Scientists complete first human-to-human mind meld…

Above is a scene from Star Trek in which Evil Spock performs a 'Vulcan mind meld' on McCoy. Scientists said Tuesday they have achieved the first human-to-human mind meld, with one researcher sending a brain signal via the Internet

U.S. scientist operates colleague's brain from across campus

TorontoSun: NEW YORK - Scientists said Tuesday they have achieved the first human-to-human mind meld, with one researcher sending a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motion of a colleague sitting across the Seattle campus of the University of Washington.

The feat is less a conceptual advance than another step in the years-long progress that researchers have made toward brain-computer interfaces, in which electrical signals generated from one brain are translated by a computer into commands that can move a mechanical arm or a computer cursor - or, in more and more studies, can affect another brain.

Much of the research has been aimed at helping paralyzed patients regain some power of movement, but bioethicists have raised concerns about more controversial uses.

In February, for instance, scientists led by Duke University Medical Center’s Miguel Nicolelis used electronic sensors to capture the thoughts of a rat in a lab in Brazil and sent via Internet to the brain of a rat in the United States. The second rat received the thoughts of the first, mimicking its behavior. And electrical activity in the brain of a monkey at Duke, in North Carolina, was recently sent via the Internet, controlling a robot arm in Japan.

That raised dystopian visions of battalions of animal soldiers - or even human ones - whose brains are remotely controlled by others. Some of Duke’s brain-computer research, though not this study, received funding from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA.

FINGERING A KEYBOARD

For the new study, funded by the U.S. Army Research Office and other non-military federal agencies, UW professor of computer science and engineering Rajesh Rao, who has studied brain-computer interfaces for more than a decade, sat in his lab on Aug. 12 wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain.

He looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game but only mentally. At one point, he imagined moving his right hand to fire a cannon, making sure not to actually move his hand.

The EEG electrodes picked up the brain signals of the “fire cannon!” thought and transmitted them to the other side of the UW campus.

There, Andrea Stocco of UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences was wearing a purple swim cap with a device, called a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) coil, placed directly over his left motor cortex, which controls the right hand’s movement.

When the move-right-hand signal arrived from Rao, Stocco involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. He said the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily was like that of a nervous tic.

“It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain,” Rao said.

Other experts suggested the feat was not particularly impressive. It’s possible to capture one of the few easy-to-recognize EEG signals and send “a simple shock ... into the other investigator’s head,” said Andrew Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh, who was not part of the research.

Rao agreed that what his colleague jokingly called a “Vulcan mind meld” reads only simple brain signals, not thoughts, and cannot be used on anyone unknowingly. But it might one day be harnessed to allow an airline pilot on the ground help someone land a plane whose own pilot is incapacitated.

The research has not been published in a scientific journal, something university spokeswoman Doree Armstrong admits is “a bit unusual.” But she said the team knew other researchers are working on this same thing and they felt “time was of the essence.”

Besides, she said, they have a video of the experiment which “they felt it could stand on its own.”

Vulcan Mind Meld

Video: Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans: A Pilot Study

The absence of a scientific publication that other researchers could scrutinize did not sit well with some of the nation’s leading brain-computer-interface experts. All four of those reached by Reuters praised UW’s Rao, but some were uneasy with the announcement and one called it “mostly a publicity stunt.” The experiment was not independently verified.

Technorati Tags: brain,brain function,brain skills,mind meld,Star Trek

Made These Seniors' Brains an Average of 11 Years Younger in Only 40 Hours

Story at-a-glance

• Research into brain plasticity has proven that your brain continues to make new neurons throughout life in response to mental activity, which means that cognitive function can be improved, regardless of your age, and cognitive decline can be reversed
• A key factor or ingredient necessary for improving brain function or reversing functional decline is the seriousness of purpose with which you engage in a task. In other words, the task must be important to you, or somehow meaningful or interesting
• There are computer-based brain fitness programs designed to help improve cognitive function in six different areas in about 40 hours, and can be used by any age group
• To optimize your brain fitness, the following lifestyle factors can help: daily physical exercise, focusing on your body movements and your environment, engaging in new learning throughout your life, staying socially active, and practicing “mindfulness”

How Innate ‘Plasticity’ of Your Brain Allows You to Improve Cognitive Performance and Prevent Age-Related Decline

Video: Dr. Mercola and Dr. Merzenich on Innate Brain Plasticity

Dr. Mercola:

It was once thought that any brain function lost was irretrievable. Today, research into what's referred to as "brain plasticity" has proven that this is not the case. On the contrary, your brain continues to make new neurons throughout life in response to mental activity.

