The cutting edge of brain science technologies

National Geographic has an excellent article that gives a tour of some of the latest technologies of neuroscience that are likely to be leading the way in understanding the brain over the next decade.

You can read the full article online but you need to complete a free registration first. A typical publication ploy but, in this case, it’s well worth doing.

The article is itself fascinating but is also wonderfully illustrated with photos and videos to show exactly how the new technologies allows us to see the brain at work in many different ways.

An excellent guide to the cutting edge of lab brain science.

Link to National Geographic article ‘Secrets of the Brain’ (free reg required).
Link to plain text copy of article – no reg required.

View the original article here

Candidate neurotech for the billion dollar brain projects

Nature has an article that discusses candidate neuro-mapping technologies that may form the basis of the billion dollar brain projects that are just kicking off on either side of the Atlantic.

Both Europe’s and Obama’s brain projects have set themselves the (possibly over-) ambitious goal of mapping the working brain on the neuron-by-neuron level.

This is off the back of new technologies that promise multiple-neuron fine-grained recording and systems to make sense of the date – but can only currently do it on a very small scale.

The Nature article looks at the most promising options and how they might scale to whole brain, or at least, ‘big chunk of brain’ level.

Attempting to take another leap farther, Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Winfried Denk of the Max Plank Institute for Neurobiology in Munich, Germany, are working with the German optics company Carl Zeiss on a new electron microscope that would image even thinner slices — 25 nanometres, or one-thousandth the thickness of an average cell. “Then you get to see every little damn thing in the brain, from every neuron to every subcellular organelle, from every synapse to every spine neck — everything,” says Lichtman.

It’s probably worth saying that the ‘mapping the whole brain as it’s working’ thing is spin. Considering there are about 100 billion or so neurons in the human brain that’s a lot of microchips you’d need mixing in with your brain.

Link to Nature article ‘Neuroscience: Solving the brain’

View the original article here

Like a kid in a brain candy store

Slate has got a great article that takes on the newly fashionable field of ‘neuromarketing’ and calls it out as an empty promise.

The piece is written by neuroscientist Matt Wall who notes the upsurge in consumer EEG ‘brain wave’ technology has fuelled a boom in neuromarketing companies who claim that measuring the brain is the shining path to selling your product.

Because neuromarketing companies don’t provide the key details of the analysis techniques they use, it’s hard to evaluate them objectively. However, they seem to take a highly automated approach, essentially plugging the raw data into a black box of algorithms that spits out a neatly processed answer at the other end. Such an approach must involve making a large number of assumptions and some fancy-analysis footwork to make something coherent out of the poor-quality data.

In general the same applies to getting information out of a data set as to getting information out of a human: If you torture it long enough, it’ll tell you everything you want to know, but information extracted under torture is highly unreliable.

In addition, marketing-related studies are not well-suited to the kind of repetition that’s required to boost the useful signal and reduce noise; the same product or TV commercial can be presented only a few times before the participant becomes very bored indeed and therefore ceases to have any kind of meaningful reaction.

The article discusses why the current fad of EEG-based neuromarketing is scientifically unsound but despite the technical difficulties and theoretical incoherence of the field, it would all become irrelevant with one simple demonstration: a measure of the brain that could predict buyer preference better than behavioural or psychological measures.

Until now, no-one has shown this. In other words, no-one, nowhere, has shown that a ‘neuromarketing’ approach adds anything to what can be done by a standard marketing approach.

I’m all for neuromarketing research but until you can come up with the goods as a commercial product, you’re selling hot air.

There is one area that neuromarketing companies excel at though – marketing themselves. Considering a complete lack of data for their benefits, they pull in millions of dollars a year from advertising contracts.

Now that is effective marketing.

Link to Slate article ‘What Are Neuromarketers Really Selling?’

View the original article here

The Quarterly Goodies — Hacker Credit Cards, Alpha BRAIN, Refuel Bars, and More

Every three months, I ship out a box of amazing physical products, along with two personal letters explaining everything: a physical letter and a video “letter.”  

One of the latter is above.  I do *not* plan on including these the blog, but giving an example is fun.

The theme of these quarterly mailings is obsession–I include the ideas and objects I can’t get out of my head.

