Brain function
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Multi-tasking
Media multitasking is really multidistracting | KurzweilAI
(credit: iStockphoto) Multitaskers who think they can successfully divide their attention between the program on their television set and the information on their computer screen have proven to be driven to distraction by the two devices, according to a new study of media multitasking by Boston College researchers. Placed in a room containing a television and a computer and given a half hour to use either device, subjects in the study on average switched their eyes back and forth between TV and computer a 120 times in 27.5 minutes, nearly once every 14 seconds.Cognitive psychologist Douglas L. Hintzman has urged memory researchers and theorists to consider the wide variety of things that memory does for us and not to oversimplify them. “Cognitive psychologists are trying to be like physicists and chemists, which means doing controlled laboratory experiments, getting numbers out of them and explaining the numbers,” says Hintzman, now retired from the University of Oregon . Most experiments, he says, involve giving people lists of words and asking them to remember the words. Hintzman has reviewed the literature and experimental models in this field and concluded that these simple experimental tasks, observed in isolation from one another, yield theories that are so oversimplified as to fundamentally misrepresent the nature of memory. For instance, he says, these word-list tasks make it look as if we only remember when we intentionally put our minds to it— yet we all experience spontaneous memories, many times every day.
Oversimplified memory theories ignore time-based patterns: psychologist | KurzweilAI
This surprising (and disturbing) research at the University of Illinois revealed that many people in the U.S. (in some cases, a substantial majority) think that memory is more powerful, objective, and reliable than what decades of scientific research has demonstrated. The telephone survey asked 1,500 respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements about memory. Nearly two-thirds of respondents likened human memory to a video camera that records information precisely for later review. Almost half believed that once experiences are encoded in memory, those memories do not change. Nearly 40 percent felt that the testimony of a single confident eyewitness should be enough evidence to convict someone of a crime.
Can you trust your memory? Take these two simple tests. | KurzweilAI
Average activity for the brain networks that subserve working memory (credit: Min Wan et al./Nature) The neural networks in the brains of the middle-aged and elderly have weaker connections and fire less robustly than in youthful ones, Yale University researchers have found . (Credit: Yale University Medical School) “With normal aging, there are impairments in the working memory functions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC),” says Amy F. T.
How aging affects working-memory neuron firing rate and how to improve it | KurzweilAI
How the brain’s ‘workspace’ allows multitasking | KurzweilAI
Cognitive neuroscientist Robert H. Logie at the University of Edinburgh has found that a “workspace” in the brain allows us to do something while other functions operate in the background or to apply ourselves to a single task involving more than one function, contrary to the “controlled attention” model. “We have a range of different capacities, each with its own function, and they operate at the same time” when we perform a task or think about something, says Logie. Within this “multiple-component framework,” working memory capacity (the ability to keep track of ongoing mental processes and moment-to-moment changes in the immediate environment) is “the sum of the capacities of all these different functions.”
The functional connectivity between two cortical structures is given by a Pearson correlation between the mean regional activity of fMRI signals from 112 brain regions (right). The resulting N × N correlation matrix was statistically corrected by constructing a subject-specific weighted functional brain network (left). (Credit: Danielle S. Bassett et al./PNAS) The “flexibility” of a person’s brain — how much different areas of the brain link up in different combinations — can be used to predict how fast someone will learn, according to research by an international team from Oxford University, UC Santa Barbara, and UNC Chapel Hill.
Brains that switch between active areas more often learn faster | KurzweilAI
Rare procedure documents how the human brain computes language
Public release date: 15-Oct-2009 [ Print | E-mail | Share ] [ Close Window ] University of California - San DiegoThe brain's rostrolateral prefrontal cortex region (credit: UBC Dept. of Psychology) Researchers at the University of British Columbi a have discovered that people can gain greater control over their thoughts with real-time brain feedback. Participants performed tasks that either raised or lowered mental introspection in 30-second intervals over four six-minute sessions. fMRI technology tracked real-time activity in the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (RLPFC), the region of the brain involved with higher-order thoughts. Participants with access to real-time fMRI feedback could see their RLPFC activity increase during introspection and decrease during non-introspective thoughts, such as mental tasks that focused on body sensations. These participants used the feedback to guide their thoughts, which significantly improved their ability to control their thoughts and successfully perform the mental tasks.
People control thoughts better when they see their brain activity | KurzweilAI
Scans of the part of the brain responsible for memory have for the first time been used to detect a person's location in a virtual environment. Using functional MRI (fMRI), researchers decoded the approximate location of several people as they navigated through virtual rooms. This finding suggests that more detailed mind-reading, such detecting as memories of a summer holiday, might eventually be possible, says Eleanor Maguire , a neuroscientist at University College London. Her team trained its scanner on the hippocampus, a region of the brain critical to the formation and storage of memories. It is known that in animals, specialised place cells in the hippocampus fire regularly as they move from place to place. Firing patterns
Brain scan reveals memories of where you've been - health - 12 March 2009 - New Scientist
Brain Function
A Model for the Creation of It will be helpful to take a quick look at how the brain processes information from the environment before we consider the specific implications of how the environment affects learning. David Sousa (2001) and Patricia Wolfe (2001) explain in detail how the brain takes in information from the environment and processes it.