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How Does The Human Brain Work? - John Nicholson - 03-05-2010
[SIZE="7"]How Does The Human Brain Work?[/SIZE]
[SIZE="6"][COLOR="Navy"]When we look at anything closely it is most usual to divide it into its smallest possible segments/atoms, we humans like to think we can eventually understand everything, but the extent and manner of space and all the intricacies’ of the human brain may always be beyond our understanding. Believing that our human brains are the most capable working system we are ever likely to encounter, it is vital that we understand them just as much as is humanly possible. It appears at the moment that forty thousand neuro scientists have not unveiled the holy grail of human thinking, which is some relief to me, having given over almost one quarter of my working life to the study of brain function and the manner by which we can best enhance it. Reading copious amounts of scientific papers regarding brain function and education alongside the consideration of what I have read has kept my own brain fully occupied in trying to prove scientifically what I realised in a ten minute television program, that very young children build a visual mathematic map quite easily and quickly simply from using an abacus.
My work is intended to enhance the human mind of every child born, simply be showing its parents something they cannot remember naturally. (how they learnt to count read and think logically)
My hypothesis is based on human and brain philosophy rather than scientific evidence, at nearly seventy I shall of course continue my reading to that end but my reasoning is already provable as far as my work is concerned. Obviously my work concerns utilising the Abacus mans very first intellectual assistant. A simple Childs counter containing over one thousand one hundred and eleven answers on one moving page, not to mention the possibilities concerning the millions of questions that can be framed on that one page. (I am reliably told over one billion questions can be framed by that one page.)
So for every child’s high speed realisations and every parent`s benefit here is a thorough systematic process for teaching your own child and any child, to count read and think logically, system one 4 ever 1
We need to take note of every neoro scientists observations and their theories in regards to their experimental findings in order to build the bigger picture regarding our human brains. In order to clarify human brain function it is most likely that well written reasoning in relation to what is already known will be the simplest way forwards, so looking at a common philosophical explanation as to mind over matter will best suffice.
I have included some scientific reasoning from the results of scientific investigation, combined with its associated well reasoned but still hypothetical arguments.
Every one of us is scientifically proven to be related for over one million generations, it follows therefore that every one of us in good health is in possession of our species brain which must be regarded as capable of development as any other.
To that end I give you my findings.
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[SIZE="5"]How Does The Human Brain Work? New Ways To Better Understand How Our Brain Processes Information
ScienceDaily (May 26, 2009) — The human brain is perhaps the most complex of organs, boasting between 50-100 billion nerve cells or neurons that constantly interact with each other. These neurons ‘carry’ messages through electrochemical processes; meaning, chemicals in our body (charged sodium, potassium and chloride ions) move in and out of these cells and establish an electrical current.
Scientists have, for a long time now, stimulated with different types of inputs individual neurons that have been isolated for study. To have enough statistical power, these experiments typically involved stimulating a single neuron over and over again, to get a general idea of how it responds to different signals. Although these studies have yielded a lot of information, they have their own limitations.
An article by University of Leicester bioengineer Professor Rodrigo Quian Quiroga appeared recently in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. In the article, Prof. Quian Quiroga and co-author Dr. Stefano Panzeri discuss new methodologies that are enabling scientists to better understand how our brain processes information.
Prof. Quian Quiroga explains, “The human brain typically makes decisions based on a single stimulus, by evaluating the activity of a large number of neurons. I don’t get in front of a tiger 100 times to make an average of my neuronal responses and decide if I should run or not. If I see a tiger once, I runâ€. Traditional studies thus undermine this complexity by only accounting for the responses single neurons.
Moreover, these studies take into account an “average response†obtained by stimulating the neuron numerous times. The brain, on the other hand, acts based on single stimulus presentations. Therefore, the information given by an averaged response can often be insufficient.
Prof. Quian Quiroga and Dr. Panzeri stress, on account of these factors “it is important to shift from a single-neuron, multiple-trial framework to multiple-neuron, single-trial methodologiesâ€. In other words, it is more beneficial to study responses of numerous neurons to a single stimulus.[/SIZE]
How Does The Human Brain Work? - John Nicholson - 03-05-2010
[SIZE="5"]Chloride Channels Render Nerve Cells More Excitable: Scientists Discover How Nerve Cells May Influence Their Own Activity
ScienceDaily (Apr. 23, 2010) — Nerve cells communicate with each other by means of electrical impulses. To create such an impulse, the cells exchange charged ions with their environment. However, the role played by the ever-present chloride channels remained obscure, although some theories predicted a relation between the chloride channel ClC-2 and epilepsy.
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried are now able to confirm a number of assumptions about the ClC-2 channel and could at last explain why the anticipated epileptic seizures do not occur when nerve cells lack the ClC-2 channels in mice. The results, published online in The Journal of Neuroscience online publication (April 1st, 2010), also provide a completely new understanding of how nerve cells may actively influence the exchange of information.
The cell membranes of nerve cells, like those of all other cell types in the body, are perforated by so-called chloride channels. These permit the exchange of negatively charged chloride ions between the cell and its environment. Yet scientists could so far only speculate about the purpose of this exchange. According to one very prevalent theory, the excitability of nerve cells decreases when they lose chloride ions through these channels. Or, to put it the other way round, the lack of chloride channels would cause nerve cells to become overexcited. This in turn should lead to an increased rate of epileptic seizures. However, mice whose nerve cells lack chloride channels due to a genetic mutation were found no more susceptible to epilepsy than healthy animals. And so the function of the ClC-2 and of other chloride channels remained obscure.
