+- Teach the Brain Forums (https://www.teach-the-brain.org/forums)
+-- Forum: Teach-the-Brain (https://www.teach-the-brain.org/forums/Forum-Teach-the-Brain)
+--- Forum: How the Brain Learns (https://www.teach-the-brain.org/forums/Forum-How-the-Brain-Learns)
+---- Forum: John Nicholson (https://www.teach-the-brain.org/forums/Forum-John-Nicholson)
+---- Thread: Our brains my opening explanation (/Thread-Our-brains-my-opening-explanation)
Our brains my opening explanation - John Nicholson - 17-12-2010
[SIZE="3"]
Our brains my opening explanation
MY OPENING EXPLANATION
[/SIZE]MY OPENING EXPLANATION
[COLOR="Navy"][SIZE="3"]
(STOLEN WORDS)
Today, breathtaking findings by neuroscientists are showing that biology is the ultimate level playing field. The human brain at birth holds within it untold, often untapped, equal opportunity only slightly influenced by genetic prophecy.
Many scientists now believe that 20 per cent of a person's outcome in life is the result of innate brain capacity. The other 80 per cent is based on what happens after birth.
It means, controversially, that nurture is far more important than nature alone, although of course the two work in tandem. And that means changes to nurturing – particularly parenting and schooling – can affect whether a child becomes a surgeon or a slacker.
"Most people think of biology as a limit, but I think of it as a platform," says Zachary Stein, a PhD candidate in human education and development at Harvard University's graduate school of education.
An adult brain will have perhaps 100 trillion to 500 trillion synapses, and is capable of pruning and building new ones throughout life. In effect, the more synapses, and the more efficiently they connect, the smarter you are. Conceptually, then, given the same stimulation, any brain can be pretty much as smart as the next.
[/SIZE][/COLOR]Today, breathtaking findings by neuroscientists are showing that biology is the ultimate level playing field. The human brain at birth holds within it untold, often untapped, equal opportunity only slightly influenced by genetic prophecy.
Many scientists now believe that 20 per cent of a person's outcome in life is the result of innate brain capacity. The other 80 per cent is based on what happens after birth.
It means, controversially, that nurture is far more important than nature alone, although of course the two work in tandem. And that means changes to nurturing – particularly parenting and schooling – can affect whether a child becomes a surgeon or a slacker.
"Most people think of biology as a limit, but I think of it as a platform," says Zachary Stein, a PhD candidate in human education and development at Harvard University's graduate school of education.
An adult brain will have perhaps 100 trillion to 500 trillion synapses, and is capable of pruning and building new ones throughout life. In effect, the more synapses, and the more efficiently they connect, the smarter you are. Conceptually, then, given the same stimulation, any brain can be pretty much as smart as the next.
[SIZE="3"]THIS IS SOMETHING I REALISED IN TEN MINUTES AND CONFIRMED IN TEN YEARS
27-06-2005, 07:35 am John Nicholson THIS WAS MY FIRST POSTING ON THIS WEBSITE
For five and a half years I have trawled through the internet looking for confirmation of what I knew to be true, I had already redesigned the abacus, creating a simple abacus capable of being built in any language used in the world, I had spent ten years thinking about the human brain, I had read the comments written by the world’s most famous philosophers and continually searched and reasoned about teaching and learning, I know that we have to redesign the manner by which we teach virtually everything, and because I have been on the job for so long I realise that humanity will stand little chance of survival without giving every child on the planet an inclusive education and starting just as quickly as we can. I am by breeding and inclination a farmer, I am by realisation a futurist thinker a humanitarian and by experience disappointed at the way we teach our children disappointed in our civil administration, determined that I will change the way we teach our children to count read and think and to that end require the changes in educational thinking that I discovered only yesterday to be understood first by the scientific press and secondly on conformation by our scientists and finally by the parents of our young children they have to be made to understand that any one of those babies they hold in their hands may become responsible for the very many advancements in human requirements we need to see developed properly if we are to survive.
