Biological Psychology Links

By BENEDICT CAREY Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies). And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school. Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how. Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying. The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on. For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

By Bruce Bower Toddlers get a kick out of giving adults a hard time. True to form, these wobbly-legged knowledge-sponges learn virtually nothing from best-selling DVDs that their parents believe will boost vocabulary and trigger academic superstardom. Young children who viewed a popular DVD regularly for one month, either with or without their parents, showed no greater understanding of words from the program than kids who never saw it, according to a study slated to appear in Psychological Science. “The degree to which babies actually learn from baby videos is negligible,” says psychologist and study director Judy DeLoache of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Still, adults who initially liked the DVD thought that their children learned many words by watching it. DeLoache suspects that some parents mistakenly assume that educational DVDs such as Baby Einstein prompt the spike in word learning that naturally occurs between 12 and 24 months of age (SN: 4/25/98, p. 268). Annual sales of Baby Einstein products now reach about $200 million in the United States. Other companies sell competing educational DVDs in what is now an international business. DeLoache calls the educational DVD she used in her new study “one of the best available” but wouldn’t identify the brand. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

By Bruce Bower Mental exercise lets seniors outrun Alzheimer’s disease — for a while. Then the race takes a tragic turn for the sharp-minded, a new study finds, as declines in memory and other thinking skills kick into high gear. After age 65, regular participation in mentally stimulating activities, including doing crossword puzzles and reading, delays intellectual decay caused by Alzheimer’s disease, say neuropsychologist Robert Wilson of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and his colleagues. But when this debilitating condition finally breaks through the defenses of a mentally fortified brain, it rapidly makes up for lost time, the scientists report in a paper published online September 1 in Neurology. “The benefit of delaying initial signs of cognitive decline by keeping mentally active may come at the cost of more rapid dementia progression later on,” Wilson says. His team also found that mental stimulation slows cognitive declines typically experienced by seniors with healthy brains but offers no protection against the onset of memory and thinking problems that fall short of Alzheimer’s disease. Several recent studies have pointed to a delayed but sharp drop in thinking skills among mentally active people who develop Alzheimer’s disease, remarks neuropsychologist Yaakov Stern of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. Unlike the new report, though, those studies did not compare mentally active adults who developed Alzheimer’s disease with those who remained healthy or lost some mental function. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

By John Biemer, Special to the Chicago Tribune Catholic nuns are known for their acts of charity, but Sister Adrienne Schmidt has found a way to give beyond the grave: She will donate her brain to science. First, though, she is exercising it in an annual battery of memory tests administered by researchers at Chicago's Rush University. Schmidt, 82, repeats two-digit numbers, then three, four, five, six and seven digits. She names as many animals as she can in a minute. She listens to a 30-second story about a school cafeteria cook who is robbed of $56. Half an hour later, she must repeat as many details as she can. The yearly tests are designed to provide a history of how her brain is aging. When the time comes, Schmidt's brain will join hundreds of others in 38 cooling units in a laboratory at the school's medical center. Schmidt is one of the original participants in Rush University's Religious Orders Study, which began in 1993. It is one of a handful of studies nationwide that uses donated brains with a rich and detailed clinical history gleaned from years of memory tests and physical exams. Funding for the study is slated to run out next year, but researchers are preparing a federal grant proposal in hopes of extending the study five years, because it continues to yield a bounty of results. Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

Melissa Dahl In Michelle Philpots' world, Bill Clinton is still president, everyone keeps telling each other that "life is like a box of chocolates" and no one can get Ace of Base's "The Sign"out of their heads. That's because Philpots is stuck in 1994. That year, Philpots suffered traumatic brain injuries in two car crashes. Since then, she's been unable to form new memories; every morning, her husband has to convince her that they're married, using a photo album as proof -- a real-life version of the Adam Sandler-Drew Barrymore movie "50 First Dates." She can remember everything that happened to her until 1994, but nothing after that -- not even her 1997 marriage. (She started dating her husband before her injury, but doesn't remember marrying the guy.) Philpots, 47, who lives in Spalding, England, has an extreme case of anterograde amnesia, a condition that inhibits the brain's ability to record any new memories. Other amnesiacs can't recall older memories, a condition called called retrograde amnesia. Amnesia is a handy plot device in pop culture, and memory experts say real-life "Memento" cases are rare, but they do exist. No case of amnesia is exactly alike, says Dr. Ronald Petersen, a Mayo Clinic neurologist and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. Some forget faces, some forget their native language, some "forget" their entire personality. But each case is caused by a head injury, a neurological disease or, in some cases, years of drug or alcohol abuse. Petersen, who did not treat Philpots, explains that the type of memory loss depends on what region of the brain is impacted; for example, retrograde amnesia generally happens when damage is done to the brain's temporal lobes, and both retrograde and anterograde amnesia, like Philpots has, can happen when the hippocampus is injured. But it's still not understood what makes someone's memory "reset" every 30 seconds or, in Philpots' case, every day. © 2010 msnbc.com

