Efficient Learning via Brain Priming

Externally modulating the brain's activity can boost its performance. The easiest way to manipulate the brain is through transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which involves applying electrodes directly to the head to influence neuron activity with an electric current.

Roi Cohen Kadosh's team at the University of Oxford showed last year that targeting tDCS at the brain's right parietal lobe can boost a person's arithmetic ability - the effects were still apparent six months after the tDCS session (newscientist.com/article/dn19679).

More recently, Richard Chi and Allan Snyder at the University of Sydney, Australia, demonstrated that tDCS can improve a person's insight. The pair applied tDCS to volunteers' anterior frontal lobes - regions known to play a role in how we perceive the world - and found the participants were three times as likely as normal to complete a problem-solving task (newscientist.com/article/dn20080).

Brain stimulation can also boost a person's learning abilities, according to Agnes Flöel's team at the University of Münster in Germany. Twenty minutes of tDCS to a part of the brain called the left perisylvian area was enough to speed up and improve language learning in a group of 19 volunteers (Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2008.20098).

Using the same technique to stimulate the brain's motor cortex, meanwhile, can enhance a person's ability to learn a movement-based skill (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0805413106). _NS

In traditional learning psychology, the term "priming" often refers to the concept of "implicit learning (PDF)," where unconscious associations between mental objects often aids recall and memory. But in a larger sense, priming can refer to a wide array of methods to prime the brain for more efficient learning. As mentioned above, different types of direct electromagnetic brain stimulation can serve as "priming" stimuli.

A person can learn to prime the brain for efficient learning to the point where he can eventually dispense with the hardware, once he develops the knack -- using feedback.

Gabrieli and his colleagues used functional MRI scanning to monitor the naturally fluctuating brain activity of 20 volunteers and investigate whether the brain enters such a learning state. While in the scanner, each person was presented with 250 images, one at a time, and asked to memorise them. The volunteers were shown the images again 2 hours later - mixed in with 250 new ones - and asked to remember which they had seen before.

Looking through the results, the team was surprised to find that in the moments before individuals were shown images that they later remembered, they had low levels of activity in the parahippocampal place area - a region of the brain that is known to be highly active during learning. "Maybe the fact that this region was less active meant that the deck was cleared - that it was more open for a stimulus to provoke a response," suggests Gabrieli.

To investigate further, the team attempted to boost subsequent participants' memory test scores by presenting them with images only when they showed this pattern of brain activity. "There was around a 30 per cent improvement in the memory task," Gabrieli says (NeuroImage, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.07.063).

The MIT team is now working on a way to monitor this "preparedness to learn" using electroencephalography (EEG) - a more portable and much cheaper brain-monitoring technique. Gabrieli's idea is to make learning more efficient by selectively teaching the prepared brain. "You could imagine a computer-based learning system which would stop when the brain is not prepared to learn and restart when it is," he says. _NS

The MIT researchers are able to detect when the brain is ready to learn, by using MRI and EEG. But individuals can teach themselves to detect this "learning readiness state" using neurofeedback.

Using neurofeedback, subjects not only can learn to detect their learning readiness states, but they can learn to actively shift their brain into more efficient learning modes on command. Eventually they can master the skill well enough to do it without the expensive equipment.

This is a type of individual empowerment which is potentially revolutionary and disruptive to society at large. It is particularly threatenting to a power structure which has worked so hard to dominate most levels of academia, media, political agencies, and conventional culture and thought.

Imagine, individuals who are more creative, learn better, can master physical skills more quickly -- and are likely to grow more independent from the herd. It will be interesting to watch these developments.

A Fresh Approach to Foreign Language Learning

Learning languages is fun and easy -- if you are a small child. If, on the other hand, you have allowed your critical window of language development to close without having learned multiple languages, you have a serious challenge to face in trying to add languages to your verbal repertoire. But a new team of learning gurus are in town, and they aim to make language learning fun and easy again, even for you old codgers who are long past your peaks!

A world memory champion and a neuroscientist have joined forces to create a language-learning website called Memrise, which combines mnemonic tricks with a game to help users learn quickly and efficiently. Its carefully paced learning structure and competitive points system, the app's developers believe, make their site more effective than other language-learning tools.

Memrise makes learning a game with virtual gardens that users must tend. As they do, they also earn points and thereby fight their way up a community-wide leaderboard.

Mandarin Chinese and English are the only languages that have been rolled out yet, but others including French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Arabic can be used in beta form.

...The premise is that each word or phrase is a seed for users to plant in their gardens. A new word is planted when a user is exposed to it. Once planted, the seed sprouts in a few hours and must be harvested—that is, the user is tested, typically by having to type out words or choose characters, depending on the language. With each success, a plant is moved to a greenhouse, where it will thrive or wilt depending on how well the user tends it by practicing with the word.

"Learning should always be emotional; you should always be delighted and proud of what you've learned,

" says Memrise cofounder and memory champion Ed Cooke. That's where many language-learning aids lose users, he says—the presentation fails to engage users and make them want to learn.

The Memrise learning method is based on three principles. The first, Cooke says, is one of the most important aspects of memory training: vivid encoding. In order to recall otherwise arbitrary words, the user's brain benefits from connecting them to an image. The more associations to a word the user makes, the quicker and clearer the recall. Memrise provides some associations for users—the Chinese character for "man," for example, transforms into a cartoon drawing of a man. But it also encourages users to submit their own verbal mnemonics. For instance, in one French session, the phrase "une boucle" (which means "a loop" in English) is paired with a user-submitted mnemonic about a roller coaster: "I hope they boucle us in securely. This roller coaster has so many loops."