Obsessions enter my life from all over the place.  Currently, my gadgets and gear recommendations are coming from Cirque du Soleil performers, chess prodigies, Fortune 500 CEOs, and military snipers.  It’s the randomness that makes it fun.

More than 1,500 people subscribe to these boxes through Quarterly.co. They are opening up 1,000 more spots for my next shipment, if of interest.

Here are the goodies from the latest:

1. Spectacle by David Rockwell with Bruce Mau ($49.95 retail, $33.94 Amazon)

2. Edible Green Tea ($25 retail)

3. LSTN Earbuds ($50 retail) Get 20% off by using the code “Quarterly” at check out!

4. AMRAP Refuel Bars ($23.95 retail, $23.90 Amazon)

5. Creative Whack Pack ($16 retail, $11.30 Amazon)

6. $20 DonorsChoose.org Gift Card

7. Hacker Credit Card, Mini Work Tool ($7.95 retail, $8 Amazon)

8. Alpha BRAIN ($35 retail)

Want to get the next box? First come, first served here.

###

Some of the feedback so far (more here):

Joshua Millage - @jmillage – on 26 May

WOW @tferriss #TIM02 spanked #TIM01 if you keep this up – Im guessing we will be getting Ferraris in our boxes soon. THANKS!

Scott Miller – @Scotchmo – on 28 May

@tferriss Tim02 box arrived LSTN headphones sound great, and I am a headphone snob! Thanks Tim! #tim02

Will Lenzen Jr - @wlenzenjr – on 30 May

Blown away by the quality & thought put into what @tferriss included in #TIM02 of @Quarterly. Thanks Tim! pic.twitter.com/fdLoidRF7u

Want to explore further?  Here are the Twitter handles for all the above, in alphabetical order:

Alpha BRAIN by Onnit Labs – @Onnit
AMRAP Nutrition – @AMRAPUSA
Donors Choose gift card – @DonorsChoose
Eat Green Tea – @eatgreentea
LSTN headphones – @LSTN
Mini work tool is created by BCB International – @bcbin
Spectacle, by David Rockwell and Bruce Mau - @labatrockwell, @brucemaudesign
Whack Pack, creator Roger von Oech – @RogervonOech

Posted on June 11th, 2013

View the original article here

Does brain stimulation make you better at maths?

The Headlines

Brain stimulation promises “long-lasting” maths boost

Mild electric shocks to brain may help students solve maths problems

Electrical brain boost can make you better at maths

What they actually did

Researchers led by Roi Cohen Kadosh at the University of Oxford trained people on two kinds of maths skills, rote learning simple arithmetic problems and practicing more varied calculations.

During this learning process they applied small and continually varying electrical currents to the scalp, above the temples. A control group wore the electrodes but didn’t receive any current. Compared to the controls, the people who practiced with the current turned on performed faster on the maths problems.

Even more amazing, when a subset of the participants were brought back six months later, those who had received the electrical treatment were still significantly faster, albeit only for the harder, more varied, calculations.

How plausible is it?

The particular technique these researchers used, called Transcranial Random Noise Stimulation (TRNS) is a recent invention, but the use of electrical stimulation to affect brain activity has a long history.

The brain is an electrochemical machine, so there’s every reason to think that electrical stimulation should affect its function. The part of the brain the researchers stimulated – the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex – is known to be involved in complex tasks like learning, decision making and calculation.

What’s amazing is that such a gross intervention as applying a current via electrodes, to such a large part of the brain, could have a specific (and beneficial) effect on mathematical ability.

Tom’s take

This is technically impressive work, done by highly capable researchers at well respected institutions and published in a prestigious journal. Still, there are a few warning signs that make me nervous about how reliable the result is.

The key result showing the long-lasting nature of the effect is based on just six people who received the treatment (out of the 12 originally treated and the 12 controls). Even worse, the statistical test they rely on would have come up as “no effect” if they had done it the conventional way. While the result is based on such small numbers it has to remain as “promising” at best, rather than confirmed.

The researchers recorded percentage correctly on the maths problems, as well as speed of responding, but they only discuss the speed of responding. The graphs of errors make it look like the people who got faster also make more mistakes, which doesn’t count as an improvement in my book. Why no combined analysis of speed and accuracy?