SO OVER TO
Jonathan Sharples, a neuroscientist at the Institute for Effective Education at the University of York[/SIZE]
http://www.bestevidence.org.uk/index.html
http://www.york.ac.uk/iee/
Our brains my opening explanation - John Nicholson - 19-12-2010
[SIZE="3"]An extreme example in the value of specific knowledge.[/SIZE]
[SIZE="3"]I am reading a learned book on the treatment of allied prisoners during world war two, as to Japanese treatment regarding prisoners of war. The author Gavin Daws ( Prisoners of the Japanese ) an Australian academic is explaining desperate measures taken by two wonderful doctors, coming from two different backgrounds when dealing with specific situations regarding the treatment of ulcers, in the undernourished and over worked prisoners of war, building the Burmese railway. The Australian and totally western trained doctor relied on amputation to save the prisoners life when failure to cure the ulcer would have resulted in death anyway, unfortunately half the amputees died for one reason or another after the amputation, where as the Dutch East Indian trained doctor (Doc –Hekking) never lost a patient with an ulcer, local experience and specific treatments available prevented the need for a last resort amputation,
Reading about Doctor Hekking fascinated me, I was specifically looking out for his treatment of dysentery (ground wood ash and sieved clay) this was no surprise to me as in my hay days of farming I was producing over twelve hundred pigs a week, the pigs digestive system is not unlike ours so preventing deaths from the multitudes of stomach bugs which infect newborn pigs reared intensively, required liberal treatment with numerous antibiotic and other medicines. When ever a drug failed to cure any specific outbreak of E coli I quickly resorted to a sod of grass, pigs are born short of iron, this physiological circumstance encourages a newborn pig to root in search of food, so blocking the infection by swamping the gut with clay. This cure is as old as man, today we can cure most stomach upsets quickly by liberal use of Kalin and morphine, I personally never leave England without it.
My observation is that our modern society can only continue to exist by on the job training, general medical training was insufficient to save those prisoners lives in those circumstances.
My observation as regarding teaching children to read, is that we have become far worse at it especially so in the Childs home, it would most likely follow the introduction of television, my regard for reading proficiency is absolute, any child not being taught to read just as quickly as is humanly possible, is being deprived of intellectual stimulus, more vital to its future than food and as a farmer I am well aware of that, alongside the difficulties we will encounter with a rapidly rising world population,
I believe we are dying at around 107 deaths a minute, and reproducing at around 260 a minute, exponential raises in our population will either be curbed by ourselves or curbed by nature.[/SIZE]
:dazed:
[SIZE="3"]
THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DECISIONS WE HAVE TO FACE DEMOCRATICALLY, REGARDING OUR HUMAN FUTURE DEMAND THE VERY BEST INFORMATION, AND THE VERY BEST PERSONAL ABILITY TO TRANSLATE THAT INFORMATION THAT WE ARE ABLE TO PROVIDE FOR OUR POPULATION. OUR SO CALLED ACADEMICS HAVE FAILED TO RESPOND TO THE QUITE OBVIOUS NATURAL LEVEL OF SPECIES INTELLIGENCE WE ALL INHERIT GIVEN NORMAL HEALTH CIRCUMSTANCES.
[/SIZE]
unny:
Our brains my opening explanation - John Nicholson - 22-12-2010
[SIZE="6"]
Jonathan Sharples, a neuroscientist at the Institute for Effective Education at the University of York in England, had a taste of this rancour recently. He was labelled "intrusive" after he spent the day at a conference of social scientists and education researchers in Oxford in December.
[/SIZE][SIZE="5"]Visibly shaken, he explained over dinner afterward that some social scientists question whether there is any objective truth, and whether evidence shows anything at all. It's the opposite of the beliefs underpinning the science of observation, such as neuroscience.
"As you learn something new, the neurons in the brain actually change. They make new connections," he said. "Therefore, you classroom teachers, every time you teach, you're changing brain structure. You're remapping the neural network." On the other hand, Howard-Jones recently heard an influential policy-maker in the U.K. announce: "We don't need educational theory any more, we've got neuroscience." That's just as wrong as education not needing neuroscience, he says.
Many of the scattered neuroeducators discovered each other and formed a robust network – just as neurons in the brain do – at a workshop for the 400th anniversary of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome in 2003.
At Cambridge, it was Usha Goswami, who is director of its centre for neuroscience in education.
Baroness Susan Greenfield, director of Oxford University's Institute for the Future of the Mind, has brought the movement before British parliamentarians, including at a seminar before an all-party group on scientific research in learning and education in 2007. Her band of researchers on neuroeducation has now spread to several key centres in the U.K. as well as to Australia.