Aside from toxicity, our modern lifestyle plays a part in cognitive decline, as described by Dr. Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus at the University of California, who has pioneered research in brain plasticity for more than 30 years.

He founded Scientific Learning Corporation in Oakland, California, and Posit Science in San Francisco; both specialize in science research into brain training software.

Dr. Merzenich's career arose from an interest in philosophy, and a fascination with the nature and origin of the human persona and individuality, and how brain processes might account for the evolution of our individual abilities. He believed that in those who have learning disabilities or develop psychiatric illnesses, the natural progressions of these brain processes must have encountered errors.

Use It or Lose It — the Principles of Brain Plasticity

The inherent plasticity of the brain was discovered some 30 years ago, and not long thereafter, animal models demonstrated that brain deterioration and aging were in fact reversible, provided the appropriate brain engagement. Dr. Merzenich describes brain plasticity as follows:

"The basic concept is simple. The brain changes physically, functionally, and chemically, as you acquire any ability or skill. You know this instinctively. Something must be changing as your abilities improve, or as new abilities emerge. You are actually remodeling your brain machinery by 'practicing' the skill; those physical changes account for your learning.

Actually what the brain is doing is changing its local wiring, changing the details of how the machinery controlling your behavior is connected. It's also changing itself in other physical, chemical, and functional ways. Collectively, those changes account for the improvement or acquisition of any human ability.

You probably haven't realizd it, but as you acquire an ability – for example, the ability to read – you have actually created a system in the brain that does not exist, that's not in place, in the non-reader. It [the ability; the brain system that controls the ability] actually evolves in you as it has been acquired through experience or learning."

As Dr. Merzenich explains, your brain is designed and constructed to be stimulated and challenged, and to carefully examine, resolve and interpret your environment. During the early days of mankind's development, keeping track of the details of immediate human environments was imperative for survival.

Today, however, we tend to try to remove ourselves from the details of life. For example, instead of keeping track of appointments and to-do lists in our head, we use electronic gadgets with reminder features. Our streets are paved and lit, requiring virtually no attention to navigate from one location to another. And if you don't sufficiently challenge your brain with new, surprising information, it eventually begins to deteriorate.

"Generally, by the third or fourth decade in life, you're in decline," Dr. Merzenich says. "One of the things that happens across this period is that you go from a period of the acquisition of abilities to largely using abilities that have been acquired earlier in life. By that I mean to say, most of the fundamental skills that you apply in your profession or in your everyday life are things you have mastered at a young age, and you're now doing them in 'automatic pilot' mode.

To a large extent, you're operating most of your day without really being consciously engaged in the things you're doing. You're substantially disengaged: 'sleepwalking through life.'

This inattention to detail is substantially a product of modern culture. Modern culture is all about minimizing environmental challenges and surprises... about enabling brainless stereotypy in our basic actions so that our brains can be engaged at more abstract levels of operations. We're no longer interested in the details of things in our world. Because our brains are highly dependent in their functional operations in recording information in detail, they slowly deteriorate. Without that recorded detail, memory and brain speed are compromised."

Contributing Factors to Cognitive Decline, and How to Counteract it

With age, brain researchers have found that there's an increase in "chatter" in your brain. Dr. Merzenich explains:

"Your brain becomes less precise in how it's resolving information as you're operating and listening in language, as you're operating in vision, or as you're operating in controlling your actions. We actually record these 'noisier' processes within the brain as you age. In fact, we can correlate the growing 'chatter' quite directly with the slowing down of your processing.

You know, every older person is slower in their actions, slower in their decisions, and less fluent in their operations than when they're younger. They're slower because the brain basically is dealing with information that is represented in its machinery in a fuzzier, more degraded form."

