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.”

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.

Landmark results from neuroscience research are debunking yet another myth about aging – that the brain continually loses cells and naturally dims with age.

On the contrary, recent studies show that if we continue to challenge our minds and stimulate our creativity, we not only feel better, we also cause our brains to sprout new branches, or dendrites. These new branches actually improve brain function and help compensate for the small loss of brain cells that comes with age.

In effect, the aging brain responds to mental exercise in much the same way that muscle responds to physical exercise.

In his new book, The Creative Age: Awakening Human Potential in the Second Half of Life, world-renowned psychiatrist and gerontologist Gene Cohen shares the latest findings in brain and aging research, and offers a plan for leading a creative and fulfilling life well beyond retirement.

For those who don’t think they have creative potential, Dr. Cohen emphasizes that creativity is not just for geniuses. One does not have to be born with inherited talent or raised in a special environment to be creative. It is universal. He calls it “an equal opportunity attribute.”

Dr. Cohen makes a distinction between creativity with a “big C” and creativity with a “little c.” He defines “big C” creativity as extraordinary accomplishments of unusual people, such as renowned artists, scientists and inventors. Creativity with a “little c” refers to personal creativity, grounded in the various and sundry realities of life. It is something one has brought into being and which has enhanced one’s life and given satisfaction. It could be a new recipe, a floral arrangement, a letter or poem that you wrote, or a new trick you taught your dog. Both dimensions of creativity are valuable, and both continue throughout the human life cycle, independent of age.

Read the rest of this article to learn how to keep your brain young: Think Young! Get Creative!

A research team from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla has identified a protein in the brain of mice that protects neurons from excessive inflammation, which can lead to neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Their study, which identifies the protective function of a protein called Nurr1 and defines the pathway by which it works, will be published in the April 3 edition of the journal Cell.

Nurr1 is a transcription factor that has been known for some time to play an essential role in the generation and maintenance of dopaminergic neurons in the brain. Rare mutations in Nurr1 are associated with familial Parkinson’s disease, and the loss of dopaminergic neurons — which are the main source of dopamine in the central nervous system — is associated with the disease. Dopamine helps control multiple brain functions such as movement, attention, pleasure, emotion and motivation. The new findings have uncovered a second and previously unexpected role of the Nurr1 protein in two other cell types in the brain — microglia and astrocytes. The brain’s microglia are macrophage-like cells that are active components of the immune defense in the central nervous system, while astrocytes are large star-shaped cells that normally play important support functions in the brain.
Read the rest of this article at: Protein Protection

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

Education may provide mental reserves that help to keep the brain agile into old age. Those are the findings of a new study from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Other studies have shown similar correlations between years of education and risk of Alzheimer’s disease. But the current study suggested that even those individuals whose brains appeared “scarred” by Alzheimer’s could still be cognitively normal, especially if they had received more years of formal education.

The researchers found that seniors with the most years of formal education scored higher on tests of memory, learning and thinking compared to those who spent the least time in school. In fact, many of the highly educated individuals who did well on the memory tests were shown by imaging tests to have the same kind of damage seen in the brains of those with Alzheimer’s disease. The findings were published in the Archives of Neurology, one of the medical journals from the American Medical Association.

Read the rest of this article to learn more about what the study showed: Cognitive Reserve Theory

Young adults with a genetic variant that increases their chance of developing Alzheimer’s later in life also have increased activity in the section of their brain devoted to memory, a new study has found. Researchers say the results suggest that the memory portion of the brain, the hippocampus, may eventually get worn out from a lifetime of overuse.

Researchers conducted fMRI brain scans of 36 volunteers, half of whom had at least one copy of the gene, known as APOE4. “We were surprised to see that even when the volunteers carrying APOE4 weren’t being asked to do anything, you could see the memory part of the brain working harder than it was in the other volunteers,” [study coauthor Christian] Beckmann said…. “Not all APOE4 carriers go on to develop Alzheimer’s, but it would make sense if in some people, the memory part of the brain effectively becomes exhausted from overwork and this contributes to the disease” [Reuters].

Read the rest of this article by clicking the following link: Brain Memory Center