In the U.S., public schools in New York, Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia are striving to incorporate the findings of brain science in the classroom and a national effort is brewing through the Society for Neuroscience Conceptually, then, given the same stimulation, any brain can be pretty much as smart as the next. Except in real life, that doesn't happen. What gets in the way? That seems to be connected mainly to social factors – including how you perceive your own ability and how others do, however prejudiced – as well as to the amount of experience and opportunity you get throughout life and such things as how well you eat.
That means two brains that start out the same way can be dramatically different at the age of 2 if one has been deprived of play, talk, touch, food or love.
By the age of 5, when most children start school, the differences in the connective tissue in the brain can be even more startling. The level playing field they started with is no longer level; some children can read fluently by kindergarten and others still don't know their colours.
The 2000 book From Neurons to Neighborhoods, edited by Jack Shonkoff and Deborah Phillips, notes that these "striking" differences, which are connected with levels of household wealth and status, end up predicting how well the children later do at school. Unless, that is, the child can make up the disparities through terrific teaching or other factors.
the movement is quietly capturing the imaginations of people all over the world.
It could revolutionize education, making questions about whether the two fields can collaborate all the more urgent.
What if, for the first time, teachers were to use radical new findings about how the brain actually learns? Would teaching look different? Could every child, regardless of family wealth, race, sex or country reach his or her full potential? Could it transform society?
Yes, says Stuart Shanker, research professor of psychology and philosophy at York University.
The stunning implication is that intelligence is not fixed. You are not born smart or stupid. You build intelligence during your life.
In addition, much of your intelligence – and how you do in life – seems to rely on how well the so-called "executive function" portion of your brain works. That's the brainy front part of the cerebral cortex that gives you the ability to control impulses, sustain attention, hold an idea in your head, plan. And executive function can be both taught and learned at any age.
"We used to say that intelligence was 80 per cent genetic and 20 per cent environmental," says Martin Westwell, a neuroscientist in Adelaide at Flinders University. "Now we tend to say that it's 20 per cent genetic and 80 per cent environmental."
The brain is malleable. And the research is showing that if students think they can learn, then they do. If they think their intelligence is fixed at a low level – whether because of social or economic status, skin colour, gender, family history, which country they live in – then they stick to that level.[/SIZE]
[SIZE="7"]"It is absolutely clear that the brain is not fixed," says Westwell. "And in schools the kids who see intelligence as malleable have a better trajectory."[/SIZE]
[COLOR="darkred"][SIZE="6"]"It's like lighting the fire. Learning skills are inert until they are driven by intrinsic motivation," says Jonathan Sharples, a neuroscientist at the Institute for Effective Education at the University of York in England.[/SIZE][/COLOR]
Our brains my opening explanation - John Nicholson - 26-12-2010
[SIZE="6"]OK these are two typical brain imagining results both of them have been reviewed by experts, there for we are getting the results of experts opinions from what they are seeing.
BUT
Would we be seeing these results from these children if they had had the very best early counting and reading intervention at the earliest possible age, that is the question I am continually asking myself and anyone else that cares about mass education. As we are now continually being made aware that the brain is being reformed by neurological connections continually, early one to one teaching is showing the response from disadvantaged children when they have this advantage.[/SIZE]
BUT
Would we be seeing these results from these children if they had had the very best early counting and reading intervention at the earliest possible age, that is the question I am continually asking myself and anyone else that cares about mass education. As we are now continually being made aware that the brain is being reformed by neurological connections continually, early one to one teaching is showing the response from disadvantaged children when they have this advantage.[/SIZE]
[SIZE="6"]
[COLOR="DarkRed"]My personal view is that we educate to the hilt every child on earth that means that we must use a standard system and be able to teach the parents the basic teaching required easily, we must also make these observation clearly to the general public in every country in order that concerned parents lead the way to educational practise reform, quite obviously research into the benefits’ of this early education has to be verified quickly and internationally adopted.
Check out my recommendations.
http://www.system-one-4-every-1.co.uk/
[/COLOR]
[/SIZE]Check out my recommendations.
http://www.system-one-4-every-1.co.uk/
[/COLOR]
[SIZE="5"][COLOR="Black"]Neuroimaging Helps to Predict Which Dyslexics Will Learn to Read
ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2010) — Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have used sophisticated brain imaging to predict with 90 percent accuracy which teenagers with dyslexia would improve their reading skills over time.
Their work, the first to identify specific brain mechanisms involved in a person's ability to overcome reading difficulties, could lead to new interventions to help dyslexics better learn to read.
