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Tero Toivanen

Visual training to retain driving competence - and your independence! | On the Brain by... - 1 views

  • Today, Posit Science announced the release of a new computer-based visual training tool, DriveSharp, specifically designed to improve the performance abilities of adult automobile drivers to a degree that can be expected to very substantially impact their driving safety.
  • As you get older, you progressively lose the ability to accurately detect and respond to visual events in your far visual periphery.
  • In our fast-moving world, losing control of one’s peripheral vision is a main cause of driving accidents.
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  • Ball and Roenker demonstrated that these losses are substantially reversible, through appropriate, intensive training, in almost all older drivers. UFOVs can be re-expanded to relatively youthful ability levels through only a few hours of exercise. The result: About 50% fewer driving accidents in the over-65 population.
  • Moreover, once your UFOV is opened up again, you use it!
  • You can use DriveSharp repeatedly, over the rest of your days, to keep yourself in fine driving fettle!
  • The second training program that is included in DriveSharp is designed to improve your ability to keep track of more than one thing happening at the same time. This fundamental visual skill — called “multiple object tracking” (MOT) — also dramatically declines as you get older.
  • Again, with a few hours of intensive training, a youthful MOT performance level can be achieved for most individuals. The result: A still FURTHER increase of driving safety.
  • If you’ve reached your 50th birthday, DriveSharp training is especially important for upgrading and sustaining your driving competence. It’s all about maintaining your performance abilities in driving as in all other ways at the highest possible level, throughout the second half of life.
  • few other benefits demonstrated by published studies originating with the Ball/Roenker team (including University of South Florida scientist Sherri Willis and a University of Iowa scientist, Fred Wolinsky).
  • 1) You’re healthier after DriveSharp training! Five years after training, Physical indices of Quality of Life are more than 30% higher — maybe because you get out more.
  • Trainees are much more likely to have retained your driver’s license — and to have sustained their personal independence.
  • After DriveSharp, you are a more confident driver, as expressed by gains in the number of times you drive each week, by an increase in average driving distances, and by your driving more often at night, or in the rain or snow.
  • Try DriveSharp now: If you are a member of one of the participating AAA clubs, please visit your AAA club’s website for more information and a special offer on DriveSharp. If not, please visit www.DriveSharp.com or call (866)599-6463 to learn more.
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    Today, Posit Science announced the release of a new computer-based visual training tool, DriveSharp, specifically designed to improve the performance abilities of adult automobile drivers to a degree that can be expected to very substantially impact their driving safety.
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.
Tero Toivanen

Eide Neurolearning Blog: fMRI of Learning Styles: Confirmation of Visual and Verbal Lea... - 0 views

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    Using a simple True/False Learning Styles questionnaire(like this, see below), researchers found that people could reliably predict whether they are predominantly visual or verbal learners.
Tero Toivanen

Color after image demonstration - Seeing color when there is none. : Of Two Minds - 0 views

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    This is how you use the human visual system to turn a black and white photo into color.
Tero Toivanen

Basking in the Dopamine Glow : Neurotopia - 0 views

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    Gubernator et al. "Flourescent flase neurotransmitters visualize dopamine release from individual presynaptic terminals" Science, 2009.
Tero Toivanen

Scientists capture the first image of memories being made - 0 views

  • A new study by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro), McGill University and University of California, Los Angeles has captured an image for the first time of a mechanism, specifically protein translation, which underlies long-term memory formation. The finding provides the first visual evidence that when a new memory is formed new proteins are made locally at the synapse - the connection between nerve cells - increasing the strength of the synaptic connection and reinforcing the memory. The study published in Science, is important for understanding how memory traces are created and the ability to monitor it in real time will allow a detailed understanding of how memories are formed.
  • research has focused on synapses which are the main site of exchange and storage in the brain.
  • They form a vast but also constantly fluctuating network of connections whose ability to change and adapt, called synaptic plasticity, may be the fundamental basis of learning and memory.
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  • Using a translational reporter, a fluorescent protein that can be easily detected and tracked, we directly visualized the increased local translation, or protein synthesis, during memory formation.
  • Importantly, this translation was synapse-specific and it required activation of the post-synaptic cell, showing that this step required cooperation between the pre and post-synaptic compartments, the parts of the two neurons that meet at the synapse.
  • This study provides evidence that a mechanism that mediates this gene expression during neuronal plasticity involves regulated translation of localized mRNA at stimulated synapses.
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    A new study by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro), McGill University and University of California, Los Angeles has captured an image for the first time of a mechanism, specifically protein translation, which underlies long-term memory formation.
David McGavock

