Last week the Dalai Lama addressed an Irish audience at the University of Limerick and he spoke of the need for more neuroscientific research into emotions and the health benefits of cultivating a more compassionate and loving outlook in life.
In this video, His Holiness, gives his inaugural address at the 16th Convention of Acadamecia Eurasiana Neurochirugica in Mumbai, India, on February 18th, 2011.
THE LATEST OECD survey reveals that almost one-quarter of Irish 15-year-olds are below the level of literacy needed to participate effectively in society. How can this be after unprecedented investment in Irish schools in the past decade?*
Research in neuroeducation – the brain science of learning – suggests that something is lost in switching from book to computer screen, and from pen to keyboard. Neuroeducation may help to explain the reported decline in literary – particularly writing – skills observed in students over the past decade.
When it comes to learning – the pen is mightier than the keyboard
Do you remember that diary you so assiduously kept or that pen pal you wrote to? Little did you know then, but the mere act of picking up a pen and writing makes you smarter. The answer may be that reading and writing involves a number of the senses. When writing by hand, our brain receives feedback from our motor actions, together with the sensation of manipulating the pencil to form words on paper. This nerve activity is significantly different from those we receive when touching and typing on a keyboard. This explains why a written signature carries so much weight in the legal and business world – because it reflects the wiring unique to that brain.
The knack to learning is – learning by doing
The trick to all learning is to create an enriched physical learning environment by employing as many of the five senses as possible – seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling – in your learning. Thus, when writing by hand, the movements involved leave behind a kind of motor memory in the sensorimotor part of the brain, which helps us recognize letters. This implies a nerve connection between reading and writing, and suggests that the sensorimotor system plays a role in the process of visual recognition during reading. This nerve connection is weak or absent in keyboard typing.
Work it out – with pen and paper
In addition, writing involves more ‘doing’ than that observed for keyboard typing and the ‘doing’ actually reinforces the learning process by helping us focus on the task at hand and strengthening the nerve connections. Furthermore, brain scans of avid writers show an activation of Brocas area – a language centre within the brain – while little or no activation of this area is observed in those who had learned by typing on keyboards.
Awaken the living roots in your head – with your pen
The poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney – a master craftsman of the written word – was not far off the mark in his poem ‘Digging’. The poem takes the form of a promise from the poet to his father and grandfather, whose lives were, spent literally digging the soil. In this short poem Heaney acknowledges that he is not a farmer, and will not follow their vocation. But at the start of his career, he vows to translate their virtues into another kind of work:
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
*Irish students drop in rankings for literacy and maths, Irish Times, Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Google Tech Talks
September 16, 2008
ABSTRACT
The ability to recognize and work with different emotions is fundamental to psychological flexibility and well-being. Neuroscience has contributed to the understanding of the neural bases of emotion, emotion regulation, and emotional intelligence, and has begun to elucidate the brain mechanisms involved in emotion processing. Of great interest is the degree to which these mechanisms demonstrate neuroplasticity in both anatomical and functional levels of the brain.
Speaker: Dr. Phillippe Goldin
In a new study, participants who received electrical stimulation of the anterior temporal lobes were three times as likely to reach the fresh insight necessary to solve a difficult, unfamiliar problem than those in the control group. (Credit: iStockphoto/Andrey Volodin)
In this week’s round-up of the latest discoveries in the field of neuroscience – electric thinking caps, shrinking brains, brain controlled bionic arms, expanding memories..and much more.
Are we on the verge of being able to stimulate the brain to see the world anew with an electric thinking cap? Research by Richard Chi and Allan Snyder from the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney suggests that this could be the case.
Human brains have shrunk over the past 30,000 years, but it is not a sign of decreasing intelligence, according to scientists who suggest that evolution is making the key motor leaner and more efficient in an increasing population.
The LA Times reports that the FDA are about to test a brain-controlled prosthetic arm. The arm system, developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, uses a microchip implanted in the brain to record and decode signals to neurons that control muscles linked to the prosthesis.