"This gives us hope that we can identify which children might get better over time," said Fumiko Hoeft, MD, PhD, an imaging expert and instructor at Stanford's Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research. "More study is needed before the technique is clinically useful, but this is a huge step forward."
Hoeft is first author of a paper, which will be published online Dec. 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The senior author is John Gabrieli, PhD, a former Stanford professor now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dyslexia, a brain-based learning disability that impairs a person's ability to read, affects 5 to 17 percent of U.S. children. Affected children's ability to improve their reading skills varies greatly, with about one-fifth able to benefit from interventions and develop adequate reading skills by adulthood. But up to this point, what happens in this brain to allow for this improvement remained unknown.
Past imaging studies have shown greater activation of specific brain regions in children and adults with dyslexia during reading-related tasks; one area in particular, the inferior frontal gyrus (which is part of the frontal lobe), is used more in dyslexics than in typical readers. As the researchers noted in their paper, some experts have hypothesized that greater involvement of this part of the brain during reading is related to long-term gains in reading for dyslexic children.
For this study, Hoeft and colleagues aimed to determine whether neuroimaging could predict reading improvement and how brain-based measures compared with conventional educational measures.
The researchers gathered 25 children with dyslexia and 20 children with typical reading skills -- all around age 14 -- and assessed their reading with standardized tests. They then used two types of imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor imaging (a specialized form of MRI), as the children performed reading tasks. Two-and-a-half years later, they reassessed reading performance and asked which brain image or standardized reading measures taken at baseline predicted how much the child's reading skills would improve over time.
What the researchers found was that no behavioral measure, including widely used standardized reading and language tests, reliably predicted reading gains. But children with dyslexia who at baseline showed greater activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus during a specific task and whose white matter connected to this right frontal region was better organized showed greater reading improvement over the next two-and-a-half years. The researchers also found that looking at patterns of activation across the whole brain allowed them to very accurately predict future reading gains in the children with dyslexia.
"The reason this is exciting is that until now, there have been no known measures that predicted who will learn to compensate," said Hoeft.
As the researchers noted in their paper, "fMRI is typically viewed as a research tool that has little practical implication for an individual with dyslexia." Yet these findings suggest that, after additional study, brain imaging could be used as a prognostic tool to predict reading improvement in dyslexic children.
The other exciting implication, Hoeft said, involves therapy. The research shows that gains in reading for dyslexic children involve different neural mechanisms and pathways than those for typically developing children. By understanding this, researchers could develop interventions that focus on the appropriate regions of the brain and that are, in turn, more effective at improving a child's reading skills.
Hoeft said this work might also encourage the use of imaging to enhance the understanding (and potentially the treatment) of other disorders. "In general terms, these findings suggest that brain imaging may play a valuable role in neuroprognosis, the use of brain measures to predict future reductions or exacerbations of symptoms in clinical disorders," she explained.
The authors noted several caveats with their findings. The children were followed for two-and-a-half years; longer-term outcomes are unknown. The study also involved children in their teens; more study is needed to determine whether brain-based measures can predict reading progress in younger children. [/COLOR][/SIZE]
Our brains my opening explanation - John Nicholson - 26-12-2010
[SIZE="6"][COLOR="DarkRed"]In practise I have always been aware of this situation clearly the very disadvantaged highly intelligent child most likely from a successful family where alternative early stimulus is part and parcel of family life IE gypsies stall owners where the child is naturally sharpened by early personal experience rather than being left without stimulus in a formal classroom
Dyslexia: Some Very Smart Accomplished People Cannot Read Well[/COLOR][/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"][COLOR="Black"]ScienceDaily (Dec. 19, 2009) — Contrary to popular belief, some very smart, accomplished people cannot read well. This unexpected difficulty in reading in relation to intelligence, education and professional status is called dyslexia, and researchers at Yale School of Medicine and University of California Davis, have presented new data that explain how otherwise bright and intelligent people struggle to read.
The study, which will be published in the January 1, 2010 issue of the journal Psychological Science, provides a validated definition of dyslexia. "For the first time, we've found empirical evidence that shows the relationship between IQ and reading over time differs for typical compared to dyslexic readers," said Sally E. Shaywitz, M.D., the Audrey G. Ratner Professor in Learning Development at Yale School of Medicine's Department of Pediatrics, and co-director of the newly formed Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity.