We don’t know which part of the brain this effect is due to. Although they did record brain activity and show that it changes in the area they were interested in, the basic comparison is still “doing something to the brain” vs “doing nothing to the brain” (thanks to Vince Walsh for pointing this out). It is hard to make any solid conclusions on how this technique might be having an effect.

There was no systematic check that participants were truly ignorant of which group they were in, although the researchers believe this to be the case. If participants knew when their brain was being stimulated then the change in performance could have been due to motivation or a desire to please rather than any specific manipulation of brain function.

Putting these worries aside, we’re not going to see this technique used in the classroom any time soon, even if it holds up. Suppose this technique is reliable, and we really can improve people’s basic maths skills with a bit of electrical stimulation we’d still hesitate to deploy it. Does it affect any other skills, perhaps taking resources away from them?

Competition is a basic principle of brain development, it isn’t implausible that there would be a cost to overclocking the brain like this. There might be all sort of minor side effects such as increased fatigue or poorer attention, which would mean that stimulation wasn’t just pure benefit. Or – also plausible – perhaps the more rapid learning of the basics would mean that skills which build on those basics would be harder to learn (sort of like screenburn for memories).

I’m not worried for the participants in this research, but I’d still want a lot more questions answered before I started setting electrical stimulation along with homework.

Read more

The original paper: Snowball, A., Tachtsidis, I., Popescu, T., Thompson, J., Delazer, M., Zamarian, L., Zhu, T., Cohen Kadosh, R. (2013). Long-Term Enhancement of Brain Function and Cognition Using Cognitive Training and Brain Stimulation. Current Biology. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.04.045Ed

Ed Yong on the dangers of neuroscience with small data sets.

Dorothy Bishop has collected some reactions to misleading headlines about ‘shocks’).

Tom Stafford does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

View the original article here

TED news in brief: Esther Perel on female libido, an update on Henry Markram’s supercomputer brain, and more

News

Below, take a look at some of the TED speakers and Fellows who are cropping up in the news this week.

Esther Perel: The secret to desire in a long-term relationshipLybrido, a drug to treat women with low libido, is in clinical trials and could be presented to the FDA for review as early as this summer. In The New York Times Magazine‘s look at this new drug, TED speaker Esther Perel is asked about the conundrum of desire for women in long-term relationships. “Many couples confuse love with merging,” she says. “This mix-up is a bad omen for sex. To sustain élan toward the other, there must be a synapse to cross. Eroticism requires distance.” Watch Perel’s talk “The secret to desire” »

Philosopher Dan Dennett has a great new book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. Read an excerpt containing his “seven tools for thinking, or check out any of his four TED Talks »

Last week, NASA announced the shutdown of the Kepler spacecraft mission. On the TED Fellows blog, Lucianne Walkowicz – an astronomer who worked on the project – shares her thoughts on its end. Watch her talk “Finding planets around other stars” »

Henry Markram: A brain in a supercomputer The new Wired takes a detailed look at Henry Markram’s years-long campaign to build a supercomputer replica of the human brain — a plan he shared early on at TEDGlobal, in fact. The piece begins, “Even by the standards of the TED Conference, Henry Markram’s 2009 TEDGlobal talk was a mind-bender. He took the stage of the Oxford Playhouse, clad in the requisite dress shirt and blue jeans, and announced a plan that—if it panned out—would deliver a fully sentient hologram within a decade.” And it gets weirder. Watch his 2009 talk »

CERN physicists share with the TED-Ed blog what it was like to have their words — and sometimes their personas — animated in five TED-Ed videos that boil down concepts in particle physics into understandable terms. Watch these five animated lessons »

Rose George: Let's talk crap. Seriously.Related to Rose George’s talk, “Let’s talk crap. Seriously”: On Monday, in the state of Madhya Pradesh, India, 184 couples wed in a mass ceremony — before which the husband-to-be had to prove he had a toilet or would build one within the month. As a reward, The Wall Street Journal reports, “the state covers the costs of the wedding and gifts for the groom’s family, which are traditionally provided by the bride’s parents.” Watch George’s talk »

Finally, fashion website Refinery 29 admits that Meg Jay’s talk “Why 30 is not the new 20” got their “entire office buzzing.” Watch the talk »

Congratulations to TED Fellow Kellee Santiago for being named one of Inc. Magazine‘s ”5 Most Powerful Women in Gaming.” Read a TED Blog interview with Santiago about the inspiration behind the game Journey »

View the original article here

Science behind the billion dollar brain hype

If you want to hear me talk about what the US and Europe’s billion dollar brain projects are trying to achieve, I’m on the latest BBC All in the Mind discussing the science behind the quite considerable hype.

