Adult Brains More Flexible Than Previously Thought 123
stemceller passed us a link to the official site for Johns Hopkins, which is reporting on some research into cognition. Generally, doctors have understood our best learning to be done at a young age, when the brain has a 'robust flexibility'. As we get older, our brain cells become 'hard-wired' along certain paths and don't move much - if at all. Or, at least, that was the understanding. Research headed by the hospital's Dr. Linden has taken advantage of 'two-photon microscopy', a new technique, to get a new picture inside a mouse's head. "They examined neurons that extend fibers (called axons) to send signals to a brain region called the cerebellum, which helps coordinate movements and sensory information. Like a growing tree, these axons have a primary trunk that runs upward and several smaller branches that sprout out to the sides. But while the main trunk was firmly connected to other target neurons in the cerebellum, stationary as adult axons are generally thought to be, 'the side branches swayed like kite tails in the wind,' says Linden. Over the course of a few hours, individual side branches would elongate, retract and morph in a highly dynamic fashion. These side branches also failed to make conventional connections, or synapses, with adjacent neurons. Furthermore, when a drug was given that produced strong electrical currents in the axons, the motion of the side branches stalled.'"
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Where are the comments!!
OMG they stoled teh commants!!
Ron Paul??? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why is this article tagged with 'ronpaul' and 'ronpaulisanazi'?
I've been wondering the same thing. And now I'm wondering why you said that as a reply to my comment..
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Not true (Score:2, Funny)
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Re:Not true (Score:5, Funny)
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In those days, on Sunday morning, the farmer would get out the caleche and attach the horse, to head to church. Often the farmer would fall asleep in the caleche, and they would arrive nevertheless. The horse followed the ruts in the path, and knew how to arrive.
I think our brain is the same. The more we repeat actions, the deeper the ruts, and the more difficult it is to jump out fro
Re:Not true (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is also one reason why it may be good for a person to change job now and then to not grow stale in one environment. It may be good to not change too often but if the job stops to develop a person it will result in that the person having the job will get bound to the job and unable to accept changes or the person will change job.
It's important for people to take on challenges now and then - even if failing it's a learning experience. If failing all the time - it's just meaning that this person is attempting things that always are too hard or that that particular person hasn't the ability to know his/her own limits.
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Any chance you'd do motivational speaking? Say 5 maybe 10 minutes with my kids on the phone?
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Adults can learn... (Score:3, Interesting)
I had to fight them for a long time to use it, but now even my parents (in their 60s) suffer from internet withdrawal if they go without for a few days.
Re:Adults can learn... (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, most of this comes back to lack of effort, but in most cases, the decision to not put forth the effort is very understandable. It doesn't mean that adults can't learn. It just means they're too busy, have too many distractions and demands on their time, are happy with their current methods, or are simply too damn tired.
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So... when are we getting the ability to edit posts?
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Re:Adults can learn... (Score:5, Insightful)
If an adult speaks a second language poorly, people go, "Oh, what an idiot... Will you please just speak in your native tongue?!"
But if a child learning a language speak it poorly, people go, "Wow! You're learning so quickly! You're really doing a great job!" They'll smother the child with attention.
Kids also find other kids who are basically forced to learn to speak a language, and are learning at the same skill level, and so on.
Re:Adults can learn... (Score:4, Interesting)
When my son comes home from a full day dedicated to the learning of new things and shows me a test result that isn't up to par, two things happen.
First, I make it very clear that I am not happy with the test result, and that I expect better of him. (He tends to be the fool-around-in-class type, but is very bright. Usually he doesn't learn because he wasn't paying attention. As for the fooling around, well, we're working on that.)
Second, we sit down at the dinner table and go over the subject matter until he knows and understands it. He knows at this point that he must learn the material, and that I won't be satisfied until I can randomly quiz him on it a day or two later and get a good result. In other words, he knows he has little choice but to learn. Even if it wasn't for me, his teacher would push him into it to some degree, there's peer pressure, there's the pride of seeing good test results...
Along those lines, adults are constantly learning new things as well. As I mentioned in my original post, though, it doesn't tend to be random, gratuitous learning; it's stuff that they need to do their jobs and excel in their careers. The most common field around the
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Re:Adults can learn... (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, you've got me trying to learn Spanish. I've never taken a class, but have had my family trying to teach me for four years. I was apologizing one day for my bad Spanish, and remarked on how much better the kids seem to understand it. We got into a discussion about why that would be, and she brought up the subject of how kids can learn faster than adults. My explanation was exactly what I wrote in the GP, plus the immersion aspect.