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have now tracked down a number of the ClC-2 channel's functions. This constitutes the first tangible proof of the circumstances under which chloride ions can escape from nerve cells through the ClC-2 channels. In the case that nerve cells were lacking the ClC-2 channels due to a mutation in the channel's gene, the concentration of chloride inside the cells did indeed increase considerably.
The Max Planck scientists were also the first to successfully prove the third hypothesis -- that the nerve cells of mice with a genetic ClC-2 deficiency were much easier to excite than nerve cells in a healthy brain. Earlier assumptions therefore turned out to be correct. Then why did animals lacking the ClC-2 channels show no sign of epilepsy?
The answer to this question was not only plausible, but also straightforward. In addition to having cells that transmit information to their neighbouring cells, the nervous system contains a second group of nerve cells. These cells inhibit the exchange of information between its neighbours. In animals with a ClC-2 genetic defect, these inhibitory nerve cells also forfeit their chloride channels, and therefore become more excitable. Thus, excitatory and inhibitory cells become more excitable. "Although the whole system becomes more sensitive, at the end of the day the balance between the cells is maintained," explains Valentin Stein, leader of the study. And so the anticipated connection between genetic defect and epilepsy is not expressed. However, the lack of ClC-2 channels throws the nervous system into an unnaturally excited state. The scientists therefore speculate that although a defective ClC-2 gene does not cause epilepsy in itself, it may increase the risk of contracting epilepsy if other factors are present.
"We reckon, however, that we have come across something even more exciting," says Valentin Stein. The neurobiologist is referring to the discovery that nerve cells can theoretically use the ClC-2 channels to influence their own excitability. "If a nerve cell can control its own excitability by opening or closing its ClC-2 channels, then it could basically have a say in whether or not it transmits information to its neighbour." This possibility adds a whole new dimension to brain research. When and how nerve cells transmit information is one of the most fundamental functions of the brain and forms the basis of our ability to think. And so it comes as no surprise that the scientists can hardly wait to get on with the next stage of their investigations into this discovery
Prof. Quian Quiroga says, “A major challenge of our days is (thus) to develop the methodologies to record and process the data from hundreds of neurons and developing these is by no means a trivial taskâ€.
He adds, “Our brains are able to create very complex processes – just imagine the perfect harmony with which we move different muscles for normal walking – thousands of neurons are involved in this and to determine the role of each is complicatedâ€.
In his recent review paper, Prof. Quian Quiroga and Dr. Panzeri discuss two complementary approaches that can be used to resolve this, namely ‘decoding’ and ‘information theory’.
‘Decoding’ essentially helps determine what must have caused a particular response (much like “working backwardsâ€). Thus, the response of a neuronal population is used to reconstruct the stimulus or behaviour that caused it in the first place. ‘Information theory’, on the other hand, literally quantifies how much information a number of neurons carry about the stimulus.
Prof. Quian Quiroga explains, “together, the two approaches not only allow scientists to extract more information on how the brain works, but information that is ambiguous at the level of single neurons, can be clearly evaluated when the whole ‘population’ is consideredâ€. The review is an asset for anyone involved in the field, as it carefully considers and evaluates the two statistical approaches, as well as describes potential applications.
As part of his own research, Prof. Quiroga (in collaboration with Prof. Richard Andersen at Caltech) has been studying the ‘decoding’ of movement plans using activity of certain neuronal populations. This ability to predict movement intentions from activity of neurons has application in brain-machine interfaces, especially for development of neural prostheses (electronic and/or mechanical devices that connect to the nervous system and replace functions lost as a result of disease or injury) for paralysed patients.[/SIZE][SIZE="5"][/SIZE]
How Does The Human Brain Work? - John Nicholson - 03-05-2010
[SIZE="5"]More Brain Research Suggests 'Use It Or Lose It'
ScienceDaily (Feb. 12, 2008) — Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) scientists have found another important clue to why nerve cells die in neurodegenerative diseases, based on studies of the developing brain.
Neuroscientists at The University of Queensland have just published findings, which add more weight to the "use it or lose it" model for brain function.
QBI's Dr Elizabeth Coulson said a baby's brain generates roughly double the number of nerve cells it needs to function; with those cells that receive both chemical and electrical stimuli surviving, and the remaining cells dying.
In research published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Dr Coulson and her colleagues have identified a crucial step in the cell-death process.
"It appears that if a cell is not appropriately stimulated by other cells, it self-destructs," Dr Coulson said. This self-destruct process is also known to be an important factor in stroke, Alzheimer's and motor neuron diseases, leading to the loss of essential nerve cells from the adult brain.
"We know that a lack of both chemical and electrical stimuli causes the cells to self-destruct," Dr Coulson said. "But we believe that nerve cells will survive if appropriate electrical stimuli are produced to block the self-destruct process that we have identified."
The researchers' next step is to test whether dying cells receiving only electrical stimulation can be rescued.
More than three years' research has gone into understanding these crucial factors regulating nerve cell survival, but it is a major step in the long process of discovery needed to combat neurodegeneration.
QBI Director, Professor Perry Bartlett said the research is an extremely exciting finding because it also provides the missing piece of information as to how the brain likely keeps alive the new neurons it generates in some brain areas as an adult.
"Combining this with our knowledge of how to stimulate new neurons in the brain of adults following to disease processes such as stroke, it provides new mechanisms for the treatment of a variety of diseases from depression to dementia," he said
Different Signal Paths for Spontaneous and Deliberate Activation of Memories
ScienceDaily (Mar. 13, 2010) — Entirely different signal paths and parts of the brain are involved when you try to remember something and when you just happen to remember something, prompted by a smell, a picture, or a word, for instance. This is shown by Kristiina Kompus in her dissertation at Umeå University in Sweden.