Using data from the Connecticut Longitudinal Study, an ongoing 12-year study of cognitive and behavioral development in a representative sample of 445 Connecticut schoolchildren, Shaywitz and her team tested each child in reading every year and tested for IQ every other year. They were looking for evidence to show how the dissociation between cognitive ability and reading ability might develop in children.
The researchers found that in typical readers, IQ and reading not only track together, but also influence each other over time. But in children with dyslexia, IQ and reading are not linked over time and do not influence one another. This explains why a dyslexic can be both bright and not read well.
"I've seen so many children who are struggling to read but have a high IQ," said Shaywitz. "Our findings of an uncoupling between IQ and reading, and the influence of this uncoupling on the developmental trajectory of reading, provide evidence to support the concept that dyslexia is an unexpected difficulty with reading in children who otherwise have the intelligence to learn to read."
Typical readers learn how to associate letters with a specific sound. "All they have to do is look at the letters and it's automatic," Shaywitz explained. "It's like breathing; you don't have to tell your lungs to take in air. In dyslexia, this process remains manual." Each time a dyslexic sees a word, it's as if they've never seen it before. People with dyslexia have to read slowly, re-read, and sometimes use a marker so they don't lose their place.
"A key characteristic of dyslexia is that the unexpected difficulty refers to a disparity within the person rather than, for example, a relative weakness compared to the general population," said co-author Bennett A. Shaywitz, M.D., the Charles and Helen Schwab Professor in Dyslexia and Learning Development and co-director of the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity.
Sally Shaywitz estimates that one in five people are dyslexic and points to many accomplished writers, physicians and attorneys with dyslexia who struggle with the condition in their daily lives, including Carol Greider, the 2009 Nobel laureate in medicine. She hopes to dispel many of the myths surrounding the condition.
"High-performing dyslexics are very intelligent, often out-of-the box thinkers and problem-solvers," she said. "The neural signature for dyslexia is seen in children and adults. You don't outgrow dyslexia. Once you're diagnosed, it is with you for life."
Shaywitz also stresses that the problem is with both basic spoken and written language. People with dyslexia take a long time to retrieve words, so they might not speak or read as fluidly as others. In students, the time pressure around standardized tests like the SATs and entrance exams for professional schools increases anxiety and can make dyslexia worse, so the need for accommodations is key in helping those with the disorder realize their potential, she says.[/COLOR][/SIZE]
Our brains my opening explanation - John Nicholson - 28-12-2010
[SIZE="7"][COLOR="DarkRed"]Human Working Memory Is Based on Dynamic Interaction Networks in the Brain
ScienceDaily (May 8, 2010) —[/COLOR][/SIZE]
[SIZE="6"][COLOR="Black"] A research project of the Neuroscience Center of the University of Helsinki sheds light on the neuronal mechanisms sustaining memory traces of visual stimuli in the human brain. The results show that the maintenance of working memory is associated with synchronisation of neurons, which facilitates communication between different parts of the brain. On the basis of interaction between the brain areas, it was even possible to predict the subject's individual working memory capacity.The results were published last week in the online version of the journal PNAS.
The working memory of an average person can sustain only three of four objects at a time. The brain areas maintaining the working memory are known well, but there is little information about how these areas interact. The research group led by Satu and Matias Palva imaged the brain activity of subjects performing working memory tasks by using magneto- and electroencephalography (MEG and EEG). In addition to this, they developed a new method for using MEG and EEG data to identify networks of fast neuronal interactions, i.e., synchrony, between different areas of the cerebral cortex. With this novel approach, it was possible to reveal functional networks formed by brain areas at the accuracy of milliseconds.
Maintaining of a memory trace synchronised different brain areas
In their study, the researchers mapped almost four billion different neuronal interactions. They were especially interested in rhythmic interactions between different parts of the brain. While sustaining the working memory of visual stimuli, the rhythmic activity of the subject's different brain areas were transiently synchronised. The results reveal that the synchronisation of neuronal activity in different brain areas had a connection both to the maintenance and to the contents of working memory.
The study also revealed several specialized function-specific networks and interactions between them. The network comprising different areas of the brain's frontal and parietal lobes played a central role. These areas are responsible for the coordination of attention and action. The networks in the occipital lobe, on the other hand, handle and maintain the sensory information about the visual stimuli.
