color of letters that flashed on a computer screen caused them to take 77 milliseconds longer than single-taskers to decide whether they were looking at the letter “X.” (The multi-taskers were just as accurate, however.)

But you would think that someone with a lot of multi-tasking experience would have an edge when it came to toggling between two tasks. Not so.

Volunteers were shown a letter and a number together on a computer screen. They were asked to decide whether the letter was a consonant or a vowel or whether the number was even or odd. The researchers found that it took 167 milliseconds longer for the multi-taskers to switch between the letter and the number tasks than it did for the single-taskers.

Taken together, the results certainly imply that multi-taskers “approach fundamental information-processing activities differently than” single-taskers, the researchers conclude.

But why? Does a long history of multi-tasking make it difficult for people to focus? Or do they become multi-taskers because they are naturally attracted to a wide range of stimuli? That question remains unanswered.

The answer is important, especially for single-taskers. Though they performed better on the battery of tests, it’s clear these modern times favor those who can manage multiple forms of media at one time. If it’s hard for single-taskers to adapt, the researchers said, they may “be increasingly unable to cope with the changing media environment.”

Pierre Balthazard, an associate professor at the Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, also says he can use neuroscientific techniques to help people improve the skills that play a part in leadership.

Balthazard uses electroencephalography (EEG) to produce a “brain map” of his subjects. By attaching electrodes to their heads, he says he can measure electrical activity generated by neurons in their brain.

Much of his work has focused on calibrating the EEG data with standard psychometric tests, and now Balthazard says that just by looking at someone’s brain map he can predict their capacity for certain traits linked to leadership.

“From someone’s brain map I can tell if someone would rank high, medium or low on a psychometric assessment of their transformational leadership, and just that is an earth-shattering finding,” he told CNN.

He has been working with the U.S. military to produce a model that will allow them to scan soldiers’ brains for complexity. The idea is that more complex brains produce better situational awareness and adaptive thinking — essential skills for the modern soldier, who must be able to transition from front-line combat to nation building.

He refers to traits like complexity and transformational leadership as antecedents to leadership itself. But for Balthazard, the ability to assess these skills is only half the story. What really excites him is the possibility of brain training and improving leadership skills.

“If you could only assess and not develop then it’s only an exercise in social engineering, and that’s of no interest to me,” he said.

Balthazard explained that brains can be trained using positive and negative reinforcement, in the same way that disorders like ADD are treated.

A subject is wired to software programmed to recognize “correct” functioning of a specific part of the brain. If the brain isn’t performing correctly, there is a negative reinforcement, such as a noise emitted from a speaker at an unpleasant frequency. “The brain is amazing at adjusting so it doesn’t get the negative feedback,” he told CNN.

But others think it may prove difficult to develop something as intangible as leadership. Dr Bob Kentridge, a member of the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit at Durham University, in England, told CNN, “Even if you find differences in the brains of people with different leadership abilities, it’s very difficult to say if that difference is just related to leadership.

“It could be due to all sorts of things that might be fairly tangentially related to leadership.”

“Leadership is such a fuzzy quality that it’s hard to say conclusively what you are changing,” Kentridge added. “You might change things that contribute to leadership, for example people might learn to stay calmer in conflict situations, but is that the same as saying you’re improving the leadership center of your brain?”

So, what’s inside the brain of a born leader? Interestingly, intelligence is not a requirement. “There’s zero correlation between IQ and leadership,” Balthazard told CNN.

“Emotion control has a lot to do with leadership. People who lead very well tend to have a much more coherent brain on the emotional, right side, and more differentiated brain on the more rational, left side, that can assess more different options.”

Balthazard says that although he has identified brain profiles for antecedents to leadership, he stresses that before he can produce a set of exercises designed to improve leadership itself, he must develop a “leadership norm” — a standard for what makes a good leader.

He has currently analyzed the brains of between 200 and 225 subjects, including bankers and military leaders, and says he must test twice that amount before he has his “norm.”