What research into brain plasticity shows us is that by providing your brain with appropriate stimulation, you can counteract this degeneration. A key factor or ingredient necessary for improving brain function or reversing functional decline is the seriousness of purpose with which you engage in a task. In other words, the task must be important to you, or somehow meaningful or interesting — it must hold your attention. Rote memorization of nonsensical or unimportant items or even heavy work at non-challenging tasks will not stimulate your brain to create new connections or neurons.

Dr. Merzenich has been instrumental in the development of a kind of "brain gym" environment — a computer-based brain training program that can help you sharpen a range of skills, from reading and comprehension to improved memorization and more. The program is called Brain HQ.¹

"There are some very useful exercises at www.BrainHQ.com that are free, and using them can give a person a better understanding of how exercising your brain can drive it in a rejuvenating direction. Using exercises at BrainHQ, most people, of any age, can drive sharp improvements in brain speed and accuracy, and thereby rewire the brain so that it again represents information in detail," he says.

"Basically, what you're doing is reducing the chatter -- the 'noisiness' -- of the processes in your brain. That impacts your capacity, for example, to record and remember that information. When the information the brain is shipping around in its machinery is in a degraded form, when it's fuzzy, when it's imprecise, all of the uses that it makes of it are also degraded. When you rejuvenate those elementary abilities, you significantly recover your 'higher' brain powers."

Who Can Benefit from a "Brain Gym"?

Everybody's brain is plastic, including yours, so no matter what your age or current level of brain function, your brain can improve to some degree or another. Dr. Merzenich and his colleagues have specialized in training children, primarily those with learning disabilities or impairments, using similar approaches. More than 4 million struggling kids have been trained so far. But seniors and adults of all ages are also using these programs at BrainHQ.com in increasing numbers. Individuals in all age groups have been found to reap significant rewards.

Children operating in the 10th to 20th percentile of academic performance are commonly able to improve their scores to the middle or average level with 20-30 hours of intensive computer-based training.

"That's a big difference for the child," he says. "It carries most children who are near the bottom of the class, on the average, to be somewhere in the middle or above average in the class. And that gives struggling children a chance to really succeed and in many cases excel in school."

Careful controlled studies in seniors have also been reported in scientific journals. After 40 hours of computer-based training, the average improvement in cognitive performance across the board was 14 years. On average, if you were 70 years old when you underwent the training after 40 hours of brain training, your cognitive abilities operated like that of a 56-year old. Equally strong or even greater effects were seen in 40 to 50 year olds using the program. Individuals who worked on the BrainHQ exercises at home did just as well as those who completed training in a clinic or research center.

How to Implement a Brain Training Program

So, how does such a training program work, and what's the optimal way to implement it in order to maximize the benefits?

"One of the great advantages that we have is that there's a very large body of scientific information that informs us about the optimum brain training approach," Dr. Merzenich says. "It comes from understanding, on a scientific level, the basis of what controls brain change. We know how the machine operates to control its own remodeling. We know that you have to be engaged attentively, and in a sense that the more attentively focused you are on the training tasks, the greater the positive benefits of training.

We know that rewards have to occur, or information or feedback about how you're doing have to occur, in a specific and timely way to drive the optimum changes in the brain. The way difficulties change in the task are also crucial for driving changes with highest proficiency.

One simple thing we do is to [continually] adjust the difficulty level of the task, so that every trainee is at a level in which they get most things correct but they're still capable of error. Because only when you're in this demanding situation, only when it matters to the brain, does the machinery turn on to change the brain. We actually regulate this, and as the person progresses session by session, day by day, they notch up their performance to higher and higher and higher and higher and higher levels."

Ideally, it would be wise to invest at least 20 minutes a day. But no more than five to seven minutes is to be spent on a specific task. When you spend longer amounts of time on a task, the benefits weaken. According to Dr. Merzenich, the primary benefits occur in the first five or six minutes of the task.

You can typically improve yourself to the highest practical or possible level in anywhere between five to a dozen brief sessions of seven or eight minutes each. Again, having a sense of purpose is crucial.

"When it matters to you, you are going to drive changes in your brain," he explains. "That's something always to keep in mind. If what you're doing seems senseless, meaningless, if it does not matter to you, then you're gaining less from it."

