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Tero Toivanen

The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages: Scientific American - 0 views

  • The ability to speak a second language isn’t the only thing that distinguishes bilingual people from their monolingual counterparts—their brains work differently, too. Research has shown, for instance, that children who know two languages more easily solve problems that involve misleading cues.
  • The findings suggest that after learning a second language, people never look at words the same way again.
  • “The most important implication of the study is that even when a per­son is reading in his or her native language, there is an influence of knowledge of the nondominant second language,” Van Assche notes. “Becoming a bilingual changes one of people’s most automatic skills.”
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    "The most important implication of the study is that even when a per son is reading in his or her native language, there is an influence of knowledge of the nondominant second language," Van Assche notes. "Becoming a bilingual changes one of people's most automatic skills."
Tero Toivanen

Selective aphasia in a brain damaged bilingual patient : Neurophilosophy - 0 views

  • A unique case study published in the open access journal Behavioral and Brain Functions sheds some light on this matter. The study, by Raphiq Ibrahim, a neurologist at the University of Haifa, describes a bilingual Arabic-Hebrew speaker who incurred brain damage following a viral infection. Consequently, the patient experienced severe deficits in Hebrew but not in Arabic. The findings support the view that specific components of a first and second language are represented by different substrates in the brain.
  • A native Arabic speaker, he learned Hebrew at an early age (4th grade) and later used it competently both professionally and academically.
  • A CT scan showed that he had suffered a massive hemorrhage in the left temporal lobe, which was compressing the tissue on both sides of the central sulcus, the prominent gfissure which separates the frontal and parietal lobes.
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  • A craniotomy was performed to relieve the pressure, and afterwards another scan showed moderate hemorrhage and herpes encephalitis in the left temporal lobe, and another hemorrhage beneath the outer membrane (the dura) lying over the right frontal lobe.
  • During his 2 month stay there, he developed epileptic seizures which originated in the left temporal lobe, and amnestic aphasia (an inability to name objects or to recognize their written or spoken names). 
  • After the rehabilitation period, a series of linguistic tests was administered to determine the extent of his speech deficits. M.H. exhibited deficits in both languages, but the most severe deficits were seen only in Hebrew. In this language he had a severe difficulty in recalling words and names, so that his speech was non-fluent and interrupted by frequent pauses. He had difficulty understanding others' spoken Hebrew, and also had great difficulty reading and writing Hebrew. In Arabic, his native language, all of these abilities were affected only mildy.
  • The results support a neurolinguistic model in which the brain of bilinguals contains a semantic system (which represents word meanings) which is common to both languages and which is connected to independent lexical systems (which encode the vocabulary of each language). The findings further suggest that the second language (in this case, Hebrew) is represented by an independent subsystem which does not represent the first language (Arabic) and is more succeptible to brain damage.
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    A unique case study published in the open access journal Behavioral and Brain Functions sheds some light on this matter. The study, by Raphiq Ibrahim, a neurologist at the University of Haifa, describes a bilingual Arabic-Hebrew speaker who incurred brain damage following a viral infection. Consequently, the patient experienced severe deficits in Hebrew but not in Arabic. The findings support the view that specific components of a first and second language are represented by different substrates in the brain.
Tero Toivanen

Sign language study shows multiple brain regions wired for language - 1 views

  • A new study from the University of Rochester finds that there is no single advanced area of the human brain that gives it language capabilities above and beyond those of any other animal species.
  • Instead, humans rely on several regions of the brain, each designed to accomplish different primitive tasks, in order to make sense of a sentence.
  • "We're using and adapting the machinery we already have in our brains," said study coauthor Aaron Newman. "Obviously we're doing something different [from other animals], because we're able to learn language unlike any other species. But it's not because some little black box evolved specially in our brain that does only language, and nothing else."
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  • The team of brain and cognitive scientists
  • published their findings in the latest edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.
  • The study found that there are, in fact, distinct regions of the brain that are used to process the two types of sentences: those in which word order determined the relationships between the sentence elements, and those in which inflection was providing the information.
  • In fact, Newman said, in trying to understand different types of grammar, humans draw on regions of the brain that are designed to accomplish primitive tasks that relate to the type of sentence they are trying to interpret. For instance, a word order sentence draws on parts of the frontal cortex that give humans the ability to put information into sequences, while an inflectional sentence draws on parts of the temporal lobe that specialize in dividing information into its constituent parts, the study demonstrated.
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    A new study from the University of Rochester finds that there is no single advanced area of the human brain that gives it language capabilities above and beyond those of any other animal species.
Tero Toivanen