Learning a language is the same as learning any other complex topic. There are jargon to learn and rules to be followed, as well as obtaining that finesse that only comes through practice. If the world was such that adults could dedicate the same time and attention as kids can, I don't think this myth would ever have existed to begin with.
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[...]for my bad Spanish[...]
Try emulating with your mouth and tongue the sounds--vowel lengths, etc.--that native speakers of Spanish use and you are likely to improve! Copy the way the native speakers talk...
I've had speakers of other languages (specifically, German and Spanish) tell me that my pronunciation is very good. I use a completely different mouth shape and tongue position for German than for Spanish. I can speak better German with my mouth open wide (for correct enunciation) and my tongue "back" (so that I can correctly
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What tends to kill me are the vocabulary and idioms. I'll be going along and suddenly have no idea how to say what I want to say. Then I wind up sort-of talking around it, explaining what I'm trying to say. Other than that, I don't use enough articles, but I think that's forgivable. I took 5-1/2 years of
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Re:Adults can learn... (Score:5, Informative)
That and the anecdotes of retired people learning new things with all the time they now have - such as a friend's father, who's a retired air force officer - doing a computer science degree in his 60s, and doing it as well as any college kid.
Similar to neural net entropic topography. (Score:5, Interesting)
While there are various deterministic algorithms that are used to evolve neural nets, it's only recently that we've begun seeing randomness used. This has an added benefit of bringing in unexpected mutations, which really don't happen with the deterministic algorithms.
Some advances from the study of Lei topographies have also lead to breakthroughs recently, where some of the more complex, yet deterministic, algorithms have had entropic terms introduced in order to bring in an element of randomness. These neural nets are probably the closest to the human brain, as they introduce the random mutation that is so prevalent within the human species, while also following the constraints of this new-found core neural path.
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An artificial neural network (digital or not is irrelevant) has an architecture (lay-out; topography?), which defines a blue-print of its connections and its parameters. Usually, these parameters are optimised with a process called learning for neural networks, and fitting in statistics. Randomness is used to assist this process since the 1950s. One learning
Humans (Score:1, Redundant)
This whole thing is about mice brains actually, how do we know how that applies to adult human brains? The RTFA doesn't seem to say much about that..
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The RTFA...
Err crap, I mean "TFA" of course..
usage of brains (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate this view that some how results of tests on animals don't apply to humans at all. It's simply not true, almost every major medical advance has been tested or researched on animals like mice first. the simple fact is mammals bodies all work in very similar ways.
Having worked in a lab (disclaimer: not as a scientist) I learned that there are loads and loads of promising treatments for cancer and such that work great in mice, and never translate beyond. Even a casual glance at immunology from a layman's perspective reveals your statement to be utter bullshit; there are many, many diseases and afflictions that are species specific, sometimes highly so.
Anyway...it is entirely plausible that this ability to re-purpose brain cells is a plus for mice in survival/adaptation, where they have very little brain capacity at their disposal. We have loads at our disposal, and tend to build a lot of generally useful knowledge..ie, we build tools, literally or figuratively, and apply those 'real' tools or knowledge/skill 'tools'. Mice do not do either. We're more "general purpose", so maybe we don't *need* the ability to re-learn, since our learned skills are so broadly applicable in a survival sense.
bullshit? (Score:5, Insightful)
He stated that it's "not true" that animal tests don't apply to humans at all (true), that almost every major medical advance has been tested or researched on animals like mice first (true, at least since the mid-twentieth century), and that mammal bodies work in very similar ways (true).
What you said is also true--that despite the huge similarities there are also significant differences--but that doesn't make his statement "bullshit"... perhaps merely "incomplete."
I support your point in general, especially because brains is obviously one of the organs in which humans differ the most, but I don't think that gives you the right to call a bunch of essentially truthful statements "bullshit."
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I have some concern about your statment.
It is true that in all likelyhood mice brains function on the low level almost exactly like ours and I am willing to bet that reptile brains also exhibit this behavior. While I haven't examined their research yet I am confident in making the statment.
The reason is simple...brains are built upon the
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I hate this view that some how results of tests on animals don't apply to humans at all.
