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A Brain–Computer Interface Allows Paralyzed Patients to Play Music with Brainpower Alone

March 21, 2011 / Klint Finley

brain computer interface for music

A pianist plays a series of notes, and the woman echoes them on a computerized music system. The woman then goes on to play a simple improvised melody over a looped backing track. It doesn’t sound like much of a musical challenge — except that the woman is paralysed after a stroke, and can make only eye, facial and slight head movements. She is making the music purely by thinking.

This is a trial of a computer-music system that interacts directly with the user’s brain, by picking up the tiny electrical impulses of neurons. The device, developed by composer and computer-music specialist Eduardo Miranda of the University of Plymouth, UK, working with computer scientists at the University of Essex, should eventually help people with severe physical disabilities, caused by brain or spinal-cord injuries, for example, to make music for recreational or therapeutic purposes. The findings are published online in the journal Music and Medicine.

Nature News: Music is all in the mind

(via Richard Yonck)

See also: Eyewriter, an inexpensive way for people to draw using only their eyes.

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.

More On Creativity and Distractibility

February 22, 2011 / Klint Finley

Day dreaming

Jonah Lehrer writes for the Wall Street Journal:

A new study led by researchers at the University of Memphis and the University of Michigan extends this theme. The scientists measured the success of 60 undergraduates in various fields, from the visual arts to science. They asked the students if they’d ever won a prize at a juried art show or been honored at a science fair. In every domain, students who had been diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder achieved more: Their inability to focus turned out to be a creative advantage. […]

Here’s where the data get interesting: Those undergrads who had a tougher time ignoring unrelated stuff were also seven times more likely to be rated as “eminent creative achievers” based on their previous accomplishments. (The association was particularly strong among distractible students with high IQs.) […]

This doesn’t mean, of course, that attention isn’t an important mental skill, or that attention-deficit disorders aren’t a serious problem. There’s clearly nothing advantageous about struggling in the classroom, or not being able to follow instructions. (It’s also worth pointing out that these studies all involve college students, which doesn’t tell us anything about those kids with ADHD who fail to graduate from high school. Distraction might be a cognitive luxury that not everyone can afford.)

Wall Street Journal: Jonah Lehrer on Distractions, ADHD and Creativity

This is encouraging for people with major distractibility problems, such as myself. However, I’m not going to get too excited. That first study cited had only 60 participants – a tiny sample. Especially when you consider the “decline effect.”

I’ve been meaning to blog about the decline effect, and hopefully will soon. Incidentally, Lehrer wrote a great article about it for the New Yorker recently. Here’s a particularly relevant portion:

Although such reforms would mitigate the dangers of publication bias and selective reporting, they still wouldn’t erase the decline effect. This is largely because scientific research will always be shadowed by a force that can’t be curbed, only contained: sheer randomness. Although little research has been done on the experimental dangers of chance and happenstance, the research that exists isn’t encouraging.

I would consider myself a creative person. Perhaps distractability has helped me be more creative. But creativity is worthless without execution – and that’s why I’ve been trying to train myself to be more focused.

Having difficulty paying attention has negatively impacted my life more times than I can remember. It’s a big problem for me. That said, there’s usually room to use weaknesses as strengths.

Previously:

Are Distractible People More Creative?

Research Shows That American Creativity is Declining

Teachers hate creativity?

Secrets of a Mind-Gamer

February 22, 2011 / Klint Finley

Memory competition

Amazing article on mnemonics and memory competitions:

Researchers put the mental athletes and a group of control subjects into f.M.R.I. scanners and asked them to memorize three-digit numbers, black-and-white photographs of people’s faces and magnified images of snowflakes as their brains were being scanned. What they found was surprising: not only did the brains of the mental athletes appear anatomically indistinguishable from those of the control subjects, but on every test of general cognitive ability, the mental athletes’ scores came back well within the normal range. When Cooke told me he was an average guy with an average memory, it wasn’t just modesty speaking.

There was, however, one telling difference between the brains of the mental athletes and those of the control subjects. When the researchers looked at the parts of the brain that were engaged when the subjects memorized, they found that the mental athletes were relying more heavily on regions known to be involved in spatial memory. At first glance, this didn’t seem to make sense. Why would mental athletes be navigating spaces in their minds while trying to learn three-digit numbers?

