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isaac Mao

Brain science to help teachers get into kids' heads - science-in-society - 16 September... - 42 views

  • "In medicine, we have an excellent system in place to go from basic research to clinical practice, while in neuroscience we have the basic understanding of how the brain learns but still need to figure out how to translate this into the classroom," says Manfred Spitzer of the University of Ulm in Germany, one of the conference organisers. With brain imaging and, increasingly, genetic studies now complementing psychology research, a host of new findings could inform teachers about the conditions in which our brains can be primed to learn best.
isaac Mao

Exercise and your brain: Why working out may help memory: Scientific American Blog - 20 views

  • Glucose metabolism naturally slows with age, and memory begins to decline in our 30s, says co-author Scott Small, an associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. The new study suggests a possible association between the two, because elevated blood sugar appears to damage the dentate gyrus, Small says.
isaac Mao

Forming Social Memories - 9 views

  • such as the amygdala, which is specialized in the memory of emotions.
isaac Mao

The Human Brain - Exercise - 13 views

  • Only recently have scientists been able to learn how the neural network of the brain forms. Beginning in the womb and throughout life this vast network continues to expand, adapt, and learn.
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  • Plasticity is the basic mental drive that networks your brain, giving you cognition and memory – fluidity, versatility, and adaptability.
  • Before birth you created neurons, the brain cells that communicate with each other, at the rate of 15 million per hour! When you emerged into the world, your 100 billion neurons were primed to organize themselves in response to your new environment – no matter the culture, climate, language, or lifestyle.
  • A healthy, well-functioning neuron can be directly linked to tens of thousands of other neurons,
  • A healthy, well-functioning neuron can be directly linked to tens of thousands of other neurons, creating a totality of more than a hundred trillion connections – each capable of performing 200 calculations per second!
  • Many neuroscientists believe that learning and memory involve changes at neuron-to-neuron synapses.
  • Travel is another good way to stimulate your brain. It worked for our ancestors, the early Homo sapiens. Their nomadic lifestyle provided a tremendous stimulation for their brains that led to the development of superior tools and survival skills. In comparison, the now-extinct Neanderthal was a species that for thousands of years apparently did not venture too far from their homes. (Maybe they were simply content with their lives – in contrast to the seldom-satisfied sapien.)
  • Exercise is a natural part of life, although these days we have to consciously include it in our daily routine. Biologically, it was part of survival, in the form of hunting and gathering or raising livestock and growing food. Historically, it was built into daily life, as regular hours of physical work or soldiering. What is now considered a form of exercise – walking –was originally a form of transportation.
isaac Mao

Face to Face: Alan Kay Still Waiting for the Revolution | Scholastic.com - 7 views

  • Since inventing much of the technology behind personal computing in the late 1960s, Alan Kay has dedicated his work to developing better learning environments for children. Now a senior researcher at HP and the president of Viewpoints Research Institute, Kay is launching Squeak, a multimedia authoring tool that allows children to construct dynamic simulations of real-world phenomena. We spoke with him about the unfulfilled promise of technology in schools—and about what computers have in common with pianos.
isaac Mao

Study provides new insights about brain organization - 0 views

  • "One theory is that individual senses have separate areas of the brain dedicated to them," said Mark Wallace, Ph.D., the study's lead investigator. "In this view, information is processed initially on a sense-by-sense basis and doesn't come together until much later. However, this view has recently been challenged by studies showing that processing in the visual area of the brain, for example, can be influenced by hearing and touch."
isaac Mao

Financial Literacy: Making Sense of Dollars and Cents | Edutopia - 2 views

  • Financial Literacy:Special Report Table of Contents Financial Literacy: Making Sense of Dollars and CentsThe Bucks Start Here: A Hands-On Approach to Personal FinanceHow To: Teach the Soft Side of BusinessTake It to the Bank: Students Learn to Manage Their MoneyMoney Corps: Finance Experts as Guest TeachersEntrepreneurial Education: The Successful Investor ProjectMoney Lessons: A Guide to Financial-Literacy Resources
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    素质教育应当改名为素养教育
isaac Mao

Every drink shrinks the brain, warns new research | theage.com.au - 3 views

  • The American research, which looked at brain scans of more than 1800 people, comes after Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council released draft guidelines warning that more than two drinks a day posed a health risk.
  • Their MRI scans revealed brain volume of moderate drinkers was almost 1% smaller than teetotallers while those who had 14 or more drinks a week suffered 1.2% shrinkage.
isaac Mao

untitled - 0 views

  • For middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet could be a boost to the brain, a new study suggests.
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  • The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging scans to record subtle brain-circuitry changes in the patients as they performed Web searches and read book passages. fMRI scans track the intensity of cell responses in the brain by measuring the level of blood flow through the brain
  • But Internet searches revealed differences between the two groups. While all the participants showed the same activity as during the book-reading, the Web-savvy group also registered activity in the frontal, temporal and cingulate areas of the brain, whereas those new to the net did not. (These areas of the brain control decision-making and complex reasoning.)
  • Compared with reading, the wealth of choices on the Internet requires that people make decisions about what to click on, which engages important cognitive circuits in the brain
isaac Mao

Joho the Blog » Internet not the child-devouring swamp many adults fear - 0 views