The second principle of Memrise's approach is to remind users systematically. Using an algorithm developed by neuroscientist and cofounder Greg Detre, the app is designed so "plants," or words, wilt when not tended to. The user interface tells users which plants are wilting, a problem they can remedy by "watering," or repeated testing. Reminders pop up when a user is most likely to forget new words, rather than at random intervals.

The final Memrise principle is adaptive testing, which means that questions vary in difficulty according to the user's performance. "Other language sites get this wrong," says Cooke. "It's really important that you test these memories at the right time and in the right way." _TechnologyReview

In an age where machine language translation devices are growing on trees, one might wonder why humans would take the trouble to fill their minds with foreign sounding words and phrases when machines could do the work for them. And yet there is that "use it or lose it" dynamic at work, where entire parts of the brain are taken over by other -- perhaps more mundane -- tasks if certain skills and abilities are not exercised or learned.

Humans have not yet begun to learn how to use their brains. Research into memory and learning is helping to slowly unwrap the marvelous present so carefully packed and perched on a stalk above our shoulders. But most people will not want to take the trouble, when there are so many mind-numbing ways of killing time out there.

The choice between the next level and the Idiocracy is made on a daily and sometimes hourly basis.

Objective Testing of Individual Learning Capacity

Researchers collected brain imaging data from people performing a motor task, and then analysed this data using new computational techniques. They found evidence that the 'flexibility' of a person's brain - how much different areas of the brain link up in different combinations; essentially 'swapping partners' - can be used to predict how fast someone will learn. _PO

PO
Scientists are developing better tools for testing human cognitive capacity objectively. In a recent study featuring an international scientific team from Oxford University, UC Santa Barbara, and UNC Chapel Hill, sophisticated brain imaging techniques were used to predict how quickly individuals could learn particular motor tasks.

The new study uses computational methods developed to analyze what the researchers call multilayer networks, in which each layer might represent a network at one snapshot in time, or a different set of connections between the same set of brain regions. These layers are combined into a larger mathematical object, which can contain a potentially huge amount of data and is difficult to analyze. Previous methods could only deal with each layer separately.

..."Parts of the brain communicate with one another very strongly, so they form a sort of module of intercommunicating regions of the brain," said first author Danielle S. Bassett, postdoctoral fellow in physics at UC Santa Barbara. "In this way, brain activity can segregate into multiple functional modules. What we wanted to measure is how fluid those modules are."

Bassett explained that there are flexible brain regions with allegiances that change through time. "That flexibility seems to be the factor that predicts learning," said Bassett. "So, if you are very flexible, then you will end up learning better on the second day, and if you are not very flexible, then you learn less." _PO

The ability to objectively measure cognitive capacity using brain imaging, bypasses most of the problems identified with IQ testing. During a brain imaging session, the person does not necessarily know what is being measured, and could not likely influence the measured outcome even if he tried -- short of withholding cooperation entirely. And that would be quite obvious to observers.

With the ability to objectively measure cognitive capacity, we are faced with a "put up or shut up" moment. If scientists seriously want to accurately measure group differences in IQ and cognitive ability, they now have the tools to do so. But if they only want to shout down opposing viewpoints without doing the work to get to the heart of the matter -- they will continue to shout, grouse, whine, and grumble. Which is it to be?

Getting to the Bottom of IQ Differences

The old IQ comparison studies that looked merely at skull size or head circumference as proxies for brain size, have been superceded by more advanced brain imaging capable of precise measurements of whole brain, total grey matter, total white matter, specific brain centers, and specific brain pathways and networks. These volumes are, to a large extent, under genetic control. A new era in comparing group IQs is dawning, thanks to advanced brain imaging and matching analysis of brain genetics. And a new era in improving gene expression relating to cognition is near to dawning -- as long as the key research is carried out and not obstructed out of a misguided sense of "political correctness."

Brain size as measured by MRI correlates highly with IQ. Specific brain networks and brain centers are even more highly correlated to IQ than gross brain size. In fact, a particular type of MRI analysis -- diffusion tensor imaging -- may supersede traditional IQ tests as the most objective means of testing IQ.

Anyone who truly wants to get to the bottom of the question of IQ differences between population groupings, will want to see the best designed, executed, and analysed research possible done on the subject. Anyone who is afraid of having such research done, does not truly want the question answered, and is lying to himself and everyone else when he claims that "there are no IQ differences, and even if there were it wouldn't matter!" Such persons' voices should be ignored as mere noise by all of those committed to finding the best answers to important questions.

A recent UK study at UCL Institute of Child Health, finds that teens who were delivered premature at birth have significantly lower brain white matter and IQ. (Abstract Annals of Neurology) For this study, it would be helpful to match by ethnicity, sex, and SES.

Between species, a longer gestation and breast feeding, correlate with larger brains, higher cognition, and longer lifespan.

And on and on. As brain genetic expression is correlated with advanced brain imaging with greater precision, and further correlated with IQ (and executive function), the larger global picture of human brain development should become clearer. At that point it will be impossible to deny the glaringly obvious group differences in brain function, and how these differences manifest themselves on a societal and economic level.

Being an HBD denier is growing more untenable every day.