playthink

I just returned home after a week of high-altitude livin’ in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Two great runs bookended my trip: On day one of my vacation in Jackson, I went for a light and easy morning jog to stretch my legs. Twenty minutes into my jaunt through the neighboring community of Wilson (population: 1,300; elevation: 6,100 feet), I looked up at Teton Pass, the mountain road that climbs 2,200 vertical feet at grades of up to 10 percent and cuts through the rugged range that divides the Equality State from the Gem State, and was overwhelmed with a curiosity to run to the top. (In summers past I have busted my quads riding to the summit.) A breathtaking view of the valley floor from an elevation of 8,400 feet was my reward. Incredible.

This run was just a warm-up for when I would play King of the Mountain(s) at the end of my vacation. Starting from Teton Village (elevation: 6,300 feet) at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, I darted up a trail that wraps its way to the top of Apres Vous Mountain (8,500 feet), then crossed over and trekked up to the tippity snow-capped top of Rendezvous Mountain (10,500 feet), and then descended just a wee-bit to Gondola Summit (9,000 feet). This epic trail run sometimes seemed like a Sisyphian challenge (especially the trudge up the steep, slippery, and bowl-shaped Sublette chutte), but was ultimately — because of the difficulty of the trek, the views afforded from the mountain peaks, the wildlife that I found myself surrounded by, and the quiet solitude of such an adventure  — the highlight of my trip.

Having just returned home, I want to share some noteworthy news items from the past week that I am just now having a chance to catch-up on:

** Philosophy Talk, one of my favorite local radio programs, gets some much deserved recognition, courtesy of the L.A. Times article, Yeah, these philosophy professors will give it some thought. “Thank you for thinking.”

** Gretchen Reynolds of the NYT highlights an important and oft overlooked concern about the health of endurance athletes: The sometimes obsessive weight iusses of male and female athletes:

In [a] study published earlier this year in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, 223 Swedish Olympians (125 men and 98 women) were weighed, measured and asked about their eating habits. The thinner athletes, many of them from endurance sports, reported more episodes of wild weight swings and eating disorders than other athletes. Even more startling was that the eating and weight problems were most common among the thin male athletes. The women didn’t worry about their weight nearly as much. In fact, according to Dr. Hagmar Magnus, a physician at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm and the study’s lead author, “the female Olympians ate a lot and planned meals well. The men didn’t.”

Magnus says the lessons of the study are broad. For one, “we’ve all been paying a great deal of attention to female athletes, trying to help them avoid eating disorders,” he says. “We need to start doing that for men.”

In addition, “the best female athletes in Sweden eat quite well, which suggests that good eating is a real competitive advantage,” Magnus says. “As a physician, I see many female athletes, not quite so elite, who have eating problems. That may be what has kept them from the top ranks. I’d love to get the message to them, you can eat your way to greatness.”

** Walking book clubs?! Exercise the mind and the body to maximize cognitive and bodily health, says Dr. Arthur Kramer, Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Biomedical Imaging Center at the University of Illinois, in this interview with Alvaro Fernandez of SharpBrains.

** And follow-this up with another fascinating AF/SharpBrains discussion about why and how smart people do really dumb things, like the Harvard students who paid $204 for a $20 bill. Wha?! Ori Brafman, co-author of Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, explains “the different hidden forces” and “psychological undercurrents” of our decision making processes here.

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood

So. Much. Good. Stuff.

*** “Can We Play?,” by Dr. David Elkind and published on the SharpBrains blog, is a summary of the “research [that] confirms the value of play.” It makes for an interesting, science-rooted companion to a book that deserves a deep and thorough re-read every year, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, by Thomist philosopher and Christian theologian Josef Pieper, who makes a compelling case that purposeless activity is the most purposeful activity that we can and should engage in!

*** What is the best way to boost cognitive functioning? By exercising the body or by exercising the mind? What about the use of nutrition supplements and the practice of meditation? Jeremy at PsyBlog explores these questions in, Brain Health: Physical or Mental Exercise?, also republished on the SharpBrains blog. (If you regularly peruse only one or two sites about the brain sciences, SharpBrains is the best.)

*** Light reading: Boris Johnson, the recently-elected Mayor of London, analogizes bike riding with and without a helmet to the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” sharp elbow game of politics in Get a bike helmet to get ahead - or maybe not, an opinion piece in Britain’s Daily Telegraph.

*** To listen to: NPR’s Talk of the Nation has an audio archive of today’s discussion with Alan Schwartz of the NYT about his front-page profile of Kendall Bailey, a “6-foot-6-inch 19 year-old”  diagnosed with cerebral palsy, mental retardation, and autism, but who also happens to be one the fastest disabled swimmers in the world. Kendall is so fast that he is favored to win gold, if not set a world record in the breastroke, at this summer’s 2008 Paralympics in Beijing. That is, if he is allowed to compete. Officials of the event have been slow to confirm whether Kendall, because of his intellectual and mental handicaps, would be allowed to compete alongside physically disabled athletes. The politics of sport and the heart of a champion. Read Schwartz’s article here.