I discuss these latest brain initiatives alongside presenter Claudia Hammond and distinguished neuroscientist Donald Stein – who appeared despite my suggestion of inviting distinguished neuroscientist Shakira.

Either way, a good discussion on an important topic.

Link to programme information and streamed audio.
mp3 of podcast.

View the original article here

Mind and brain podcast radio rush

Several new mind and brain radio series have just started in the last few weeks and all can be listened to online.

The two ‘All in the Minds’ have just started a new series.

BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind has just started a new series with the first programme including end-of-the-world hopefuls and psychologist and journalist Christian Jarrett.

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind new series has also just begun – kicking off with a programme on the social brain.

BBC Radio 4's brilliant online sociology series The Digital Human started a new series a few weeks ago.

The latest Nature NeuroPod just hit the wires a few days ago.

The Neuroscientists Talk Shop podcast is technical but ace and has a big back catalogue.

Any mind and brain podcasts you’re into at the moment? Add them in the comments.

View the original article here

5 Sneaky Tricks Your Left Brain is Playing on You

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A brain of warring neurons

A fascinating talk from philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett where he refutes his earlier claims that neurons can be thought of like transistors in a computational machine that produces the mind.

This section is particularly striking:

The question is, what happens to your ideas about computational architecture when you think of individual neurons not as dutiful slaves or as simple machines but as agents that have to be kept in line and that have to be properly rewarded and that can form coalitions and cabals and organizations and alliances? This vision of the brain as a sort of social arena of politically warring forces seems like sort of an amusing fantasy at first, but is now becoming something that I take more and more seriously, and it’s fed by a lot of different currents.

The complete talk is over at Edge.

Link to Dennett talk at Edge.

View the original article here

TED Weekends wonders: Can you reset your brain?

One morning when she woke up, Jill Bolte Taylor felt pain behind her left eye similar to what she’d felt biting into an ice cream cone. Soon, her own appearance — from her hands to her reflection — felt utterly bizarre to her. Next she lost her balance and then her internal chatter simply stopped — years of thinking dissolving into silence. It was only when her right side became paralyzed that she, a neuroscientist, realized that she was having a stroke.

In her classic talk from TED2006, watched more than 10 million times, Taylor explains what it felt like to have a stroke, and how the experience — from which it took her eight years to recover — gave her a deeply different understanding of who she is.

Today’s TED Weekends on the Huffington Post explores the theme “Resetting the brain,” digging into the ways our brains frame our lives, often in contradictory, unexplainable ways. Below, three of the essays from the site.

Jill Bolte Taylor: Does Our Planet Need a Stroke of Insight?

Before 2008, everything I did had something to do with mental health. I’m a neuroscientist, and I was all about understanding how we create our perception of reality, and understanding what’s going on in the brains of people who experience hallucination and delusion.

But then I gave a TEDTalk about my own experience with stroke. Within weeks of delivering that talk in 2008, my life changed and the repercussions still resonate loudly in my world. My book, My Stroke of Insight, has been translated into 30 languages. Time and Oprah’s Soul Series came calling. I’ve traveled to Europe, Asia, South America, Canada; I’ve crisscrossed the states. And in February 2012, I took a trip to Antarctica with Vice President Al Gore, 20 scientists, and 125 global leaders who care deeply about climate.

While I was traveling the globe, I still thought my core issue was mental health. But, perhaps spurred by that trip to Antarctica, I’ve come to understand that the two issues of mental health and global health are closely linked — if not one and the same.

Read the full essay >>

Ben Thomas: Some Songs Just Can’t Be Heard

The composer’s wife had died suddenly; violently. Here, at the premiere of his latest piece, the audience whispered that this new song must be a tribute to her memory. From the first notes, vast choruses of voices seemed to tear themselves from the strings of a single violin — gnashing in conflict, pleading for understanding; howling beyond the reach of words.

