Internet use can “boost” brain function

Science Daily reports:

UCLA scientists… found that middle-aged and older adults with little Internet experience were able to trigger key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning after just one week of surfing the Web.

The findings, presented Oct. 19 at the 2009 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, suggest that Internet training can stimulate neural activation patterns and could potentially enhance brain function and cognition in older adults.

Is multitasking hazardous to your cognition?

CNN reports:

A new study suggests that people who often do multiple tasks in a variety of media — texting, instant messaging, online video watching, word processing, Web surfing, and more — do worse on tests in which they need to switch attention from one task to another than people who rarely multitask in this way.

Specifically, heavy multitaskers are more easily distracted by irrelevant information than those who aren’t constantly in a multimedia frenzy, according to the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One reason may be because the multitaskers tend to retain the distracting information in their short-term memory, which affects their ability to focus, compared with people who don’t check their e-mail while talking on the phone and sneaking in some online shopping.

The article is available here (subscription required).

New drug restores memories lost by Alzheimer’s patients

Science Daily reports:

A drug similar to one used in clinical trials for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis has been found to rescue memory in mice exhibiting Alzheimer’s symptoms.The discovery by UC Irvine scientists offers hope that a new treatment may be on the horizon for people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, the leading cause of elderly dementia afflicting more than 5 million people in the U.S. and for which no cure exists.

This finding seems to support the notion that memory is ‘hard wired’ into our brains but some kind of executive function is necessary to retrieve memory…

Reflections on the Implicit Association Test

NEWSWEEK’s Raina Kelley writes:

…I have spent the next 12 years leaving my purse wide open and at least six feet away from me. It’s my penance for having automatically assumed a black man in L.A. was a criminal. Being black doesn’t get me a pass on unconscious negative feelings about African-Americans or the shame we feel when they become conscious. We see the same cultural indicators as everybody else—back then, hours of riot footage, rap videos, and the O.J. trial had created an automatic connection in my mind between African-American Los Angelenos and danger.

So, I was actually excited to read about a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in which researchers from the University of Washington confirmed the validity of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT made a lot of news late last year when results showed that 70 percent of those who took it harbor an unconscious preference for white people over black people. And no, I’m not talking about 70 percent of white people—I mean people of all races who took it, including African-Americans.

The Implicit Association Test can be accessed here.

The influence of ’stereotype threat’ on cognition

TIME Magazine reports:

As explicit discrimination has receded in the last two decades, culminating in the elevation of an African-American to the Presidency, a woman to the House Speakership and a black woman to the galactic dominance known as being Oprah Winfrey, those who study the effects of racism and sexism have had to cope with a difficult question: If discrimination is less powerful, why do some groups in society continue to fare worse than others? Has bias merely become better hidden, or are there other forces at work?

One theory that has gained influence among sociologists is that some members of stigmatized groups, when faced with stressful situations, expect themselves to do worse — a prophecy that fulfills itself. These expectations, which can occur even in otherwise fair (or fair-seeming) situations — such as, say, a standardized test — produce stress and threaten cognitive function. The effect is called “stereotype threat,” and African-Americans, girls, even jocks have all been shown susceptible to stereotype threat.

As explicit discrimination has receded in the last two decades, culminating in the elevation of an African-American to the Presidency, a woman to the House Speakership and a black woman to the galactic dominance known as being Oprah Winfrey, those who study the effects of racism and sexism have had to cope with a difficult question: If discrimination is less powerful, why do some groups in society continue to fare worse than others? Has bias merely become better hidden, or are there other forces at work?

One theory that has gained influence among sociologists is that some members of stigmatized groups, when faced with stressful situations, expect themselves to do worse — a prophecy that fulfills itself. These expectations, which can occur even in otherwise fair (or fair-seeming) situations — such as, say, a standardized test — produce stress and threaten cognitive function. The effect is called “stereotype threat,” and African-Americans, girls, even jocks have all been shown susceptible to stereotype threat.

Are ‘neuro-enhancing’ drugs coming to a campus near you?

NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross reports:

In the modern world of busy schedules and busier lives, some people are turning to “neuro-enhancing” drugs to gain a competitive edge.

As journalist Margaret Talbot writes in the April 27 issue of The New Yorker magazine, a variety of students, professors and business people are taking drugs intended for attention deficit disorder, narcolepsy and epilepsy in an effort to enhance brain function and get ahead.

Talbot’s New Yorker article is available online here.

Social networking sites harm children’s brains, scientist claims

The Daily Mail reports:

Social networking websites are causing alarming changes in the brains of young users, an eminent scientist has warned.

Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo are said to shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centred.

The claims from neuroscientist Susan Greenfield will make disturbing reading for the millions whose social lives depend on logging on to their favourite websites each day.

But they will strike a chord with parents and teachers who complain that many youngsters lack the ability to communicate or concentrate away from their screens.

‘Gut instinct’ may draw upon unconscious memories, study suggests

LiveScience (via Yahoo! News) reports:

After conducting some unique memory and recognition tests, while also recording subjects’ brain waves, scientists conclude that some gut feelings are not just guesswork after all. Rather, we access memories we aren’t even aware we have.
“We may actually know more than we think we know in everyday situations, too,” said Ken Paller, professor of psychology at Northwestern University and co-researcher on the study. “Unconscious memory may come into play, for example, in recognizing the face of a perpetrator of a crime or the correct answer on a test. Or the choice from a horde of consumer products may be driven by memories that are quite alive on an unconscious level.”

Napping improves memory, study finds

From the AP (via MSNBC):

Interrupting sleep seriously disrupts memory-making, compelling new research suggests. But on the flip side, taking a nap may boost a sophisticated kind of memory that helps us see the big picture and get creative.

“Not only do we need to remember to sleep, but most certainly we sleep to remember,” is how Dr. William Fishbein, a cognitive neuroscientist at the City University of New York, put it at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last week.

The science of bad memories

From Live Science (via MSNBC):

Scientists may have found the glue that keeps fearful memories stuck in the brain, a discovery that could be useful in new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and post-traumatic stress disorder.

That glue seems to be a protein that is key to maintaining the structure of cells and also is essential to embryonic development, a new study suggests.