Woman uses brain implant to stimulate her brain’s pleasure center, study reports

io9.com reports:

The 1986 case of a woman addicted to stimulating herself with a brain implant is chronicled in a scientific article from Pain journal called Compulsive thalamic self-stimulation: a case with metabolic, electrophysiologic and behavioral correlates.

The unnamed woman had been suffering from chronic pain… and had tried a number of drugs to deal with it. Though she was an alcoholic, doctors prescribed opium-based painkillers to her and she had been known to take more than her recommended dose. With her history of drug addiction, it’s easy to see why doctors would have imagined that a brain implant would be the best course of action for the treatment of her chronic pain. Little did they know that the woman would become addicted to that, too…

Internet use does not increase social isolation, study finds

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a new report, available here, that examines the relationship between Internet use and social isolation. The reports abstract is as follows:

This report adds new insights to an ongoing debate about the extent of social isolation in America. A widely-reported 2006 study argued that since 1985 Americans have become more socially isolated, the size of their discussion networks has declined, and the diversity of those people with whom they discuss important matters has decreased. In particular, the study found that Americans have fewer close ties to those from their neighborhoods and from voluntary associations. Sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew Brashears suggest that new technologies, such as the internet and mobile phone, may play a role in advancing this trend. Specifically, they argue that the type of social ties supported by these technologies are relatively weak and geographically dispersed, not the strong, often locally-based ties that tend to be a part of peoples’ core discussion network. They depicted the rise of internet and mobile phones as one of the major trends that pulls people away from traditional social settings, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, and public spaces that have been associated with large and diverse core networks…

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

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).

The “new science of learning”

The journal Science has published a paper on a developing “new science of learning.” The article’s abstract states:

Human learning is distinguished by the range and complexity of skills that can be learned and the degree of abstraction that can be achieved compared with those of other species. Homo sapiens is also the only species that has developed formal ways to enhance learning: teachers, schools, and curricula. Human infants have an intense interest in people and their behavior and possess powerful implicit learning mechanisms that are affected by social interaction. Neuroscientists are beginning to understand the brain mechanisms underlying learning and how shared brain systems for perception and action support social learning. Machine learning algorithms are being developed that allow robots and computers to learn autonomously. New insights from many different fields are converging to create a new science of learning that may transform educational practices.

The article is available here (subscription required). Science Daily has a summary of the article here.

Note: this is cross-posted with my Education Blog.

Changing emotion with gaming simulations

Note: this is cross-posted with my Education Blog.

Science Daily reports:

Social problems like bullying and stereotyping involve thoughts, feelings and reactions that resist change. New research shows that when students play active roles in virtual dramas their attitudes and behaviour can change.

In 2006, a group of European educators, psychologists and IT specialists realised that emotionally driven problems, such as bullying, stereotyping and scapegoating demanded emotionally compelling interventions.

The researchers set out to create virtual worlds with characters that children could interact and empathise with powerfully enough to change their own attitudes and behaviour.

The EU-funded research project eCIRCUS (Education through Characters with emotional-Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction) has now produced two programs – FearNot! and ORIENT – that give students helpful roles in interactive virtual worlds, where they can learn to change their thoughts, feelings and actions.

Finding new ways to resolve such problems is important, says eCIRCUS coordinator Ruth Aylett, because they are pervasive, hurtful, and can cause lasting psychological damage.

“Knowledge-based interventions don’t necessarily succeed,” says Aylett. “If we’re able to reduce victimisation, we’re giving people a way to get out of a very painful situation and improve the quality of their lives.”

FearNot! – help for bullied children

The eCIRCUS researchers first focused on primary school children who were the victims of bullying. They drew on recent psychological theories that highlight the importance of feelings for changing how people treat each other.

“Emotion is an essential part of human interaction,” says Aylett, “so education about human social interaction must include feelings.”

The theories led them to expect that if they could get children to empathise with and try to help victims of bullying in a virtual world, the children could try out different strategies, experience the results, and develop better ways to deal with bullying in their own lives.

The researchers used a computer program, called FearNot! (Fun with Empathic Agents to Achieve Novel Outcomes in Teaching), that had been developed as an initial small prototype by an earlier European research effort called VICTEC.

The eCIRCUS team made FearNot! much richer in content and more open-ended. For example, they provided virtual bullying victims with the ability to remember strategies that they have tried. Those memories allow the virtual characters to reject approaches that have failed and ask the children who are helping them in the simulation to come up with better ideas.

“We are the first people to produce software for dealing with bullying that is not pre-scripted,” says Aylett. “We’ve produced something that is genuinely interactive to the individual responses of each child.”