Dr. Merzenich developed a website, Brain HQ.com, to help take advantage of the brain's ability to repair.The Brain HQ website has many different exercises designed to improve brain function and it also allows you to track and monitor your progress over time. While there are many similar sites on the web, Brain HQ is one of the oldest and most widely used, and its programs are supported by dozens of published science studies and the most complete confirmation of behavioral benefits and brain rejuvenation.

How Your Daily Lifestyle Can Improve Your Brain Function

Aside from engaging in a computer-based brain exercise program, Dr. Merzenich lists several things you can do on a daily basis, as part of your day-to-day lifestyle, to help maintain optimal brain fitness:

• Get 15-30 minutes of physical exercise each day, and when exercising, think about using your brain to control your actions. That means, skip the iPod and instead take in the details of your environment.

  "Reconstruct the environment you're walking through in your mind. Basically, we are constructed to take in the details of our physical environments, and to interpret and reconstruct them. That's a critical form of exercise for us basically to refine our navigational skills and abilities in this sense – to basically look at the landmarks, to look at the details, to record them in detail," he says.

  Secondly, look for and take note of surprises in your environment. "If you walk across the landscape and are paying attention, you cannot take a walk for 15, 20, or 30 minutes without being surprised or delighted many times," he says. "And the brain loves surprises, because surprises mean that they must be engaged to interpret what they mean."

  Lastly, pay attention to your physical body. "You should feel yourself again. When's the last time you actually thought about the feelings of your body in motion?"

• Spend about five minutes every day working on the refinement of a specific, small domain of your physical body. Dr. Merzenich explains:

  "That is to say, move in a very variable and controlled way – variable in speed, variable to reach a target, for example, with your big toe or your little finger or the small of your back or the motion of your jaw. Pick a specific refinement target to work on, every day. I do that in a systematic way, because I'm trying to maintain the fidelity of the neurological control movement. I know that I'm very much thinking about the feeling in my movements as I do that."

• Find ways to engage yourself in new learning as a continuous aspect of your life, such as taking on new hobbies or learning new skills.
• Stay socially engaged.
• Practice "mindfulness," in which you're attentively focusing on the world around you again, as if you're seeing it for the first time.

  "Look at the wonder in the flower. Look with curiosity again at the movements of the lizard. Engage in the details of the world and in life. Associate what you hear with what you feel on your skin," he suggests. "It's incredibly important that you engage the brain and all of its details of how it's drinking in information, because this again relates to the fidelity with which it will represent it for all of its operations."

Nutrition and Brain Health

Another factor that cannot be overlooked is your diet. Foods have an immense impact on your brain, and eating whole foods as described in my nutrition plan will best support your mental and physical health. Just like exercise, avoiding sugar (particularly fructose) and grains will help normalize your insulin levels.

This is an important aspect, as sugar causes chronic inflammation that disrupts your body's normal immune function and can wreak havoc on your brain. But sugar also suppresses BDNF, which is important for proper memory function, and appears to play a significant role in depression as well. At least we know that BDNF levels tend to be critically low in people with depression, and some animal models have suggested low BDNF levels may actually be causative.

The medical literature is also showing that coconut oil can be of particular benefit for brain health, and anecdotal evidence suggests it could be very beneficial in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. Ketone bodies have been found to feed your brain and prevent brain atrophy. It may even restore and renew neuron and nerve function in your brain after damage has set in. Ketones are what your body produces when it converts fat (as opposed to glucose) into energy, and a primary source of ketone bodies are the medium chain triglycerides (MCT) found in coconut oil. Other dietary recommendations to preserve and improve your brain health include the following:

1. Optimize your vitamin D levels through safe sun exposure, a safe tanning bed and/or vitamin D3 supplements.
2. Take a high-quality animal-based omega-3 fat. I recommend consuming high quality krill oil to meet the optimal amount of omega-3 fats needed to achieve good health and fight cognitive decline.
3. Avoid processed foods and sugars, especially fructose – Excessive sugar and grain consumption are the driving factors behind insulin resistance, and the strategies that protect your brain are very similar to those for avoiding diabetes. There is simply no question that insulin resistance is one of the most pervasive influences on brain damage, as it contributes massively to inflammation, which will prematurely degenerate your brain.

