Although we assume we can see everything in our field of vision, the brain actually picks and chooses the stimuli that come into our consciousness. A new study in the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology’s Journal of Vision reveals that our brains can be trained to consciously see stimuli that would normally be invisible.

Lead researcher Caspar Schwiedrzik from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Germany said the brain is an organ that continuously adapts to its environment and can be taught to improve visual perception.

“A question that had not been tackled until now was whether a hallmark of the human brain, namely its ability to produce conscious awareness, is also trainable,” Schwiedrzik said. “Our findings imply that there is no fixed border between things that we perceive and things that we do not perceive – that this border can be shifted.”

The researchers showed subjects with normal vision two shapes, a square and a diamond, one immediately followed by a mask. The subjects were asked to identify the shape they saw. The first shape was invisible to the subjects at the beginning of the tests, but after 5 training sessions, subjects were better able to identify both the square and the diamond.

The ability to train brains to consciously see might help people with blindsight, whose primary visual cortex has been damaged through a stroke or trauma. Blindsight patients cannot consciously see, but on some level their brains process their visual environment. A Harvard Medical School study last year found that one blindsight patient could maneuver down a hallway filled with obstacles, even though the subject could not actually see.

Schwiedrzik said the new research may help blindsight patients gain conscious awareness of what their minds can see, and he suggested that new research should address whether the brains in blindsight patients and people with normal vision process the information the same way.

“Our study suggests that it might in principle be possible for blindsight patients to recover some visual awareness, and thus our findings might open a venue for a new line of research and potential treatments for patients with acquired cortical blindness,” Schwiedrzik said.

Train your brain in new ways at Myfitbrain

In his speech to America’s schoolchildren last month, President Obama had a clear directive about video games: Put them away. It wasn’t the first time he had sounded this particular alarm, warning of the dangers of days spent at gaming consoles. But the latest science shows that there’s a lot more to video games than their dark reputations suggest.

“There’s still a tendency to think of video games as a big wad of time-wasting content,’’ said Cheryl Olson, co-director of the Center for Mental Health and Media at Massachusetts General Hospital. “You would never hear a parent say we don’t allow books in our home, but you’ll still hear parents say we don’t allow video games in our home.

“Games are a medium. They’re not inherently good or bad.’’

After years of focusing on the bad – and there are still legitimate concerns, for instance, about the psychological effects of certain violent games – scientists are increasingly examining the potential benefits of video games. Their studies are revealing that a wide variety of games can boost mental function, improving everything from vision to memory. Still unclear is whether these gains are long-lasting and can be applied to non-game tasks. But video games, it seems, might actually be good for the brain.

The very structure of video games makes them ideal tools for brain training.

“Video games are hard,’’ said Eric Klopfer, the director of MIT’s Education Arcade, which studies and develops educational video games. “People don’t like to play easy games, and games have figured out a way to encourage players to persist at solving challenging problems.’’

The games aren’t just hard – they’re adaptively hard. They tend to challenge people right at the edge of their abilities; as players get better and score more points, they move up to more demanding levels of play. This adaptive challenge is “stunningly powerful’’ for learning, said John Gabrieli, a neuroscientist at MIT.

Most games involve a huge number of mental tasks, and playing can boost any one of them. Fast-paced, action-packed video games have been shown, in separate studies, to boost visual acuity, spatial perception, and the ability to pick out objects in a scene. Complex, strategy-based games can improve other cognitive skills, including working memory and reasoning.

These findings fit with scientists’ increasing understanding of how malleable the human brain truly is. Researchers now know that learning and practicing a challenging task can actually change the brain.

Richard Haier,a pediatric neurologist and professor emeritus at the School of Medicine at the University of California at Irvine, has shown in a pair of studies that the classic game Tetris, in which players have to rotate and direct rapidly falling blocks, alters the brain. In a paper published last month, Haier and his colleagues showed that after three months of Tetris practice, teenage girls not only played the game better, their brains became more efficient.

A type of scan that illuminates brain activity showed that at the end of the three months, the girls’ brains were working less hard to complete the game’s challenges. What’s more, parts of the cortex, the outer layer of their brains responsible for high-level functions, actually got thicker. Several of these regions are associated with visual spatial abilities, planning, and integration of sensory data.