Working memory and attention are the cornerstones of our cognition and consciousness -- knowledge about their underlying neuronal mechanisms can be applied, for example, when developing therapeutic and diagnostic methods for Alzheimer's disease, dementia, schizophrenia, perception and learning disorders, autism and other brain diseases[/COLOR][/SIZE]
Window Into The Brain: Diffusion Imaging MRI Tracks Memories And May Detect Alzheimer's At Early Stage
ScienceDaily (Aug. 17, 2009) — [SIZE="7"]When we absorb new information, the human brain reshapes itself to store this newfound knowledge. But where exactly is the new knowledge kept,[/SIZE] and how does that capacity to adapt reflect our risk for Alzheimer's disease and other forms of senile dementia later in our lives?
[COLOR="darkred"][SIZE="5"]Dr. Yaniv Assaf of Tel Aviv University's Department of Neurobiology is pioneering a new way to track the effect of memory on brain structure. "With a specific MRI methodology called 'Diffusion Imaging MRI,' we can investigate the microstructure of the tissue without actually cutting into it," he explains. "We can measure how much capacity our brain has to change structurally, what our memory reserve is and where that happens."
His study, presented at the Annual Meeting of the Human Brain Mapping Organization in San Francisco, has been pivotal to the way scientists view the effect of memory on the brain. Scientists used to believe that the brain took days or weeks to change its microstructure. Dr. Assaf's new observations demonstrate that the microstructure can change in mere hours.[/SIZE][/COLOR]
"It gives us a quantifiable measure of the plasticity of each individual brain," he says. "It's possible that before a person experiences any memory loss, the plasticity is affected — that is, the ability of one's brain to adapt to change. A lack of ability for change in the brain could mean susceptibility to dementia. Now, we have the means to monitor this ability."
[SIZE="6"][COLOR="Black"]The need for speed
In order to track changes in the brain, Dr. Assaf developed a study that focused on spatial learning and memory. "Usually, scientists distinguish between functional and structural plasticity," he says. Functional plasticity refers to neuronal activity in the brain, while structural plasticity refers to the physical shape of the brain itself. "From animal studies we know that spatial memory tasks have consequences for both."
First, study volunteers were scanned by Diffusion Imaging MRI. Then, they were asked to play two hours of a race-track video game, going over the same virtual race track 16 times. "This measured a special form of memory — spatial memory," says Dr. Assaf. "Each time they circled the track, the time they took to complete it decreased. At the end of the two hours, we put them back into the MRI to see the difference."
Dr. Assaf and his team saw a marked change measured by Diffusion Imaging MRI in the characteristics of brain microstructure. The memorization of the virtual race track affected the hippocampus, motor and visual areas of the brain. "The most striking thing about this study is that it shows structural plasticity happening in only two hours," he says. "This changes what we think structural plasticity is. It shows that memory is rapidly changing the structure of the cells, and that may lead to a lasting effect on the brain."[/COLOR][/SIZE]An early warning system for Alzheimer's disease and dementia
According to Dr. Assaf, most of the research on Alzheimer's disease and dementia focuses on its aftereffects. Diffusion Imaging MRI, he believes, could be used for early detection of the disorder.
"We can study the memory capacity of an individual at high risk for these disorders, and compare it to the morphological plasticity of people who are not at risk," Dr. Assaf says. "Such an approach may allow us to develop an intervention at an early stage, possibly in the form of drugs, one that may not be appropriate at a later stage." One parallel study, now being pursued in collaboration with Tel Aviv University's Prof. Daniel M. Michaelson, involves working with MRI and animals with mutations of Alzheimer's.
Dr. Assaf's work was done in collaboration with his Ph.D. students Yaniv Sagi, Tamar Katzir, Efrat Sasson and Ido Tavor
Our brains my opening explanation - John Nicholson - 28-12-2010
[SIZE="7"]
Echoes Discovered In Early Visual Brain Areas Play Role In Working Memory
ScienceDaily (Mar. 1, 2009)
[/SIZE]—ScienceDaily (Mar. 1, 2009)
[SIZE="6"] Vanderbilt University researchers have discovered that early visual areas, long believed to play no role in higher cognitive functions such as memory, retain information previously hidden from brain studies. The researchers made the discovery using a new technique for decoding data from functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. The findings are a significant step forward in understanding how we perceive, process and remember visual information.[/SIZE]The results were published Feb. 18 online by Nature.
[COLOR="Black"][SIZE="5"]
"We discovered that early visual areas play an important role in visual working memory," Frank Tong, co-author of the research and an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt, said. "How do people maintain an active representation of what they have just seen moments ago? This has long been a conundrum in the literature.
