Watch How You Train Your Brain - Balancing Effects Between Right and Left

Interesting article about how researchers attempting to train teenage girls in a visualspatial task (Tetris) did see increases in cortical thickness in visualspatial areas, but how they were also surprised to see reduce cortical thickness in the opposite hemisphere (not in visualspatial areas), but in the right prefrontal cortex. So the stronger certain areas of the left brain became, weaker connectivity on the right.



Be careful of what you wish for. The neurological literature is filled with anecdotal reports about how injury in one hemisphere of the brain could compensated for by higher activity in the other, but the mechanisms of how different sides of the brain create a balancing act are virtually unknown. The right and left hemispheres have some overlapping functions, some complementary functions, and some functions that seem designed for cooperation.

Some of this up in one hemisphere, down in the other is not completely unanticipated by us, perhaps because of the frequency of twice-exceptional kids and adults that we see and know throughout history. Individuals who may be phenomenally talented in or gifted in one area, may be phenomenally inept or backward in the other. A common profile we see among the spatially-talented is delayed language development and poor expression through words. Conversely, it is not difficult to find phenomenally verbal individuals who are quite backward in basic spatial orientation and problem solving.

A finding such as this raises questions about whether 'intense brain training' will do what devotees hope it will...increase capacities in all areas. The likehood is that it won't.

It'll be interesting to see what future studies find.

Maybe the best thing to keep in mind is to train if there's a specific weakness that's causing significant problems, like problems hearing certain sounds that make reading and listening difficult. If you don't have a problem like that, then best to do all the other more complex things in life like reading this blog, playing with the kids, and talking with friends...


Tetris brain training and fMRI pdf

Self-Appraisal - Teen Brains Reflect Opinions of Peers

Preteens and teens (11-14 yo) are more likely to activate 'social cognition' areas of the brain when reflecting about themselves ("I am smart", "I am popular"), meaning that they reflect the opinions that they feel their peers or parents have. In the figure at the right, for instance, kids more closely mirrored what they thought their best friend thought of them, vs. adults who seemed to have a different appraisal of themselves compared to what they thought their friends thought of them. In trials involving domain-specific knowledge (e.g. whether mom thought I was smart or whether my best friend thought I was popular), brain fMRI activity seemed to mirror the relevant domain-specific perspective.

It's striking to see how differently kids self-belief is their perceived mothers' beliefs about them...Also with the much lower activation of the temporal lobes for adolescents, it makes you think that adolescents are likely to make more quick self-appraisal opinions about themselves vs. adults who draw on more previous experiences (episodic memory) to inform how they think about themselves.


Self-Appraisals in Adolescents and Adults fMRI pdf

Multi-Tasking Dumbs Us Down for Some Jobs, But Could It Provide Breakthroughs for Others?

"They're suckers for irrelevancy," said communication Professor Clifford Nass... "Everything distracts them."

Because many in your acquaintance (or even household) may proudly tout their media multi-tasking ability, researchers thought for sure they could identify the cognitive gifts that come with this ability. Researchers at Stanford searched high and low for this gift, but their final conclusion - it's not a gift at all, but a liability.

"We kept looking for what they're better at, and we didn't find it," said Ophir, the study's lead author and a researcher in Stanford's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab.

Now by true multi-tasking, we don't really mean semi-automatic activities like listening to familiar pleasant music, walking, or driving a car. These tasks don't require a lot conscious higher cortical brain work, like say reading and responding to an email or answering questions when a colleague or classmate calls you to find out what was missed in an important meeting.

At left look how poorly high media multi-taskers did compared to low media multi-taskers on a distraction task. Not only were the high media multi-taskers more distractible, but they also performed lower on memory tests and ability to task-switch.

A few years ago, a Hewlett-Packard sponsored study suggested that the IQs of knowledge workers distracted by emails and phone calls dropped their IQs about 10 points, and a Microsoft study found that on average, workers who stopped their activities to read emails needed on average about 24 minutes to return to their tasks.