“Does this mean that Tetris is good for your brain?’’ Haier said. “That is the big question. We don’t know that just because you become better at playing Tetris after practice and your brain changes . . . whether those changes generalize to anything else.’’

Generalizability to non-game situations is the big question surrounding other emerging games, particularly software that is being marketed explicitly as a way to keep neurons spry as we age. The jury is still out on whether practicing with these games helps people outside of the context of the game. In one promising 2008 study, however, senior citizens who started playing Rise of Nations, a strategic video game devoted to acquiring territory and nation building, improved on a wide range of cognitive abilities, performing better on subsequent tests of memory, reasoning, and multitasking. The tests were administered after eight weeks of training on the game. No follow-up testing was done to assess whether the gains would last.

Now that researchers know these off-the-shelf games can have wide-ranging benefits, they’re trying to home in on the games’ most important aspects, potentially allowing designers to create new games that specifically boost brain power.

“Until now, people have been asking can you learn anything from games?’’ MIT’s Klopfer said. “That’s a less interesting question than what aspects of games are important for fostering learning.’’

Klopfer is currently conducting research to determine how important narrative is in an educational physics game: Do students learn more with a more narrative game? And Anne McLaughlin, a psychologist who co-directs the Gains Through Gaming lab at North Carolina State University, is assessing whether games that are novel, include social interaction, and require intense focus are better at boosting cognitive skills. McLaughlin and her colleagues will use the findings to design games geared toward improving mental function among the elderly.

Other researchers are hoping to use video games to encourage prosocial behaviors – actions designed to help others. (“Prosocial’’ behaviors are, in some ways, the opposite of “antisocial’’ ones.) In June, an international team of researchers, including several from Iowa State University, reported that middle school students in Japan who played games in which characters helped or showed affection for others, later engaged in more of these behaviors themselves. Researchers also found that US college students randomly assigned to play a prosocial game were subsequently kinder to a fellow research subject than students who played violent or neutral games.

Unlike, say, movies or books, video games don’t just have content, they also have rules. A game is set up to reward certain actions and to punish others. This means they have immense potential to teach children ethics and values, said Scott Seider, an assistant professor of education at Boston University. (Of course, this is a double-edged sword. Games could reward negative, antisocial behavior just as easily as positive, prosocial behavior.)

Some off-the-shelf games already contain strong prosocial themes; consider The Sims, for instance, or the classic Oregon Trail, which make players responsible for the well-being of other characters and feature characters who take care of one another. But Seider also hopes game developers consider the prosocial possibilities in developing new games. The challenge for the architects of future games will be figuring out how to wrap virtuous characteristics into an engaging package.

“Ultimately, the video game needs to be an entertaining experience,’’ Seider said. “The game has to be fun.’’

Original article here

Myfitbrain games

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

The effects of video-game playing on your brain have been studied for a quarter-century, but the latest research reveals that there are still deep puzzles yet to be solved.

One of the earliest and most noted studies in the field was conducted back in 1992 by neuroscientist Richard Haier at the University of California at Irvine, who looked at how frequent sessions with the Tetris video game changed the players’ brains. The game requires players to fit colorful puzzle pieces together at a quickening pace as they fall from the top of the screen.

Back then, Haier used brain scans to discover that some parts of the brain actually used less glucose as the players became more skilled at the game. The “Tetris effect” illustrated how video-game training could make brains work more efficiently – an idea that eventually led to a whole host of brain-training games.

Now Haier serves as a consultant to Blue Planet Software, the company that markets Tetris, and he was asked to follow up on his 17-year-old research using the new tools available to neuroscientists.

Haier recruited three colleagues – Sherif Karama from the Montreal Neurological Institute, Leonard Leyba from the New Mexico-based Mind Research Network and Rex Jung, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of New Mexico. They came up with an experiment that budgeted out at “under $100,000,” with the expense picked by Blue Planet, Haier said.

The company had no say in how the experiment was conducted – and it didn’t get an advance look at the resulting research, which was published online today in BMC Research Notes, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal. “This was kind of a labor of love,” Haier told me.