Imagine you are asked to remember what you were doing exactly one week ago. You would probably have to make quite a mental effort to sift through your memories. On another occasion, a smell, a picture, or a word might suddenly and unexpectedly trigger a vivid memory of something that happened to you. Science still does not fully understand why our brain sometimes automatically supplies us with a memory that we have done nothing to deliberately call to mind, whereas why, on other occasions, we cannot remember things even though we make efforts to recall them.
The studies in Kristiina Kompus's dissertation show that these two different ways of remembering things are initiated by entirely different signal paths in the brain. Efforts to retrieve a specific memory are dealt with by the upper part of the frontal lobe. This area of the brain is activated not only in connection with memory-related efforts but also in all types of mental efforts and intentions, according to the dissertation. This part of the brain is not involved in the beginning of the process of unintentionally remembering something as a response to external stimuli. Instead, such memories are activated by specific signals from other parts of the brain, namely those that deal with perceived stimuli like smells, pictures, and words. Sometimes such memories are thought to be more vivid and emotional; otherwise they would not be activated in this way. But Kristiina Kompus's dissertation shows that this is not the case -- memories do not need to be emotionally charged to be revived spontaneously, unintentionally. Nor do memories that are revived spontaneously activate the brain more than other memories.
The studies also reveal that our long-term memory is more flexible that was previously believed. There is not just one single neurological signaling path for reliving old memories but rather several paths that are anatomically separate. This discovery is important, since it helps us understand how we can help people who have a hard time remembering things, regardless of whether this is related to aging or to some disorder in the brain. It may also help people who are plagued by unpleasant memories that constantly haunt them. This can happen following traumatic experiences, but also in depression.
The dissertation uses a combination of two imaging methods for the brain: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). The methods yield different information about the function of the brain. By combining them, Kristiina Kompus has been able both to determine what part of the brain is activated and how the activation proceeds over extremely brief time intervals, on the order of milliseconds.
Read My Lips: Using Multiple Senses In Speech Perception
ScienceDaily (Feb. 13, 2009) — When someone speaks to you, do you see what they are saying? We tend to think of speech as being something we hear, but recent studies suggest that we use a variety of senses for speech perception - that the brain treats speech as something we hear, see and even feel.
In a new report in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum describes research examining how our different senses blend together to help us perceive speech.
We receive a lot of our speech information via visual cues, such as lip-reading, and this type of visual speech occurs throughout all cultures. And it is not just information from lips- when someone is speaking to us, we will also note movements of the teeth, tongue and other non-mouth facial features. It's likely that human speech perception has evolved to integrate many senses together. Put in another way, speech is not meant to be just heard, but also to be seen.
The McGurk Effect is a well-characterized example of the integration between what we see and what we hear when someone is speaking to us. This phenomenon occurs when a sound (such as a syllable or word) is dubbed with a video showing a face making a different sound. For example, the audio may be playing "ba," while the face looks as though it is saying "va." When confronted with this, we will usually hear "va" or a combination of the two sounds, such as "da." Interestingly, when study participants are aware of the dubbing or told to concentrate only on the audio, the McGurk Effect still occurs. Rosenblum suggests that this is evidence that once senses are integrated together, it is not possible to separate them.
Recent studies indicate that this integration occurs very early in the speech process, even before phonemes (the basic units of speech) are established. Rosenblum suggests that physical movement of speech (that is, our mouths and lips moving) create acoustic and visual signals which have a similar form. He argues that as far as the speech brain is concerned, the auditory and visual information are never really separate. This could explain why we integrate speech so readily and in such a way that the audio and visual speech signals become indistinguishable from one another.
Rosenblum concludes that visual-speech research has a number of clinical implications, especially in the areas of autism, brain injury and schizophrenia and that "rehabilitation programs in each of these domains have incorporated visual-speech stimuli."[/SIZE]
How Does The Human Brain Work? - John Nicholson - 03-05-2010
[SIZE="5"]Learning To Talk Changes How Speech Is Heard: 'Sound Of Learning' Unlocked By Linking Sensory And Motor Systems
ScienceDaily (Nov. 4, 2009) — Learning to talk also changes the way speech sounds are heard, according to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by scientists at Haskins Laboratories, a Yale-affiliated research laboratory. The findings could have a major impact on improving speech disorders.
"We've found that learning is a two-way street; motor function affects sensory processing and vice-versa," said David J. Ostry, a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories and professor of psychology at McGill University. "Our results suggest that learning to talk makes it easier to understand the speech of others."
As a child learns to talk, or an adult learns a new language, Ostry explained, a growing mastery of oral fluency is matched by an increase in the ability to distinguish different speech sounds. While these abilities may develop in isolation, it is possible that learning to talk also changes the way we hear speech sounds.
Ostry and co-author Sazzad M. Nasir tested the notion that speech motor learning alters auditory perceptual processing by evaluating how speakers hear speech sounds following motor learning. They simulated speech learning by using a robotic device, which introduced a subtle change in the movement path of the jaw during speech.
To assess speech perception, the participants listened to words one at a time that were taken from a computer-produced continuum between the words "had" and "head." In the speech learning phase of the study, the robot caused the jaw to move in a slightly unusual fashion. The learning is measured by assessing the extent to which participants correct for the unusual movement.
"Its like being handed a two-pound weight for the first time and being asked to make a movement, it's uncomfortable at first, but after a while, the movement becomes natural," said Ostry. "In growing children, the nervous system has to adjust to moving vocal tract structures that are changing in size and weight in order to produce the same words. Participants in our study are learning to return the movement to normal in spite of these changes. Eventually our work could have an impact on deviations to speech caused by disorders such as stroke and Parkinson's disease."
