Remember Not To Forget, Again.


 Having misplaced my keys one again – please note that I refuse to use the word lost – I started to wonder about senior moments, but gave up as soon as my keys showed up back in the pocket of the jacket that I wore yesterday instead of the hook by the door, which they should know by now is their proper place. Remembering not to forget takes effort and, perhaps, a notepad.

However, the problem of memory decline with age is a problem that is bandied about rather a lot. We should remember that we have several sorts of memory. We learn skills, for example, and this procedural memory doesn’t decline very much.

Our working memory, which is associated with our reasoning and comprehension skills, does usually decline from 60 or so. One has just to eavesdrop on the bus to hear “I just don’t understand the youth of today”. The other type of memory that we see decline is our episodic memory, that is our memory of what we did, when, to whom and why, fades with age, although, it’s the old feuds that we recall as opposed to the row last week.

Is there anything that we can do to change all this (apart from having a sharp word with my errant keys)? Nyberg et al have written extensively on the topic in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences (1). They point out that there are broad differences across the population. Firstly, we have plenty of brain in reserve, but some of us have more banked than others, Secondly, we can indulge in brain maintenance with nutrition and lifestyle choices.

Our reward pathways, dopamine levels and pathway connectivity, decrease with age so that means we don’t get so much fun any more. They conclude that if we want to minimize our memory decline, we should work keep a youthful brain structure. Sounds easy, all we have to do is get out there and have a very active, stimulating leisure life.

Not sure why it should just be leisure, though, but just remember to keep your hippocampus plumped up.

  1. Nyberg et al, (2012). DOI: 10.1016/tics.2012.04.005


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Another Shocking Result?


The process of our body responding to an external stimulus is a cascade of action. We notice the stimulus and then we our brain decides to act and this takes a finite amount of time, our reaction time. The body struggles through our motor control system to get action. This is our response time.

So once our network gets stimulated the time for the signals are physical characteristics of our system, but on top of that are factors such as anticipation or intensity of the stimulation. Lakhan et al in PLoS ONE have mapped out the electrical potentials and how they map out in the brain while shocking some twelve  twenty-somethings and getting them to press a button (1).

The variable in these studies was the intensity of the shock that the participants received. The results of the electrophysiological measurements showed that only the event related potentials were sensitive to the shocking intensity. So it appears that the frontal part of the brain makes the decision to get a move on and move those muscles.

This frontal lobe of the brain is where the planning and motivation activities are generated and one would imagine that the bigger the shock, the stronger the motivation to get that button pressed. Not really a very shocking result.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036407


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Supercolonies Means Constant Warfare


We’re all very familiar with ants and know that they are social creatures who live in colonies. Some live in small colonies, some in large, and some in super colonies. The Argentine is, apparently, the place to study supercolonies. Here they occupy hundreds of square kilometers with billions of ant citizens (1).

The interesting thing about these supercolonies is, that as they spread out, they indulge in constant warfare at their periphery and don’t deign to fraternize (and thus interbreed) with their neighboring supercolonies.  These are not collections of separate nests, although the local density varies, but are one nation under, well, the sun. Of course, carrying out a census is no mean feat as pointed out by Lester and Gruber (2).

Now Discovery News has picked up this work and focuses on the similarities between these ant supercolonies and human societies (3). The thought out there is that as humans live in societies consisting of millions on up to billions we have  more things in common with ants than our primate cousins as the latter live in small groups.

Why does this matter? Well with huge societies there are lots of civic problems such as long distance communication and transportation of goods, public health, complex teamwork, animal domestication, slavery and warfare, to highlight a few mentioned.

Apparently, as Moffett observes, it is ants and humans that are the only two species to get into “full-blown warfare”(3). The key to their success is their communication system, which is chemically based, that is, the use of pheromones.

We, of course, eschew our chemical heritage, masking it heavily with antiperspirants, deodorants, perfumes and aftershaves, in favor of our smartphones and social networks. One wonders why the ant colonies choose not to interbreed so they don’t, like us, have the option to make love, not war. Maybe a good deodorant would help.



  1. M. W. Moffett, J. Behav. Ecol. (2012). DOI: 10.1093/beheco/ars043
  2. http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/04/13/beheco.ars048.extract?sid=7df3d554-3c93-4dde-a43f-d6f670aa35a
  3. http://news.discovery.com/human/humans-ant-colonies-120502.html


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Driven Or Incentivized


The annual cry to the workers at the performance review of our large corporations is do more with less. We get coerced and incentivized as the business models recommend from the current playbooks of our big business schools. But the big question for the fast moving growth enterprises is are their people driven or incentivized?

The guys in the successful start-ups are clearly driven, while the rest of us are left toying with the size of bonuses or promises of a new gymnasium facility as our incentives. 16-hour days don’t result from the idea that we’ll be able to spend our lunch break on a new treadmill.

In the latest issue of Experimental Brain Research, Minamimoto et al report on a study to check out the origin of motivation on a repetitive task (1). One aim of the study was to determine if the motivation was due to externally applied factors (incentives) or an internal factor(s) (drive).

The task was designed so the subjects had to press a bar, hold it while they saw a patterned cue which would indicate the size of the prize. They then saw a red marker indicating that they hold the lever and after a period of time it would change to green so that they could release the lever. A blue marker indicated that they could take the reward.

