Posts tagged brain training
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Training brain patterns of empathy using functional brain imaging
An unprecedented research conducted by a group of neuroscientists has demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to train brain patterns associated with empathic feelings – more specifically, tenderness. The research showed that volunteers who received neurofeedback about their own brain activity patterns whilst being scanned inside a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) machine were able to change brain network function of areas related to tenderness and affection felt toward loved ones. These significant findings could open new possibilities for treatment of clinical situations, such as antisocial personality disorder and postpartum depression.
In Ridley Scott’s film “Blade Runner”, based on the science fiction book ‘Do androids dream of electric sheep?’ by Philip K. Dick, empathy-detection devices are employed to measure tenderness or affection emotions felt toward others (called “affiliative” emotions). Despite recent advances in neurobiology and neurotechnology, it is unknown whether brain signatures of affiliative emotions can be decoded and voluntarily modulated.
The article entitled “Voluntary enhancement of neural signatures of affiliative emotion using fMRI neurofeedback” published in PLOS ONE is the first study to demonstrate through a neurotechnology tool, real-time neurofeedback using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), the possibility to help the induction of empathic brain states.
The authors conducted this research at the D’Or Institute for Research and Education where a sophisticated computational tool was designed and used to allow the participants to modulate their own brain activity related to affiliative emotions and enhance this activity. This method employed pattern-detection algorithms, called “support vector machines” to classify complex activity patterns arising simultaneously from tenths of thousands of voxels (the 3-D equivalent of pixels) inside the participants’ brains.
Volunteers who received real time information of their ongoing neural activity could change brain network function among connected areas related to tenderness and affection felt toward loved ones, while the control group who performed the same fMRI task without neurofeedback did not show such improvement.
Thus, it was demonstrated that those who received a “real” feedback were able to “train” specific brain areas related to the experience of affiliative emotions that are key for empathy. These findings can lead the way to new opportunities to investigate the use of neurofeedback in conditions associated with reduced empathy and affiliative feelings, such as antisocial personality disorders and post-partum depression.
The authors point out that this study may represent a step towards the construction of the ‘empathy box’, an empathy-enhancing machine described by Philip K. Dick’s novel.
Training the Brain to Focus
About one in 10 school children suffers from attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Linked to measurable differences in children’s brain structures and brain waves, ADHD can have dire effects on children’s academic achievements and lead to disrupted classrooms.
The CDC reports that as many as 3 million American elementary school children now take medications to control their symptoms. But these drugs don’t work for everyone. Worse, their potential side effects can have serious consequences for kids who also have heart conditions, eating or digestive problems or mood disorders such as depression.
In a recent study, Naomi J. Steiner, director of the CATS Project (Computer Attention Training in Schools for children with ADHD) at Tufts Medical Center, and her colleagues found that computer-based attention-training exercises significantly improved the ability of kids with ADHD to focus and pay attention.
The team tested two kinds of computer training systems. The first, computer cognitive attention training, uses computerized brain exercises to strengthen key mental skills such as short-term memory, eye-hand coordination and visual processing through a series of game-like activities. The second, neurofeedback, measures children’s brain waves in real time and provides visual and auditory feedback that can help them harness their ability to focus. The researchers found that both systems ameliorated the symptoms of ADHD, with neurofeedback outperforming computer cognitive attention training.
What’s more, the team found that the effect lasted months after the computer-based training sessions ended. The results of the large-scale clinical trial, published earlier this year in the journal Pediatrics, bolster the positive findings Steiner and her colleagues saw in a pilot study they conducted previously.
That’s encouraging news, because these therapies—some of which are commercially available to the public and many of which have been adopted by school systems in every state—aren’t yet covered by health insurance policies, nor will they be without a data showing their efficacy. Steiner’s body of research is one more step down that road. (See the story “Your Brain on Video Games.”)
(Image: Shutterstock)
New Studies Show Promise for Brain Training in Improving Fluid Intelligence
Whether computerized games designed by psychologists and neuroscientists can literally make people smarter has been hotly debated by scientists, with a small but outspoken cadre of skeptics demanding stronger proof. Now two new studies have found the kind of real-world benefits from the brain-training games that skeptics have been calling for.
The first, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that less than six hours of brain games played over the course of 10 weeks enabled poor first-graders who attend school irregularly due to family problems to catch up with their regularly-attending peers in math and language grades.