Hey slow down, it's not as if I was claiming "hey this thing doesn't apply to humans!". I'm just asking, and I believe this is a legitimate question, does that very thing apply to us, as it hasn't been mentioned, and you're not even answering to that. It's not because something works one on on mice that it's automatically working the same way in humans, mostly that our human brains have quite different capabilities and
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Haha thanks for your comment. By the way I'm working on a rewrite of the program to make it much faster (and also a bit more ergonomic and polished), and I plan on releasing it within the next few weeks.
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That is actually an important observation that often goes unexplained. The fact is, mice are genetically very close to humans, but they reproduce quickly, are cheap, and their genetics and physiology are very well understood. That makes them a great animal to experiment on.
At the cellular level, most mammals are very, very similar to each other. In fact, we
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I know all of that, but thanks anyways. But do we know if in these very news we're talking about it applies to humans? Because both the summary and the article make it sound like it does apply to us, but it sounds more like misleading us in order to make it sound more interesting than anything else.
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I didn't look up the actual peer-reviewed article, and I don't generally trust reporters to accurately summarize scientific results. However, as a rule of thumb, in biology one study doesn't really mean much at all, unless it is demonstrating a new experimental method. The results must be duplicated in several experiments. In this case, I wouldn't be confident that the 'news' applies even to mice (the experimental subjects), let
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Or is that just a theory? I forget - must be getting old...
Re:Humans (Score:4, Informative)
I've got a knife, you've got a brain... let's study this on your brain. ;-)
Must I understand that you don't have a brain? ;-)
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No, but you must understand it would be hard for you to function if you were cutting into your own, unless you really _are_ a fucking idiot.
You've never watched Hannibal now, have you? ;-)
Wow now I understand (Score:2, Funny)
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Scary combination (Score:5, Informative)
Here's another article [wired.com] on the same topic.
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When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative's birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so.
To be honest, that doesn't say much to me. I didn't memorize most of my realtives' birthdays until I was older simply because I didn't care. The often-selfish mind of a child doesn't really care about birthdays that aren't his/hers because they don't get anything out of it. But their own birthday? Oh my god, presents! APRIL THIRD, APRIL THIRD! GIVE ME MY CAKE AND TOY CAR!@
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I did not read the article, but i believe the main idea was that with all the new technology that remembers things for us, young people will have less opportunity to exercise their memory. I don't thing it's true, and this is exactly the reason why:
i bet if you asked the under 30's to recite some website addresses they would do far better then the over 5
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A generation before that list gets reduced further.
Today, how many phone numbers, email addresses, irc addresses, computer and site logins and their accompanying passwords does one have to remember? For personal, work and/or school?
Personally I w
Re:Scary combination (Score:5, Insightful)
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The bigger problem is that certain aspects of our modern technology allow young people these days do less to develop their minds than in past generations.
no, the bigger problem is that a survey question like that one ignores generational differences in what people keep track of. the fact that i can't name as many relatives' birthdates as, say, my grandmother--or even my mother--says more about how i've been developing my brain, and more importantly, what types of information i keep track of. i can quote more random freaking tv shows, movies, and comics than my parents know existed, but that doesn't indicate any kind of developmental lethargy on their part
Not really scary--it's smart. (Score:4, Insightful)
Technology isn't conflicting with our brain's evolution; it's extending and enhancing it. One less phone number to remember is who knows how many neurons that don't have to waste time storing and retrieving it. You might question whether young people are using this freed memory space to good use (for the love of all that's holy, I do NOT care about who won the latest reality show or what celebrities do in their spare time), but I think that it's a mistake to view this phenomenon as a fault.
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When you hear that the sky is falling over and over, but it still hasn't, it tends to make you a little less likely to change your ways. It really doesn't have much to do with neural pathways.
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I wonder if he compensated for how long people had their phone numbers...it took me a couple of months to really be sure what my new phone number was, but at this point, I doubt I ever forget it.
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In the old days, you learned it by giving it to people all the time.
These days, all of your friends have caller id. Call them once and they have your number. you never have to give it to anyone.
Personally I really hope I am more family-focused when I'm older than I am now, when I'm fairly young and still self-absorbed as I build for my future.
if they really wanted to study this, they would have to test for random informat
Re: Old & Young, Remembering & Forgetting (Score:2)
Group 1: Young People able to remember phone numbers:
These are the "Connected youngsters" talked about in conjunction with the rise of Web 2.0 and later, business networking. Someone constantly telling people to "call me on my cell"
Group 2: Older People unable to remember phone numbers:
Watch what happens when such a person is either not used to their cell, or
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"Certainly" replied Einstein. He picked up the phone directory and looked up his phone number, then wrote it on a slip of paper and handed it to the reporter.