"Our study showed that speech motor learning altered the perception of these speech sounds. After motor learning, the participants heard the words differently than those in the control group," said Ostry. "One of the striking findings is that the more motor learning we observed, the more their speech perceptual function changed."
Ostry said that future research will focus on the notion that sensory remediation may be a way to jumpstart the motor system.
The team previously found that the movement of facial muscles around the mouth plays an important role not only in the way the sounds of speech are made, but also in the way they are heard.
Haskins Laboratories was founded in 1935 by the late Dr. Caryl P. Haskins. This independent research institute has been in New Haven, Connecticut since 1970 when it formalized affiliations with Yale University and the University of Connecticut. The Laboratories' primary research focus is on the science of the spoken and written word.
Blindness Causes Structural Brain Changes, Implying Brain Can Re-Organize Itself to Adapt
ScienceDaily (Nov. 19, 2009) — Visually impaired people appear to be fearless, navigating busy sidewalks and crosswalks, safely finding their way using nothing more than a cane as a guide. The reason they can do this, researchers suggest, is that in at least some circumstances, blindness can heighten other senses, helping individuals adapt.
Now scientists from the UCLA Department of Neurology have confirmed that blindness causes structural changes in the brain, indicating that the brain may reorganize itself functionally in order to adapt to a loss in sensory input.
Reporting in the January issue of the journal NeuroImage (currently online), Natasha Leporé, a postgraduate researcher at UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, and colleagues found that visual regions of the brain were smaller in volume in blind individuals than in sighted ones. However, for non-visual areas, the trend was reversed -- they grew larger in the blind. This, the researchers say, suggests that the brains of blind individuals are compensating for the reduced volume in areas normally devoted to vision.
"This study shows the exceptional plasticity of the brain and its ability to reorganize itself after a major input -- in this case, vision -- is lost," said Leporé. "In other words, it appears the brain will attempt to compensate for the fact that a person can no longer see, and this is particularly true for those who are blind since early infancy, a developmental period in which the brain is much more plastic and modifiable than it is in adulthood."
Researchers used an extremely sensitive type of brain imaging called tensor-based morphometry, which can detect very subtle changes in brain volume, to examine the brains of three different groups: those who lost their sight before the age of 5; those who lost their sight after 14; and a control group of sighted individuals. Comparing the two groups of blind individuals, the researchers found that loss and gain of brain matter depended heavily on when the blindness occurred.
Only the early-blind group differed significantly from the control group in an area of the brain's corpus callosum that aids in the transmission of visual information between the two hemispheres of the brain. The researchers suggest this may be because of the reduced amount of myelination in the absence of visual input. Myelin, the fatty sheaf that surrounds nerves and allows for fast communication, develops rapidly in the very young. When the onset of blindness occurs in adolescence or later, the growth of myelin is already relatively complete, so the structure of the corpus callosum may not be strongly influenced by the loss of visual input.
In both blind groups, however, the researchers found significant enlargement in areas of the brain not responsible for vision. For example, the frontal lobes, which are involved with, among other things, working memory, were found to be abnormally enlarged, perhaps offering an anatomical foundation for some of blind individuals' enhanced skills.
Previous studies have found that when walking down a corridor with windows, the blind are adept at detecting the windows' presence because they can feel subtle changes in temperature and distinguish between the auditory echoes caused by walls and windows.
Leporé noted that scientists and others have long been curious about whether or not blind individuals compensated for their lack of vision by developing greater abilities in their remaining senses. For example, the 18th-century French philosopher Denis Diderot wrote of his amazement with some of the abilities shown by blind individuals, in particular a blind mathematician who could distinguish real from fake coins just by touching them.
But it wasn't until the early 1990s that the suspicions of science began to be confirmed with the development of neuroimaging tools.
"That allowed researchers to probe inside the brain in a non-invasive manner, yielding insights into the impressive adaptive capacity of the brain to reorganize itself following injury or sensory deprivation," Leporé said.
Other authors included Caroline Brun, Yi-Yu Chou, Agatha D. Lee, Sarah K. Madsen, Arthur W. Toga and Paul M. Thompson, all of UCLA, and Franco Leporé, Madeleine Fortin, Frédéric Gougoux, Maryse Lassonde and Patrice Voss, of the University of Montreal.
This study was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canada Research Chairs Program, the National Institute on Aging, the National Library of Medicine, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, the National Center for Research Resources, the National Institute for Child Health and Development, and a grant from the National Institutes of Health.[/SIZE]
How Does The Human Brain Work? - John Nicholson - 11-05-2010
[SIZE="6"]
[COLOR="DarkRed"]Research Taken From The Latest
Thinking In Relation To Brain Function
Uncorrelated Activity in the Brain[/COLOR]
[/SIZE]Thinking In Relation To Brain Function
Uncorrelated Activity in the Brain[/COLOR]
[SIZE="5"]ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2010) — Interconnected networks of neurons process information and give rise to perception by communicating with one another via small electrical impulses known as action potentials. In the past, scientists believed that adjacent neurons synchronized their action potentials. However, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany said in a current report in the journal Science that this synchronization does not happen.
Their findings provide detail as to how the brain accesses and processes information.
"Understanding healthy neuronal activity is one of the first steps to unlocking the brains of those with illnesses such as autism," said Dr. Andreas S. Tolias, assistant professor of neuroscience at BCM and senior author on the paper.
The patterns of action potentials are organized to allow our brain to work efficiently. For example, the visual cortex, which is the area of the brain where information from the eyes is processed, contains around two dozen distinct regions organized in a hierarchical fashion. People can see and interpret the surrounding world because the information is processed (through action potentials) through this organized system from one region to the next.Tolias, who is also on the staff at with the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center, said, "If you were to eavesdrop on the activity of a neuron in the visual part of the brain while a person is looking at a picture over and over again, the neuron will respond differently each time. In other words, a substantial part of the activity is unrelated to the picture itself. It is this activity that was believed to be common among many adjacent neurons because they are densely interconnected."