The second, presented over the weekend at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting in Boston, combined the results of 13 previous studies of computerized brain-training in young adults to conclude that training significantly enhances fluid intelligence—the fundamental human ability to detect patterns, reason, and learn. That is, practicing the games literally makes people smarter.
Together with other recent studies demonstrating real-world benefits of brain training in healthy older adults, preschoolers, and school children with ADHD, the new papers appear to provide fresh ammunition to psychologists and neuroscientists whose research has been under attack by a handful of skeptics who insist that the training is a waste of time.
Learning to see better in life and baseball
With a little practice on a computer or iPad—25 minutes a day, 4 days a week, for 2 months—our brains can learn to see better, according to a study of University of California, Riverside baseball players reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on February 17. The new evidence also shows that a visual training program can sometimes make the difference between winning and losing.
The study is the first, as far as the researchers know, to show that perceptual learning can produce improvements in vision in normally seeing individuals.
"The demonstration that seven players reached 20/7.5 acuity—the ability to read text at three times the distance of a normal observer—is dramatic and required players to stand forty feet back from the eye chart in order to get a measurement of their vision," says Aaron Seitz of the University of California, Riverside. For reference, 20/20 is considered normal visual acuity.
In the training game, the players’ task was to find and select visual patterns modeled after stimuli to which neurons in the early visual cortex of the brain respond best, Seitz explains. As game play commenced, those patterns were made dimmer and dimmer, exercising the players’ vision as they searched.
"The goal of the program is to train the brain to better respond to the inputs that it gets from the eye," Seitz says. "As with most other aspects of our function, our potential is greater than our normative level of performance. When we go to the gym and exercise, we are able to increase our physical fitness; it’s the same thing with the brain. By exercising our mental processes we can promote our mental fitness."
After the 2 month training period, players reported “seeing the ball much better,” “greater peripheral vision,” “easy to see further,” “able to distinguish lower-contrasting things,” “eyes feel stronger, they don’t get tired as much,” and so on.
The players also showed greater-than-expected improvements in their game. They were less likely to strike out and got more runs. The researchers estimate that those gains in batting statistics may have given the team an additional four or five wins in the 2013 season.
The researchers are now extending their work to include different groups, including members of the Los Angeles and Riverside Police Departments and people with low vision due to cataracts, macular degeneration, or amblyopia. They will also apply the same principles to other aspects of cognition, including memory and attention.
It all comes down to one thing: “Understanding the rules of brain plasticity unlocks great potential for improvement of health and wellbeing,” Seitz says.
Training your brain using neurofeedback
A new brain-imaging technique enables people to ‘watch’ their own brain activity in real time and to control or adjust function in pre-determined brain regions. The study from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital – The Neuro, McGill University and the McGill University Health Centre, published in NeuroImage, is the first to demonstrate that magnetoencephalography (MEG) can be used as a potential therapeutic tool to control and train specific targeted brain regions. This advanced brain-imaging technology has important clinical applications for numerous neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions.
MEG is a non-invasive imaging technology that measures magnetic fields generated by nerve cell circuits in the brain. MEG captures these tiny magnetic fields with remarkable accuracy and has unrivaled time resolution - a millisecond time scale across the entire brain. “This means you can observe your own brain activity as it happens,” says Dr. Sylvain Baillet, acting Director of the Brain Imaging Centre at The Neuro and lead investigator on the study. “We can use MEG for neurofeedback – a process by which people can see on-going physiological information that they aren’t usually aware of, in this case, their own brain activity, and use that information to train themselves to self-regulate. Our ultimate hope and aim is to enable patients to train specific regions of their own brain, in a way that relates to their particular condition. For example neurofeedback can be used by people with epilepsy so that they could train to modify brain activity in order to avoid a seizure.”
In this proof of concept study, participants had nine sessions in the MEG and used neurofeedback to reach a specific target. The target was to look at a coloured disc on a display screen and find their own strategy to change the disc’s colour from dark red to bright yellow white, and to maintain that bright colour for as long as possible. The disc colour was indexed on a very specific aspect of their ongoing brain activity: the researchers had set it up so that the experiment was accessing predefined regions of the motor cortex in the participants’ brain. The colour presented was changing according to a predefined combination of slow and faster brain activity within these regions. This was possible because the researchers combined MEG with MRI, which provides information on the brain’s structures, known as magnetic source imaging (MSI).