Interesting abstract in the New Scientist which shows that just as gardeners prune unwanted growths from flowers, the brain has its own molecular secateurs for trimming back unwanted connections.
Researchers have identified a protein that appears vital for forming the right kind of connections in the rapidly growing brain of newborn babies.
New research by scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London provides evidence that the cerebellum, a part of the brain used to store memories for skilled movements, could also store memories important for mental skills
Research conducted with deaf people in Nicaragua shows that language may play an important role in learning the meanings of numbers.
In the Neuroscience of Resilience, Lisa Brookes Kift is asking the question what does the brain and neuroscience have to do with building up our resilience?
Finally, if you do just one thing this weekend, make it a walk. A report in the New York Times this week reveals that taking a walk may expand the hippocampus – a part of the brain important to the formation of memories. In healthy adults, the hippocampus begins to atrophy around 55 or 60. So get your walking shoes on this weekend!
People’s brains are more responsive to friends than to strangers, even if the stranger has more in common, according to a study in the Oct. 13 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.
In Time magazine’s What Your Brain Looks Like After 20 Years of Marriage, Belinda Luscomb has been taking a look at the neuroscience of love.
And speaking of love, new research has also found that falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second!
And what exactly is going on in your brain if you are looking back with nostalgia at past loves? I came across a fascinating article on the neuroscience of nostalgia and memories.
Now a question for you? How many of you feel you have lost the art of writing by hand, now that we are all so computer literate these days? Associate professor Anne Mangen at the University of Stavanger’s Reading Centre asks if something is lost in switching from book to computer screen, and from pen to keyboard and discovers that writing by hand does indeed strengthen the learning process.
I came across this 3D animation showing the anatomy and function of the brain – an excellent primer for brain beginners.
Do you gesture while you talk? These gestures seem to be important to how we think. They provide a visual clue to our thoughts and, a new theory suggests, may even change our thoughts by grounding them in action.
In how the brain shops, we have an exploration of the neurons associated with valuing objects, and on a related theme, A.K. Pradeep’s Marketing to Women examines how women shop using their instinct.
An interesting study from Dehaene et al.
on how reading rewires the brain
Latest research shows that emotional stress can change brain function. A single exposure to acute stress affected information processing in the cerebellum — the area of the brain responsible for motor control and movement coordination and also involved in learning and memory formation.
Neuroscientists at MIT’s Picower Institute of Learning and Memory have uncovered why relatively minor details of an episode are sometimes inexplicably linked to long-term memories.
Finally, are you feeling a little bored? Well new research suggests that it is not just in your head. Individual differences in sensitivity to reward, for example, are another important factor.
I am interested in ongoing research focusing on the effects of music training on the nervous system, and have given some talks on the subject over the past few years. It is also very interesting to note from recent studies that music training has implications for neuroeducation.
Research from Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory strongly suggests that an active engagement with musical sounds not only enhances neuroplasticity, but also enables the nervous system to provide the stable scaffolding of meaningful patterns so important to learning.
According to Northwestern’s Professor Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory “The brain is unable to process all of the available sensory information from second to second, and thus must selectively enhance what is relevant,” Kraus said. Playing an instrument primes the brain to choose what is relevant in a complex process that may involve reading or remembering a score, timing issues and coordination with other musicians.”
Again, I am most interested to note that in Northwestern’s research shows that children who are musically trained have a better vocabulary and reading ability than children who did not receive music training.
Furthermore Professor Kraus says that “Music training seems to strengthen the same neural processes that often are deficient in individuals with developmental dyslexia or who have difficulty hearing speech in noise.”
Professor Kraus argues for proper investment of resources in music training in schools: “The effect of music training suggests that, akin to physical exercise and its impact on body fitness, music is a resource that tones the brain for auditory fitness and thus requires society to re-examine the role of music in shaping individual development. ”
“Music training for the development of auditory skills,” by Nina Kraus and Bharath Chandrasekaran, will be published July 20 in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
Would you take a pill to erase bad memories?