Kea parrots are renowned thieves in their native New Zealand, and with good reason - even a complicated sequence of locks can't foil them. Hiromitsu Miyata of Kyoto University in Japan first presented keas with boxes of food secured with up to three bolts. The parrots managed to open all of them, so he made the tasks harder. The most challenging set-up involved two bolts blocking each other such that one needed to be slid open before the second would release. Miyata found that the keas cracked this problem faster if they were allowed to study the set-up for a while before attempting to break it (Animal Cognition, DOI: 10.1007/s10071-010-0342-9). This suggests they are able to plan their moves, he says. Until now, the birds were thought to tackle problems in a haphazard fashion. Issue 2773 of New Scientist magazine © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

by Sujata Gupta FINDING it difficult to revise for an exam? Help could be on its way in the form of the first non-invasive way of stimulating the brain that can boost visual memory. The technique uses transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), in which weak electrical currents are applied to the scalp using electrodes. The method can temporarily increase or decrease activity in a specific brain region and has already been shown to boost verbal and motor skills in volunteers. Richard Chi, a PhD student at the Centre for the Mind, University of Sydney, and colleagues wanted to follow up on previous research showing that lesions in the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL), an area near the temple, can lead to improvements in visual memory and perceptual skills similar to the abilities exhibited by some people with autism. Chi's team wondered if inhibiting that area using tDCS might likewise improve memory. To investigate, his team showed 36 volunteers a dozen "study" slides covered with shapes that varied in their number, arrangement, colour and size (see "Brain games"). The volunteers were then shown five "test" slides - two with patterns that appeared in the study slides, two with completely new patterns and one whose pattern looked similar to that on a study slide. Participants were asked to identify which of the test slides they had already seen, first performing the task without any brain stimulation. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

By Caroline Parkinson Health reporter, BBC News People who stay in education for longer appear to be better able to compensate for the effects of dementia on the brain, a study suggests. A UK and Finnish team found those with more education were as likely to show the signs of dementia in their brains at death as those with less. But they were less likely to have displayed symptoms during their lifetime, the study in Brain said. Experts said scientists now had to find out why the effect occurred. Over the past decade, studies on dementia have consistently shown that the more time you spend in education, the lower the risk of dementia. But studies have been unable to show whether or not education - which is linked to higher socio-economic status and healthier lifestyles - protects the brain against dementia. The researchers in this study examined the brains of 872 people who had been part of three large ageing studies. Before their deaths they had also completed questionnaires about their education. The researchers found that more education makes people better able to cope with changes in the brain associated with dementia. Post-mortems showed the pathology - signs of disease - in the brains of people with and without long educations were at similar levels. But the researchers found those with more education are better able to compensate for the effects of the condition. It also showed that, for each year spent in education, there was an 11% decreased risk of developing dementia. (C)BBC

