Category: Neuroscience

How Drawing Facilitates Science Learning Abilities

by Jackie Edwards

A research study designed to test students’ ability to think in divergent ways in order to generate multiple solutions or ideas found that when the group of children was tested as preschoolers, 98% were considered to be geniuses in divergent thinking. This percentage went down to just 10% when tested at 14 to 15-years-old. The findings seemed to suggest that children lost their ability to think in divergent ways, which is crucial in scientific study and research, as they lost their natural childlike curiosity and creativity.

The act of drawing is an act of recording, and science is one of the most, if not the most, important areas in which it is crucial to record data in order to make sense of patterns and develop insights and hypothesis. It is likely, for this reason, that ancient Greek mathematicians used diagrams to express their findings instead of equations. While students of science are likely not developing world-changing equations and methods in their science classrooms, drawing still proves to be beneficial in helping them retain material and expand their reasoning capabilities.

The effects of drawing on model-based reasoning

The act of drawing is important for artists, students and scientists alike as it enables them to activate visual model-based reasoning. One study even noted that “visual representations are a powerful tool, because they help to make the unseen seen and the complex simple.”While this type of model-based reasoning is useful, it is much more impactful if it is backed up by intuition and highly-developed observational skills that art can add to the equation.

Another study, aimed at helping science students improve their observational skills and show them the interconnectedness of the arts and the sciences, designed a drawing class for students to take before a subsequent biology class. Students who participated in the study indicated that the drawing class helped them make better observations in the biology course.

While this study was focused on drawing the biology-related terms and images, it seems to be that drawing features such as faces, physical attributes, and other anatomy-driven concepts has the ability to increase observational skills in a way that induces deeper retention of scientific material.

Drawing for learning in Science classrooms

Drawing caters to individual learning differences, allowing students to express their learning process in a unique way and find their way to certain scientific terms and tasks in their own manner. Furthermore, research has shown that if students are able to draw a concept to understand it better, they learn to reason creatively in a way distinct from, but complementary to, reasoning through argumentation.

As research develops in this area of learning, teachers and scientists should explore what mental mechanisms exactly drawing involves in order to understand how to incorporate it into the classroom in a way that is conducive to not only scientific learning, but learning in a general sense. From the Great Pyramids to the works of Da Vinci, centuries of engagement in model-based reasoning, visual-based learning and the combination of science and the arts have proven that it is a beneficial mixture in both learning and culture.

Researchers Test New Ways to Combat Brain Cancer

by Megan Ray Nichols 

Thanks to researchers testing innovative treatments, brain cancer patients have new hope. Glioblastoma is just one form of brain cancer that may be better treated in the future with one of these new methods. Discover the ways scientists are working to stop the progression of this potentially deadly cancer.

What Is Glioblastoma?

Glioblastoma, also known as glioblastoma multiforme or GBM, is projected to affect 24,000 Americans in 2018. And 17,000 will die from these fast, aggressive tumors, which are the most common tumor-creating brain cancer. This cancer is a grade 4 tumor that may arise from an existing tumor or on its own. Most who develop GBM are older adults, where the disease typically grows in the frontal or temporal lobes. Without treatment, glioblastoma often kills its victims in about 15 months.

Treatment usually requires surgery to remove the tumor. Radiation and chemotherapy are added to ensure the removal of cancerous cells. Sadly, GBM recurs frequently in patients who have undergone treatment. That’s why new treatment options are so exciting for those with GBM and their families.

Virus vs. Cancer

Though you might not think of a virus versus cancer as much of a battle, researchers are discovering that a cold could help cancer patients live longer. Scientists took a common cold virus, called an adenovirus, and modified it to target glioblastoma. The virus attacked the tumor cells as it normally would other cells by taking over the cell and killing it. Viruses also use the cell’s natural reproduction to make copies of themselves. This allows viruses to spread to other cells.

The trials at MD Anderson Cancer Center gave 20 percent of patients three years or more of life where they’d have just months without treatment. Though the tumor came back in these patients, the viral therapy gives a few more years to those with recurrent tumors. To increase this number, additional studies are looking at combining the viral therapy with other treatments.

Space Age Lasers Blasting Glioblastoma

Laser ablation sounds more like a sci-fi weapon than a cancer treatment, but this option is currently showing promise in trials. Using magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, and a laser, heat and light eat away at the tumor inside the brain. Unlike brain surgery, this option does not require completely opening the skull, making it much less invasive. Recovery is easier and faster for the patient.

