Fresh Takes on Innovation

In a recent Time article two Harvard professors of psychology talk about how seldom our mind is actually focussing on the here and now. If our environment doesn’t draw our attention, we keep wandering off: Traveling back (and forth) in time, browsing through experiences and thoughts - “moving across the landscape of our history to see what we can learn — for free”. We learn by trial and error. By reviewing our experiences and previewing the consequences of our actions, we save a lot of real life trial and error that could lead to mistakes.

The effect of brain games is not as clear as one might think. Canadian tech site Digital Home recently questioned if they really work, stating that there is more “anecdotal evidence” than scientific proof, up to now.

Providers of brain fitness software like Luminosity or Nintendo with their bestselling ‘Brain Age’ game, insist on the effect of their “scientifically designed” products.

I played Brain Age myself and found it pretty entertaining and motivating. Still I think, that brain fitness is mainly about using your grey matter in every day life. Try not to use a calculator every time bigger figures come your way. Don’t write everything down, memorize dates, names and figures that surround you. Keep your body in shape, then your brain will be fit, too. Eat healthy, get enough sleep and socialize.

Need more tips? There are tons of brain improvement lists on the net: Try e.g. these 70 tips or these 22 ways to overclock your brain.

Everybody knows: Training your brain will help you staying flexible and creative for a lifetime! On this gamesforthebrain.com you will find a variety of games that will help you stimulate your brain in no time!

For example:

Drag

Mahjongg Solitaire

Find Alice’s mistakes

Try it out and make those neurons grow!

Everybody knows that a short but effective mid-day nap will help you to enhance workforce and productivity for the rest of the work day.

Born from the realization that individuals can significantly increase their energy with a brief daytime rest, MetroNaps committed themselves to the development of professional power nap products and services.

After researching and testing at the Carnegie Mellon University a new relaxing “machine” was born, called the EnergyPod. The EnergyPod is an elegant yet simple device that counters the problem of employee’s daytime fatigue. Each EnergyPod is equipped with built-in music loaded onto an internal memory card. Sound is played through speakers or headphones.

MetroNaps also developed the Enhanced Energy Seminar, that teaches employees effective sleep techniques to boost personal and professional productivity. The seminars are divided in categories:

• Night Time Sleep: Getting a better night sleep by optimizing sleep routines and the bedroom environment.
• Day Time Rest: Boost energy during the workday by recharging with a quick nap.
• Jet Lag Management: Learn valuable tips for staying productive while traveling.

I could need one of these, what about you?

Ever saw yourself standing in front of yourself? Ever hovered in a room, looking down at your body lying on the bed? Out-of-body-experiences are reported regularly in all cultures. As they are virtually impossible (physically speaking), scientists have been searching for a neurological explanation for a long time. Now, a British and a Swiss team of scientists have conducted some interesting experiments that led people to believe that they are standing outside their body.

Check out this BBC News-article.

A team of famous neuroscientists has developed a new technique that allows to look inside a person’s brain and forecast peoples behaviour and intentions.

According to the Guardian:

The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future.

It is the first time that scientists have succeded in reading the intentions of a human person.

Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there’s no way you could possibly tell is in there. It’s like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall,

said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study with colleagues at University College London and Oxford University.

This new technique opened the discussion about the ability to probe people’s minds again and raises serious ethical issues. The main question is, how will brain-reading technology be used in the future?

see The Guardian

A recently released study by the Trinity College of Dublin shows that a quarter of all Britons do not know their own landline number while as little as a third can recall more than three birthdays of their immediate family.

People rely on their cell phones, when it comes to memorizing numbers and dates. Especially younger people, who grew up with the technology tend to outsource memory from their brains to their cells. Don’t use that grey muscle and it will shrink.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

Check out Jeff Hawkins’ TED-Talk about the brain. There is no reasonable brain theory yet - but Hawkins has some clues where to start. Intelligence, he claims, is not defined by behaviour but by prediction. Our brain is constantly making predictions about our enviroment. It stores sequential patterns and recalls them constantly. That’s what makes you know the end of a sentence before you heard or read it as a whole.

I am thinking about, how Hawkins’ views can be applied to brainstorming. Are we breaking up the straight forward recollection of sequential patterns? We play tricks on the brain by creating exceptional situations. We try to stimulate it so that associations and connotations bubble out of the neocortex. Try doing this with a supercomputer. A.I. still has a long way to go.

Mice that have undergone transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) showed growth of new neurons in their brains. Scientists of the City University of New York used a magnetic coil to induce a magnetic field into the brain tissue of the rodents.

TMS, if successfully applied to humans, could help treating memory decline caused by deseases or age.

Check out the article in the NewScientists magazine.

In other brain science news: A portable device using TMS to treat depressions.

In an article in the Evolutionary Psychology journal, Andrew and Gordon Gallup, of the State University of New York at Albany, present interesting findings of their yawning-experiments. Yawning, they conclude, cools the brain, accelerates blood circulation and thereby increases attention.

According to our hypothesis, rather than promoting sleep, yawning should antagonize sleep. It has been widely believed that yawning in the presence of others is disrespectful and a sign of boredom (e.g., witness the fact that many people cover their mouths when they yawn). However, according to our account yawning more accurately reflects a mechanism that maintains attention. Likewise, when someone yawns in a group setting as evidence for diminished mental processing efficiency, contagious yawning may have evolved to promote the maintenance of vigilance.