“The remarkable thing is that with each training session, the participants were able to reach the target aim faster, even though we were raising the bar for the target objective in each session, the way you raise the bar each time in a high jump competition. These results showed that participants were successfully using neurofeedback to alter their pattern of brain activity according to a predefined objective in specific regions of their brain’s motor cortex, without moving any body part. This demonstrates that MEG source imaging can provide brain region-specific real time neurofeedback and that longitudinal neurofeedback training is possible with this technique.”
These findings pave the way for MEG as an innovative therapeutic approach for treating patients. To date, work with epilepsy patients has shown the most promise but there is great potential to use MEG to investigate other neurological syndromes and neuropsychiatric disorders (e.g., stroke, dementia, movement disorders, chronic depression, etc). MEG has potential to reveal dynamics of brain activity involved in perception, cognition and behaviour: it has provided unique insight on brain functions (language, motor control, visual and auditory perception, etc.) and dysfunctions (movement disorders, tinnitus, chronic pain, dementia, etc.).
Dr. Baillet and his team are collaborating presently with Prof. Isabelle Peretz at Université de Montréal to use this technique with people that have amusia, a disorder that makes them unable to process musical pitch. It is hypothesized that amusia results from poor connectivity between the auditory cortex and prefrontal regions in the brain. In an ongoing study, the team is measuring the intensity of functional connectivity between these brain regions in amusic patients and aged-matched healthy controls. Using MEG-neurofeedback, they hope to take advantage of the brain’s plasticity to reinforce the functional connectivity between the target brain regions. If the approach demonstrates an improvement in pitch discrimination in participants, that will demonstrate the clinical and rehabilitative applications of this approach. The baseline measurements have been taken already, and the training sessions will take place over this year.
(Source: mcgill.ca)
Brain training works, but just for the practiced task
Search for “brain training” on the Web. You’ll find online exercises, games, software, even apps, all designed to prepare your brain to do better on any number of tasks. Do they work? University of Oregon psychologists say, yes, but “there’s a catch.”
The catch, according to Elliot T. Berkman, a professor in the Department of Psychology and lead author on a study published in the Jan. 1 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, is that training for a particular task does heighten performance, but that advantage doesn’t necessarily carry over to a new challenge.
The training provided in the study caused a proactive shift in inhibitory control. However, it is not clear if the improvement attained extends to other kinds of executive function such as working memory, because the team’s sole focus was on inhibitory control, said Berkman, who directs the psychology department’s Social and Affective Neuroscience Lab.
"With training, the brain activity became linked to specific cues that predicted when inhibitory control might be needed," he said. "This result is important because it explains how brain training improves performance on a given task — and also why the performance boost doesn’t generalize beyond that task."
Sixty participants (27 male, 33 females and ranging from 18 to 30 years old) took part in a three-phase study. Change in their brain activity was monitored with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Half of the subjects were in the experimental group that was trained with a task that models inhibitory control — one kind of self-control — as a race between a “go” process and a “stop” process. A faster stop process indicates more efficient inhibitory control.
In each of a series of trials, participants were given a “go” signal — an arrow pointing left or right. Subjects pressed a key corresponding to the direction of the arrow as quickly as possible, launching the go process. However, on 25 percent of the trials, a beep sounded after the arrow appeared, signaling participants to withhold their button press, launching the stop process.
Participants practiced either the stop-signal task or a control task that didn’t affect inhibitory control every other day for three weeks. Performance improved more in the training group than in the control group.
Neural activity was monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which captures changes in blood oxygen levels, during a stop-signal task. MRI work was done in the UO’s Robert and Beverly Lewis Center for Neuroimaging. Activity in the inferior frontal gyrus and anterior cingulate cortex — brain regions that regulate inhibitory control — decreased during inhibitory control but increased immediately before it in the training group more than in the control group.
The fMRI results identified three regions of the brain of the trained subjects that showed changes during the task, prompting the researchers to theorize that emotional regulation may have been improved by reducing distress and frustration during the trials. Overall, the size of the training effect is small. A challenge for future research, they concluded, will be to identify protocols that might generate greater positive and lasting effects.”Researchers at the University of Oregon are using tools and technologies to shed new light on important mechanisms of cognitive functioning such as executive control,” said Kimberly Andrews Espy, vice president for research and innovation and dean of the UO Graduate School. “This revealing study on brain training by Dr. Berkman and his team furthers our understanding of inhibitory control and may lead to the design of better prevention tools to promote mental health.”