cognizingconsciousness:

Language Learning Makes the Brain Grow, Swedish Study Suggests

At the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy in the city of Uppsala, young people with a flair for languages go from having no knowledge of a language such as Arabic, Russian or Dari to speaking it fluently in the space of 13 months. From morning to evening, weekdays and weekends, the recruits study at a pace unlike on any other language course.

As a control group, the researchers used medicine and cognitive science students at Umeå University — students who also study hard, but not languages. Both groups were given MRI scans before and after a three-month period of intensive study. While the brain structure of the control group remained unchanged, specific parts of the brain of the language students grew. The parts that developed in size were the hippocampus, a deep-lying brain structure that is involved in learning new material and spatial navigation, and three areas in the cerebral cortex.

“We were surprised that different parts of the brain developed to different degrees depending on how well the students performed and how much effort they had had to put in to keep up with the course,” says Johan Mårtensson, a researcher in psychology at Lund University, Sweden.

Students with greater growth in the hippocampus and areas of the cerebral cortex related to language learning (superior temporal gyrus) had better language skills than the other students. In students who had to put more effort into their learning, greater growth was seen in an area of the motor region of the cerebral cortex (middle frontal gyrus). The areas of the brain in which the changes take place are thus linked to how easy one finds it to learn a language and development varies according to performance.

Previous research from other groups has indicated that Alzheimer’s disease has a later onset in bilingual or multilingual groups.

“Even if we cannot compare three months of intensive language study with a lifetime of being bilingual, there is a lot to suggest that learning languages is a good way to keep the brain in shape,” says Johan Mårtensson.

Gender stereotypes and nature vs. nurture

Leading neuroscientist Professor Simon Baron Cohen will be taking part in a debate at this year’s Cambridge Festival of Ideas on whether science has been used to promote gender stereotypes.

Neuroscientists have been criticised in recent books by feminist writers such as Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls for bolstering gender stereotypes.

Simon Baron Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, says critics who argue that gender difference is all a question of socialisation are in danger of oversimplifying the interaction of biology and experience. He says: “Some gender differences in the mind and behaviour may in part be the result of our biology (prenatal hormones and genes) interacting with our experience. The old nature vs. nurture debate is absurdly simplistic and a moderate position recognises the interaction of both.

He adds that he is wary of neuroscience research being used to bolster traditional gender stereotypes. He says: “The main goal of neuroscience is to understand the mind, and is certainly not to bolster traditional views.”

The aim of the Festival, which is in its fourth year, is to celebrate the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Most of the over 170 events running during the Festival are free, but some debates may need to be prebooked.

More information: www.cam.ac.uk/festivalofideas
*Gender differences: nature vs nurture takes place from 7.30-9pm at the Babbage Theatre, Downing Street on 30 October.

Rethinking Sleep

SOMETIME in the dark stretch of the night it happens. Perhaps it’s the chime of an incoming text message. Or your iPhone screen lights up to alert you to a new e-mail. Or you find yourself staring at the ceiling, replaying the day in your head. Next thing you know, you’re out of bed and engaged with the world, once again ignoring the often quoted fact that eight straight hours of sleep is essential.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Thanks in part to technology and its constant pinging and chiming, roughly 41 million people in the United States — nearly a third of all working adults — get six hours or fewer of sleep a night, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And sleep deprivation is an affliction that crosses economic lines. About 42 percent of workers in the mining industry are sleep-deprived, while about 27 percent of financial or insurance industry workers share the same complaint.

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Google simulates brain networks to recognize speech and images

This summer Google set a new landmark in the field of artificial intelligence with software that learned how to recognize cats, people, and other things simply by watching YouTube videos (see “Self-Taught Software“).

That technology, modeled on how brain cells operate, is now being put to work making Google’s products smarter, with speech recognition being the first service to benefit, Technology Review reports.

Google’s learning software is based on simulating groups of connected brain cells that communicate and influence one another. When such a neural network, as it’s called, is exposed to data, the relationships between different neurons can change. That causes the network to develop the ability to react in certain ways to incoming data of a particular kind — and the network is said to have learned something.

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Discovery of gatekeeper nerve cells explains the effect of nicotine on learning and memory

Researchers at Uppsala University have, together with Brazilian collaborators, discovered a new group of nerve cells that regulate processes of learning and memory. These cells act as gatekeepers and carry a receptor for nicotine, which can explain our ability to remember and sort information.

The discovery of the gatekeeper cells, which are part of a memory network together with several other nerve cells in the hippocampus, reveal new fundamental knowledge about learning and memory. The study is published today in Nature Neuroscience.

The hippocampus is an area of the brain that is important for consolidation of information into memories and helps us to learn new things. The newly discovered gatekeeper nerve cells, also called OLM-alpha2 cells, provide an explanation to how the flow of information is controlled in the hippocampus.

“It is known that nicotine improves cognitive processes including learning and memory, but this is the first time that an identified nerve cell population is linked to the effects of nicotine”, says Professor Klas Kullander at Uppsala University.

thenewenlightenmentage:

Sleeping Brain Behaves as If It’s Remembering Something

ScienceDaily (Oct. 7, 2012) — UCLA researchers have for the first time measured the activity of a brain region known to be involved in learning, memory and Alzheimer’s disease during sleep. They discovered that this part of the brain behaves as if it’s remembering something, even under anesthesia, a finding that counters conventional theories about memory consolidation during sleep.

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The Strange Neuroscience of Immortality

In the basement of the Northwest Science Building here at Harvard University, a locked door is marked with a pink and yellow sign: “Caution: Radioactive Material.” Inside researchers buzz around wearing dour expressions and plastic gloves. Among them is Kenneth Hayworth. He’s tall and gaunt, dressed in dark-blue jeans, a blue polo shirt, and gray running shoes. He looks like someone who sleeps little and eats less.

Hayworth has spent much of the past few years in a windowless room carving brains into very thin slices. He is by all accounts a curious man, known for casually saying things like, “The human race is on a beeline to mind uploading: We will preserve a brain, slice it up, simulate it on a computer, and hook it up to a robot body.” He wants that brain to be his brain. He wants his 100 billion neurons and more than 100 trillion synapses to be encased in a block of transparent, amber-colored resin—before he dies of natural causes.

Why? Ken Hayworth believes that he can live forever.

But first he has to die.

"If your body stops functioning, it starts to eat itself," he explains to me one drab morning this spring, "so you have to shut down the enzymes that destroy the tissue." If all goes according to plan, he says cheerfully, "I’ll be a perfect fossil." Then one day, not too long from now, his consciousness will be revived on a computer. By 2110, Hayworth predicts, mind uploading—the transfer of a biological brain to a silicon-based operating system—will be as common as laser eye surgery is today.

The £90,000 ‘robolegs’ that got me out of my wheelchair: How one woman stood on her own feet nine years after she was paralysed

It is an extraordinary sight. From the waist up, 27-year-old Sophie Morgan is every inch the pretty blonde girl-next-door. But from the waist down, with her legs encased in £90,000 of motorised carbon-fibre, she is RoboCop.

Sophie’s thumb manipulates a joystick built into the armrests of her suit, causing the legs to hiss and whirr into life, before she takes three slow but sure steps. Her face breaks into a broad grin.

Five minutes earlier, Sophie was in her wheelchair. She was left paralysed from the chest down in a car crash nine years ago that shattered her spine. Over the years, Sophie, an aspiring television presenter who appeared in Channel 4’s Paralympics coverage, had come to accept that she would never walk again.