"Here is where problems begin to arise," Tolias said. "If the activity that is unrelated to the picture is common to many cells, it would build up from one stage of processing to the next, ultimately dominating brain activity and making information processing impossible -- a scenario called runaway synchrony."
[COLOR="Green"]To find an answer to this paradox, Tolias and his colleagues, including Alexander S. Ecker, the paper's first author who is a graduate student in Tolias' lab at BCM and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany developed a new technology that allowed more precise measurement of action potentials. They found that the groups of neurons believed to be reacting in a related fashion actually had a weak relationship. They were reacting on their own, not dependent on each other.[/COLOR[COLOR="DarkRed"]]"We measured correlations in awake, behaving primates, allowing us to have control of the experimental conditions. This gave us the chance to eliminate the possibility of a number of artifacts affecting our measurements," Ecker said. "For recording, we used chronically implanted multi-tetrode arrays -- a technique that offered us the chance to monitor many neurons at extremely high recording quality."
According to the chair of the Department of Neuroscience, Dr. Michael Friedlander, "The authors achieved this result using a clever combination of recording technology and experimental paradigm that builds on their profoundly interdisciplinary approach to neuroscientific study including experimental, computational, engineering, mathematical and behavioral research skills."[/COLOR]The testing involved a variety of visual stimulation ranging from bars and grating to natural images. The groups of neurons tested were physically close to each other with highly overlapping receptive fields and all receiving strong common input.
[COLOR="Purple"]One reason Tolias believes the neurons behave without correlation is to allow information to be sent through the brain in the most efficient way possible.
"Such a mechanism that allows the decorrelation might be a crucial prerequisite to prevent small correlations from accumulating and dominating network activity along the visual hierarchy," Ecker said.
The "decorrelated state" may also have other benefits, Tolias added. "Information processing in the brain is much easier if nerve cells' activity is uncorrelated. If one level of the hierarchy wants to know what the previous area is doing, it can simply forget about correlations in this case. Otherwise, it has to perform more complex computations to get to the same result."[/COLOR]Tolias said these findings open the door for new important questions about the brains of those with illnesses such as autism or epilepsy. Questions such as, "Are the neuron correlations higher or lower among these groups of people and are these patterns in the brain being disrupted?"
Others who took part in the study include Philipp Berens, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (MPI) in Tübingen, Germany, Center for Integrative Neuroscience and Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Tübingen, Germany and Department of Neuroscience at BCM; Georgios A. Keliris, MPI; Matthias Bethge, MPI, Center for Integrative Neuroscience and Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Tübingen, Germany; Nikos K. Loogothetis, MPI and Divison for Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering, University of Manhester, UK. Ecker is also affiliated with the Center for Integrative Neuroscience and the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Tübingen, Germany. Tolias is also an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University.
Funding for this study came from the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health, the Max Planck Society, the United States Department of Defense, a Merit Award from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award to Tolias, and by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) through the Bernstein Award to Bethge.[/SIZE]
How Does The Human Brain Work? - John Nicholson - 11-05-2010
[SIZE="6"]The Fancier The Cortex, The Smarter The Brain?[/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"][[SIZE="5"]FONT="Comic Sans MS"]ScienceDaily (July 19, 2009) — Why are some people smarter than others? In a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Eduardo Mercado III from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, describes how certain aspects of brain structure and function help determine how easily we learn new things, and how learning capacity contributes to individual differences in intelligence.
[COLOR="DarkRed"]Cognitive plasticity is the capacity to learn and improve cognitive skills such as solving problems and remembering events. Mercado argues that the structural basis of cognitive plasticity is the cortical module. Cortical modules are vertical columns of interconnected neuronal cells. Across different areas of the cerebral cortex, these columns vary in the number and diversity of neurons they contain. Identifying how cortical modules help us learn cognitive skills may help explain why variations in this capacity occur — that is, why people learn skills at different rates and why our ability to learn new skills changes as we age.
Studies examining a number of different species have shown that, on average, a larger cortex predicts greater intellectual capacity. The source of this correlation is unclear, but Mercado believes that a "more expansive cortex provides more space within which a larger quantity and greater diversity of cortical modules can be distributed." In other words, Mercado notes that when it comes to intellectual potential, it is not the absolute or even relative size that is important, but how many cortical modules (with various types of neurons) are available. These features of cortical organization and function determine how effectively our brain distinguishes events. This ability to differentiate events may be what enables us to learn cognitive skills.[/COLOR][SIZE="7"]One implication of this proposal is that experience can be as important as genetics in determining intellectual capacity. Specifically, structural changes of cortical modules generated by development and learning experiences may also contribute to individual differences in intelligence. As these networks of neurons develop over time, their diversity increases, leading to further increases in cognitive plasticity.[/SIZE]This research has important implications for improving educational techniques and can potentially lead to new methods for rehabilitating patients suffering from brain damage. In addition, understanding how cortical modules function may lead to new ways of increasing intelligence. However, Mercado cautions that "new technologies for increasing cognitive plasticity have ethical implications far beyond those raised by doping in sports." He concludes, "The phrase 'changing your mind' may soon take on a whole new meaning."[/SIZE]
How Does The Human Brain Work? - John Nicholson - 11-05-2010
[SIZE="6"]
When It Comes To Intelligence, Size Matters
[/SIZE][SIZE="5"]ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2009) — A collaborative study led by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), McGill University has demonstrated a positive link between cognitive ability and cortical thickness in the brains of healthy 6 to 18 year olds. The correlation is evident in regions that integrate information from different parts of the brain.