Scientific Understanding of Consciousness - 0 views

  • During the past 20 years or so, biological sciences have advanced to the point that scientists have begun researching biological mechanisms of brain function and suggesting some reasonably well-founded hypotheses for consciousness. Leading the way in these pioneering efforts, in my judgment, have been:   Gerald Edelman with his hypothesis of the Dynamic Core, Antonio Damasio with his concepts of  Protoself, Core Self, Autobiographical Self, Core Consciousness and Extended Consciousness, Joseph LeDoux and his emphasis on the intricacies of synapses and the emotional brain,
  • Rudolfo Llinás and his researches into ~40 Hz oscillations and synchronization, György Buzsáki with his discussion and exploration of neural mechanisms related to oscillation and synchronization in the neocortex and hippocampus for perception and memory, Joaquín Fuster, the world’s preeminent expert on the frontal lobes, and his concept of the "perception-action cycle," Susan Greenfield's notion of "neuronal gestalts" as a way of conceptualizing a highly variable aggregation of neurons that is temporarily recruited around a triggering epicenter. I use the neuronal gestalts idea in my way of visualizing the functionality of the dynamic core of the thalamocortical system, Eric Kandel who has explored short-term and long-term memory,
  • The late Francis Crick with his collaborator Christof Koch who have pursued the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC), Michael Gazzaniga with the concept of the left hemisphere ‘interpreter’ unifying consciousness experience, Edmund Rolls and Gustavo Deco with their mathematical models of brain function using information theory approaches for biologically plausible neurodynamical modeling of cognitive phenomena corroborated by brain imaging studies, David LaBerge with his discussion of the thalamocortical circuit and attention, Alan Baddeley who continues to refine his model for working memory, Philosopher John Searle who endorses the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of neural networks.
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    "My objective in this website has been to bring together salient features of these assorted interpretations by science experts into a synthesis of my own understanding of consciousness. I consider these statements and interpretations to be a framework on which to build a fuller understanding as further data, concepts and insights develop from ongoing research."
Tero Toivanen

Naps, Learning and REM : The Frontal Cortex - 0 views

  • Taking a nap without REM sleep also led to slightly better results. But a nap that included REM sleep resulted in nearly a 40 percent improvement over the pre-nap performance.
  • The study, published June 8 in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that those who had REM sleep took longer naps than those who napped without REM, but there was no correlation between total sleep time and improved performance. Only REM sleep helped.
  • Numerous studies have now demonstrated that REM sleep is an essential part of the learning process. Before you can know something, you have to dream about it.
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  • The breakthrough came in 1972, when psychologist Jonathan Winson came up with a simple theory: The rabbit brain exhibited the same pattern of activity when it was scared and when it was dreaming because it was dreaming about being scared. The theta rhythm of sleep was just the sound of the mind processing information, sorting through the day's experiences and looking for any new knowledge that might be important for future survival. They were learning while dreaming, solving problems in their sleep.
  • Wilson began his experiment by training rats to run through mazes. While a rat was running through one of these labyrinths, Wilson measured clusters of neurons in the hippocampus with multiple electrodes surgically implanted in its brain. As he'd hypothesized, Wilson found that each maze produced its own pattern of neural firing. To figure out how dreams relate to experience, Wilson recorded input from these same electrodes while the rats were sleeping. The results were astonishing. Of the 45 rat dreams recorded by Wilson, 20 contained an exact replica of the maze they had run earlier that day. The REM sleep was recapitulating experience, allowing the animals to consolidate memory and learn new things. Wilson's lab has since extended these results, demonstrating that "temporally structured replay" occurs in both the hippocampus and visual cortex.
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    Taking a nap without REM sleep also led to slightly better results. But a nap that included REM sleep resulted in nearly a 40 percent improvement over the pre-nap performance
Ruth Howard

Artificial Synesthesia for Synthetic Vision via Sensory Substitution - 0 views

  • The additional perception is regarded by the trained synesthete as real, often outside the body, instead of imagined in the mind's eye. Its reality and vividness are what makes artificial synesthesia so interesting in its violation of conventional perception. Synesthesia in general is also fascinating because logically it should have been a product of the human brain, where the evolutionary trend has been for increasing coordination, mutual consistency and perceptual robustness in the processing of different sensory inputs.
  • synesthesia
  • options it may provide for people with sensory disabilities like deafness and blindness, where a neural joining of senses can help in replacing one sense by the other:
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  • hear colors, taste shapes, or experience other curious sensory modality crossings, allegedly related to abnormal functioning of the hippocampus, one of the limbic structures in the brain. It has also been suggested that synesthesia constitutes a form of "supernormal integration" involving the posterior parietal cortex. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin and Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky both pioneered artistic links between sight and sound, while they may have been synesthetes themselves. Russian mnemonist Solomon Shereshevskii, studied for decades by neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, appears to have used his natural synesthesia to memorize amazing amounts of data.
  • in seeing with your ears when using a device that maps images into sounds, or in hearing with your eyes when using a device that maps sounds into images.
  • In case of "explicit" synesthesia, the sounds would induce conscious sensations (qualia) of light and visual patterns.
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