  • A three-year research project, headed by Mimi Ito, involving 28 researchers and 800 subjects, and sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, finds that the stereotypical idea of the Internet as a soul-devouring, anti-social wasteland for our kids is just plain wrong. If you suspected otherwise, now you know you were right.
  • The researchers identified two distinctive categories of teen engagement with digital media: friendship-driven and interest-driven. While friendship-driven participation centered on “hanging out” with existing friends, interest-driven participation involved accessing online information and communities that may not be present in the local peer group.
isaac Mao

Memories may be stored on your DNA - 26 November 2008 - New Scientist - 1 views

  • To remember a particular event, a specific sequence of neurons must fire at just the right time. For this to happen, neurons must be connected in a certain way by chemical junctions called synapses. But how they last over decades, given that proteins in the brain, including those that form synapses, are destroyed and replaced constantly, is a mystery.
  • Many genes are already coated with methyl groups. When a cell divides, this "cellular memory" is passed on and tells the new cell what type it is - a kidney cell, for example. Miller and Sweatt argue that in neurons, methyl groups also help to control the exact pattern of protein expression needed to maintain the synapses that make up memories.
isaac Mao

Study Shows How The Brain Pays Attention; Neural Circuits That Control Eye Movements Pl... - 4 views

  • "Without regulating your attention, you would orient to everything that appears and moves. An organism that couldn't filter anything just wouldn't work. It would be in a state of constant distraction," said Moore. "This work shows that, whether we are moving our eyes or not, the networks that control eye movements may be a source of that filtering."
isaac Mao

Neuron - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

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  • Neurons exist in a number of different shapes and sizes and can be classified by their morphology and function. The anatomist Camillo Golgi grouped neurons into two types; type I with long axons used to move signals over long distances and type II without axons. type I cells can be further divided by where the cell body or soma is located. The basic morphology of type I neurons, represented by spinal motor neurons, consists of a cell body called the soma and a long thin axon which is covered by the myelin sheath. Around the cell body is a branching dendritic tree that receives signals from other neurons. The end of the axon has branching terminals (axon terminal) that release transmitter substances into a gap called the synaptic cleft between the terminals and the dendrites of the next neuron.
isaac Mao

Free will - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

  • It is claimed by some that quantum indeterminism is confined to microscopic phenomena.[54] The claim that events at the atomic or particulate level are unknowable can be challenged experimentally and even technologically: for instance, some hardware random number generators work by amplifying quantum effects into practically usable signals. However, this only amounts to macroscopic indeterminism if it can be shown that microscopic events really are indeterministic.
  • Hard incompatibilism is defended by Derk Pereboom, who identifies a variety of positions where free will is seen irrelevant to indeterminism/determinism, among them the following: Determinism (D) is true, D does not imply we lack free will (F), but in fact we do lack F. D is true, D does not imply we lack F, but in fact we don't know if we have F. D is true, and we do have F. D is true, we have F, and F implies D. D is unproven, but we have F. D isn't true, we do have F, and would have F even if D were true. D isn't true, we don't have F, but F is compatible with D. Derk Pereboom, Living without Free Will,[13] p. xvi. Pereboom calls positions 3 and 4 soft determinism, position 1 a form of hard determinism, position 6 a form of classical libertarianism, and any position that includes having F as compatibilism. He largely ignores position 2
  • Compatibilist models of free will often consider deterministic relationships as discoverable in the physical world (including the brain). Cognitive naturalism[118] is a physicalist approach to studing human consciousness in which mind is simply part of nature, perhaps merely a feature of many very complex self-programming feedback systems (for example, neural networks and cognitive robots), and so must be studied by the methods of empirical science, for example, behavioral science and the cognitive sciences like neuroscience and cognitive psychology.[101][119] Cognitive naturalism stresses the role of neurological sciences. Overall brain health, substance dependence, depression, and various personality disorders clearly influence mental activity, and their impact upon volition also is important.[113] For example, an addict may experience a conscious desire to escape addiction, but be unable to do so. The "will" is disconnected from the freedom to act. This situation is related to an abnormal production and distribution of dopamine in the brain.[120] The neuroscience of free will places restrictions on both compatibilist and incompatibilist free will conceptions. Compatibilist models adhere to models of mind in which mental activity (such as deliberation) can be reduced to physical activity without any change in physical outcome. Although compatibilism is generally aligned to (or is at least compatible with) physicalism, some compatibilist models describe the natural occurrences of deterministic deliberation in the brain in terms of the first person perspective of the conscious agent performing the deliberation.[7] Such an approach has been considered a form of identity dualism. A description of "how conscious experience might affect brains" has been provided in which "the experience of conscious free will is the first-person perspective of the neural correlates of choosing".[7]
anonymous

100 Best Social Sites for Students, Academics and Educators | Associate Degree - Facts ... - 31 views

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    A number of schools are even hiring to accommodate the increase in students. For those heading back to school, here are the 100 best social sites for students, academics and educators.
anonymous

100 Awesome Blogs for Your Business Education - Learn-gasm - 23 views

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    Whether you want to learn about marketing, business in a global community, finance, economics, management, leadership, or sustainable business practices, you will find information among these blogs.
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