Dumbfounded, the reporter said, "You are considered to be the smartest man in the world and you can't remember your own phone number?"
Einstein replied, "Why should I memorize something when I know where to find it?"
Defensive coding... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like as a programmer learns of which coding constructs work for which situations... they learn it becomes more important to worry about understandability rather than speed, and to code with clear structures they can pick up later if and when they need to clean up misunderstandings later. The default practice becomes a sort of robust defensive form, that requires the fewest changes over the widest plausible set of needs - while still doing the job of completely enumerating the problem set needed.
I'd expect that even with minds unhindered by age, the same sort of defensive practices programmers pick up would have analogues in most other realms of experience that mankind goes through. That would then, be easily confused with a mind unable to rapidly change, because such wide change is then rarely observed.
That said - there are more concrete bits of evidence that complicate things - such as rates of new language adoption between adults and children... but again, there's also evidence that some adults can still pick up new languages rapidly. Perhaps those same defensive practices act as a 'language censor' to 'wasting time with confusing sentence structure' - or perhaps there really is some factor of truth to the hardware limitations of an aging brain. Hard to know for sure until we get the computational nuerobiology tools in place to be able to strictly test such things... I'm really happy to see the progress so far though.
Ryan Fenton
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Children of ages 6 months and 9 months were shown a variety of ape faces in photographs
This is because children lose the ability to differentiate between ape faces - simply because they don't interact with other species of apes and therefore don't need to know the difference.
I wish they had done the experime
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i already know that (Score:1, Insightful)
flexy (Score:1)
So (Score:1, Interesting)
They're spare tires (Score:1)
That pretty much says it: they just sit there and do nothing but replace good ones.
Or they really think it provides a "second mechanism for conveying information beyond traditional synapses" -- but how can it convey information if
Just hand waiving (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, the observation that learning and memorizing becomes more difficult with age is pretty solid. If our neurons maintain their plasticity, these people should explain how a plastic brain stops learning.
Concluding: the observations are probably true, the conclusions were just made to draw attention and get more funding (aging is a big topic for funds these days). Such is the sad state of science.
PS I hold a post-doc in neurocognition.
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1.) You can't spell (hand "waving")
2.) There's a vast body of evidence growing that neuroplasticity is greatest in childhood, but continues throughout life, even in heavily damaged brains, as of stroke victims;
http://www.normandoidge.com/ [normandoidge.com]
3.) As an anthropologist, I can tell you that our culture is the only one that warehouses and infantilizes the elderly on an industrial scale. What you think you're seeing is an artifact of a cultural phenom
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Anyway, plasticity is there, but there is a "vaster" body of evidence that the older you get, the harder it is to learn. Of course, you still can remember things, but e.g. these memories have to compete with existing ones. Consequently, perhaps our brain's plasticity is not enough to accomodate a huge amount of memories. Then again, plasticity does not seem to apply equally
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How dare you emply that I can't splell!
I think we agree that plasticity is greater in the young, less in the elderly.
The central story in Norman Doidge's "The Brain That Changes Itself" is a remarkable example of how the effects of age, or even of the damage resulting from stroke, can be mitigated by encouraging neuroplasticity.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070410/brain_doidge_070410/20070410?hub=Specials/ [www.ctv.ca]
A psychiatrist whom I know, and who has been following Doi
Of mice and men... (Score:1)
"use it or lose it" (Score:1)
So finally they catch up ... (Score:1)
Epilepsy and Math ability related? (Score:1, Interesting)
There is a man in his early 20's who recently recited pi to some 200,000 digits perfectly at Oxford university. He says he can visualize numbers in his head and is able to (as Oxford researchers found) do division to a precision of 20 or more decimal places in his head (there are some techniques to do this too I'm sure).
The point is he's said that his ability to visualize
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Tiresome (Score:2)
Can you still play? (Score:2)
Will you play?
That is essentially how you know if the state of your brain matters or not.
And more tasty! (Score:1)
Flexible? (Score:1)
What's the saying? (Score:2)
Language (Score:2)
Please Remove Your Hat (Score:2)
On brain plasticity... (Score:1)