The cue card indicated the size of the prize to tell the participants which were more desirable activities. If the bar was released early or the reward not taken promptly, the prize was forfeit and they were shown to be committing an error. Repetitive and boring work, but not too difficult to accomplish.

 Only two participants were put to work. They were male rhesus monkeys and the reward came in the form of drops of water, 1,2,4 or 8 drops. As this was all the monkeys got to drink, 8 drops was a prize indeed, a big incentive.

The measure of the internal factors, the salt level in the blood, was continually monitored as an indicator of thirst level. Higher osmotic pressure (more salt) meant they were thirstier and had stronger drive, QED.

Now results. Did the size of the reward make them pay more attention to getting it right, or did their thirstiness make them do better? Well, a nice little mathematical formula was derived to describe how the error rate decreased as the thirst level increased.

If the monkeys were very thirsty, they made damn sure the got some water, however much. There was no way they would be casual about one or two drops and only work for eight.

This is clearly a lesson already understood by the 1% as the cash flows copiously into their accounts and they allow it to trickle down in small drops to us 99%.


http://www.springerlink.com/content/v714q400333537x6/fulltext.pdf?MUD=MP

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Picture Perfect


When we’re young we get picture books, and if we’re lucky someone will read the words until we have learned to read ourselves. As we get older, our books have fewer pictures and we have to more and more rely on our imagination to “picture” the scene.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t like pictures, but our stories have become too complicated to have many pictures. It is interesting how the words and pictures work on each other. Vandeberg et al have published a study in PLoS ONE exploring some of these aspects (1).

In some of their experiments they showed a picture briefly and then had their participants read a short story that mentioned the object. Here is the twist. In some of the stories the object was reported as being present and in others it was reported as being absent. After reading the story the participants were shown two versions of the image one being more transparent than the other. Note that the initial picture had a transparency of 50%.

In the case of the stories in which the objects were said to be present, the participants chose the more opaque picture as being most like the one seen before the story. Whereas when the story mentioned that the object was not present, the choices switched to the more transparent picture of the two shown at the end.

So it seems that mentioning that something is around in a story gives us a stronger image of that object than if the story mentions that it wasn’t there. This is a very interesting cognitive result. For example, if someone tells me that they saw a unicorn in my garden this morning, I will have a stronger picture of a unicorn eating my roses than if they had said that there was no unicorn in my garden.

I will be watching out for the technique in the fairy stories in the political advertisements this summer. If they tell me it’s true maybe I’ll see the utopia – picture perfect.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036154


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The Cloud Beneath Our Feet


For the tech geeks like most of us are rushing to become, the pathway to heaven is now marked out. Soon we’ll have our cloud beneath our feet. No harps yet and with electric cars becoming popular, the traffic noise will be much reduced except for the squeal of the occasional pedestrian getting run over while checking their data.

The latest development from Spain is the iPavement (1, 2), these are paving slabs with WiFi and Bluetooth built in so that we can be connected wherever we wander, except in the digitally challenged countryside of course.

The paving slabs have microprocessors built in with 5 GB per slab and it’s anticipated that one slab every 20 meters (or 66 feet for the metrically challenged) should be sufficient for smartphone or tablet users to “wander lonely on their cloud” (apologies for the mis-quote) without losing signal and staying buried in their personal business.

All the common browsers should be fine and it is planned to bring them out with their own group of apps such as via books, via maps and an analytic package. Of course this will just be the start. One can imagine each slab guiding you to the next in case you get lost or ask for a particular destination.

Equipped with temperature sensors and a speedometer working via vibration sensing, I imagine the paving will start to tell passers by to hurry up or stop running. I guess one will have to park their car or curb-crawl if our cars are going to make use of it.

  1. http://www.ipavement.com/en/index_eng.html
  2. http://news.discovery.com/tech/ipavement-wi-fi-sidewalk-120428.html


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Video Gaming, Your Aid To Stress Control.


The videogame industry is huge with many of the consumers playing violent shooter games while they save the world or finish some quest. These games demand a high level of manual dexterity, but also concentration as your adrenaline levels rise with the levels of attainment in the game.

Of course, the gamers know this is a fantasy-land behind the screen, but how does the stress of playing a difficult shoot-’em-up play in their daily life?  Well, Bouchard et al decided to check this out with a group of 41 soldiers and have reported in the current issue of the Public Library of Science (1).

The participants all had training in tactical breathing to control stress (breathe in through the nose, count to 4 and breath out through the mouth and repeat),  spent three days playing scary shooter videogames with stress control coaching or just the latter. Their saliva cortisol levels were checked to monitor their stress levels.

This stage was just the softening up period. On the last day they had a simulated first aid exercise were they had to deal with wounded personnel after a roadside bomb. Again they had to spit in a cup to check and quantify their stress levels. Those who’d had the coaching while playing the video games had lower stress levels than those who hadn’t been desensitized by several days of horror and mayhem on the screen.

 Maybe before we go for that big job interview we should have a few hours of violent video shooting while we tactically breathe so we don’t freeze up at the first question. Clearly, stress reduction after a hard day at work by a hard videogame session sounds like a good idea, but don’t forget the tactical breathing at those heavy-duty meetings during the day to help with controlling stress.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036169


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