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The Neuroscience of Video Games, a Review of the Literature

November 23, 2011 / Klint Finley

Gamer

John Walker takes a look at the journal Nature‘s recent Brains On Video Games collection, which includes both possible negative and possible positive outcomes of video game play.

The bad news: much of the positive cognitive gains from video gaming are non-transferable, and gaming may increase both aggression and the symptoms of ADHD. The good news: it doesn’t sound like that should be a problem for people without existing aggressive tendencies or ADHD.

My take-away: if you like playing games, keep playing them. If you don’t, there’s probably not much benefit in starting.

Rock, Paper Shotgun: Nature’s Neuroscientific Review Of Games

Reverse Placebo: People Wrongly Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Go Senile

August 30, 2011 / Klint Finley

Psychologists in the Netherlands have documented the case of a 58-year-old woman who was misdiagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Her condition deteriorated to the point where she became permanently confused, and at one point suicidal — before another doctor realized the diagnosis was incorrect.

What happens to people who are wrongly diagnosed with having cognitive difficulties? It turns out that even if your brain is perfectly healthy, you’ll start having more problems with concentration.

io9: What happens when you’re wrongly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease

(Thanks Bill!)

What’s Next for Cognitive Training Games?

June 26, 2011 / Klint Finley

brain

Most of the cognitive training games of 2011 resemble the simple games you can play online for free or apps designed for smartphones. However, in ten years, we can expect many of the big developers, following Nintendo’s lead, to introduce critical gaming elements. Envision games featuring improved graphics, compelling gameplay, and engaging storylines that compel players to train their brains often and in a variety of ways. Imagine a role-playing game (RPG) in which your character’s level and progress are determined in part by your performance on a variety of cognitive training tasks, and the selection of tasks are dependent on the class chosen by the player, and thus tailored made for each individual user. Much in the same way that RPG style games will foster unique training experiences, cognitive training games in general will become tailored to individual interests, focusing on training specific cognitive mechanisms, rather than providing a general training regimen that the user may not be looking for. […]

Non-Conscious Defenses- Starting all the way back in the 1950’s, firms have sought to understand human psychology in order to capitalize on our biases and tendencies through influencing us on the sub-conscious level. In the past couple decades however, research into non-conscious processing and subliminal priming have begun to unravel the fascinating ways that people develop preferences for products and how they estimate value. Companies have been following this research closely and already implement their findings into many forms of media: magazines, movies and even presidential election commercials (5). Expect that training games will begin to offer cognitive defenses against advertising seeking to influence us on the sub conscious level.

The Future of Brain Workouts

5 Reasons Why Having a High IQ Ain’t All It’s Cracked-Up to Be

June 10, 2011 / Klint Finley

Odd John

Yes, it’s from Cracked, but it’s interesting:

#5.You’re Probably a Night Owl — And That’s a Bad Thing
#4.You’re Less Likely to Pass On Your Genes
#3. You’re More Likely to Lie
#2. You’re More Likely to Believe Bullshit
#1. You’re More Likely to Be Self-Destructive

Cracked: 5 Unexpected Downsides of High Intelligence

Coffee: The Original Smart Drug and Aphrodisiac

April 18, 2011 / Klint Finley

Coffee: Grounds for Debate, a title in the Philosophy for Everyone series, argues that coffee is a performance-enhancing drug for thinkers. “The appropriate analogy is that coffee and philosophy go together like foreplay and sex,” insist editors Scott F Parker and Michael W Austin. “You can have one without the other, but the latter is better with the former and the former often leads to the latter.” Philosopher Basam Romaya says: “With the use of coffee, critical thinking abilities are sharpened, attention to detail enhanced.” This is a venerable claim: in the 16th century, Sheik Abd-al-Kadir, an Arab scholar, said: “No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee’s frothy goodness.” […]

So what about impotence? That does seem to have been overstated. The Women’s Petition Against Coffee prompted a broadside from men who argued that it “makes the erection more Vigorous, the Ejaculation more full, adds spiritualescency to the Sperme”. Initially I wasn’t sure what “spiritualescency” means, either, until I read in this book that caffeine increases sperm motility. That said, some say coffee may harm the sperm while speeding it on its way, which makes a kind of sense.

The Guardian: Can coffee wreck your marriage?

(via James Governor)

7 Ways to Amplify Your Intelligence

March 8, 2011 / Klint Finley

one second of human brain activity

Plot of one second of human brain (EEG) activity, from the Sounds Of Complexity by Enzo Varriale via Flickr

Andrea Kuszewski writes about five ways to amplify your intelligence for Scientific American. I’ve added two additional techniques.

Kuszewski’s list:

1. Seek Novelty – “People who rate high on Openness are constantly seeking new information, new activities to engage in, new things to learn—new experiences in general.”