Despite the Chaconne‘s harrowing nakedness, none of us can know just how it felt to be Johann Sebastian Bach as the piece’s strains first poured from his pen. Although the composition conjures up, as the composer Brahms wrote, “a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings,” the original of that world belonged — and still belongs — to Bach alone. We can guess intuitively at his thoughts; try to feel how we imagine he felt — but no matter how closely we listen, we can never fully know how it felt to be him in those moments.

And after all the centuries since Chaconne, we’re still struggling to understand just why that is.

Read the full essay  >> 

Robert M. Bilder’s The Balancing Brain: Finding Harmony and Awareness

Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk and book — “My Stroke of Insight” — offer vivid and intensely personal recollections of her life-threatening brain hemorrhage. Her stroke shifts a delicate balance of complementary forces in her brain, generating a dramatic upheaval in her sense of self and the world around her. How can we best understand her experience, and what does this tell us about our own minds and brains?

In Dr. Bolte Taylor’s narrative, the hemispheres of the brain serve as a neuroanatomical metaphor for a duality of consciousness, the hosts of a dynamic tension between competing powers that exist within us all. She emphasizes contrasts between “parallel,” “holistic” and “nonverbal” processing of the right hemisphere, versus “serial,” “analytic” and “verbal” processing of the left hemisphere. Others have emphasized the role of the right hemisphere in dealing with novelty, while the left hemisphere designs and deploys rules, tactics and other “descriptive systems” (language, math, the rules of games). I like to view hemisphere differences from an evolutionary perspective, and particularly think about how the hemispheres contribute to the overall balance of stability and flexibility of brain activity. On one hand, we need to keep ourselves on track by stabilizing and then executing our plans for action. On the other hand, we need to flexibly adjust these plans as needed to match the exigencies of our changing world as we experience these through our sensorium. What happens when the scales are tipped?

Imbalance between brain systems is often the source of problems.

Read the full essay >>

View the original article here

The brain in numbers, colours and wow

An amazing picture by Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham from PhD Comics. Click for the full size image just published at the Scientific American site. Definitely worth seeing in its hi-res glory.

Link to full size image (via @CeliaHodent)

View the original article here

Plug n’ play cosmic dust brain t-shirt

The Imaginary Foundation do an amazing t-shirt of someone plugging in a huge cosmic dust covered brain. It’s available in guys and gals styles but sadly doesn’t come with any cosmic dust to make your own accessories.

View the original article here

Schizophrenia beyond the brain

The Wilson Quarterly has an excellent article about the rebirth of interest in how social experiences affect the development of schizophrenia.

It’s written by the brilliant anthropologist Tanya Marie Luhrmann, who tracks how the enthusiasm for a completely neurobiological explanation for the disorder has now begun to wane.

It’s worth saying that this extreme neurobiological focus has really been an American phenomenon.

While it’s true to say that psychiatry has taken a distinct neurobiological turn across the world, the mantra that ‘schizophrenia is a brain disease’ and only needs to be understood in terms of brain function has been most strongly championed in the United States.

For somewhat mysterious reasons, and not without a touch of irony, American psychiatry has been subject to quite striking mood swings over the past century.

The ‘Freudian takeover’ only really occurred in the US, and was overturned by the diagnostic manual championing ‘mid-Atlantics’ who created the DSM-III.

Subsequently, a dominant current of thought emerged that mental illnesses could be understood as ‘brain disorders’ – a concept massively promoted and funded by drug companies. Searches for the ‘gene for schizophrenia’ and the ‘brain circuit for depression’ were all the rage, even if they seem a little naive in hindsight.

In Europe, however, social psychiatry – where mental disorders are seen within a social context – remained widely taught. In the UK, it had more an an epidemiological flavour, where on the continent it was more focussed on analysing the cultural meaning of mental illness.

Nevertheless, Luhrmann’s article is an excellent overview of how psychiatry has started to look ‘beyond the brain’, although we’d hope it doesn’t lose sight of it while gazing at the horizon

My only significant problem was that the article repeats the ‘people with schizophrenia do better in the developing world’ claim, which is so over-general as to be useless.

Other than that though, an excellent incisive article and one of the best pieces you’re likely to read in a while.

Link to ‘Beyond the Brain’ in The Wilson Quarterly (thanks Peter!)