The answer lies in a discovery supposedly made by the poet Simonides of Ceos in the fifth century B.C. After a tragic banquet-hall collapse, of which he was the sole survivor, Simonides was asked to give an account of who was buried in the debris. My trainer and all the other mental athletes I met kept insisting that anyone could do what they do. It was simply a matter of learning to ‘think in more memorable ways.’ When the poet closed his eyes and reconstructed the crumbled building in his imagination, he had an extraordinary realization: he remembered where each of the guests at the ill-fated dinner had been sitting. Even though he made no conscious effort to memorize the layout of the room, it nonetheless left a durable impression. From that simple observation, Simonides reportedly invented a technique that would form the basis of what came to be known as the art of memory. He realized that if there hadn’t been guests sitting at a banquet table but, say, every great Greek dramatist seated in order of birth — or each of the words of one of his poems or every item he needed to accomplish that day — he would have remembered that instead. He reasoned that just about anything could be imprinted upon our memories, and kept in good order, simply by constructing a building in the imagination and filling it with imagery of what needed to be recalled. This imagined edifice could then be walked through at any time in the future. Such a building would later come to be called a memory palace. […]

But mental athletes don’t merely embrace the practice of the ancients. The sport of competitive memory is driven by an arms race of sorts. Each year someone — usually a competitor who is temporarily underemployed or a student on summer vacation — comes up with a more elaborate technique for remembering more stuff more quickly, forcing the rest of the field to play catch-up. In order to remember digits, for example, Cooke recently invented a code that allows him to convert every number from 0 to 999,999,999 into a unique image that he can then deposit in a memory palace.

New York Times: Secrets of a Mind-Gamer

The Next God Helmet? Zap Your Brain for Insight

February 10, 2011 / Klint Finley

i-can-see-clearly-now1

Researchers are using transcranial direct current stimulation to stimulate insight:

Remember Michael Persinger and his “God helmet”? A professor at the University of Sydney and his grad student are working on something similar — and while they claim that it can boost certain kinds of creativity, parapsychologists might find it interesting too.

Until the 1990s, the American-born Allan Snyder was an optical physicist, responsible for some of the key insights that led to the modern telecom network. He was awarded the Marconi Prize in 2001 (the year before Tim Berners-Lee won it) and is a fellow of the Royal Society. But for the past fifteen years or so, most of them at the University of Sydney, he’s been studying the process of insight itself. He seems to have had little funding; most of his publications have been in lower-impact journals; he has compensated by being very media-friendly; and he’s had a fascination with the use of magnetic and electrical currents to alter brain activity — all of which make me think of him as a sort of Michael Persinger 2.0.

Heretical Notions: Persinger 2.0

(via Catvincent)

Interesting stuff. The research paper can be found here.

It’s probably worth mentioning that Persinger’s results have never been replicated.

More on transcranial direct current stimulation.

Study: Mindfulness Meditation Can Change Brain Structure

February 6, 2011 / Klint Finley

Meditation by oddsock

Yet another study on the effects of meditation on the brain, this one focused on mindfulness meditation:

Participating in an 8-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. In a study that will appear in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers report the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s grey matter.

“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study’s senior author. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”

PhysOrg: Mindfulness meditation training changes brain structure in 8 weeks

(via Boing Boing)

However, this study had a VERY small sample size: just 16 participants.

Previous coverage of meditation.

Photo by Odd Stock

Sleeping Protects Memories From Corruption

February 5, 2011 / Klint Finley

sleeping woman

Replaying memories while people are awake leaves their memories subject to tinkering. But reactivating memories during sleep protects them from interference, researchers in Germany and Switzerland report online January 23 in Nature Neuroscience.

The finding shows that the brain handles memories differently during sleep than while awake, says Sara Mednick, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego who was not involved in the research. Armed with this new knowledge, she says, therapists may be able to destabilize traumatic memories and overwrite the bad memories with good ones, then solidify the new memory with a nap.

Wired: Sleeping Protects Memories From Corruption

(image by mollyollyoxenfree)

Study: Yes, Music Does Get You High

January 19, 2011 / Klint Finley

What music listeners have known for centuries has been vindicated by science: music gets you high. Specifically, when we listen to music we like, our brains release dopamine. Dopamine is released even when anticipating listening to a song.

You can find the study here.

Flavorwire has a round-up of ten songs used in the study.

(via Socialphysicist)

I wonder if this might explain a bit about how binaurel beats actual work?

The Human Brain Changes Its Own Behavior with Its Electric Field

January 18, 2011 / Klint Finley

Your brain is electric. Tiny impulses constantly race among billions of interconnected neurons, generating an electric field that surrounds the brain like an invisible cloud. A new study published online July 15 in Neuron suggests that the brain’s electric field is not a passive by-product of its neural activity, as scientists once thought. The field may actively help regulate how the brain functions, especially during deep sleep. Although scientists have long known that external sources of electricity (such as electroshock therapy) can alter brain function, this is the first direct evidence that the brain’s native electric field changes the way the brain behaves.

Scientific American: Neural Feedback: Brain Influences Itself with Its Own Electric Field

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?

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