The researchers recruited 26 girls, aged 12 to 15. Adolescents were selected because their developing brains were more likely to reflect changes, and girls were selected because they tend to have less experience with video games than boys. Fifteen of the girls were given the task of playing the video game for an average of 90 minutes a week over the course of three months. The others were told to avoid playing video games.

Both groups were monitored for changes in brain function as well as brain structure. Earlier research conducted in Germany had shown that juggling practice led to a thickening in areas of the cerebral cortex, so Haier and his colleagues were pretty sure they’d find a link between what they saw in the functional MRI (about more efficient brain function) and in the structural MRI (about cortex thickening).

And that’s where the brain puzzle threw them for a new loop.

“In science, everyone makes a very big deal about having a hypothesis before you go on a fishing expedition,” Haier said. “Never once in 20 years has my hypothesis worked out the way I thought it would. The brain is always a surprise.”

The researchers analyzed the brain changes in the game-playing group compared with the control group, and they found that the Tetris players’ brain function became more efficient in areas linked to critical thinking, reasoning, language and information processing – just as Haier found in 1992. They also discovered that the cortex became thicker – just as the German researchers had discovered. The only problem was … they weren’t the same areas.

“We all were surprised when we put the images together and saw that there was no overlap,” Haier said. The cortex became thicker in areas of the brain linked to the planning of complex movements as well as the coordination of sensory information.

Haier had hoped that he and his colleagues would come up with a mechanism to explain in physiological terms how the brain became more efficient through game-playing. “The obvious thing would be if you get more brain tissue, you have more neurons to work on a problem, so therefore that area of the brain doesn’t have to work as hard,” he said.

Now he realizes the problem isn’t as simple as he thought. “What this study does, really, is lay the groundwork for a whole series of studies to untangle all this,” he said.

In a news release, the University of New Mexico’s Jung said he’d like to see what happens to game-playing brains over time.

“We hope to continue this work with larger, more diverse samples to investigate whether the brain changes we measured revert back when the subjects stop playing Tetris,” Jung said. “Similarly, we are interested if the skills learned in Tetris, and the associated brain changes, transfer to other cognitive areas such as working memory, processing speed, or spatial reasoning.”

Haier would love to figure out how the different areas of the brain interact during mental training, on a time scale of milliseconds. But that job may be beyond the capability of functional MRI scans, which can monitor changes only on the scale of seconds. “If we’re interested in information flow in the millisecond range, by the time fMRI can see it, it’s too late,” Haier said.

So Haier is setting his sights on yet another new technology, and it’s a real mouthful. Magnetoencephalography, or MEG, monitors the faint magnetic fields produced by the brain’s electrical activity. Haier thinks MEG scans could reveal how the parts of the brain that become more efficient interact with the parts that develop thicker tissue.

“The time resolution of this technology is a millisecond, so you can see changes in the brain millisecond by millisecond,” he said.

As Haier talked about how he’d design those future experiments in game-playing, which would have to be conducted within a magnetically shielded environment, I could tell he was already trying to fit the puzzle pieces together in his mind.

“I want to know what the heck is going on in those brains,” he said.

Cognitive decline as we age is all over the news lately. “Brain fitness” products are available for cell phones, Game Boys, and Xboxes, all designed to prevent the natural decline in cognitive ability as we age. There’s even a significant body of work suggesting that this sort of product really can work.

But some of the brain games can be dull, repetitive work: memory tasks, number games, and optical illusions, while endlessly fascinating to cognitive scientists, might be less appealing to the general population.

Researchers Helga and Tony Noice believe that training in the theater arts has similar cognitive benefits, with the added benefit of actually being quite enjoyable to its participants. Together with Graham Staines, in 2004 they developed a controlled study to test their idea. They recruited 124 older adults, age 60 to 86, to participate in one of three study groups, by posting notices in senior centers in DuPage County, Illinois, offering a chance to participate in “arts training”:

Ah, but which art? Will you be learning about painting landscapes, playing the oboe, reciting Shakespeare, or writing verse? Only those who sign up will find out.

After everyone agreed they could attend all nine 90-minute sessions over the course of a month, one group was assigned to participate in a theater workshop, one group studied visual art, and one group received no training at all. Each group took a variety of cognitive tests at the beginning and end of the month. Everyone was paid $50 after completing the study.