   Ideally, you'll want to restrict your total fructose consumption to below 25 grams a day. This includes refraining from eating too many fruits, if you normally eat a lot of them. If you consume more than 25 grams a day of fructose you can damage your cells by creating insulin and leptin resistance and raising your uric acid levels.

4. Avoid grains – Even whole, organic grains will convert to sugar in your body and spike your insulin levels.
5. Avoid artificial sweeteners – Aspartame, for example, is an excitotoxin that can literally destroy your brain cells. There are many studies showing the dangers of aspartame. For example, one study published in 2000 found that aspartame shortens the memory response, impairs memory retention and damages hypothalamic neurons in mice.
6. Avoid soy – Unfermented soy products are another common food that should be avoided if you want to maintain healthy brain function.

   One well-designed epidemiological study linked tofu consumption with exaggerated brain aging. Men who ate tofu at least twice weekly had more cognitive impairment, compared with those who rarely or never ate the soybean curd, and their cognitive test results were about equivalent to what they would have been if they were five years older than their current age. What's more, higher midlife tofu consumption was also associated with low brain weight. Shrinkage does occur naturally with age, but for the men who had consumed more tofu showed an exaggeration of the usual patterns you typically see in aging.

   Dr. Kaayla Daniel has written an excellent book, The Whole Soy Story, which covers the health dangers of soy in great depth and I highly recommend it to anyone still under the illusion that soy is a health food.

Technorati Tags: seniors,anti-aging,brain function,brain skills,brain plasticity,soy,aspartame,exercise,exercise your brain,Dr. Mercola

How video games can combat Alzheimer's

Video games have long been one of my pet peeves. I think they've made a generation of our kids fat, dumb, and lazy at best -- and violent and suicidal at worse. But while raising kids on video games is likely a road to ruin, there are some researchers who believe that these games could help the elderly stave off some of the degenerative effects of aging on the brain.

I'm not about to advise senior citizens to run out and buy an Xbox. However, I like to keep an open mind about these things. After all, my problems with video games stem from the fact that they turn teens into zombies. But North Carolina State psychologists Jason Allaire and Anne McLaughlin are investigating the idea that many of the brain skills used in video games, such as memory and problem solving, can help slow cognitive decline.

The video games we're talking about here are not the gory, blood-spattered kill fests that I've bashed in the past. Some games are specifically designed as workouts for the brain, such as the "Brain Age" series for the handheld Nintendo DS. This game puts players through a series of brainteasers, math problems, and fast-decision games like rock, paper, scissors.

The primary purpose of games like Brain Age, though, is entertainment (and sales). There's little scientific or clinical evidence that the games have a positive impact on the health of a player's mind. McLaughlin and Allaire have just received a $1.2 million grant to conduct a four-year study to find out more.

The researchers' plan is to get nearly 300 seniors to play the Nintendo Wii game "Boom Blox," the goal of which is to smash video targets like castles with a series of weapons, including cannons and slingshots. This game was chosen because it makes players use "real world" skills like memory, multitasking, and reason.

McLaughlin says that her research aims "to produce guidelines for producing games for older adults... Part of it is making it fun so it does not feel like work."

I'm sure that the National Science Foundation, which funded McLaughlin and Allaire's four-year study, will be happy to hear that the team is spending their grant money to do product research for Nintendo!

There's certainly merit to giving your brain a workout in order to keep it sharp. But it's hard not to be skeptical about some of the amazingly far-reaching goals and theories of some of this research. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has given $8.5 million to examine how video games can help sharpen seniors' driving skills -- and to see if they can help to ward off Alzheimer's disease.
Seems like a stretch to me.

While these studies are just starting to become popular and the results are years off, Stern says that he thinks "it's silly for someone run out, buy a game with the hope that it is going to help them age better... there is no proof that it is going to be effective."

I tend to agree. But while researchers grasp at straws for scientific proof of the benefits of video games, there's one completely unscientific upside that has come to light -- they can be a great social activity. Nintendo Wii bowling leagues have popped up in senior homes all over the country. The game controller is motion sensitive, and many seniors have come to enjoy the light exercise and camaraderie that comes with playing the game.

As a tool for smashing the loneliness that sometimes accompanies aging, it's hard not to give video games a nod of approval.

Source:  Daily Dose

Posted:  True Health Is True Wealth