The imaging study published this week in a special issue of scientific journal Intelligence is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind with a representative sample of healthy children and adolescents.
This study stems from the NIH MRI Study of Normal Brain Development, for which the MNI was the data coordinating centre. The database contains MRI scans and other data on the structure and function of the developing brains. More than 500 children and adolescents from newborns to 18-year-olds had brain scans multiple times over a period of years as well as intelligence, neuropsychological, verbal, non-verbal and behavioural tests. This information is now contained within the database allowing scientists to study how normal developmental changes in brain anatomy relate to motor and behavioural skills, such as motor coordination and language acquisition. Even higher-order skills like planning, IQ, and organizational skills can be assessed.
Previous studies have shown that intelligence and cognitive ability are correlated with regional brain structure and function. The association between regional cortical thickness and intelligence has been little studied and most previous studies of normal children had a relatively small sample. So with improvements in MRI-based quantification of cortical thickness and a much larger sample, researchers aimed to examine this relationship and to further characterize and identify brain areas where cortical thickness was associated with cognitive performance.
Cortical thickness may in part reflect the amount of complex connections between nerve cells. In other words, thicker cortices are likely to have more complex connections with consequences on cognitive ability. A positive link between cortical thickness and cognitive ability was detected in many areas of the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes. The regions with the greatest relationship were the 'multi-modal association' areas, where information converges from various regions of the brain for processing.
"A principal finding of this study is that it supports a distributed model of intelligence where multiple areas of the brain are involved with cognitive ability difference instead of the view that there is just one centre or structure important for intelligence differences in the brain," says Dr. Sherif Karama, psychiatrist at the MNI and co-investigator in the study. "Previous studies have shown a link between intelligence differences and individual brain structure or function. This is the first time that a correlation between a general cognitive ability factor and essentially most, if not all, cortical association areas is demonstrated in the same study."
A deeper insight into normal cognitive functioning and abilities is an important first step in the understanding of cognitive decline observed in the elderly as well as in those with various pathologies ranging from multiple sclerosis to schizophrenia, depression and mental retardation. Such an understanding may eventually lead to interventions that may be able to prevent or alleviate the decline or complications in cognitive function.
The project was funded by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and the Fonds de Recherché en Santé du Quebec (FRSQ).
Comments on the above research findings by John Nicholson
[COLOR="Blue"]I have highlighted these three papers concerning brain function in order that I could read and understand what I was reading so much better, I believe this manner of separating ideas which are new to any reader is highly beneficial, My area of concern is to the process of developing the best and therefore an evolving system of early thorough and simple learnt teaching methods.
I have called it “System One 4 every 1†every texting expert should understand the simplicity of this title.
What they will not understand is why any concept so simple and obvious has taken so long to produce and why it should not be available to every child born immediately,
As regards human brain function careful reading of these three reports will illustrate clearly the fact that we are only at the beginning of understanding this science, I was advised by a prominent university head that what I was trying to promote “Abacus One†had nothing to do with science, I was trying to explain that the complexity of a small child’s brain was able to instantaneously benefit from the best demonstration of at least ten thousand years development of mathematic systematic science, simply by moving a few tablets with words on them. Ten minutes was my own realisation time, in regards to the benefits
which any and every child could obtain simply by early and regular use of any abacus. My instantaneous realisation was that the abacus was based on the manner in which we use notation to understand and utilise mathematical thinking.
It is from mans early utilisation of the abacus that the very notation which is so valuable to us is derived. Indian symbols have been modified to become universal. One symbol representing one word. With Abacus One we are turning the process backwards, enhancing a child’s ability to comprehend the meaning of thirty words and numbers as having joint meaning, through simple movements initially, until the child moves on to utilising the abacus one map both simple resources are essential along with twenty six letters in the rhythmic six row pattern.
Abacus One holds one thousand one hundred and ten answers on one page with the possibility of producing over a million differing arithmetic questions simply by manipulation and the child’s developing mental arithmetic abilities.
My fascination with the human brain and its possibilities’ have simply driven me for one third of my working life to produce the SYSTEM ONE ***** 4 EVERY 1 ******
There is more to learn in life then any single lesson in any single classroom. System One is the combined results of thinking through every minute process in order that any and every child shall be able to count read and think logically, just as quickly sat on the pavement as it could be done safely within a primary schoolroom.
My instantaneous realisation was easy, adapting the abacus was a natural evolution of mans oldest recording system learning everything about the human brain is a task beyond the wit of any man.
My having to add every minute detail in teaching a child to visualise every number has been a pure pleasure to me, now by using rhythmic chanting visualisation and common sense we should be able to ensure that any child in any circumstances learns to count read and think logically so enjoying learning perfect basic skills, the three basic skills develop quite naturally throughout our lives once mathematics are perfected. Arithmetic itself is the closest thing to pure thought that we are capable of at such an early age, minds are built by man using millions of years of natural evolution. Our brains are as near perfect in every child born as they can be, we are born with the capabilities of developing our own brains every last one of us, providing we ensure the provision of perfect basic skills.