But he said plenty of people are already going to neurotherapists to train their brain for skills linked to leadership, such as decision-making, cognition, and memory retrieval, and Balthazard says he’ll soon be able to use neurotherapy techniques to develop leadership itself.

“At some point in the next 18 months we’ll have a seminal paper out that says we’ve done this. We’re not there yet but I’ve seen it in the lab.”

If that happens, budding CEOs might be queuing up at neurotherapists to plug themselves in and turn themselves into the business brains of the future.

CNN article

Our brains are essentially massively parallel processing machines.  Even the simple activity of gazing out at the ocean in total bliss requires the coordination of millions of perceptual processes.  When it comes to large-scale goal directed attention or action, however, we struggle to do more than a single thing at once.  A paper published last month in Neuron looked into the brain activity associated with multitasking and attempted to understand why.

A research group at Vanderbilt led by Paul Dux studied the changes that occur when people learn to perform two different tasks–a visual-manual task and an auditory-vocal task–at the same time.  fMRI brain scanning revealed that no areas of the brain respond only when the two activities are undertaken together. In other words, there is no part of the brain explicitly devoted to handling multitasking.  The researchers did find, however, that many regions of the brain were involved in these tasks but that only one, the left inferior frontal junction (IFJ), was more active when they were performed together.

The subjects in this experiment initially found it very difficult to multitask, but they got better with training.  The researchers thus looked at what was happening in the IFJ when these improvements were made to understanding how multitasking works in neural tissue.  They considered three separate hypotheses, each of which made different claims about the neural response to multitasking training.

In the first story, we get better at multitasking because the processing moves away from the slow abstraction of the prefrontal cortex to direct inflexible circuits linking sensory and motor areas.  To test this theory, the researchers looked at the effective connectivity between the regions involved in this task.  Even with training, however, there was no strengthening in the direct circuits between perception and response.  The information was still passing through the IFJ, it was just doing so more quickly.

A second hypothesis, then, was that dedicated circuits formed within the IFJ to segment and accelerate multitasking processes.  Dux and his colleagues performed a pattern classification analysis to evaluate this theory.  Pattern classification works by teaching a computer algorithm to discriminate between the brain response associated with different activities.  According the this second theory, classification performance should improve if the IFJ develops dedicated pipelines to handle the individual requirements of the multitasking procedure.

In fact, however, classification performance slightly decreased with training, indicating that the second hypothesis was also false.  This result does suggest, though, that there were some sort of changes within the IFJ, so the researchers turned to the third hypothesis.  They scanned several additional subjects using high temporal resolution fMRI focused just within the IFJ both before and after multitasking training.

With this new fine-grained data, the researchers were able to reach the conclusion that training leads to gains of efficiency in the central processing module within the IFJ.  The degree of improvement in reaction time corresponded to the acceleration in IFJ processing as revealed by fMRI. This shows that, even though the brain is massively parallel, complicated behaviors must  pass through this bottleneck before they can be executed.

Key Concepts

• When passing on DNA to their offspring, mothers silence certain genes, and fathers silence others. These imprinted genes usually result in a balanced, healthy brain, but when the process goes awry, neurological disorders can result.
• Imprinting errors are responsible for rare disorders such as Angelman and Prader-Willi syndromes, and some scientists are beginning to think imprinting might be implicated in more common illnesses such as autism and schizophrenia.
• Even typical brains are the result of asymmetric contributions from Mom and Dad. Higher cognitive function seems to be disproportionately controlled by Mom’s genes, whereas the drive to eat and mate is influenced by Dad’s.

Your memories of high school biology class may be a bit hazy nowadays, but there are probably a few things you haven’t forgotten. Like the fact that you are a composite of your parents—your mother and father each provided you with half your genes, and each parent’s contribution was equal. Gregor Mendel, often called the father of modern genetics, came up with this concept in the late 19th century, and it has been the basis for our understanding of genetics ever since.