By Janet Raloff Being fat may diminish mental performance, studies find — a problem that worsens with age. But among elderly women, where fat is deposited may matter. To wit: The big apple is sharper than the obese pear. Genetics dictates where people preferentially accumulate body fat. For most it’s around the belly. Among the obese, these apple-shaped individuals tend to run a bigger risk of developing heart disease than do pears — people who deposit most of their excess fat at the hips and thighs. For a host of reasons, physicians had expected that if body shape affected mental performance, apples would again prove the bigger losers. In fact, the opposite appears true, Diana Kerwin of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago and her colleagues report online July 14 in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The team pored over data collected from more than 8,700 women, all 65 to 79 years old. These were a healthy subset of incoming participants to the Women’s Health Initiative study. This long-running trial at 40 medical centers across the country has been investigating the role of hormone-replacement therapy and diet on risk of heart disease, fractures and certain cancers. Each woman was administered a test of memory and reasoning known as the Modified Mini-Mental State Examination, or 3MSE. Kerwin’s team correlated a participant’s score with her shape and her height-adjusted weight — something known as body-mass index, or BMI. BMI values were divided into six categories, with 1 being lean and 6 morbidly obese. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Aging and wisdom are supposed to go together, but it turns out that a molecule that prevents one may actually play a role in the other. Researchers have discovered a new role for the famous antiaging protein SIRT1. It not only fends off aging, but also aids in learning and memory, a new study published online July 11 in Nature shows. Sirtuins, a family of proteins that includes SIRT1, help to regulate gene activity and have been implicated in governing metabolism and many of the biological processes that lead to aging. In the new study, Li-Huei Tsai, a neuroscientist and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at MIT, finds that SIRT1 also plays a critical role in protecting learning and memory, at least in mice. Tsai and her colleagues had an inkling that SIRT1 might play some role in the brain from earlier experiments showing that resveratrol, an activator of sirtuins, could help neurons survive a mouse version of Alzheimer’s disease. Resveratrol also improved the animals’ ability to learn and remember. Since resveratrol can act on all seven of the sirtuins found in mammals and also affects other biological processes (SN Online: 6/28/10), the researchers didn’t know what role, if any, SIRT1 played in the process. To find out, Tsai and her colleagues put mice genetically engineered to lack SIRT1 in their brains through a series of learning and memory tests. The mice had trouble remembering the location of a submerged platform in a water maze, couldn’t tell the difference between a new object and an old one placed in their cages, and did poorly on other memory tests. “The ability for these animals to learn is clearly impaired,” Tsai says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS Jeremy Niven spends his days at Cambridge University running locusts across ladders and through mazes, trying to figure out how bugs think. Dr. Niven, 34, studies the evolution of brains and neurons in insects and other animals, like humans. We spoke during a break in last month's World Science Festival in New York, where he was a guest presenter, and then again later via telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows: Q. YOUR RESEARCH SUBJECTS ARE LOCUSTS. SOME PEOPLE MIGHT SAY, “LOCUSTS, YUCK!” WHY STUDY THEM? A. I think locusts are sweet. When you get used to them, they are actually quite nice. Actually, I find that working with invertebrates opens your mind. Insects don’t perceive the world the way we do. Trying to understand them makes you think more about why we see the world as we do. Many animals have different sensors and receive different energies. Birds have ultraviolet vision. So do bees. They can see things we don’t. One learns respect for their capacities. But the other thing is that insects in general and locusts in particular are admirable because they permit us to gain new information about nervous systems. With insects, we can actually study neural circuits and see how what happens in the neurons relates to behavior. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

When a person loses his sense of smell, does he also lose any memory associated with a smell? —Ana Artega, via e-mail David Smith, a professor of psychology and a researcher at the Center for Smell and Taste at the University of Florida, replies: Normally people can detect a cacophony of odors using the 40 million olfactory receptor neurons that reside in the nasal cavity. When we encounter a new odor, these neurons send information about the whiff to a brain area called the olfactory cortex, leaving an imprint of the smell there. These memories accumulate over time to create a library of odors. Although we do not fully understand how the olfactory cortex encodes these memories, we do know that olfactory memories seem to be particularly rich—perhaps because the olfactory cortex is closely connected to the brain regions important for recollection. These areas include the amygdala, which processes emotions, and the hippocampus, which encodes and stores memories. Damage to the olfactory receptor neurons because of a respiratory infection, a head injury or a neurodegenerative disease can disrupt the brain’s ability to process different smells. When olfactory neurons stop working altogether, a person develops anosmia, or the inability to discern odors. According to a 2008 report from the National Institutes of Health, 1 to 2 percent of the U.S. population younger than 65 years old, and more than half older than 65, have almost completely lost their sense of smell. © 2010 Scientific American,