Movement Therapy May Also Improve Language Skills in Stroke Patients - 0 views

  • All of the patients exhibited improved motor and language abilities, although the six-week therapy only targeted arm movement. Interesting, Page says, patients exhibiting the greatest improvement on the arm tests also showed the most improvement on the language assessment.
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    All of the patients exhibited improved motor and language abilities, although the six-week therapy only targeted arm movement. Interesting, Page says, patients exhibiting the greatest improvement on the arm tests also showed the most improvement on the language assessment.
Tero Toivanen

New Light On Nature Of Broca's Area: Rare Procedure Documents How Human Brain Computes ... - 0 views

  • The study – which provides a picture of language processing in the brain with unprecedented clarity – will be published in the October 16 issue of the journal Science.
  • "Two central mysteries of human brain function are addressed in this study: one, the way in which higher cognitive processes such as language are implemented in the brain and, two, the nature of what is perhaps the best-known region of the cerebral cortex, called Broca's area," said first author Ned T. Sahin, PhD, post-doctoral fellow in the UCSD Department of Radiology and Harvard University Department of Psychology.
  • The study demonstrates that a small piece of the brain can compute three different things at different times – within a quarter of a second – and shows that Broca's area doesn't just do one thing when processing language.
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  • The procedure, called Intra-Cranial Electrophysiology (ICE), allowed the researchers to resolve brain activity related to language with spatial accuracy down to the millimeter and temporal accuracy down to the millisecond.
  • "We showed that distinct linguistic processes are computed within small regions of Broca's area, separated in time and partially overlapping in space," said Sahin. Specifically, the researchers found patterns of neuronal activity indicating lexical, grammatical and articulatory computations at roughly 200, 320 and 450 milliseconds after the target word was presented. These patterns were identical across nouns and verbs and consistent across patients.
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    "Two central mysteries of human brain function are addressed in this study: one, the way in which higher cognitive processes such as language are implemented in the brain and, two, the nature of what is perhaps the best-known region of the cerebral cortex, called Broca's area," said first author Ned T. Sahin, PhD, post-doctoral fellow in the UCSD Department of Radiology and Harvard University Department of Psychology.
Tero Toivanen

Eide Neurolearning Blog: Why Boys Need Alternatives with Reading and Writing - 0 views

  • If you give girls and boys language tasks, most girls will process the information in the same way (in a specialized language area)
  • help them with word storage and retrieval
  • But for boys, sensitivity to the modality of how words are presented means that an extra steps need to be taken to match words that are picked up by listening and words that are read on the printed page. No wonder dyslexia is much more common in boys - the separate system means that the sight and sound of words are learned as distinct processes.
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  • As a result, verbal competence may be strong in one domain (oral speech for instance), but be weak in another (reading).
  • because boys require two areas and a matching of visual-auditory inputs, impairment in one system may cause the whole language coordination process to fail.
  • The visual-auditory gap may also be why some boys may need to read word-for-word outloud or to themselves (i.e. not silently read) in order to fully comprehend or remember the story.
  • Some careful consideration needs to made of instructional implications for boys given some of these new discoveries. Learning by listening and learning by reading are not synonymous; route-congruent factors(listening - oral presentation, reading - written response) may need to be considered when a learning gap or frank underachievement is seen, and an insistence on the availability of auditory-visual supports (reading along with books-on-tape, detailed handouts for lecture courses) should be a requirement of every classroom.
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    Boys require two areas and a matching of visual-auditory inputs, impairment in one system may cause the whole language coordination process to fail.
David McGavock