2. Challenge Yourself – “Individual brain training games don’t make you smarter—they make you more proficient at the brain training games,” Kuszewski writes. “Once you master one of those cognitive activities in the brain-training game, you need to move on to the next challenging activity. Figure out how to play Sudoku? Great! Now move along to the next type of challenging game.” (Previous Technoccult coverage)

3. Think Creatively – “Contrary to popular belief, creative thinking does not equal ‘thinking with the right side of your brain.’ It involves recruitment from both halves of your brain, not just the right.” (Previous coverage)

4. Do Things the Hard Way “There are times when using technology is warranted and necessary. But there are times when it’s better to say no to shortcuts and use your brain, as long as you can afford the luxury of time and energy.”

5. Network “By networking with other people—either through social media such as Facebook or Twitter, or in face-to-face interactions—you are exposing yourself to the kinds of situations that are going to make objectives 1-4 much easier to achieve.” (Previous coverage)

Scientific American: You can increase your intelligence: 5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential

Here are my bonus tips:

Get more sleep.

Meditate.

Humanity’s Next Evolution May Be Mental, Not Biological

February 28, 2011 / Klint Finley

Mark Changizi, author of the upcoming book Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Man, writes:

Where are we humans going, as a species? If science fiction is any guide, we will genetically evolve like in X-Men, become genetically engineered as in Gattaca, or become cybernetically enhanced like General Grievous in Star Wars. […]

Simply put, none of these scenarios are plausible for the immediate future. […]

We have already been transformed via harnessing beyond what we once were. We’re already Human 2.0, not the Human 1.0, or Homo sapiens, that natural selection made us. We Human 2.0’s have, among many powers, three that are central to who we take ourselves to be today: writing, speech, and music (the latter perhaps being the pinnacle of the arts). Yet these three capabilities, despite having all the hallmarks of design, were not a result of natural selection, nor were they the result of genetic engineering or cybernetic enhancement to our brains. Instead, and as I argue in both The Vision Revolution and my forthcoming Harnessed, these are powers we acquired by virtue of harnessing, or neuronal recycling.

In this transition from Human 1.0 to 2.0, we didn’t directly do the harnessing. Rather, it was an emergent, evolutionary property of our behavior, our nascent culture, that bent and shaped writing to be right for our visual system, speech just so for our auditory system, and music a match for our auditory and evocative mechanisms. […]

The road to Human 3.0 and beyond will, I believe, be largely due to ever more instances of this kind of harnessing. And although we cannot easily anticipate the new powers we will thereby gain, we should not underestimate the potential magnitude of the possible changes. After all, the change from Human 1.0 to 2.0 is nothing short of universe-rattling: It transformed a clever ape into a world-ruling technological philosopher.

Seed: THE NEXT GIANT LEAP IN HUMAN EVOLUTION MAY NOT COME FROM NEW FIELDS LIKE GENETIC ENGINEERING OR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, BUT RATHER FROM APPRECIATING OUR ANCIENT BRAINS

(via Justin Pickard)

As Humans Evolve, Our Brains Are Actually Getting Smaller

January 4, 2011 / Klint Finley

Leader

Today’s human brain is about 10 percent smaller than the Cro-Magnon brain from more than 20,000 years ago.

When it comes to brain size, bigger doesn’t always mean better. As humans continue to evolve, scientists say our brains are actually getting smaller. […]

Cro-Magnon man, who lived in Europe 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, had the biggest brains of any human species. In comparison, today’s human brain is about 10 percent smaller. It’s a chunk of brain matter “roughly equivalent to a tennis ball in size,” McAuliffe says.

The experts aren’t sure about the implications of this evolutionary trend. Some think it might be a dumbing-down process. One cognitive scientist, David Geary, argues that as human society grows increasingly complex, individuals don’t need to be as intelligent in order to survive and reproduce.

But not all researchers are so pessimistic. Brian Hare, an anthropologist at the Duke University Institute for Brain Sciences, thinks the decrease in brain size is actually an evolutionary advantage.

NPR: Our Brains Are Shrinking. Are We Getting Dumber?

Are Stoners Really Dumb, or Do They Just Think They Are?

November 29, 2010 / Klint Finley

Stoner cropped

Earleywine and his colleagues studied 57 users, 30 male and 27 female. Half were given material to read suggesting that marijuana damages the brain; the other half read a research summary suggesting that the drug had no long-term negative cognitive effects. Then, all participants were asked to take cognitive tests after abstaining from marijuana for at least one day. (More on Time.com: See photos of cannabis conventions)
There was a marked difference in results — interestingly, between men and women. Men who got the negative information about marijuana performed worse than men who didn’t, but the women who were faced with stereotype threat actually scored better on tests of verbal skills and memory than women who weren’t given negative information.

Time: Are Stoners Really Dumb, or Do They Just Think They Are?

Group Exhibit Their Own Cognitive Intelligence, Enhanced by Women

October 1, 2010 / Klint Finley

the groomsmen from my wedding
My groomsmen from my wedding and me. Perhaps not the best example of group intelligence.

When it comes to intelligence, the whole can indeed be greater than the sum of its parts. A new study co-authored by MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Union College researchers documents the existence of collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well, showing that such intelligence extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the groups’ individual members, and that the tendency to cooperate effectively is linked to the number of women in a group.

PhysOrg: Study finds small groups demonstrate distinctive ‘collective intelligence’ when facing difficult tasks

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