To test the effectiveness of FearNot!, the eCIRCUS team tried it out with close to 1000 students in 30 primary schools across Germany and the UK.

The researchers tested FearNot! by comparing a group of users and a control group of non-users, similar to the method used for testing medical treatments.

Students in selected classes spent a total of 1.5 hours playing FearNot! over the course of three weeks.

The results were encouraging. “It definitely reduces victimisation in the short term,” says Aylett. “It has a significant positive effect even at this low exposure.”

Although further work is needed to demonstrate long-term effects, Aylett is confident that if all the children in a school experienced FearNot! over a longer term, and as part of a social learning curriculum, bullying and victimisation would be reduced.

“FearNot! has achieved its objectives very well,” says Aylett. “You’d need a games or educational software company to take it further.”

ORIENT – empathising with newcomers

While FearNot! has younger children interacting with cartoon-like characters in a simple world, ORIENT immerses older students in a much more vivid and complex virtual world, where they learn to empathise with and accept newcomers from other cultures.

In ORIENT, three students are equipped with various handheld control devices and “beamed down” as a team to save the planet Orient.

Planet Orient is populated by aliens called Sprytes, who look rather like large bipedal tree frogs and who have their own language and customs. Students have to learn a lot about the Sprytes and empathise with them in order to help them.

“We wanted users to feel adrift in this alien culture,” says Aylett. “How can you empathise with new people in your own culture if you’ve never experienced being adrift yourself?”

The software that shapes what happens as students interact with the Sprytes acts like the director of an improvisational drama. The software starts and ends scenes, chooses which characters appear, and can impose challenges such as a storm.

Each Spryte has its own goals, feelings and memories that control what it does and that can change based on experience. The interaction between the Sprytes and the students produces an unpredictable “emergent narrative”.

“There’s no fixed plot,” says Aylett. “Our characters are acting autonomously, making up their minds as they go.”

According to Aylett, students standing in front of a large screen and interacting with these psychologically believable aliens soon respond as if they were real. “ORIENT produces the feeling of really being there,” she says.

Although ORIENT needs further development and testing, Aylett believes it has the potential to help solve a major social problem by spurring students to change their attitudes toward students from other cultures.

“It’s the attitudes of the host community that can either make new students welcome or make their lives miserable,” she says.

Social problems like bullying and stereotyping involve thoughts, feelings and reactions that resist change. New research shows that when students play active roles in virtual dramas their attitudes and behaviour can change.

In 2006, a group of European educators, psychologists and IT specialists realised that emotionally driven problems, such as bullying, stereotyping and scapegoating demanded emotionally compelling interventions.

The EU-funded research project eCIRCUS (Education through Characters with emotional-Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction) has now produced two programs – FearNot! and ORIENT – that give students helpful roles in interactive virtual worlds, where they can learn to change their thoughts, feelings and actions.

The eCircus Web site is here.

Can watching TV hurt children’s language development?

USA Today reports:

For every hour in front of the TV, parents spoke 770 fewer words to children, according to a study of 329 children, ages 2 months to 4 years, in the June issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Adults usually speak about 941 words an hour.

Children vocalized less, too, says author Dimitri Christakis of the Seattle Children’s Research Institute. In some cases, parents may have spoken less because they sat a child in front of a TV and left the room, he says. In others, parents simply zoned out themselves while watching TV with a child. Researchers didn’t note the content of the TV shows.

 

The study is available here.

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.

New study probes relationship between poverty, life stress, and intelligence

USA Today reports:

“Family income is a strong and consistent predictor,” of test scores, school grades and education, say a Cornell University study in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. “The longer the childhood exposure to poverty, the worse the achievement levels become.”

Although a “large, robust literature” stretching back more than a decade describes this observation, study authors Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg note there is no biological explanation for it. Why does poverty have this effect?

To find an answer, the pair looked at 195 men who were part of a long-term study of rural poverty. The study included health records and income. In 2006, about 22% of all children nationwide lived below the poverty line, living on less than $21,200 for a family of four, according to the federal Department of Health and Human Services. (About 18% of people worldwide live below the international poverty line of $1 a day, according to Princeton economist Alan Krueger.)

“The proportion of early childhood spent in poverty is also significantly related to working memory,” finds the study, perhaps not surprising. But when the researchers went back and looked at the men’s health records, the relationship between poverty and memory dissolved, revealing their health — as reflected in blood pressure, obesity and stress hormone measures — are factored in. What looks like an income effect is actually a public health problem.

The Evans & Schamberg report can be accessed 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.