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS What goes on inside your brain when you exercise? That question has preoccupied a growing number of scientists in recent years, as well as many of us who exercise. In the late 1990s, Dr. Fred Gage and his colleagues at the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute in San Diego elegantly proved that human and animal brains produce new brain cells (a process called neurogenesis) and that exercise increases neurogenesis. The brains of mice and rats that were allowed to run on wheels pulsed with vigorous, newly born neurons, and those animals then breezed through mazes and other tests of rodent I.Q., showing that neurogenesis improves thinking. But how, exactly, exercise affects the staggeringly intricate workings of the brain at a cellular level has remained largely mysterious. A number of new studies, though, including work published this month by Mr. Gage and his colleagues, have begun to tease out the specific mechanisms and, in the process, raised new questions about just how exercise remolds the brain. Some of the most reverberant recent studies were performed at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. There, scientists have been manipulating the levels of bone-morphogenetic protein or BMP in the brains of laboratory mice. BMP, which is found in tissues throughout the body, affects cellular development in various ways, some of them deleterious. In the brain, BMP has been found to contribute to the control of stem cell divisions. Your brain, you will be pleased to learn, is packed with adult stem cells, which, given the right impetus, divide and differentiate into either additional stem cells or baby neurons. As we age, these stem cells tend to become less responsive. They don’t divide as readily and can slump into a kind of cellular sleep. It’s BMP that acts as the soporific, says Dr. Jack Kessler, the chairman of neurology at Northwestern and senior author of many of the recent studies. The more active BMP and its various signals are in your brain, the more inactive your stem cells become and the less neurogenesis you undergo. Your brain grows slower, less nimble, older. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

By NATALIE ANGIER I was walking through the neighborhood one afternoon when, on turning a corner, I nearly tripped over a gray squirrel that was sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, eating a nut. Startled by my sudden appearance, the squirrel dashed out to the road — right in front of an oncoming car. Before I had time to scream, the squirrel had gotten caught in the car’s front hubcap, had spun around once like a cartoon character in a clothes dryer, and was spat back off. When the car drove away, the squirrel picked itself up, wobbled for a moment or two, and then resolutely hopped across the street. You don’t get to be one of the most widely disseminated mammals in the world — equally at home in the woods, a suburban backyard or any city “green space” bigger than a mousepad — if you’re crushed by every Acme anvil that happens to drop your way. “When people call me squirrely,” said John L. Koprowski, a squirrel expert and professor of wildlife conservation and management at the University of Arizona, “I am flattered by the term.” The Eastern gray tree squirrel, or Sciurus carolinensis, has been so spectacularly successful that it is often considered a pest. The International Union for Conservation of Nature includes the squirrel on its list of the top 100 invasive species. The British and Italians hate gray squirrels for outcompeting their beloved native red squirrels. Manhattanites hate gray squirrels for reminding them of pigeons, and that goes for the black, brown and latte squirrel morphs, too. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Improvement seen in patients with either mild cognitive impairment or Parkinson's-related dementia Honolulu, Hawaii - New data provide the first evidence that ARICEPT (donepezil HCl tablets) may have potential in treating two dementia-related illnesses beyond Alzheimer's disease (AD). Findings from two separate studies showed that treatment improved cognition in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and behavioral symptoms in patients with Parkinson's-related dementia. The data were presented for the first time at the American Academy of Neurology 55th Annual Meeting (AAN). ARICEPT� is approved for the treatment of symptoms of mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. "As the first placebo-controlled trial with an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor to improve cognitive symptoms in MCI, this study provides encouraging news for the millions of Americans with MCI," said Stephen Salloway, M.D., director of Neurology and The Memory Disorders Program, associate professor of Clinical Neurosciences at Brown Medical School, Providence, Rhode Island. "The findings underscore the importance of early intervention to promote healthy aging and preserve independence in the elderly."

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Musicians who hear the music they are performing while learning a new piece have a better memory for the music later, a new study suggests. But after they learn a song, actually hearing the music as they play does not improve the accuracy of their performance. These results shed new light on how memory works and on theories about how people learn, said Caroline Palmer, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University. Specifically, Palmer said the findings cast doubt on the universality of matching theories – theories that state memory works best when conditions are similar during learning and during recall of the information.

Neuroscientists at NYU and Harvard identify cells in the hippocampus that signal new memory formation Neuroscientists at NYU and Harvard have identified how the brain’s hippocampus helps us learn and remember the sights, sounds and smells that make up our long-term memory for the facts and events, termed declarative memory. By studying the activity of neurons of the hippocampus, the scientists have illuminated how the brain signals the formation of new associative memories, a form of declarative memory. These results provide some of the strongest direct evidence to date for learning-related plasticity in the hippocampus. The research findings are reported in the June 6 issue of the publication Science in a paper entitled “Single Neurons in the Monkey Hippocampus and the Learning of New Associations.” Since the 1950s, scientists have been aware of the link between the hippocampus and memory, but knew little of how this association manifested itself in neural activity. The NYU research team, led by NYU post-doctoral fellow Sylvia Wirth, NYU professor Wendy Suzuki and graduate student Marianna Yanike, examined the neural correlates of associative memory formation by using electrodes to monitor the electrical activity of individual neurons in the brains of monkeys performing an associative learning task. The neural and behavioral data was analyzed using dynamic estimation algorithms developed by post-doctoral fellows Loren Frank, Anne Smith and professor Emery Brown at Harvard University.