New Year is traditionally a time for many people to make a resolution to give up smoking. The smoking cessation medications bupropion and varenicline may both be associated with changes in the way the brain reacts to smoking cues, making it easier for patients to resist cravings, according to two reports posted online that will appear in the May print issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
If you are a parent of a teen going through puberty you will know all about the hormonal changes they go through. Now, a Georgia State University scientist has found that those hormones in males may be key to changes in a part of the brain responsible for social behaviors.
It will take some time for those teen brains to develop fully though, as we know now from new research that the brain continues to develop after childhood and puberty, and is not fully developed until people are well into their 30s and 40s. The findings contradict current theories that the brain matures much earlier.
And still on the subject of teenagers, PBS science correspondent, Miles O’Brien looks at what could be happening to teenage brains as they develop in a rapid-fire world of technology and gadgets.
Finally, if you have ever watched the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you will have seen the fictional characters played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet use a technique to erase memories of each other when their relationship turns sour. It will have seemed an unreal expectation that we could erase memories so easily, but new research on “erasing” traumatic memories is quickly moving from the realm of science fiction to scientifically backed reality.
Introducing a new feature today – a weekly round-up of the best of the neuroscience news and views and latest research which has caught my attention.
You are probably familiar with the lyrics of James Taylor’s “You’ve got a friend” and indeed “ain’t it good to know you’ve got a friend when nothing’s going your way.”
But did you know that you have a friend you can call on who is with you all the time?
Say hello to your amydgala – your very own social satnav and your faithful friend.
So what is this amygdala and what role does it play in forming friendships and widening your social network?
Your amydgala
Deep down in our reptilian brain lies a small thumbnail-sized structure with a name derived from the Greek word for almond. The amygdala has long been linked with a person’s mental and emotional state – in particular an emotional response – often an instant reaction – to something presently happening such as a perceived threat including the behaviours of escape and avoidance.
The bull who would not charge
As far back as the 1950’s a Spanish neuroscientist called Delgado used a tiny radio frequency stimulator implanted into the amygdala – the activation of which produced a variety of effects, including pleasant sensations. Delgado’s most famous experiment occurred at a Cordoba bull breeding ranch where he stepped into the ring with a bull which had a stimulator already implanted in the amygdala. The bull charged Delgado, who then pressed a remote control button which caused the bull to lose its aggressive instinct and to stop its charge. The bull incident was widely mentioned in the popular media at the time.
The amygdala alerts you to danger
In another important study – when brain images were recorded while persons were shown emotionally upsetting films, such as plane crashes or killer whales dismembering and eating baby seals and increase in the activity of the amygdala was observed suggesting that it is involved in storing memories for emotional events. Over the past 10 years neuroscientists have discovered that for it small size the amygdala is very complex with connections to and from many other brain regions and plays a protective role primarily involved in protection, moving us away from potentially dangerous situations.
You’ve got a friend in your amygdala
In a social situation the amygdala processes reactions to violations concerning personal space. These reactions are absent in persons in whom the amygdala is damaged. Furthermore, the amygdala is found to be activated in when people observe that others are physically close to them, such as when a person being brain scanned knows that an experimenter is standing immediately next to the scanner, versus standing at a distance.
Behold the next big thing in social networking…the amygdala!
In interesting research published recently in the Journal, Nature Neuroscience it has been shown that the size of your amygdala correlates with the size of your social network – taking the role of the amygdala in social interaction to another level. As a social species a larger amygdala gives us more options to manage our complex social lives – helping us to get along while getting ahead.
Thus jobs involving meeting people such as shopkeepers – who may interact with hundreds people including customers, suppliers and employes in an average day – will develop a larger and more intricately wired amygdala than say someone in solitary confinement.
All this points back to a fundamental finding in neuroscience – your brain is plastic. So the message is simple – you need to meet as many people as possible if you want a rich and varied social life. You may not get along with everyone but as you learn and persist your amygdala will become your very own on-board social satnav.
inside-the-brain.com 
