1. 05 October 2005

    1066 days ago

    The Aristocracy of Cardio

    I don’t doubt the greatness of physical fitness. Gladwell mentioned in his Ivy Leauge column the other day that athletes have a much higher rate of success post-college. And I bet that conversely, being intelligent makes you better at sports and exercising in general.

    What started as a daily 2-mile walk became an ultraendurance lifestyle within a year—he once ran 63 miles nonstop in a charity race. Sure, his fitness level improved, but what he really noticed was that his brain was overflowing.

    The data showed that the single 30-minute bout of cardio had two major effects on an electrical system of the brain called P3. First, the exercise session “decreased P3 latency,” which means subjects were able to process information faster. Second, Hillman found that the cardio session “increased P3 amplitude,” a measurement of brain activity related to memory and focus. So their aerobic exercise helped them concentrate better and recall information faster.

    It’s like a wonder drug for the brain. Edward Hallowell, M.D

    via Kjell Olsen1066 days ago

  2. 14 March 2005

    1271 days ago

    Wired 11.12: The Key to Genius

    Another article on savant abilities, this time about a kid with musical and logistical talents:

    When Matt was 6, he confided to his mother, “My mind is made of math problems.” Diane started buying him math workbooks for kids twice his age. He zipped through them so quickly, she learned to hide a few in a drawer so he’d have something to work on the following day.
    Then one night, Diane and Larry heard a melody coming from downstairs. It was their son, playing “London Bridge” on a toy keyboard. Diane brought Matt into the family room and introduced him to the middle C on the piano. Within a day, he was devouring music books as hungrily as he had math books.

    As we finish lunch, Matt asks me in his distinctively high-pitched voice, “Did you know that numbers can be friendly and amicable?” He means friendly and amicable in the math-geek sense – numbers that can be factored into one another – but I also felt he was using those words in their ordinary sense. Matt is intimate with numbers. They come to him in dreams and inspire him to write songs. One of his tunes on the album Groovin’ on Mount Everest is called “Forty-Seven” – a number he feels is “lonely” because when he asks people to think up a random number, no one ever chooses it.

    The brains of typical children grow in response to lessons learned from the environment – that was one of the significant upgrades in the evolution of Homo sapiens. As new stimuli are absorbed, the neurons in the cortex adapt gradually, and synaptic connections are forged or eliminated. Our brains are cast in the image of our experience.
    The overgrowth of the brain tissue of autistic kids, however, is random and automatic, a reaction to an unknown stimulus – perhaps testosterone or some toxic agent in the environment. The result, says Courchesne, is an onslaught of neural noise that makes the infant lose the ability to make sense of its world.

    Hermelin and her colleagues found that savants also use rule-based strategies for calendar calculating. For a long time, the assumption was that they memorized tens of thousands of day-date pairings during months of obsessive practice. But as in music, the researchers discovered that when figuring dates in the distant past or future, savants supplement their prodigious memories with algorithms they derive from the cycles of the calendar.

    This oddly adhesive memory is what binds together every domain of savant skill. In the brains of savants, Treffert believes, associative memory systems located in the higher regions of the cortex fail, and older parts of the brain – the ancient pathways in the basal ganglia known as habit memory – take over.
    Habit memory is Pavlovian, an archive of involuntary stimulus/response loops – the memory that never forgets how to ride a bike. To reproduce a Bach sonata with slavish accuracy requires an inner tape recorder and a book of rules. But to play Bach with fire and originality requires Proustian memory, with its nuanced webs of association and metaphor. This higher-order memory, like a living text, is constantly under revision. It’s not just that savants remember everything, says Treffert, it’s that they are unable to forget anything, like the protagonist in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, “Funes the Memorious.”

    The drawing abilities of most savant artists, for example, burst forth with no preparation, no training, and no practice – as if their skills were already there, fully fledged, needing only access to a pencil or a brush.
    Children who seem to come into the world with profound artistic gifts have been objects of fascination for centuries, but recent discoveries suggest we may all carry a savant inside us waiting to be born.