So, SYSTEM ONE ***** 4 EVERY 1 John Nicholson [/SIZE][/COLOR]
How Does The Human Brain Work? - John Nicholson - 24-05-2010
[SIZE="6"][COLOR="DarkRed"]New Analysis Reveals Clearer Picture of Brain’s Language Areas
ScienceDaily (May 23, 2010) — Language is a defining aspect of what makes us human. Although some brain regions are known to be associated with language, neuroscientists have had a surprisingly difficult time using brain imaging technology to understand exactly what these 'language areas' are doing. In a new study published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, MIT neuroscientists report on a new method to analyze brain imaging data -- one that may paint a clearer picture of how our brain produces and understands language.[/COLOR][/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"]Research with patients who developed specific language deficits (such as the inability to comprehend passive sentences) following brain injury suggest that different aspects of language may reside in different parts of the brain. But attempts to find these functionally specific regions of the brain with current neuroimaging technologies have been inconsistent and controversial.
One reason for this inconsistency may be due to the fact that most previous studies relied on group analyses in which brain imaging data were averaged across multiple subjects -- a computation that could introduce statistical noise and bias into the analyses.
"Because brains differ in their folding patterns and in how functional areas map onto these folds, activations obtained in functional MRI studies often do not precisely 'line up' across brains," explained Evelina Fedorenko, first author of the study and a postdoctoral associate in Nancy Kanwisher's lab at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. " Some regions of the brain thought to be involved in language are also geographically close to regions that support other cognitive processes like music, arithmetic, or general working memory. By spatially averaging brain data across subjects you may see an activation 'blob' that looks like it supports both language and, say, arithmetic, even in cases where in every single subject these two processes are supported by non-overlapping nearby bits of cortex."
The only way to get around this problem, according to Fedorenko, is to first define "regions of interest" in each individual subject and then investigate those regions by examining their responses to various new tasks. To do this, they developed a "localizer" task where subjects read either sentences or sequences of pronounceable nonwords.
Sample sentence: THE DOG CHASED THE CAT ALL DAY LONG
Sample nonword sequence: BOKER DESH HE THE DRILES LER CICE FRISTY'S
By subtracting the nonword-activated regions from the sentence-activated regions, the researchers found a number of language regions that were quickly and reliably identified in individual brains. Their new method revealed higher selectivity for sentences compared to nonwords than a traditional group analysis applied to the same data.
"This new, more sensitive method allows us now to investigate questions of functional specificity between language and other cognitive functions, as well as between different aspects of language," Fedorenko concludes. "We're more likely to discover which patches of cortex are specialized for language and which also support other cognitive functions like music and working memory. Understanding the relationship between language and the rest of condition is one of key questions in cognitive neuroscience."
Next Steps: Fedorenko published the tools used in this study on her website: http://web.mit.edu/evelina9/www/funcloc.html. The goal for the future, she argues, is to adopt a common standard for identifying language-sensitive areas so that knowledge about their functions can be accumulated across studies and across labs. "The eventual goal is of course to understand the precise nature of the computations each brain region performs," Fedorenko says, "but that's a tall order."
Language Dysfunction in Children May Be Due to Epileptic Brain Activity
ScienceDaily (Apr. 23, 2010) — Epileptic activity in the brain can affect language development in children, and EEG registrations should therefore be carried out more frequently on children with severe language impairment to identify more readily those who may need medical treatment, reveals a thesis from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg.
The thesis studied 60 children of varying ages, divided into groups. The first group comprised children with language dysfunction, for example children with slow speech development who find it difficult to express themselves or who have an inadequate langugage comprehension.
The second group consisted of children with epilepsy, while the third comprised children with language dysfunction and epileptic brain activity, sometimes without epileptic seizures. The study was carried out in conjunction with speech and language pathologists, pediatric neurologists and neuropsychologists at the Queen Silvia Children's Hospital in Gothenburg.
"We reviewed patient records of children with residual speech and language problems at school start, and could see that these children also had other underlying problems," says Gunilla Rejnö-Habte Selassie, speech and language pathologist and researcher at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience and Rehabilitation.
The study showed that epilepsy (with seizures) and epileptic brain activity with or without seizures were more common in these children than in children in general. The researchers then wanted to investigate whether the epileptic activity was the cause of the children's language dysfunction or whether other factors affected their language development.
"So we also looked at speech and language ability in preschool children with various forms of epilepsy," says Gunilla Rejnö-Habte Selassie. "We found that these children had certain language problems -- they found it difficult to express themselves but had a good understanding of language." The greatest problems were to be found in children with epileptic activity in the left side of the brain, which controls our linguistic ability.
The next step was to look at children with both speech and language dysfunction and epileptic brain activity in their sleep as young chidlren. and follow up their speech, language and other cognitive abilities after some years.
"We found that more than half the children of school age and young adults still had some form of language difficulties, while a few had normal linguistic abilities," says Gunilla Rejnö-Habte Selassie. "There was no difference between the children with continously slow language development and those who had experienced a loss or deterioration of their language -- so called epileptic aphasia."
She concludes that more children with language dysfunction should be given EEG registrations to find an explanation for the underlying mechanisms, and so that the right care and treatment can be given. She also states that in some cases medical treatment could be considered to block the epileptic activity in the brain, and in this way reduce the impact on a child's language development.
"We hope that the results of our research will lead to a new way of looking at various diagnoses of language dysfunction and epileptic brain activity. More than anything, we need a completely new diagnosis for children with slow language development and epileptic brain activity."[/SIZE]
How Does The Human Brain Work? - John Nicholson - 24-05-2010
[SIZE="6"][COLOR="DarkRed"]Talking Seriously With Children Is Good for Their Language Proficiency
ScienceDaily (May 17, 2010) — How adults approach children aged 3 to 6 years during conversations has a major influence on their language acquisition. Those who address children as fully-fledged conversation partners lay an early basis for the development of 'academic language', says Dutch researcher Lotte Henrichs.[/COLOR][/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"]Children at a primary school need a certain type of language proficiency: academic language. Academic language is not an independent, new language, but is the language that teachers use and expect from the pupils. It enables children to understand instructions and to demonstrate their knowledge in an efficient manner. Academic language is characterised by difficult, abstract words and complex sentence structures. The language often contains a lot of clauses and conjunctions and due to the methods of argument and analysis it has a scientific appearance.