But in the past couple of decades, scientists have learned that Mendel’s understanding was incomplete. It is true that children inherit 23 chromosomes from their mother and 23 complementary chromosomes from their father. But it turns out that genes from Mom and Dad do not always exert the same level of influence on the developing fetus. Sometimes it matters which parent you inherit a gene from—the genes in these cases, called imprinted genes because they carry an extra molecule like a stamp, add a whole new level of complexity to Mendelian inheritance. These molecular imprints silence genes; certain imprinted genes are silenced by the mother, whereas others are silenced by the father, and the result is the delicate balance of gene activation that usually produces a healthy baby.

When that balance is upset, however, big problems can arise. Because most of these stamped genes influence the brain, major imprinting errors can manifest themselves as rare developmental disorders, such as Prader-Willi syndrome, which is characterized by mild mental retardation and hormonal imbalances that lead to obesity. And recently scientists have started to suspect that more subtle imprinting errors could lead to common mental illnesses such as autism, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. A better understanding of how imprinting goes awry could provide doctors with new ways to treat or perhaps even prevent some of these disorders.

Through the study of imprinted genes, researchers are also uncovering clues about how our parents’ genes influence our brain—it seems that maternal genes play a more important role in the formation of some brain areas, such as those for language and complex thought, and paternal genes have more influence in regions involved in growing, eating and mating. “You need both Mom and Dad in order to get a normal brain,” says Janine LaSalle, a medical microbiologist at the University of California, Davis, whose lab focuses on imprinting. “We’re really at the beginning of understanding what that means.”

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Professor Elizabeth Gould has a picture of a marmoset on her computer screen. Marmosets are a new world monkey, and Gould has a large colony living just down the hall. Although her primate population is barely three years old, Gould is clearly smitten, showing off these photographs like a proud parent. Marmosets are the ideal experimental animal: a primate brain trapped inside the body of a rat. They recognize themselves in the mirror, form elaborate dominance hierarchies and raise their young cooperatively. If you can look past their rodent-like stature and punkish pompadour, marmosets can seem disconcertingly human.

In her laboratory at Princeton University’s Department of Psychology, Gould is determined to create a marmoset environment that takes full advantage of their innate intelligence. She doesn’t believe in metal cages. “We are housing our marmosets in large, enriched enclosures,” she says, “and with a variety of objects to support foraging. These are social animals, and it’s important to let them be social. Basically, we want to bring our experimental conditions closer to the wild.”

The naturalistic habitat that Gould has created for these marmosets is essential to her studies, which involve understanding how the environment affects the brain. Eight years after Gould defied the entrenched dogma of her science and proved that the primate brain is always creating new neurons, she has gone on to demonstrate an even more startling fact: The structure of our brain, from the details of our dendrites to the density of our hippocampus, is incredibly influenced by our surroundings. Put a primate under stressful conditions, and its brain begins to starve. It stops creating new cells. The cells it already has retreat inwards. The mind is disfigured.

The social implications of this research are staggering. If boring environments, stressful noises, and the primate’s particular slot in the dominance hierarchy all shape the architecture of the brain—and Gould’s team has shown that they do—then the playing field isn’t level. Poverty and stress aren’t just an idea: they are an anatomy. Some brains never even have a chance.

Finish this article by clicking on the link: Poverty, Stress, and the Brain

The benefits of exercise:

• In children, college students and young adults, exercise or physical activity improves learning and intelligence scores.

• Exercise in childhood increases the resilience of the brain in later life resulting in a cognitive reserve.

• The decline of memory, cortex and hippocampus atrophy in aging humans can be attenuated by exercise.

• Physical activity improves memory and cognition.

• Exercise protects against brain damage caused by stroke.

• Exercise promotes recovery after brain injury.

• Exercise can be an antidepressant.

The brain needs certain ingredients to flourish or to life up to the expectations of every day problems. The brain has priority when it comes to certain ingredients. A variety of foods can be beneficial for learning. Positive effects on brain function have been reported for fish oil, teas, fruits, folate, spices, cocoa, chocolate and vitamins.

To read more about exercise and the brain,visit the following link: Exercise and the Brain