*** Another provocative read: This story about how the government of Japan is responding to its own national obesity epidemic (it seems everyone, everywhere — not just those of us in the U.S. — is getting fatter) by imposing limits to the size of its citizens’ bellies. (!) If you are a male, it is against the law for your waist to exceed 33.5 inches; for women, the government says your waist can be no bigger than 35.4 inches. If you eat too much and are too plump around the mid-section, you can be fined and forced to attend health education courses. Too much government intervention, or a necessary public policy?

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood

I read an interesting little blurb by Leah Garchik in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle about the programming at the Equal Justice Society luncheon:

Neurobiologist Maninder Kahlon described how the brain works and how biology can result in the formation of biased notions. Here is your workbook today: [Click here* to] take the Stroop test. This involves forcing one’s brain to use its power of observation rather than relying on habits of perception. It’s an astounding experiment that demonstrates only a fraction of what humans are up against when they try to change preconceived notions.

*Note, the link in the above excerpt requires you to have Shockwave software downloaded on your computer to take the Stroop test. If you do not have the Shockwave plug-in, PBS’s awesome scientific program, Nova, has a “non-Shockwave demonstration of the Stroop effect” available here.

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published an interesting article in today’s journal that examines the physical structure of brains in heterosexual and homosexual study participants.

The best summary of the article, PET and MRI show differences in cerebral asymmetry and functional connectivity between homo- and heterosexual subjects, authored by lead researchers Ivanka Savic and Per Linstrom of the Stockholm Brain Institute in Sweden, is provided by Richard Monastersky on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s News Blog:

Is There a Gay Brain? Imagine Study Finds Anatomical Clues

[Neuroscience researchers] found that the brains of homosexual men and heterosexual women were more symmetrical than the brains of heterosexual men and homosexual women. A similar difference emerged when the researchers looked in particular at the amygdala, a brain region associated with emotional reactions. Heterosexual women and homosexual men had more connections between their right and left amygdala and more connections with other brain regions than did homosexual women and heterosexual men.

Scientists have spent decades looking for brain differences between homosexual and heterosexual people and since the early 1990s have been finding anatomical distinctions in regions associated with sexual behavior. The new study suggests broader brain differences between homosexual and heterosexual men and women, even in regions not linked to sexual attraction.

The BBC article where I first read of this study can be found here.

In 2005, Dr. Savic was the lead researcher on another neuroscientific investigation about the “gay brain.” The title of that article, also published by PNAS, is Brain response to putative phermones in homosexual men.

In this 2005 study, it was discovered — as the title of the article says — that “the brains of homosexual men respond more like those of women when reacting to a chemical derived from the male sex hormone.” [Source]

These two studies lend evidence to the debate over whether sexual orientation is a biologically-determined trait.

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood

“My Amygdala, My Self,” by Jeffrey Goldberg, is a fun and fascinating article in this summer’s Ideas Issue of The Atlantic:

Intrigued (and alarmed) by the new science of “neuromarketing,” our correspondent peers into his own brain via an MRI machine and learns what he really thinks about Jimmy Carter, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bruce Springsteen, and Eddie Falco.

Article.

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood

Some of the better recent resources related to the brain sciences…

• From the Society for Neuroscience, a free downloadable “64-page primer on the brain and nervous system.”

• The TImes of London, voted the best news website of the year, has a great interactive gallery of brain training resources and puzzles at Surprise Yourself.

• Sharon Begley’s article for Newsweek, The Lotus and the Synapse, makes accessible recent research that shows how compassion mediation can actually change the structure of the brain. The paper that inspired Begley’s article, Regulation of the Neural Circuitry of Emotion by Compassion Meditation: Effects of Meditative Expertise, was published in the journal Public Library of Science One (PLoS ONE). A quick overview of the research project and its findings is provided by the University of Wisconsin.

• As part of its Author Speaker Series, the fantastic people over at SharpBrains (my favorite resource for brain science news and information) invited John Medina, biologist and author of the new book Brain Rules, to provide a “good, non-technical, summary of the implications of recent brain science in our daily lives.” Check out the post at Brain Rules: science and practice. 

In the Mind Matters section of Newsweek’s online health section, Wray Herbert authored an interesting article that introduces executive function (EF) “an emerging concept in student assessment and could eventually displace traditional measures of ability and achievement.”