New Drug Treatments

Though chemotherapy is common in GBM treatment, other drugs could be added to the regime. Many trials currently are studying combinations of drugs. Nivolumab and bevacizumab are being tested in a phase 2 clinical trial. The tolerance and effectiveness of changing bevacizumab to a low dose from a standard and combining it with nivolumab is at the core of this study. During phase 2 clinical trials, the researchers want to establish how effective this treatment is against glioblastoma.

Another phase 2 trial looks at creating a triple-method treatment, which would add to the traditional chemotherapy option, temozolomide. This study hopes to increase the length of time before a new tumor appears after treatment by combining the chemotherapy drug with pembrolizumab and TTFields. TTFields, also known as Optune, is an electromagnetic therapy for treating tumors. The control will only receive TTFields and temozolomide, while the experimental group will add pembrolizumab. Researchers will examine the length of time before the cancer progresses in participants.

Clinical Trials and Glioblastoma Treatment

Though it may take a while before the treatments tested in clinical trials today will be available to the public, it gives hope for future patients. Those who currently have GBM may discuss with their doctors the possibility of participating in clinical trials. As an aggressive, fast-acting cancer, new methods of treatment are always sought by researchers who want to lengthen the lives of those diagnosed with these tumors.

The Cocktail Party Effect

Introduction

The term cocktail party effect was coined by a British Cognitive scientist Colin Cherry, in the 1950s. He was interested in understanding how people listened, by conducting a few experiments. In his first experiment, he played two different overlapped messages recorded in the voice of the same person, through headphones. The participants were asked to listen carefully and try to write one of the messages on paper. If they put in enough concentration, the participants usually succeeded.

Now, if someone asks you to describe the cocktail party effect. The formal Cocktail Party effect definition is as follows:

Cocktail Party Effect Definition:

The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of being able to focus one’s auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, much the same way that a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room. Continue reading The Cocktail Party Effect

The Smell of Freshly Cut Grass

By Anupum Pant

Freshly cut grass certainly smells nice, doesn’t it? So does the smell of rain and the musky odor of books. There’s a reason why the freshly cut grass smell feels so good to humans, but first let’s see why does it even exist.

Some incorrectly believe that the freshly cut grass smell is a distress signal for other nearby plants to communicate to them that there’s something, either a plant eating insect or animal, coming towards them and that they need to move their nutrients to the root as soon as possible. That’s not quite right, or that is what science believes. Although there might be some truth to it because these things haven’t been extensively studied due their complexity. Researchers however have a strong feeling that this smell might not even be detectable by other plants.

But that smell, as studies have shown, definitely sends down signals that other insects can react to. This smell that comes from the fatty volatile substances released by plants is in fact really is a distress signal, however not for other plants to detect directly, it serves two purposes.

  1. It is a plant’s way of repelling the insect that’s eating it by making itself smell less appetizing to the insect.
  2. It’s  also a way for plants to call the parasitic insects to protect them from these plant eating creatures. Parasitic insects like wasps are expected to come and lay eggs inside herbivorous insects like caterpillars. And that ultimately saves the other plants from being eaten.

Another study conducted by Department of Physiology, Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine says that this odor, composed of a mixture of  trans-2-hexenal and cis-3-hexen-1-ol, both of which can be bought from a chemical supplier, is called green odor and has a psychological effect among apes.

It can in fact heal the psychological damages caused due to stress. The mixture of these two chemicals causes local blood flow in the part of your brain that processes information for you to be able to smell it, obviously. But it also does the same in some other parts which isn’t usually effected by other common smells. That, they think indicates that the smell of freshly cut grass does in fact explains the healing effect. So, it’s good for apes and they like the smell.

It also reduces stress among rats and decreases the sensation of pain to some extent among humans. The smell also does help us tap into deep touching memories too, often referred to as the Proust Effect.

[Audio for more]

Catching Russian Spies With Science

By Anupum Pant

Consider this. You have the following line and you are asked to read out loud the colour of the word. It’s a rather easy exercise.

1

However, if the letters read of one colour and appear in some other colour, like the word “blue” appears in red colour, as shown below, it takes a slightly greater amount of time to process it inside and churn our the colour.

2

It can also be said with firm belief that you’ll take that extra time in the second exercise as compared to the first one only if you speak English. If you are a Russian, for instance, your brain would just skip the English letters and focus on the colour of the words. So, Russians would complete the second exercise in more or less the same time as the first one. This is the Stroop effect.

Thanks to the Stroop effect, it was literally a words play to catch a Russian spy.

Also, depressed people can be spotted using a similar exercise (again stroop effect).

Depressed participants will be slower to say the color of depressing words rather than non-depressing words. Non-clinical subjects have also been shown to name the color of an emotional word (e.g., ‘war’, ‘cancer’, ‘kill’) slower than naming the color of a neutral word (e.g., ‘clock’, ‘lift’, ‘windy’).

Vanishing Calorie Density

By Anupum Pant

Companies which make delicious potato and corn snacks like chips and puffs are huge corporations who have an army of hundreds of psychologists, chemists and other technicians who do science experiments on equipment costing tens of thousands of dollars and spend millions every year to create and improve the snack. To make it taste, smell, sound and feel better. After hundreds of tests and iterations, these companies now probably have been able to construct a marvellous food item which is no less than any other feat of engineering that mankind has endeavoured.

One such food item is cheetos corn puffs. A food scientist,  Steven Witherly, after having tested a sample of Cheetos once said:

This is one of the most marvellously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.

And it really is. The corn puffs are designed to go into your mouth, smell and taste amazing and are carefully mastered to give you that satisfying crunch and melt inside. Melt inside, as if making your brain say, that was hardly anything I ate. Before you know, you finish off a whole party pack while watching your favourite movie. And it still doesn’t make you full.

Being full, or not is something your stomach tells your brain (after about 20 minutes it has been full). But the brain is the ultimate master. It can choose to make you feel full, or not.

With Cheetos, you are almost never full. You can keep eating. This ability of this marvellous snack to go in and melt into nothing is seen by your brain as a “vanishing calorie density”. And that is the reason you can keep eating it forever.

More about it [NYTimes]

The McCollough Effect

By Anupum Pant

Some times, you come across simple illusions. Optical illusions, for example. But then there are more complex effects which temporarily change the way your brain works and can’t really be called optical illusions. This one is called the McCollough effect and you should probably not try it. Because once you do, it might even stay in there for about three months. Or just for a few minutes may be. It really breaks you perceive your world.

This is how it works. This is something which requires an induction. So, let’s say an induction video about 8 minutes long would show you some images which would change the way you see things – it would “induce” the effect – thus the name, induction.

The video would normally consist a series of images of coloured stripes next to black stripes oriented in different directions. So, let’s say the vertical stripes that are shown in the induction video has alternating red and black stripes.

Now once the induction ends, you’ll start seeing a slight hint og green colour at places outside of the video, wherever your brain sees a vertical pattern. To test it, you can look at a vertical white and black stripe pattern and there instead of pure white you’d see a greenish white. Green because it is complementary to red.

If you are down for trying it, I’d need a couple minutes of your attention – watch the video below.

College Dropout Turned into a Math Prodigy

By Anupum Pant

Jason Padgett was a community college dropout at the age of 31 and was raising a daughter by being a furniture salesman. He had no interest in numbers. In 2002, one night in Tacoma, Washington, near a Karaoke bar, he ran into a few thugs who were there to mug him. From them, he suffered serious head injuries and somehow survived. But something changed.

An ordinary furniture salesman, and a drop-out now had turned into a mathematical prodigy and started seeing geometrical shapes all around. He now started to comprehend the meaning of pi, and much more. He became the first recorded case of acquired savant syndrome – something that has been historically seen in only 40 people across the world.

Stories like these make me question if there’s immense brain power naturally granted to us, and it’s just a matter of some mysterious event to unlock those powers.

Cockroaches and Activation Theory

By Anupum Pant

Robert Zajonc, a Polish-born American social psychologist proposed an activation Theory for social facilitation. Sounds tough, but read on. His first theory, in simple words, tried to explain the way our performance at some tasks increases in the presence of others, while the performance at some other tasks decreases.

According to him, the presence of other individuals around you serves as a source of “arousal” and affects performance (in good ways some times and bad ways the other times).

When this happens, he said, humans tend to do well at tasks which they are inherently good at, or tasks which they’ve practised well, or easy tasks which involve very little conscious cognitive effort. While the performance at other complex tasks, which aren’t well-learned is affected negatively, when there are other people watching you.

More interestingly, he also pointed that this change in performance isn’t only seen among humans.  An experiment that involved several cockroaches effectively proved this.

In two different cases, a cockroach was put in an easy maze to run around and find an exit. The first case had just the one cockroach running around in the maze. It did fine. But in the second case when there were other cockroaches watching the cockroach who was running in the maze, it ran faster. A clear increase in performance was noted in this easy maze.

Interestingly, when the difficulty of this maze was increased (it was a complex task now), as Robert had predicted, the cockroach’s performance decreased when other cockroaches were watching.

The Art of Forgetting

By Anupum Pant

At school we were expected to remember things. Every single piece of misplaced information in your brain costed you points  in tests. You couldn’t afford to forget – The very mental pressure which caused panic and made you forget things!