How Did Consciousness Evolve? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution.
  • What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?
  • Attention Schema Theory (AST),
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  • suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others,
  • The next evolutionary advance was a centralized controller for attention that could coordinate among all senses. In many animals, that central controller is a brain area called the tectum
  • It coordinates something called overt attention
  • The tectum is a beautiful piece of engineering. To control the head and the eyes efficiently, it constructs something called an internal model, a feature well known to engineers. An internal model is a simulation that keeps track of whatever is being controlled and allows for predictions and planning.
  • With the evolution of reptiles around 350 to 300 million years ago, a new brain structure began to emerge – the wulst
  • our version is usually called the cerebral cortex and has expanded enormously
  • The cortex is like an upgraded tectum
  • The most important difference between the cortex and the tectum may be the kind of attention they control
  • tectum is the master of overt attention—pointing the sensory apparatus toward anything important
  • cortex ups the ante with something called covert attention
  • Your cortex can shift covert attention from the text in front of you to a nearby person, to the sounds in your backyard, to a thought or a memory. Covert attention is the virtual movement of deep processing from one item to another.
  • the cortex must model something much more abstract.
  • it does so by constructing an attention schema
  • a constantly updated set of information that describes what covert attention is doing moment-by-moment and what its consequences are
  • The attention schema is therefore strategically vague. It depicts covert attention in a physically incoherent way, as a non-physical essence. And this, according to the theory, is the origin of consciousness. We say we have consciousness because deep in the brain, something quite primitive is computing that semi-magical self-description.
  • In the AST, the attention schema first evolved as a model of one’s own covert attention. But once the basic mechanism was in place, according to the theory, it was further adapted to model the attentional states of others, to allow for social prediction
  • theory of mind, the ability to understand the possible contents of someone else’s mind.
  • Language is perhaps the most recent big leap in the evolution of consciousness. Nobody knows when human language first evolved. Certainly we had it by 70 thousand years ago when people began to disperse around the world, since all dispersed groups have a sophisticated language.
  • Maybe partly because of language and culture, humans have a hair-trigger tendency to attribute consciousness to everything around us.
  • Justin Barrett called it the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device, or HADD
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    The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions. The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence. If the theory is right-and that has yet to be determined-then consciousness evolved gradually over the past half billion years and is present in a range of vertebrate species.
Tero Toivanen

Growing evidence of the brain's plasticity could benefit stroke victims or those suffer... - 0 views

  • With the right training, scientists now know the brain can reshape itself to work around dead and damaged areas, often with dramatic benefits.
  • Therapies that exploit the brain's power to adapt have helped people overcome damage caused by strokes, depression, anxiety and learning disabilities, and may one day replace drugs for some of these conditions.
  • Children with language difficulties have been shown to make significant progress using computer training tools that are the equivalent of cerebral cross-training.
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  • Neuroplasticity does not see the different regions of the brain as completely versatile and certainly not interchangeable. But it recognises that if part of the brain is damaged, it can be possible to train other areas to take on, at least to some extent, the job of the lost brain matter.
  • Doidge says he is not anti-medication, but wonders if therapies that tap into neuro-plasticity will soon replace drug treatments for certain conditions. "We can change our brains by sensing, imagining and acting in the world. It's economical and mostly low-tech, and I'm very, very hopeful"
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    With the right training, scientists now know the brain can reshape itself to work around dead and damaged areas, often with dramatic benefits.
Tero Toivanen

YouTube - Health Matters: Behavior and Our Brain - 0 views

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    In an interview Ph.D. Terrence Sejnowski from Salk Institute for biological studies explains about many things about brains and behavior.
Tero Toivanen

YouTube - Music and the Mind - 0 views

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    Aniruddh Patel's presentation about: What can music teach us about the brain? What can brain science teach us about music?
Tero Toivanen

Wired 14.02: Buddha on the Brain - 0 views

  • Davidson's research created a stir among brain scientists when his results suggested that, in the course of meditating for tens of thousands of hours, the monks had actually altered the structure and function of their brains.
  • Lutz asked Ricard to meditate on "unconditional loving-kindness and compassion." He immediately noticed powerful gamma activity - brain waves oscillating at roughly 40 cycles per second -�indicating intensely focused thought. Gamma waves are usually weak and difficult to see. Those emanating from Ricard were easily visible, even in the raw EEG output. Moreover, oscillations from various parts of the cortex were synchronized - a phenomenon that sometimes occurs in patients under anesthesia.
  • In the traditional view, the brain becomes frozen with the onset of adulthood, after which few new connections form. In the past 20 years, though, scientists have discovered that intensive training can make a difference. For instance, the portion of the brain that corresponds to a string musician's fingering hand grows larger than the part that governs the bow hand - even in musicians who start playing as adults. Davidson's work suggested this potential might extend to emotional centers
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  • The researchers had never seen anything like it. Worried that something might be wrong with their equipment or methods, they brought in more monks, as well as a control group of college students inexperienced in meditation. The monks produced gamma waves that were 30 times as strong as the students'. In addition, larger areas of the meditators' brains were active, particularly in the left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for positive emotions.
  • But Davidson saw something more. The monks had responded to the request to meditate on compassion by generating remarkable brain waves. Perhaps these signals indicated that the meditators had attained an intensely compassionate state of mind. If so, then maybe compassion could be exercised like a muscle; with the right training, people could bulk up their empathy. And if meditation could enhance the brain's ability to produce "attention and affective processes" - emotions, in the technical language of Davidson's study - it might also be used to modify maladaptive emotional responses like depression.
  • Davidson and his team published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November 2004. The research made The Wall Street Journal, and Davidson instantly became a celebrity scientist.
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    Davidson's research created a stir among brain scientists when his results suggested that, in the course of meditating for tens of thousands of hours, the monks had actually altered the structure and function of their brains
Tero Toivanen

