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I'm finally beginning to write down some of the experiences from last weekend.
On Friday I went to a talk by Michael Merzenich at the monthly Future Salon in Palo Alto. He made the rather bold claim that many types of age-related cognitive decline and developmental mental disabilities are reversible with the right brain training.
His colleagues have been doing studies on rats' audio cortexes. During development, brains tend to adapt to be as good as possible at distinguishing between the different stimuli that they hear/see/feel. If a rat grows up only hearing white noise, it will be unable to distinguish high pitch sounds from low pitch sounds. Its audio cortex will be totally insensitive to frequency. (Normal rats have no trouble distinguishing frequencies) The prevailing research would say that the critical period for audio cortex development occurs in infancy and thus the white noise rats would never be able to regain normal hearing. However, he found that by carefully giving the adult rat pitch discrimination tasks that gradually increased in difficulty, he could help the rats gain normal hearing again. He did similar things to prevent the age-related decline of hearing in old rats.
Interestingly, the tasks for training the brain sound a lot like a well-designed computer game, with a gradual challenge ramp that prevents the player from either getting frustrated because it's too hard or bored because it's too easy.
He's been developing software to help people. Apparently one of the big issues older drivers face is a gradual loss of peripheral vision. It turns out that this loss is due to neglect -- they simply aren't doing enough, neurologically speaking, with their peripheral vision so it begins to atrophy. He now has software to help retrain people to use peripheral vision, and a study found that this retraining cut the accident rate by 50% in older drivers. This is hugely impressive.
Apparently older people also have trouble tracking lots of objects at once, which can lead to degraded driving performance. He has a task to train up that skill as well, and the game for that task is online. I only played for about five minutes, as tracking lots of objects is not something I have a huge problem with at the moment.
Have a go: After five minutes I usually could track six jewel-fish.
http://www.positscience.com/our-products/demo
Unfortunately, his software is very expensive, and while the target audience (older people) may not notice how rough the software quality is, I did. Perhaps I'm just snooty. http://www.positscience.com/
Michael also claims that he's working on using similar methods to reduce ADD/ADHD, autism, behavioral disorders, and numerous other things that are usually treated with pharmaceuticals. It'll be interesting to see what the tasks look like. The only games I've seen for teaching social skills (eg Facade) tend to be too crude and inflexible.
There is another company ( http://www.lumosity.com/ ) that offers a range of web-based brain training tasks for substantially less $. However, a supposedly independent site (SharpBrains) claims the research backing behind Posit is stronger.
Michael's talk also covered a wide variety of other areas. He is concerned that modern society is causing us to get dumber (in fairly subtle ways) as our machines get smarter. He thinks it's healthy for people to be exposed to a wide vairety of integrated sensory stimuli. Thus, sitting at an office desk for eight hours a day enables us to do a lot of things but is depriving our bodies of audio, face-to-face social, tactile, and peripheral visual stimuli. He encourages people to seek out the richest and most stimulating environments thet can. This fits in well with my personal plan to pick up lots of new physical skills as an adult (snowboarding, motorcycle riding etc).
He also talked about attachment issues between parents and children, noting that children who grow up in lower classes tend to talk to their kids less, and when they do it's often criticism instead of praise. This leads to reduced verbal development and attachment disorders. He wants to start a program to educate parents on how to raise children in a rich and stimulating environment as well as come up with techniques for reversing these disorders.
He further pointed out that the lack of a robust paid maternity/paternity leave system in the US is basically damaging future generations because we, as a society, are not giving parents a chance to form the critically important bonds with their infant children that are necessary for proper development. Even from a pure cold-hearted economic perspective, the loss in tax revenue from having additional paid maternity/paternity leave is likely more than offset by the increased eventual salary of well-raised children.
Interesting stuff.
On Friday I went to a talk by Michael Merzenich at the monthly Future Salon in Palo Alto. He made the rather bold claim that many types of age-related cognitive decline and developmental mental disabilities are reversible with the right brain training.
His colleagues have been doing studies on rats' audio cortexes. During development, brains tend to adapt to be as good as possible at distinguishing between the different stimuli that they hear/see/feel. If a rat grows up only hearing white noise, it will be unable to distinguish high pitch sounds from low pitch sounds. Its audio cortex will be totally insensitive to frequency. (Normal rats have no trouble distinguishing frequencies) The prevailing research would say that the critical period for audio cortex development occurs in infancy and thus the white noise rats would never be able to regain normal hearing. However, he found that by carefully giving the adult rat pitch discrimination tasks that gradually increased in difficulty, he could help the rats gain normal hearing again. He did similar things to prevent the age-related decline of hearing in old rats.
Interestingly, the tasks for training the brain sound a lot like a well-designed computer game, with a gradual challenge ramp that prevents the player from either getting frustrated because it's too hard or bored because it's too easy.
He's been developing software to help people. Apparently one of the big issues older drivers face is a gradual loss of peripheral vision. It turns out that this loss is due to neglect -- they simply aren't doing enough, neurologically speaking, with their peripheral vision so it begins to atrophy. He now has software to help retrain people to use peripheral vision, and a study found that this retraining cut the accident rate by 50% in older drivers. This is hugely impressive.
Apparently older people also have trouble tracking lots of objects at once, which can lead to degraded driving performance. He has a task to train up that skill as well, and the game for that task is online. I only played for about five minutes, as tracking lots of objects is not something I have a huge problem with at the moment.
Have a go: After five minutes I usually could track six jewel-fish.
http://www.positscience.com/our-products/demo
Unfortunately, his software is very expensive, and while the target audience (older people) may not notice how rough the software quality is, I did. Perhaps I'm just snooty. http://www.positscience.com/
Michael also claims that he's working on using similar methods to reduce ADD/ADHD, autism, behavioral disorders, and numerous other things that are usually treated with pharmaceuticals. It'll be interesting to see what the tasks look like. The only games I've seen for teaching social skills (eg Facade) tend to be too crude and inflexible.
There is another company ( http://www.lumosity.com/ ) that offers a range of web-based brain training tasks for substantially less $. However, a supposedly independent site (SharpBrains) claims the research backing behind Posit is stronger.
Michael's talk also covered a wide variety of other areas. He is concerned that modern society is causing us to get dumber (in fairly subtle ways) as our machines get smarter. He thinks it's healthy for people to be exposed to a wide vairety of integrated sensory stimuli. Thus, sitting at an office desk for eight hours a day enables us to do a lot of things but is depriving our bodies of audio, face-to-face social, tactile, and peripheral visual stimuli. He encourages people to seek out the richest and most stimulating environments thet can. This fits in well with my personal plan to pick up lots of new physical skills as an adult (snowboarding, motorcycle riding etc).
He also talked about attachment issues between parents and children, noting that children who grow up in lower classes tend to talk to their kids less, and when they do it's often criticism instead of praise. This leads to reduced verbal development and attachment disorders. He wants to start a program to educate parents on how to raise children in a rich and stimulating environment as well as come up with techniques for reversing these disorders.
He further pointed out that the lack of a robust paid maternity/paternity leave system in the US is basically damaging future generations because we, as a society, are not giving parents a chance to form the critically important bonds with their infant children that are necessary for proper development. Even from a pure cold-hearted economic perspective, the loss in tax revenue from having additional paid maternity/paternity leave is likely more than offset by the increased eventual salary of well-raised children.
Interesting stuff.