    Miller formulated a provocative hypothesis to explain the fact that as some FTD patients get worse, they also get better. He posited that the dementia does not create artistic powers in these patients, it uncovers them. The disorder switches off inhibitory signals from the left temporal lobes, enabling suppressed talents in the right hemisphere to flourish. (emphasis mine)

    “It looks as though there’s a critical period when every infant has the opportunity to learn absolute pitch, if they grow up in a culture where pitch is associated with meaning,” Deutsch explains. By starting music training early, every child might be able to preserve this inborn ability.

    “Our knowledge and expertise blind us,” Snyder told me last spring. “If we could switch off our conceptual mind, we could have a momentary literal viewing of the world.”

    Along the same lines – savant art

    books to read: “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, “Extraordinary People: Understanding Savant Syndrome”, (Oliver Sacks).

    via Kjell Olsen1271 days ago

  3. 27 February 2005

    1286 days ago

    Governors Work to Improve H.S. Education | MetaFilter

    Great comment on a metafilter thread I completely agree with:

    High school has no context—no real-world, socially rich setting in which what kids learn can have real meaning. The whole thing is driven by abstract threats of abstract assesments and the promise of college or lack thereof.
    If students were doing things, making things, planning their lives, experiencing real consequences (and not verbal reprimands from bureaucrats), exercising self-discipline and evaluating themselves, we’d be turning out adults, in every sense of the world. High school graduates would be real members of the world and not the spindly numbskulls we usually guess them to be.

    Kjell Olsen1286 days ago

  4. 23 February 2005

    1290 days ago

    How to Do Anything Photographic

    A really helpful site on photography – I took a class last semester at school and the teacher was a complete wacko, all I learned to do was develop film, which incidentally will do me a lot of good… But it was fun, and I want to do more shooting on my own.

    Kjell Olsen1290 days ago

  5. 19 February 2005

    1294 days ago

    Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | A genius explains

    Amazing:

    Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn’t “calculating”: there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. “When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s mental imagery. It’s like maths without having to think.”

    Savants (I read an article on the topic awhile ago but can’t find the link) are utterly amazing, and usually autistic people. They can use their minds to do incredible things, but then are sometimes also incredibly mentally disabled.

    “Savants have usually had some kind of brain damage. Whether it’s an onset of dementia later in life, a blow to the head or, in the case of Daniel, an epileptic fit. And it’s that brain damage which creates the savant. I think that it’s possible for a perfectly normal person to have access to these abilities, so working with Daniel could be very instructive.” Dr. Snyder

    It’s just incredible some of the things the human mind can do, but why, and how?

    Last year Tammet broke the European record for recalling pi, the mathematical constant, to the furthest decimal point. He found it easy, he says, because he didn’t even have to “think”. To him, pi isn’t an abstract set of digits; it’s a visual story, a film projected in front of his eyes. He learnt the number forwards and backwards and, last year, spent five hours recalling it in front of an adjudicator. He wanted to prove a point. “I memorised pi to 22,514 decimal places, and I am technically disabled. I just wanted to show people that disability needn’t get in the way.”

    Peek can read two pages simultaneously, one with each eye. He can also recall, in exact detail, the 7,600 books he has read. When he is at home in Utah, he spends afternoons at the Salt Lake City public library, memorising phone books and address directories.

    This stuff just amazes me completely, sorry for dumping so much of it in quotes.

    “I went to the playground, but not to play. The place was surrounded by trees. While the other children were playing football, I would just stand and count the leaves.” Tammett

    via Kjell Olsen1294 days ago

  6. 10 February 2005

    1303 days ago

    Smart People Choke Under Pressure

    A study proves it: a math test was administered under little pressure to a group of college students, who were then divided into two groups according to their scores (high vs low). The same test was then re-administered under a high pressure situation – they were told that their team depended on each of its members to score well and the team which scored higher would win a prize.

    On the second time around the score of the higher group dropped significantly to the same level of the lower group, which didn’t change at all.

    Since working memory is known to predict many higher-level brain functions, the research calls into question the ability of high-pressure tests such as the SAT, GRE, LSAT, and MCAT to accurately gauge who will succeed in future academic endeavors.

    I’ve never been good at handling pressure, but interestingly, I’ve had most of my problems under pressure while playing tennis. I just can’t win matches – I can take a 5-2 lead then blow it like that. Maybe that’s why the best jocks are dumb!

    But what I want to know it: were is the research that helps you not worry yourself sick?

    via Kjell Olsen1303 days ago

  7. Also somewhat recently

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