» Brain Plasticity: How learning changes your brain   « Brain Fitness Revolut... - 0 views

  • A surprising consequence of neuroplasticity is that the brain activity associated with a given function can move to a different location as a consequence of normal experience, brain damage or recovery.
  • The brain compensates for damage by reorganizing and forming new connections between intact neurons. In order to reconnect, the neurons need to be stimulated through activity.
  • Research has shown that in fact the brain never stops changing through learning. Plasticity IS the capacity of the brain to change with learning. Changes associated with learning occur mostly at the level of the connections between neurons. New connections can form and the internal structure of the existing synapses can change.
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  • It looks like learning a second language is possible through functional changes in the brain: the left inferior parietal cortex is larger in bilingual brains than in monolingual brains.
  • For instance, London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus (in the posterior region) than London bus drivers (Maguire, Woollett, & Spiers, 2006)…. Why is that? It is because this region of the hippocampus is specialized in acquiring and using complex spatial information in order to navigate efficiently. Taxi drivers have to navigate around London whereas bus drivers follow a limited set of routes.
  • Did you know that when you become an expert in a specific domain, the areas in your brain that deal with this type of skill will grow?
  • Plastic changes also occur in musicians brains compared to non-musicians.
  • They found that gray matter (cortex) volume was highest in professional musicians, intermediate in amateur musicians, and lowest in non-musicians in several brain areas involved in playing music: motor regions, anterior superior parietal areas and inferior temporal areas.
  • Medical students’ brains showed learning-induced changes in regions of the parietal cortex as well as in the posterior hippocampus. These regions of the brains are known to be involved in memory retrieval and learning.
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    A surprising consequence of neuroplasticity is that the brain activity associated with a given function can move to a different location as a consequence of normal experience, brain damage or recovery.
Tero Toivanen

Adult Learning - Neuroscience - How to Train the Aging Brain - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • One explanation for how this occurs comes from Deborah M. Burke, a professor of psychology at Pomona College in California. Dr. Burke has done research on “tots,” those tip-of-the-tongue times when you know something but can’t quite call it to mind. Dr. Burke’s research shows that such incidents increase in part because neural connections, which receive, process and transmit information, can weaken with disuse or age.
  • But she also finds that if you are primed with sounds that are close to those you’re trying to remember — say someone talks about cherry pits as you try to recall Brad Pitt’s name — suddenly the lost name will pop into mind. The similarity in sounds can jump-start a limp brain connection. (It also sometimes works to silently run through the alphabet until landing on the first letter of the wayward word.)
  • Recently, researchers have found even more positive news. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.
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  • The trick is finding ways to keep brain connections in good condition and to grow more of them.
  • Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With a brain already full of well-connected pathways, adult learners should “jiggle their synapses a bit” by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own, says Dr. Taylor, who is 66.
  • Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education, she says. Instead, continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different. In a history class, that might mean reading multiple viewpoints, and then prying open brain networks by reflecting on how what was learned has changed your view of the world.
  • Such stretching is exactly what scientists say best keeps a brain in tune: get out of the comfort zone to push and nourish your brain. Do anything from learning a foreign language to taking a different route to work.
  • “As adults we have these well-trodden paths in our synapses,” Dr. Taylor says. “We have to crack the cognitive egg and scramble it up. And if you learn something this way, when you think of it again you’ll have an overlay of complexity you didn’t have before — and help your brain keep developing as well.”
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    Dr. Burke has done research on "tots," those tip-of-the-tongue times when you know something but can't quite call it to mind. Dr. Burke's research shows that such incidents increase in part because neural connections, which receive, process and transmit information, can weaken with disuse or age.
Tero Toivanen

YouTube - Posit Science: The Science with Dr. Merzenich - 0 views

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    Dr Michael Merzenich talks about brain plasticity in YouTube video.
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