"Before, we knew that early visual areas of the cerebral cortex that are the first to receive visual information were exquisitely tuned to process incoming visual signals from the eye, but not to store this information," Tong said. "We also knew that the higher-order brain areas responsible for memory lack the visual sensitivity of early brain areas, but somehow people are able to remember a visual pattern with remarkable precision for many seconds, actually, for as long as they keep thinking about that pattern. Our question was, where is this precise information being stored in the brain?[/SIZE][/COLOR]
[SIZE="6"]"Using a new technique to analyze fMRI data, we've found that the fine-scale activity patterns in early visual areas reveal a trace or something like an echo of the stimulus that the person is actively retaining, even though the overall activity in these areas is really weak after the stimulus is removed," Tong continued.[/SIZE]
[COLOR="Black"][SIZE="5"]"Visual cortex has always been thought to be more stimulus driven and has not been implicated in cognitive processes such as memory or active maintenance of information," Stephenie Harrison, lead author of the research and a graduate student in the Vanderbilt Psychology Department, said. "By using a neural decoding technique, we were able to read out what people were holding in their visual memory. We believe this sustained visual information could be useful when people must perform complex visual tasks in everyday life."
Research subjects were shown two examples of simple striped patterns at different orientations. They were then told to hold either one or the other of the orientations in their mind while being scanned using fMRI. Orientation has long been known to be one of the first and most basic pieces of visual information coded and processed by the brain.[/SIZE][/COLOR]
[SIZE="5"][FONT="Book Antiqua"]"Through both evolution and learning, the visual system has developed the most efficient ways to code our natural environment, and the most efficient way to code any basic shape or contour is orientation," Tong said. "We used a decoding method to see if the activity patterns contained information about the remembered orientation, and we found that they do. By analyzing responses over several trials, we were able to accurately read out which of the two orientation patterns a subject was holding in his or her mind over 80 percent of the time."
The researchers found that these predictions held true even when the overall level of activity in these visual areas was very weak, no different than looking at a blank screen. This suggests that the act of remembering an image leaves some sort of faint echo or trace in these brain areas. These activity traces are weak but are quite detailed and rich in information.
"By doing these pattern analyses, we were able to find information that was hidden before. We do not know for sure, but it's possible that a lot of information in the brain might be hidden in such activity patterns," Tong said. "Using this decoding technique and others, neuroscientists might get a better understanding of how the brain represents specific cognitive states involving memory, reminiscing, or other visual experiences that do not obviously lead to a huge amount of activity in the visual areas."[/FONT][/SIZE]Tong and Harrison are members of the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center. The research was supported with funds from the National Eye Institute, the National Institutes of Health, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Our brains my opening explanation - John Nicholson - 02-01-2011
[SIZE="7"]The Brain BBC 4 Thursday at Nine[/SIZE]
[SIZE="6"][COLOR="DarkRed"]My perception of a brain neuron, for ease of my own individual comprehension is as a tree, axons, I conceive as the root system where knowledge is passed into the soil bank of retained information and knowledge. Dendrites the receiving end of nerve cells, I consider as leaves free moving collection points catching new information and passing this information through the tree trunk on through to the roots.
But in practise it may be that information is most likely passed in both directions dendrites and axons no more than a convenient way of linking individual neurons (Brain Cells). What is the form where information is stored? I consider the only possible manner of THE VAST PROPORTION of human memory is as visual memories. I consider that our mind is a visual memory bank where millions of separate visual memories are stored,
Let me explain what I consider to be the manner by which these individual memories are stored, firstly and most commonly from direct vision Where the brains facilities are perfect most often. Of course to be retained as virtually perfect memories, the brain has to have a reason to commit these individual memories to near perfect retention. They may be dramatic events of any type or nature. Using dramatic events in memory retention, consider telling a child that something is hot only direct touching of the heat source will suffice, the child’s curiosity provides a truthful certain proof.
System one provides visual memory, not from emotion or danger but from short repetitive lessons.
THE WHOLE EFFECT OF SYSTEM ONE IS TO PROVIDE PERFECT VISUAL MEMORY FOR A LIFETIME OF INSANTANEOUS USE
The manner of brain function is at the speed of light, comparison of visual memories are utilised to provide a solution, reasoning is a utilisation of visual memory comparison.