In EF: The School Skill That Matter More than IQ, Herbert writes:

EF comprises not only effortful control and cognitive focus but also working memory and mental flexibility—the ability to adjust to change, to think outside the box. These are the uniquely human skills that, taken together, allow us keep our more impulsive and distractible brain in check. New research shows that EF, more than IQ, leads to success in basic academics like arithmetic and grammar. It also suggests that we can pump up these EF skills with regular exercise, just as we do with muscles.

Lynn Meltzer is the editor of Executive Function in Education: From Theory to Practice, a compilation of rich essays that explores the science of, and curriculum for implementing, high-order thinking.

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood 

Big news today. Best to go straight to the Reuters article:

A computer has been trained to “read” people’s minds by looking at scans of their brains as they thought about specific words, researchers from the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University announced today.

They hope their study, published in the journal Science, might lead to better understanding of how and where the brain stores information.

How’s it work? Volunteers were asked to think of 58 different words while researchers recorded their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The researchers were able to create an “average image” of each word based on the brain activity of each volunteer.

The computer was then trained to recognize the “subtle differences” among the brain images that corresponded to one of the 58 words.

Then the computer was given two new words that it had not yet seen — celery and airplane – and “was asked to choose which brain image corresponded with which word.” 

By comparing the new brain images to the brain images of the 58 words that the computer did know,

The computer passed the test, predicting when a brain image was taken when a person thought about the word “celery” and when the assigned word was “airplane.”

Researchers hope their work “might lead to better treatments for language disorders and learning disabilities.”

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood 

Monkeys… Sitting in a chair… Using an arm-like machine to grab marshmallows… And controlling this machine with their brains.

Seriously.

Scientists have made a quantum-leap in brain-machine interface technology, according to a new article in the the journal Nature. In “Cortical control of a prosthetic arm for self-feeding,” researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University built an arm-like machine, complete with “shoulder joints, an elbow and a grasping claw with two mechanical fingers” and then gave two macaques joysticks that could control the mechanical arm.

Then, as explained by Benedict Carey, in a great article for the International Herald Tribune:

Just beneath the monkeys’ skulls, the scientists implanted a grid about the size of a large freckle. It sat on the motor cortex, over a patch of cells known to signal arm and hand movements. The grid held 100 tiny electrodes, each connecting to a single neuron, its wires running out of the brain and to a computer.

The computer was programmed to analyze the collective firing of these 100 motor neurons, translate that sum into an electronic command and send it instantaneously to the arm, which was mounted flush with the left shoulder.

The scientists used the computer to help the monkeys move the arm at first, essentially teaching them with biofeedback.

After several days, the monkeys needed no help. They sat stationary in a chair, repeatedly manipulating the arm with their brain to reach out and grab grapes, marshmallows and other nuggets dangled in front of them. The snacks reached the mouths about two-thirds of the time — an impressive rate, compared with earlier work.

The monkeys learned to hold the grip open on approaching the food, close it just enough to hold the food and gradually loosen the grip when feeding.

On several occasions, a monkey kept its claw open on the way back, with the food stuck to one finger. At other times, a monkey moved the arm to lick the fingers clean or to push a bit of food into its mouth while ignoring a newly presented morsel.

The animals were apparently freelancing, discovering new uses for the arm, showing “displays of embodiment that would never be seen in a virtual environment,” the researchers wrote.

This is radical research, leading to technology that will “allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives. Brain-controlled prosthetics are technically within reach.”

Click here to view a video of a monkey controlling a robot arm with using its brain activity.

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood 

A story out of the United Kingdom provides an interesting complement to my most recent post about Nintendo’s Wii Fit…

A pilot study was conducted at a primary school in Scotland to investigate the potential value of utilizing video games in the classroom — video games that are specifically designed to improve memory, spatial reasoning, and other abstract brain functioning skills.

In the study, students were given a Nintendo DS, which is a handheld video game console, and played Dr. Kawashima’s More Brain Training video game at the beginning of every school day, for 20 minutes a day, for 10 consecutive weeks.

At the end of the trial period, the average math scores of students that played with the brain training video games increased by 10 percent (compared to their scores from a pre-intervention assessment). The time it took these students to complete the tests decreased from 17 minutes to 13 minutes.

Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS) is the lead organization for curriculum development in the country; Derek Robertson is the development officer of games-based learning for LTS. In the Telegraph article, “Pupils to start day with Nintendo Brain Training,” Robertson said the initial pilot project of Nintendo’s brain training video games produced “fascinating results.”

Not only was there a marked significant improvement in mental maths, but there was also an improvement in concentration levels, behavior, and self-regulation in the learning process.

LTS is so intrigued by the potential of brain training video games that it is expanding its study to include 32 schools — at 16 schools, students will start their day by playing brain training video games; 16 other schools will serve as a control group.

If the results from this larger study are promising, maybe playing video games will become mandatory homework for students.

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood