11May

Joshua Foer: Feats of memory anyone can do

An entertaining TED video about memory and techniques used for remembering, especially in the context of memory competitions.

16Sep

Visual Images From Brain Activity Reconstructed By Scientists

http://pinktentacle.com/2008/12/scientists-extract-images-directly-from-brain/

Three years ago, a research from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories has developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor.  Scientists who were tasked to do this research were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.  During that time, the system was only able to reproduce simple black-and-white images.

A recent development to fMRI machine is now capable of reproducing images in color.  The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have demonstrated brain motion produced by static visual patterns and have reconstructed these patterns from brain activity. There are simple examples of reconstruction done by the researchers, one of which is through watching movies.

The subject of this test has undergone the following process:

  1. Record brain activity while the subject watches several hours of movie trailers.
  2. Build dictionaries (regression model; see below) to translate between the shapes, edges and motion in the movies and measured brain activity. A separate dictionary is constructed for each of several thousand points in the brain at which brain activity was measured.  (For experts: our success here in building a movie-to-brain activity encoding model that can predicts brain activity to arbitrary novel movie inputs was one of the keys of this study)
  3. Record brain activity to a new set of movie trailers that will be used to test the quality of the dictionaries and reconstructions.
  4. Build a random library of ~18,000,000 seconds of video downloaded at random from YouTube (that have no overlap with the movies subjects saw in the magnet). Put each of these clips through the dictionaries to generate predictions of brain activity. Select the 100 clips whose predicted activity is most similar to the observed brain activity. Average those clips together. This is the reconstruction.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-09/mind-reading-tech-reconstructs-videos-brain-images

According to the researchers, there are also limitations in brain decoding.  Decoding performance depends on the quality of brain activity measurements.  This technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. Reconstructing movies using brain scans has been challenging because the blood flow signals measured using fMRI change much more slowly than the neural signals that encode dynamic information in movies, researchers said. For this reason, most previous attempts to decode brain activity have focused on static images.  However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories.  They also stressed that practical applications of the technology could include a better understanding of what goes on in the minds of people who cannot communicate verbally, such as stroke victims, coma patients and people with neurodegenerative diseases.

You can check out the details on the breakthrough here:
Mind-Reading Tech Reconstructs Videos From Brain Images
Scientists extract images directly from brain

10Sep

Amazing Facts You Didn’t Know About Sleep

 

Dreaming is one of the most mysterious experiences in our lives.   When we sleep well, we wake up feeling refreshed and alert.  It affects how we look, feel and perform on a daily basis, and can have a major impact on our overall quality of life.  Ever since you were born, you have already made this journey through different sleep levels countless of times.  Sleep isn’t merely a time when your body and brain shuts off.  While you rest, your brain stays busy, overseeing a wide variety of biological maintenance tasks that keep your body running and prepare you for the day ahead. Listed are the wonderful facts you should know about sleep.

What goes on when you sleep?

A good night’s sleep is often the best way to help you cope with stress, solve problems, or recover from illness. Sleep is prompted by natural cycles of activity in the brain and an active state that affects both your physical and mental well-being.  When you sleep:

  • Your brain recharges
  • Your cells repair themselves
  • Your body releases important hormones

You need different amounts of sleep depending on your age.

According to studies, the average adult sleeps less than 7 hours per night. In today’s fast-paced society, 6 or 7 hours of sleep may sound pretty good.  While sleep requirements vary slightly from person to person, an average amount of sleep is needed depending on your age bracket.

  • Babies – 16 hours
  • Age 3-12 (Toddlers and Preschoolers) – 10 hours
  • Age 13-18 (Teens and Pre-teens) – 13 to 18 hours
  • Age 19-55 (Adults) – 8 hours
  • Over 65 – 6 hours

The best way to figure out if you’re meeting your sleep needs is to evaluate how you feel as you go about your day. If you’re logging enough hours, you’ll feel energetic and alert all day long, from the moment you wake up until your regular bedtime.

Men have dreams about other men 70% of the time.  But women dream about women and men equally.

It was recently found out in a comprehensive standardized system of classifying and scoring the content of dream reports, that women dream equally of men and women, but 70% of the characters in men’s dreams are other men and the gender difference in favor of male characters appeared in almost every culture.  In addition to that, men have a higher degree of aggression in dreams than women.  This was based in the book The Content Analysis of Dreams, published in 1996 by Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle.

In your dreams, you only see faces that you already know.

In our dreams we see real faces of real people that we have seen during our life but may not know or remember. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces throughout our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams.

Crimes are committed in parasomnia.

Parasomnia is a sleep disorder that makes you do unnatural movements, behaviours and emotions despite being asleep.  Crimes committed on parasomnia include:

  • Sleep driving
  • Writing bad checks
  • Murder
  • Child molesting
  • Rape

Not everybody dreams in color.

12% of people dream only in black and white and the remaining number dream in full color. Recent research has suggested that those changing results may be linked to the switch from black-and-white film and TV to color media.

Dreaming is normal.

People who do not dream generally have personality disorder.  In an average lifetime, you would have spent a total of about six years of it dreaming. That is more than 2,100 days spent in a different realm!  In fact, you have several dreams during a normal night of sleep.

Sleep positions may determine your personality.

Common sleeping positions and how they correlate to personality traits. Preferred sleeping positions are seen as a sort of subconscious body language that reflects our inner traits.  The most common sleeping positions (and corresponding personality) identified were:

  • Fetal Position (41%) – This is the most common sleeping position.  The personality of these sleepers tends to be shy and sensitive, though they may present a tough exterior to the world.
  • Log Position (15%) – Often remarked as social butterfly. Indicates a social, easy going personality.
  • Yearner Position (13%) – Perceived as open but truly suspicious. Said to indicate a suspicious and cynical personality.
  • Soldier Position (8%) – Indicates a quiet and reserved personality who sets high standards.
  • Freefall Position (7%) – They are mostly fun and fantastic at parties. It also indicates a brash and sociable exterior who may inwardly be nervous and sensitive to criticism.
  • Starfish Position (5%) – They are excellent listeners.  Indicates a good listener who makes friends easily, but prefers not to be the center of attention.

1 in 4 married couples sleep in separate beds.

According to the survey by the National Sleep Foundation, nearly 1 in 4 couples sleep in separate beds or bedrooms.  And, according the National Association of Home Builders, it’s expected that 60 percent of custom homes will have dual master bedrooms by 2015

British soldiers were the first to develop being awake for 36 hours.

British soldiers were the first one to develop a method in staying up 36 hours by putting on a special visor that emulated the brightness of a sunrise that makes them awake.

Shortest sleeping animals.

  • Giraffe – The World’s Shortest Sleeping Animal, sleeps 1.9 hours a day (in 5-10 minutes sessions)
  • Roe Deer – Sleeps 3.09 hours a day
  • Asiatic Elephant – 3.1 hours a day

Longest sleeping mammals.

  • Koalas – 22 hours a day.
  • Brown Bat – 82.9 % of the day. That means they sleep 19.9 hour in a day.
  • Pangolins – 18 hours a day.

When dolphins sleep, only half of their brain shuts down.

When dolphins sleep, they only shut down half of their brain, letting that half rest while the other half controls conscious movements, thus allowing the dolphin to swim consciously. They perform this sleeping pattern for about 8 hours a day.

You’ll die from sleep deprivation before food depravation.

It takes 2 weeks to starve but 10 days without sleep can kill you.  Exhaustion, fatigue and lack of physical energy are common sleep deprivation symptoms. Exhaustion and fatigue affect our emotional moods, causing pessimism, sadness, stress and anger.

Blind people can still see images in dreams.

Those born blind experience dreams involving emotion, sound, smell and touch instead of sight. People who become blind after birth can see images in their dreams. People who are born blind do not see any images, but have dreams equally vivid involving their other senses of sound, smell, touch and emotion. It is hard for a seeing person to imagine, but the body’s need for sleep is so strong that it is able to handle virtually all physical situations to make it happen.

You forget 90% of your dreams.

Within 5 minutes of waking, half of your dream is forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone.

1 out of 50 teenagers still wet their beds.

A postal survey in Hong Kong of 21,000 people aged between five and 19 showed that as many as one in 50 teenagers still wet the bed – and for more than half of them it happens every night.

Be sure to check out the amazing infographic that was used as a reference:

Reference:  http://images.psychologydegree.net.s3.amazonaws.com/sleep.jpg

28Aug

Mind Mapping Ideals

 

First, a bit of definition. Technically speaking, a mind map is a kind of diagram that is used to represent different tasks, ideas, words and other stuff linked inside your head which radically centralizes around your nerves revolving around a central idea or picture. The act of using the diagram is mind mapping. Mind mapping is usually used to visualize, classify, generate and structure different ideas going inside a person’s head. It is useful in helping someone organize; solve problems, making decisions, write and study.

Elements depend accordingly to the intuitive approach of arrangements from the importance of different kinds of concepts through grouping, areas or branches covering goals or semantic representation and other side connections related to portions of the entire information. Mind maps also aids in recalling memories that duly exist.

Through ideas being represented in a form of a graphical, non-linear and radial manner, mind maps are somewhat encouraging brainstorming in the unorthodox approach wherein ideas are generated with regarding hierarchal and formal system of organization. Mind maps are kind of similar to cognitive maps or semantic networks which are structured rigidly and yet imposing individuality and freewheel.

Origins of Maps Made by the Mind

Similar concepts or mind maps are used for centuries now. It is evident in brainstorming, problem solving, memory, learning and visual thinking by psychologists, educators, engineers and other professions that need intensive thinking before conclusion prevails.

Network semantics was developed late 1950s which was just a basic theory in order to understand the demonstrations of how human beings develop learning. This concept was made by Quillian and Dr. Collins in the early times of the 1960s. Dr. Collins was considered as the Father of Modern Mapping because of his extensive commitment to publish researches about his creativity, graphical thinking and learning.

A famous psychologist, Tony Buzan, claimed that he have invented a modern way of mapping out the mind. According to his claims, his idea was due to the inspiration he got from semantics which are popularized in novels of science fiction. He stated that instead of scanning an entire page “traditionally”, one can scan it in a non-linear new fashion way. Buzan was the one responsible for assumptions about the different hemispheres of the brain that needs to be utilized in order to promote an exclusive form of taking dire notes.

This concept is used in some aspects of applications though sometimes others don’t recognize it. Fields include education and learning, engineering, and even planning. If compared with the usual concept map, the structure is quire radial but is more simplified by having just one keyword put in the center and let all the patent information to rush around it.

Some of its important uses are concerned primarily in business (brainstorming and note-taking), education and family and even in your personal aspect of life. General clarification of thought, summarizing and even revising of figures is also within the scope of mapping. People can use this as a structuralized system of involving one topic to a central idea and let the flow of associated information line along it.

Mind mapping is created around a single text, word or idea that is placed in the center of the page. Then, ideas, concepts and words associated to it will be added. This shows that everything is connected with one another under a single idea. It’s more like deriving from one truth with several leaks.

 

23Aug

Spray Note Taking

This involves quickly jotting down all your ideas on a subject and linking them up. Spray notes are often called spider diagrams and mostly similar to mind maps structure. Spray diagrams and mind maps are similar to look at but have different functions. It is a well-known and particular example of visual representation. Spray or spider diagrams summarize ideas that other people have written or spoken – in other words they are ideal for note taking. While Mind maps, in contrast, are a little bit like brainstorming on your own, where you are trying to get your own ideas out on paper in a relatively unstructured way.

Image source:  http://www.bized.co.uk/reference/studyskills/notes.htm

Some people prefer to take notes in a non-linear way and to be able to visualize the connections between different ideas. Spray diagrams, mind maps, spider diagrams and concept maps are all ways in which to present ideas or information in a diagram rather than as text. The key words and phrases are arranged in a branching structure. They are a simple fast technique for getting ideas down without being concerned by details of structure. They can show connections in trains of thought (compare this with cognitive maps) and can indicate groupings between ideas or thoughts. They are less useful when there are lots of loops or cross connections to consider.

The idea of mind-maps is not new in the sense that people already do this mentally. Our thinking processes include drawing links between different thoughts and information: we don’t think in straight lines. Hence the usefulness of brainstorms, mind maps and spray notes. Spray notes are used to show connections between ideas, events, theories etc.; as a working too, while reading, note taking, assignment planning, and revision. Spray notes help to strip out unnecessary detail and get a better overview.

The Elements of Spray Notes:

  1. central circle or blob for main topic
  2. dashes for sub-topics (optional)
  3. words on the lines or at the ends of lines
  4. branching sets of lines
  5. title

Purpose in Using Spray Notes

  1. Gathering information about a complex situation
  2. To think about issues is common to several problem solving or creative thinking methods
  3. Drawn at the pre-analysis stage, before you know clearly which parts of the situation should best be regarded as process and which as structure.

Guidelines in Using Spray Notes:

  1. Write down the central idea you wish to explore, leaving space all around it.
  2. Identify branches from that idea that you want to explore further. Write them down around the central idea and link each to it with a straight line. Keep going by considering each branch to see if further branches (ideas) link to it.
  3. Start by working fairly freely and then look at the diagram to see whether any of the strands are effectively the same idea.
  4. If you get stuck or lose the thread, start with a new central keyword and create a subsidiary spray diagram rather than clutter up the original. Alternatively, leave your spray diagram or mind map for a while to allow time for fresh thinking before adding to it or redrawing it, combining or grouping similar ideas.