View the original article here

Rethinking Productivity: Why Your Brain May Be Keeping You from Getting Things Done

(Editor’s Note: We’re starting a new series this week featuring new Lifehack contributor Kirsten Simmons called “Rethinking Productivity”. The hope is our readers will ask Kirsten questions about productivity, organization, and time management so that she can provide answers that will make people take a step back and “rethink” productivity. Enjoy.)

Dear Kirsten,

I’m about ready to scream.  Everywhere I look there’s “Five Steps to Inbox Nirvana” or “The ONE Secret to Productivity Flow.”  I swear I’ve tried it all and none of it works.  Sometimes I look at the systems and think, there’s no way in hell.  Other times I can see potential and I jump into it with both feet and a rush of enthusiasm, only to crash and burn within a week.  I have so much that I *want* to do, and yet I find myself jumping from this deadline to that emergency, and my projects rarely take form in the way I want.  I’m skeptical that you’ll have any ideas I haven’t tried, but I figured it was worth a shot… do I have a change to someday finishing everything, or should I just let it go as a dream and focus on the day-to-day?

Signed,
Gaaaa!

Dear Gaaaa!,

Oh, honey, I totally understand where you’re coming from. Letters like yours make me want to give you a giant hug and then step out to do battle with the ego-centered productivity industry where everyone believes that their system is the key to endless productivity and happiness. I may well be tilting at windmills, but a gal’s got to try, right?

First off, there are a few ideas that I’d like you to internalize, 100%.

You are totally capable of finishing everything. BUT, everything is a slippery target because it’s constantly growing. If you had an extra 24 hours in the day, you’d be able to fill it in a heartbeat. Every time you finish something, another project comes up that is just as enticing as the previous. You won’t stop expanding until the day you die.Your projects may not take form in the way you want, but they are taking form! No one is able to realize fully the visions we have in our heads. I went to a reading with Neil Gaiman last year, and he commented that he had hated the initial edits for American Gods, so he jumped at the chance to do an “author’s definitive edition” a few years later. But then as he continued to tour and do readings, he found even more places he wanted to change, and he had the opportunity to do so when the 10th anniversary edition came out.  But even then, in the months between the time the book went to press and the day I saw him, he had found more that he would have liked to have tweaked.  But, as he put it, you can’t put out the “author’s definitive definitive edition.”  There is a time when you must let your projects go.  To quote The Cult of Done Manifesto, “Laugh at perfection.  It’s boring and keeps you from being done… Done is the engine of more.”Productivity in isolation is useless. All of those steps and tips and secrets do absolutely nothing for you if you can’t place them in context. And what is the context, you might ask? Simple. Your productivity fits within the ecosystem of you – your goals, your commitments, your habits and your personality. Trying to apply tips and tricks is like treating symptoms without trying to understand the cause of the illness. Every system you consider must work with your needs and serve to move you toward your goals. Your personality may not be conducive to maintaining a system like Getting Things Done. In fact, most people’s personalities aren’t! If you don’t know your personality type and you’re not putting productivity systems in the context of your goals, commitments and habits, no wonder you’re crashing! All the pieces have to work together. When they don’t, you struggle with overwhelm, burnout and frustration.

You are not at all flawed or wrong because you don’t fit into society’s narrow definition of a “productive” person. You are capable of achieving every goal you’ve ever dreamed about, and a good deal more that you can’t even conceive of yet. We just have to bring your ecosystem back into balance by putting your productivity in context. So here’s what I want you to do. Write me back with an example of the last trick, tip or system you jumped into with enthusiasm, and recount for me all the painful details of your crash and burn. It’s not going to be fun, but I can start to pull your personality type from the story, and from there we can move forward to put your productivity in perspective.

With love,
Kirsten

Now it’s your turn! Please leave a comment and tell me about your most recent crash and burn with a new productivity system.

Featured photo credit: Thinker via Shutterstock and inline photo by Andrew Mason via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Social media dashboards combine and centralize your accounts under a unified interface and management system, but HootSuite sets itself apart, easy to use, reliable and efficient, just like it should be. This video by Steve Dotto will take you on a quick tour to learn what HootSuite can do for you.

A productivity rut can happen to anyone, even the most productive people in the world. Here`s your six step plan to get back on the road to getting things done.