All this seems very reasonable, but some of crazy media multi-tasking that many of us in think-heavy careers might do is not the same as the tasks given in these paradigms. The Poincare examples comes to mind. Henri Poincare (mathematician extraordinaire) has written that whenever he wanted to think deeply about a problem that remained unsolved, he would put it away and then work simple derivations in an absent-minded way. Often when he was at work with such 'mindless' activities, a new possible solution would come to him and he would return to the problem and find he had had a breakthrough.

The increase susceptibilty of media multi-taskers to peripheral distractions is not a surprise if you consider the research about diffuse attention and creativity,but I can't help thinking that the learning and task-switching results might arrive at different conclusions had the nature of the focus and distractor task been very different, especially if the focus task required more insight-based problem solving than a demanding problem solving task that require several very consciously-solved steps.

The ideal distractor, it would seem, should be familiar and not overwhelmingly pleasurable...an activity that perhaps could shift the brain into a pleasant 'default rest' or daydreaming state. Kind of like Einstein playing his violin for a while to come up with new ideas for solving difficult problems.

Anyway, something to think about before management gets the bright idea about doing away with email checking or games at work for high-level knowledge workers, It's not by accident that many of the most successful creative companies embrace a good deal of play and distraction at work.

Cognitive control in media multitaskers
Media multi-taskers pay a price
Death by information overload
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Biology of Creativity

http://www.flickr.com/photos/whartz/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Visual Overload and Visual Crowding - When More Means Less

"If there were only 10 problems on a page, I could do them all. But when there are 40 on a page, I can't do any of them." - 10 year old student


Visual overload and visual crowding are common problems in every school classroom or company work group, but the mistakes and errors that result from them are rarely recognized or traced back to their true source. It is a paradox - the more you see, the less you see, but it all makes sense if one recognizes that a child or an adult's visual working memory deskspace can become easily overloaded.

For visual scientists, visual crowding is a specific term that refers to a greater difficulty in seeing when other visual objects are present. When we look at a complex scene, for instance the picture above, it is impossible to take in all the other visual details. It's what causes some people to overload when they go to large gatherings like music concerts, Disneyland in the summertime, or a crowded Home Depot, but also children in crowded classroom, all-school assembly, writing on a scantron, or completing Mad Math Minutes.

Signs of Visual Overload
- Longer processing time, slow reading, and incomplete work on crowded worksheets
- Tantrums, irritability, and overload behaviors in crowded environments
- 'Careless' mistakes and unintentionally skipped problems on worksheets and tests
- Missed words or endings while reading, need to re-read words

Interestingly, a recent report on Visual crowding, reading, and dyslexia found that a visual crowding effect significantly contributed to slowness in word reading, and dyslexics as a group found that increased spacing between letters improved readability. The critical spacing threshold for readability was significantly higher for dyslexics as a group compared to non-dyslexic controls, so it became easier to identify a letter away from the center if the spacing between characters were greater.

Take-home points:

- Critical print size is larger for dyslexics than controls
- Critical spacing between characters is larger for dyslexics than controls
- Reading rate improves with print size to a critical point
- Explains why many dyslexics with excellent verbal funds of knowledge still have trouble reading long words

Classroom and Test Accommodations

In the classroom, more attention should be paid to print size and spacing in daily classroom (worksheets, handouts) and testing materials (as many as 1 in 5 students are dyslexic), and print size and spacing should be considered when purchasing books for students.

Large print books and reader glasses may help some students, whereas font differences (serifs like Times New Roman or hand-written fonts like Papyrus or Comic Sans often preferred) may be more important for others. For students with narrow visual spans (see only few letters at a time), serifs or handwritten fonts may dramatically lessen the work of reading - with serifs or personalized font shapes - it is easier to perceive the overall shape of words, so that even if a reader only sees the first and last letters and general shape of the word, they can make an educated guess about what that word might be even though they are unable to see all the letters.

Many of you are probably aware of this meme from the Internet:

"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

Matt Davis has written more about the science and history of the discovery of this effect here.

Eide Neurolearning Blog: Blessing and burdens of vivid visual thinkers
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Video game training increases visual span
Photo:brain
Photo: scantron