So it is that reasoning provides us with the visual creation of what we consider to be most likely to be so. That creation is directly from our imagination and has to be stored as memory creation not as a direct vision memory.
Of course the brilliant near perfect memory bank of everything we see and create during our lifetime is not all required, for reasoning purposes, or for the sake of pleasing memories, so our brains are fashioned to retain what is vital in the working processes we require daily as in mental arithmetic and on to the vast areas of mathematics.
It is a small stretch of the imagination to consider that perfect memory of every letter and sound combination is required for our brains, to work at the speed of light in order for us to read perfectly, but that is what happens quite naturally when we are taught properly. With System One 4 every I we can guarantee every concerned parent can teach their own child to read, count and think logically.[/COLOR][/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"]Key Protein Discovered That Allows Nerve Cells to Repair Themselves
ScienceDaily (Jan. 1, 2011) — A team of scientists led by Melissa Rolls, an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State University, has peered inside neurons to discover an unexpected process that is required for regeneration after severe neuron injury. The process was discovered during Rolls's studies aimed at deciphering the inner workings of dendrites -- the part of the neuron that receives information from other cells and from the outside world.
The research will be published in the print edition of the scientific journal Current Biology on 21 December 2010.
"We already know a lot about axons -- the part of the nerve cell that is responsible for sending signals," Rolls said. "However, dendrites -- the receiving end of nerve cells -- have always been quite mysterious." Unlike axons, which form large, easily recognizable bundles, dendrites are highly branched and often buried deep in the nervous system, so they have always been harder to visualize and to study. However, Rolls and her team were able to get around these difficulties. They looked inside dendrites in vivo by using a simple model organism -- the fruit fly -- whose nerve cells are similar to human nerve cells. One of the first mysteries they tackled was the layout of what Rolls referred to as intracellular "highways" -- or microtubules.
"Imagine the nerve cell with two branches -- or arms -- splayed out from it on opposite sides," Rolls explained. "Both arms have highways -- microtubules -- that run along their length and allow all the raw building materials made in the cell body to be carried to the far reaches of the cell. But the highways point in opposite directions. In axons, the growing ends -- or plus ends -- of the microtubules point away from the cell body. In contrast, in the dendrites the plus ends point towards the cell body. No one understands how a single cell can set up two different highway systems."
Unlike many other cells in our bodies, most neurons must last a lifetime. They rely on their key infrastructure -- microtubules -- to be extremely well organized, but also to be flexible so that they can be rebuilt in response to injury. Part of that flexibility comes microtubules' ability to grow constantly. Rolls and her team visualized this growth and realized that there must be a set of proteins controlling just how the highways are laid down at key intersections -- or branch points -- to keep all the microtubules pointing the same way. They identified the proteins, which include the motor protein kinesin-2, and found that when these proteins were missing the microtubules no longer pointed the same way in dendrites; that is, their polarity became disorganized.
After identifying the set of proteins required to maintain an orderly microtubule infrastructure in dendrites, the team tested whether these proteins play a role in the ability of neurons to respond to injury. Most neurons are irreplaceable, and yet they have an incredible ability to regenerate their missing parts. In earlier studies, Rolls and her team had found that, after an axon is cut off and the nerve cell no longer is able to send signals, a new axon grows from the other side of the cell; that is, from a dendrite. As part of this process, the microtubules must flip polarity. In other words, the dendrite highways must be completely rebuilt in the axonal direction. "When we disabled the flies' ability to produce the kinesin-2 protein, we found that the highways could not be rebuilt correctly, and nerve regeneration failed," Rolls explained. "Apparently, kinesin-2 is a crucial protein for polarity maintenance and for the ability to set up a new highway system when neurons need to regenerate."
Rolls also explained that visualizing how nerves maintain their intracellular highways is important for understanding neurodegenerative disease as well as response to nerve injury, which often occurs after accidents and other trauma. If the proteins that control the layout of microtubules, or carry cargo along them, do not function properly, they can become culprits in neurodegenerative diseases such as hereditary spastic paraplegia. "We hope that by showing how microtubules are built in healthy neurons and rebuilt in response to injury, our study might provide insights for future researchers who are developing drug therapies for patients with nerve disease or damage," Rolls said.
This work was funded by an American Heart Association Scientist Development Grant, a March of Dimes Basil O'Connor Starter Scholar Award, the National Institutes of Health, and a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences award to Melissa Rolls.[/SIZE]