Parents make the difference
Henrichs demonstrated that children are already confronted with academic language in the nursery school. They already hear a lot academic language from the teacher and are often expected to use academic language themselves. The extent to which academic language is used at home was found to differ strongly between families. An essential aspect is how parents approach their children during conversations. If children are given the opportunity to make meaningful contributions to conversations, they often use characteristics of academic language proficiency naturally. In addition to this, the knowledge of academic language depends on the extent to which parents read to their children, tell them stories and hold conversations about interesting subjects.
Lotte Henrichs investigated how very young children in particular acquire this academic language proficiency and the role played by child raisers and schools in this process. Within the large research programme that Henrichs carried out her research in, 150 children aged 3 to 6 years were followed for a period of three years. All of the children lived in the Netherlands and came from Turkish, Moroccan-Berber and Dutch families. From all these participants, a subgroup of 25 Dutch families were involved in the in-depth study of Henrichs
Children Can Learn A Second Language In Preschool, Study Finds
ScienceDaily (Sep. 10, 2009) — Interim results from an international research project which looks at bilingual education reveal that children can learn a second language as early as preschool.
The University of Hertfordshire is one of nine European partners in ELIAS (Early Language and Intercultural Acquisition Studies) which was awarded €300,000 by the European Union last year to research bilingual education and intercultural awareness in children through observational studies and language assessments in six project preschools.
The researchers use a concept called ‘immersion teaching’, whereby children are addressed in each language by the respective native speaker and asked to respond in that language.
The study focuses on bilingual preschools in Germany, Sweden and Belgium, where the staff members are teachers from the respective country, but at least one teacher is a native speaker of English. Data is also collected from nurseries in Hertfordshire and the bilingual nursery of the German school in London. Children’s progress in English is measured through a receptive vocabulary test and a grammar task that was designed within the project. So far, 266 preschool children aged between three and five took part in the tests.
The researchers found that although not all the preschool groups performed equally well in the tests, and there was a large amount of individual variation in children’s comprehension of vocabulary and grammatical phenomena, there was clear evidence that it is feasible for children to start to learn a second language in a preschool context, using immersion methods.
Dr Christina Schelletter, a senior lecturer in English Language and Communication in the School of Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire, who leads the UK investigation said: “We have found that immersion-type teaching can be of real benefit to children. Immersion is the best and most successful method of foreign language learning at an early age. The natural learning abilities of young children as well as their enthusiasm promise rapid and successful acquisition of the second language.â€
ELIAS will continue until October 2010 during which time it will document and assess the development of the children, organise teacher training events and recommend practical work for the preschools. Following the final symposium in 2010, a compilation of the results will be published for general public use.
For more information, see: http://www.elias.bilikita.org[/SIZE]
How Does The Human Brain Work? - John Nicholson - 24-05-2010
[COLOR="DarkRed"][SIZE="6"]Internationally Adopted Children Shed Light On How Babies Learn Language
ScienceDaily (Jan. 19, 2007) — Each year, about 40,000 children are adopted across national lines, primarily by families from North America and Western Europe. These joyful occasions mark the growth of new families and also provide the framework for a natural experiment in language development. Although most are infants and toddlers, thousands of older children are also adopted. Typically, these older children loose their birth language rapidly and become fluent speakers of their new language.[/SIZE][/COLOR]
[SIZE="5"]Jesse Snedeker of Harvard University believes that these older children can help us understand how infants learn their native language. Early language development follows a predictable series of milestones. Babies initially say one word at a time, and mostly use nouns ("ball") or social words ("hi"). As they grow older their sentences become longer and more complex, as verbs ("take") and grammatical words ("about") begin to appear.
These changes in the infant speech could be due to the child's increased cognitive abilities or, as Snedeker asserts, they might also simply be side effects of the learning process itself and independent of the child's age or cognitive abilities. For example, it might be easier for children to learn the meanings of nouns because they often refer to things that we can point to or look at.
To explore the role of cognitive maturation in language development, Snedeker and her colleagues tracked the acquisition of English in children who were adopted from China between 2 ½ and 6 years of age. The researchers followed the children's progress during their first year in the U.S. and compared them with infants who were learning English as a first language.
Studying internationally-adopted children was vital to this research because their language development is often out of sync with their cognitive development and maturation. Internationally adopted preschoolers begin learning one language and then move to a home in which a different language is spoken. Unlike most second language learners, they have no phrase book to consult or bilingual informants to translate what they hear. In many ways their situation is like that of infants learning their first language: they must discover the meanings of words by listening and watching what happens around them. But they differ from infants in one critical respect--they are older and thus more cognitively mature.
Snedeker found that the preschoolers went through the same stages as the infants. Early on they learned many nouns but few verbs or grammatical words. Like the infants, the preschoolers initially produced one word utterances, followed by short telegraphic sentences ("Mommy eat"). Snedeker and colleagues also found that the adopted children progressed through the stages more rapidly than the infants, which is good news because it suggests that many of these children will eventually catch up with their peers.
These findings, which appear in the January 2007 issue of Psychological Science, indicate that the stages used to characterize infant language development are not solely attributable to cognitive development and maturation. Children who are much older and more mature go through these same stages when they learn a new language via immersion in speech. Snedeker concludes that these stages are side effects of the processes children use to learn words and grammar.[/SIZE]
How Does The Human Brain Work? - John Nicholson - 26-05-2010
:dazed: -----------------------------:am: read 24th may 2010
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