The theater group improved significantly more compared to the control group in each of the measures (there was much less variance in the psychological well-being scores than in the other tests, so those small gains are significant). For problem solving and well-being, the theater group also improved significantly more than the visual arts group. The theater group also had the lowest drop-out rate of any group: All theater participants attended all 9 sessions, while 8 of the 44 visual arts students dropped out, despite the fact that all participants said they enjoyed the sessions.

Noice et al. continued to study the theater students for four months after the study, and found their performance on all tests was maintained for the entire post-study period.

The team argues that their results demonstrate that theater training — even over a relatively short time period — can help prevent cognitive decline associated with aging. They even speculate on some of the reasons why it is effective: Theater, they claim, requires sustained attention to the task in a way that other activities do not. Actors must stay in character for the duration of a scene, unlike studying visual art, where viewers might “rest” in between viewing different images. Also, the participants consistently remarked that theater was “new” to them, and novelty appears to be a key component of brain fitness.

The team says it would like to try other types of training in the future to see if they can find similar effects. We’ve reported on a study conducted that same year which showed IQ gains in children who studied music compared to kids who studied drama or nothing at all. This suggests that musical theater might beat music or theater alone as a brain fitness product!

Here is the original article

July 20, 2009
BY BRAD SPIRRISON chicagotechmatters@gmail.com

While popular exercise-focused video games like those played on Nintendo’s Wii Fitness appear to have some health benefits, brain games designed to enhance mental fitness are striving for clinical and commercial acceptance.

“We are learning that people can push out the natural effects of aging by playing cognitive games,” says Jim Hanekamp, founder of Glenview-based My Fit Brain.

Hanekamp, 53, started the company last year after his mother began to show early signs of Alzheimer’s. His research showed that while brain exercises could do little to reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s, they could positively impact neural growth earlier in life. This, in theory, could delay memory loss and other effects of brain aging.

The former corporate technology director has invested about $70,000 and months of salary-free time to develop a suite of brain training games found at www.myfitbrain.com. Games with titles like “Pair Em Up” and “CodeBreaker” test memory and logic function, and increase in difficulty based on the cognitive capacity of the user.

While Nintendo and neuroscience specialist Lumosity market paid and subscription-based games, everything on My Fit Brain is free to the user. Hanekamp, who has recruited 1,200 registered users and thousands more visitors to the site, hopes eventually to make money from advertisers.

“We have a new, patent-pending way to incorporate advertising within the game itself,” he said.

Although Hanekamp has had a tough go landing advertisers and investors — he was told he needs between 10,000 and 100,000 registered users to be a viable marketing channel — the company has contained costs by outsourcing its development to India and hosting the site on Amazon’s cloud computing service.

My Fit Brain is marketed largely via word-of-mouth, fueled by an instructive and regularly updated blog on the site that focuses on cognitive fitness issues.

Chicago Sun-Times article by Brad Spirrison

Training increases brain processing speed and improves our ability to multitask, new research from Vanderbilt University published in the June 15 issue of Neuron indicates.

“We found that a key limitation to efficient multitasking is the speed with which our prefrontal cortex processes information, and that this speed can be drastically increased through training and practice,” Paul E. Dux, a former research fellow at Vanderbilt, and now a faculty member at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and co-author of the study, said. “Specifically, we found that with training, the ‘thinking’ regions of our brain become very fast at doing each task, thereby quickly freeing them up to take on other tasks.”

To understand what was occurring in the brain when multitasking efficiency improved, the researchers trained seven people daily for two weeks on two simple tasks — selecting an appropriate finger response to different images, and selecting an appropriate vocal response (syllables) to the presentation of different sounds. The tasks were done either separately or together (multitasking situation). Scans of the individuals’ brains were conducted three times over the two weeks using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they were performing the tasks.

Before practice, the participants showed strong dual-task interference—slowing down of one or both tasks when they attempted to perform them together. As a result of practice and training, however, the individuals became very quick not only at doing each of the two tasks separately, but also at doing them together. In other words, they became very efficient multitaskers.

Read the rest of the article here.