Turns out, there is a forgetting protein in our brains called Musashi. It messes with the way nerve cells in the brain communicate with each other – basically makes you forget stuff.

Scientists have, genetically modified ringworms to clear Musashi off their brains. As expected, the Musashi free ringworms remembered things much better and were far less forgetful. [read more]

So, can’t we just do the same to our brains and never ever forget?  No, we can’t. If we did, we’d have our brains filled with information and there’d be no space to learn new things. We forget for a reason and it is totally normal. It’s probably high time that the educations system at schools be modified to embrace what is only natural – in fact, like  Vanessa Hill says in this new video from the BrainCraft channel, forgetting actually helps you remember!

Cotard Syndrome – Walking Dead Disorder

By Anupum Pant

Neurological conditions can be bizarre. Now I know that there is a condition that can delude patients to such an extent that they start thinking they no longer exist, or are dead. It’s called the Cotard Syndrome or the walking dead disorder.

Named after a French doctor Jules Cotard, the Cotard syndrome is a neurological condition in which severe degeneration of neural synapses occurs and messes with the facial recognition and emotion centres of the brain. Their brain creates a totally impaired perception of the self. As a result, patients suffering from it some times get convinced that their body parts no longer exist, or have started decaying.

Often times, patients think that they no longer need to eat (because they are already dead), and they starve to death.

There have also been cases in which patients have tried to get rid of their body parts using acid because they felt doing this was only the way to free themselves of being zombies.

Graham, a person who got caught up by this bizarre disorder was totally convinced that his brain did not exist. He had lost all his senses, he thought he was in a state between life and death, and saw no point in continuing to live this way. He tried to kill himself by getting electrocuted in a bathtub. Graham got cured to some extent, but the disorder completely messed up the rest of his life.

Another person who suffered brain injury due to a motorcycle accident was first cleared as health by doctors initially. After which he went on a vacation to South Africa. By the time he came back, he was totally convinced that he had died and had gone to hell.

Thankfully, it is an extremely rare disorder.

via [NewScientist]

Stopped Clock Illusion

By Anupum Pant

When you quickly move your eyes to focus on the seconds hand of an analogue clock, have you ever noticed that the first second you see actually seems to linger for a slightly longer time? Yes, it does. And there’s a reason why it happens.

When you rapidly move eyeballs to focus from one point to the another, it’s called a Saccade. If you ever try doing this rapid movement with a camera, a motion blur occurs in between the first point focus and the last point focus.

Unlike cameras our eyes (work closely with the brain) has a built-in mechanism to erase this motion blur. The brain erases all the motion blur during those few milliseconds and replaces the motion blur frames with the final image in the end.

This is why you see the longer first second when you quickly focus your eyes on the seconds hand – the stopped clock illusion or chronostasis. This also explains why you can never see your eyeballs moving when you try to spot their movement while staring at your own eyes on a mirror.

Michael Stevens from Vsauce explains…

Tickling Yourself

By Anupum Pant

In most cases tickling yourself is tough. That is because whenever you try to tickle yourself, at the back of your head (yes, really at the back, in a part of the brain called the cerebellum) you know that the sensation was caused as a result of your own movement. That way, the brain is able to predict the sensation and is able to nullify it.

When someone else tries it on you, the brain fails to predict the movement and the somatosensory cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex fire up to make you feel the tickle.

But have you ever tried tickling yourself with a fake hand? It still doesn’t work! Even when you don’t use your direct body part, your brain knows and can predict movement. Unless of course, the fake hand is being used by someone else. It’s interesting but believable that tickling yourself with a fake rubber hand doesn’t fool the brain. But there’s more.

In fact, if you had a tickling robot which could be controlled with a remote control, you still won’t be able to use the remote to operate it and make yourself tickle. While, if some one else had the control and they tried to control the robot to tickle you, you’d feel more ticklish. Unless, there’s a delay. It blows my mind to think about that!

What if, there was a robot which could control the remote control of a tickling robot, and you could control the first one with another remote control. Would you be able to tickle yourself using this contraption? I’m saying no, you still won’t be able to tickle yourself if there was no delay in between. What do you say?

Yes, delay is crucial here. Suppose you had a long contraption which would make movements after a few seconds of delay with respect to the control (which you have in your hand), you’d feel more ticklish, if you tried. Studies say, more the delay, the more ticklish it is.

Note: People with schizophrenia can tickle themselves, using their own hands, fake hand or something else.

Remember, I started the article with “most cases”. That is because there are a couple of ways to tickle yourself successfully. Try making little circles with a soft touch behind your knee for instance. Or use a feather on the sole of your foot. Or, try making circles with your tongue on the roof of your mouth where there’s a ribbed texture…