Alzheimer’s disease has stolen one of Frances Goldstein’s favorite past-times – reading a good book. Unable to remember parts she’s already read, picking up a book has become too frustrating. “It bothers her greatly, because reading has always been her love besides me of course,” says Jacobo Goldstein, Frances’ husband. Unfortunately, because current drugs simply slow the progression of Alzheimer’s, little can be done to restore memory in Alzheimer’s patients like Frances Goldstein. Alzheimer’s is a degenerative brain disease that starts with memory loss and can end with severe brain damage. It is believed that about 4 million adults in the U.S. are stricken with Alzheimer’s and if no effective therapies are developed it is estimated that by 2050 14 million Americans will have the disease. But researcher Lauren Billings of the University of California, Irvine believes she‘s discovered what triggers memory problems before Alzheimer’s sets in. Scientists know that deposits called plaques build up in between cells in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and cause memory loss. The plaques are made up of a protein called ‘beta amyloid’. “Once you've got plaques you've already got memory loss and it might be too late to intervene and sort of halt the progress of the disease.” Previous research has focused on mice engineered to develop Alzheimer’s – called ‘transgenic’ mice, only after they’ve developed plaques. Billings however, followed these mice over their entire life span, and saw that the protein first collects inside their brain cells before the plaques form in between the cells. At the same time the mice began to have problems remembering tasks they’d learned. Billings’ work suggests that the protein’s affects might start even earlier than anticipated. “We think that that initial trigger for memory loss is the accumulation of beta amyloid inside cells.” (C) ScienCentral, 2000-2005.

Researchers have identified the neural activity that occurs when the brain “sets the stage” for retaining a memory – a finding that could have important implications for memory research and help determine ways in which people can strengthen memories they want to retain while weakening ones they would rather forget. The results of the study appear as an advance online publication in the journal Nature Neuroscience. In two separate experiments with adults, UCI neuroscientist Michael Rugg, in collaboration with colleagues from University College London, looked at neural activity that preceded the presentation of single words. They found that measures of the activity could predict whether the words would be remembered in a later memory test. In the experiments, Rugg and his colleagues presented a group of young adults with a different word every four or five seconds, requiring them to make a judgment about a specific characteristic of the word, such as whether it referred to a living or a non-living thing. A moment before each word was presented, participants were “cued” with a visual signal that alerted them of the upcoming word. Neural activity caused by the cue was monitored through electroencephalograpy, or EEG, a method by which electrodes attached to the scalp measure underlying brain activity. Later, participants were shown the words again, along with words they had not previously been shown, and were asked to identify which ones had been presented in the first part of the experiment. © Copyright 2002-2006 UC Regents

Roxanne Khamsi Applying a gentle electric current to the brain during sleep can significantly boost memory, researchers report. A small new study showed that half an hour of this brain stimulation improved students’ performance at a verbal memory task by about 8%. The approach enhances memory by creating a form of electrical current in the brain seen in deep sleep, the researchers suggest. Jan Born at the University of Luebeck in Germany, and colleagues, recruited 13 healthy medical students for the study and gave them a list of word associations, such as “bird” and “air”, to learn late in the evening. Afterwards, researchers placed two electrodes on the forehead and one behind each ear of the volunteers and let them sleep. The students’ various sleep stages were monitored using an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine. When the students entered a period of light sleep, Born’s team started to apply a gentle current in one-second-long pulses, every second, for about 30 minutes. The EEG readings revealed that this current had put students into a deeper state of sleep. The next morning, the students performed about 8% better on the word memory test than when they underwent the same type of memory experiment without brain stimulation. Born believes this memory boost was due to the pattern of the applied current mimicking that seen in naturally occurring deep sleep, where memory consolidation is thought to take place. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Links for keyword: Learning & Memory