The calendar has evolved. In order to really know how to use a calendar today, we need to change our mental model of what a calendar is, and where it sits.

Close

View the original article here

BBC Future column: Does the internet rewire your brain?

My column for BBC Future from a few days ago. The original is here. Mindhacks.com readers will have heard most of this before, thanks to Vaughan’s coverage of the Baroness and her fellow travellers.

Being online does change your brain, but so does making a cup of tea. A better question to ask is what parts of the brain are regular internet users using.

This modern age has brought with it a new set of worries. As well as watching our weight and worrying about our souls, we now have to worry about our brain fitness too – if you believe the headlines. Is instant messaging eroding the attention centres of our brains? Are Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools preventing you from forming normal human bonds? And don’t forget email – apparently it releases the same addictive neurochemicals as crack cocaine!

Plenty of folk have been quick to capitalise on this neuro-anxiety. Amazon’s virtual shelves groan with brain-training books and games. (I confess I am not entirely innocent myself). You can fight the cognitive flab, these games promise, if you work that grey matter like a muscle.

But is this true? Are sudoku puzzles the only thing stopping the species turning into a horde of attention-deficient, socially-dysfunctional, email addicts – part human, part smartphone?

Fear not, there is some good news from neuroscience. But first, it is my duty to tell you the bad news. You may want to put down your phone and take note, this is the important bit.

The truth is that everything you do changes your brain. Everything. Every little thought or experience plays a role in the constant wiring and rewiring of your neural networks. So there is no escape. Yes, the internet is rewiring your brain. But so is watching television. And having a cup of tea. Or not having a cup of tea. Or thinking about the washing on Tuesdays. Your life, however you live it, leaves traces in the brain.

Brain workout

Worrying about the internet is just the latest in a long line of fears society has had about the changes technologies might bring. People worried about books when they first became popularly available. In Ancient Greece, Socrates worried about the effect of writing, saying it would erode young people’s ability to remember. The same thing happened with television and telephones. These technologies did change us, and the way we live our lives, but nothing like the doom-mongers predicted would stem from them.

But is the internet affecting our brains in a different, more extraordinary way? There is little evidence to suggest harm. Here we are, millions of us, including me and you, right now, using the internet, and we seem okay. Some people worry that, even though we cannot see any ill-effects of the internet on our minds, there might be something hidden going on. I am not so worried about this, and I’ll tell you why

We regularly do things that have a profound effect on our brains – such as reading or competitive sports – with little thought for our brain fitness. When scientists look at people who have spent thousands of hours on an activity they often see changes in the brain. Taxi drivers, famously, have a larger hippocampus, a part of the brain recruited for navigation. Musicians’ brains devote more neural territory to brain regions needed for playing their instruments. So much so, in fact, that if you look at the motor cortex of string players you see bulges on one side (because the fine motor control for playing a violin, for example, is only on one hand), whereas the motor cortex of keyboard players bulges on both sides (because piano playing requires fine control of both hands).

So practice definitely can change our brains. By accepting this notion, though, we replace a vague worry about the internet with a specific worry: if we use the internet regularly, what are we practicing?

Get a life

In the absence of any substantial evidence, I would hazard a guess that the majority of internet use is either information search or communication, using email and social media. If this is so, using the internet should affect our brains so that we are better at these things. Probably this is already happening, part of a general cultural change which involves us getting better and better at dealing with abstract information.

Internet use would only be a worry if it was getting in the way of us practicing some other life skill. If Facebook stopped people seeing their friends face to face that could have a harmful effect. But the evidence suggests this is not the case. If anything, people with more active internet lives have more active “meat-space” lives. Most of us are using the internet as a complement to other ways of communicating, not as a substitute.

So there is no magic extra risk from the internet. Like TV before it, and reading before that, it gives us a way of practicing certain things. Practice will change our brains, just like any habit. The important thing is that we are part of this process, it is not just something that happens to us. You can decide how much time you want to put into finding pictures of funny cats, bantering on Facebook or fitting your thoughts into 140 characters. There will be no sudden damage done to your brain, or great surprises for your brain fitness. You would be a fool to think that the internet will provide all the exercise your brain needs, but you would also be a fool to pass up the opportunities it offers. And those pictures of funny cats.

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Is the brain the centre of your universe?

The Observer has a fantastic debate between neuroscientists David Eagleman and Raymond Tallis about how much brain science tells us about free will and the unconscious.

It’s a wonderful pairing as Eagleman is a broad-thinking wonderboy of neuroscience while Tallis is a veteran street-fighter of brain debates.

The main point of contention revlves around whether we can understand the brain as the source of human nature or whether we have to look beyond the individual to make sense of our experience and behaviour.

Eagleman: It is clear at this point that we are irrevocably tied to the 3lb of strange computational material found within our skulls. The brain is utterly alien to us, and yet our personalities, hopes, fears and aspirations all depend on the integrity of this biological tissue. How do we know this? Because when the brain changes, we change…

Tallis: Yes, of course, everything about us, from the simplest sensation to the most elaborately constructed sense of self, requires a brain in some kind of working order. Remove your brain and bang goes your IQ. It does not follow that our brains are pretty well the whole story of us, nor that the best way to understand ourselves is to stare at “the neural substrate of which we are composed”.

This is because we are not stand-alone brains. We are part of community of minds, a human world, that is remote in many respects from what can be observed in brains. Even if that community ultimately originated from brains, this was the work of trillions of brains over hundreds of thousands of years: individual, present-day brains are merely the entrance ticket to the drama of social life, not the drama itself.

As an accompaniment to the piece, I also wrote a ‘brief guide to neuroscience’ that you can also read online.

Link to debate ‘The brain… it makes you think. Doesn’t it?’
Link to ‘A brief guide to neuroscience’.

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Snakes on a brain

The latest Journal of Neuroscience features a study on the neuroscience behind Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s famouse Rotating Snakes illusion and to celebrate they’re made a ‘Rotating Brain’ illusion for the front cover.

This type of illusion, often called a peripheral drift illusion, was thought to occur due to slow drifting eye movements but this new study suggests that it is more likely to be explained by rapid but tiny eye movements called saccades.

Brain-shaped version of Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s “Rotating Snakes” illusion. In its usual presentation, the image consists of concentric circles of stepwise luminance gradients with curved edges, which produces a strong illusion of rotation in most observers. New evidence suggests this illusion is produced by transient oculomotor events such as microsaccades, saccades, and blinks, rather than continuous drift.

Despite the fantastic cover I expect the journal to outdo itself next time and have both an article explaining the neuroscience Brocken spectre as well as an image you can hide up a mountanside to create 20 metre tall ghost-like figures.

Link to study (via BoingBoing)

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Listen now! TED Radio Hour’s first episode: “Our Buggy Brain”

Journey through the world of ideas with TED Radio Hour, a new program from NPR and TED that inspires imagination about modern life and places bets on tomorrow with today’s most compelling minds. The show’s first episode airs today, April 27 (check listings for your local station, which may vary). You can find the full hour-long episode, as well as each individual segment (yes, they’re each 18 minutes long), related TEDTalks and more in-depth content on n.pr/TEDradiohour and on NPR’s mobile apps.

In Episode 1, “Our Buggy Brain,” host Alison Stewart talks with Dan Ariely, Paul Bloom and Dan Gilbert about how our minds inform and sometimes deceive us.

Listen to TED Radio Hour Episode 1: “Our Buggy Brain” >>

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Inside The Ailing Brain

The Ailing Brain is a fantastic documentary series on the brain and its disorders that’s freely available online. It has been produced in Spanish but the first part is now on YouTube with English subtitles.

The series is among the best neuroscience documentary series I have even seen (along with Susan Greenfield’s Brain Story – made before she lost the plot) with the first part tackling the science and effects of neural implants.

If you see nothing else, go to 6:10 to watch what happens when a patient with an implanted deep brain stimulation device to treat Parkinson’s Disease switches off the machine. It’s an amazing sight.

But if you’ve got 20 minutes, you’d be very well advised to take some time to watch the whole episode as it’s both wonderfully produced and utterly compelling.

There are three programmes so far although the second and third haven’t been subtitled yet. But if you understandeas español, you can check out the whole series here. The second part is on memory disorders and the third is on mental illness.

I’ll post more on Mind Hacks when the other parts with English subtitles appear. Wonderful stuff.

Link to ‘Refurbished Brains’ episode with English subtitles.
Link to whole series in Spanish.

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