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Keep the grey matter moving

June 30, 2011 //
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Like your body muscles, your brain needs to keep fit in order to function best. Not giving your brain enough stimulation definitely has its consequences, so the key to keep your grey matter from going mushy is: move it or lose it.

The reason is that the brain is highly flexible – known as ‘neuroplasticity’ – and the pathways your neurons create when you learn something new are ever-changing. However, easily as they can be created, they can also be lost.

But never fear! The parts of your brain associated with memory and information processing are highly adaptable and with some practice, you can train your brain to pick up where you let it drop off.

So, got a spare minute? Get your matter moving with some brain teasers that will keep those neurons firing.

Good brain puzzles:

  • The New York Times crossword – subscribe for $1 to the infamous New York Times crossword and join the global millions to attempt this everyday. For a reward once you’re done, treat yourself to watching Patrick Creadon’s excellent documentary ‘Wordplay‘ which looks at die-hard NYT crossword fans, among them Bill Clinton.
  • Word and number puzzles
  • Soduku
  • Trivia – go to a night at your local pub or find trivia quizzes online at braingle.com
  • Try a jigsaw puzzle! Yes, remember those?

Or, if you’re on-the-go head to the apple store for a list of brain puzzles to enjoy.

Eating well, getting plenty of sleep, having good relationships, and managing stress levels all affect the functional capabilities of our brains. For other tips on keeping your brain and memory sharp go to helpguide.org.

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Categories brain, Brain Quizzes, Memory, science

Synaesthesia; or tasting shapes.

June 12, 2011 //
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Imagine hearing colours, feeling sounds or tasting shapes.

If you look at the letter ‘4’ and see the colour “green” or have a relationship between the sound of a car horn and feel a pain in your right leg, or smell jasmine when you see a triangle, you could be a part of the less than 1% population who experience Synaesthesia.

Synaesthesia is basically a mash up of senses. A synaesthete receives the same sensory information as you or I, but somewhere in their somatosensory cortex (the parts of your brain that receive sensory information from your body parts) and association areas (the part that is involved in complex mental processes eg forming perceptions), they process the information differently and thus they experience an altered perception – or an altered state of consciousness.

Parts of a synaesthete’s brain when looking at a letter register a letter and a colour at once.

Neuroimaging studies using PET and fMRI demonstrate significant differences between the brains of synaesthetes and non-synesthetes. The degree of white matter connectivity (white matter being the fat that coats the grey nerve cells) in the fusiform gyrus correlates with the intensity of the synaesthetic experience. There is some dispute over the functionalities of the fusiform gyrus, but it is generally accepted that it is involved in:

  1. processing color information
  2. face and body recognition (see Fusiform face area)
  3. word recognition
  4. number recognition [questionable: may only be as a result of a global response of any generic recognition tasks, further statistical evidence needed]
  5. within-category identification

Some famous synaesthetes you might know include French poet Baudelaire, Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt and Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, who was said to hear tones and chords as he painted; for example yellow was the colour of middle-C on a piano or a brassy trumpet blast. For him, the combinations and associations of colours produced vibrational frequencies akin to chords played on a piano.

Famous novelist Vladimir Nobokov wrote that he associated the letter ‘r’ with a senstion of ‘a sooty rag being ripped’, while the letter ‘a’ he associated with weathered wood.

Needless to say, it helps in the creative process!

For more information on the sensory clashes go to http://www.uksynaesthesia.com/.

Thank you to Wikipedia, and ‘Psychology 2’ by Burton, Westen and Kowalski.

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Categories brain, Hearing, Interesting bits, Neuro Conditions, science, Senses, Sight, Smell, Taste

Dissecting The Mind’s Eye

June 5, 2011 //
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As well as exploring many other patient’s stories, Sacks’ own anecdote in his latest novel ‘The Mind’s Eye” (Picador, 2010) candidly talks about his experiences with an ocular melanoma in his right eye. The treatment required cutting the eye muscle to insert a radioactive plate for 72 hours, zapping the malignant cells. When unsuccessful, this is eventually followed by laser treatment which damages the fouvea – the part of your eye which delivers your central vision.

In the following weeks of recovery he experiences is extraordinary explosions of vision, with the brain suddenly spurting blowouts of bright light and colour as it tries to heal its burned, charred parts and reconnect tissues and messages between optical nerves and occipital lobe.

Colour becomes a riddle for him. Holding up a green apple in his peripheral vision, it is green, but when moved in front of his body (and thus it is viewed by the fouvea) it becomes black; same for bluebells in a meadow – with the untreated eye they remained blue but seen with the damaged eye the flowers became green with the grass.

Similarly, the scotoma or black hole in his central vision behaves as if a sci-fi beast, changing its pattern and colour to suit his surrounds; black when he opens his eyes, if looking at a white wall, the shape would suddenly change to white to match it, or to match the pattern when looking at brick walls, or chess boards.

The colour soon returns to the apples, and he experiences a heightened sense of vision whereby he sees images in his memory long after the event; a kind of heightened visual memory.

It’s an incredible cerebral experience told by such an eloquent physician.

Among his many books, Oliver Sacks has also written ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat’, ‘Awakenings’, and ‘Musicophilia’.
www.oliversacks.com

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Categories brain, Interesting bits, Quirky brains, science, Sight

Seeing things in 3D

June 5, 2011 //
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Oliver Sacks’ most recent book ‘The Mind’s Eye’ looks at the curious relationship between your brain and your eyes.

He follows the patient Sue, who was born stereo-blind (that is, without binocular vision which is necessary to construct a sense of depth). Born cross-eyed she had surgery at ages 2 and 7 buy was told there were no corrective exercises that would be done to help her gain a 3D vision of the world. In her 40’s, with the help of a developmental optometrist,  she decided to try corrective exercises anyway and realised her 3D vision was able to be activated, suddenly seeing the steering wheel and doors “popping out” into the world once the binocular cells in her brain were activated to see the world this way. Without exercises however, this ability faded and she lost her 3D vision, demonstrating the incredible elasticity of the brain’s capacities.

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Categories brain, Interesting bits, science, Sight

I’m sorry – who are you again?

June 5, 2011 //
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The fusiform face area (FFA) is a part of the human visual system which might be specialized for facial recognition, although there is some evidence that it also processes categorical information about other objects, particularly familiar ones.

Good news! That horrible feeling when you cannot, for the life of you, recognise that person enthusiastically greeting you like a long-lost friend, actually has a name – Prosopagnosia – or face-blindness. More than that, it’s a fairly common thing.

Up to 2% of the US population – that’s 6 million people – can’t quite recognise their husbands, children, wives, teachers and colleagues, but this strange impediment isn’t even a household name.

Recognition depends on knowledge; familiarity  is based on feeling, and thus has an entirely different neural base including the amygdala and hippocampi which store memory and emotion.

Prosopagnosia comes in the form of the “hyper-familiar”  – people who greet strangers at the bus stop enthusiastically feeling them know them, while also realising they don’t quite know where they know them from, if they know them at all.

The opposite is type Capgras syndrom, definitely the sadder of the two, where someone recognises a face but has no emotional memory of them – thus the Capgras patient will argue that the person (eg their daughter or son) cannot be the real thing – they must be imposters or counterfeits.

According to case studies, Prosopagnosia seems hereditary.

But with practice, the brain can be trained to remember people’s faces highlighting the plasticity of neural circuits adapting to create new memories… so there is hope for all those yet who can’t remember people’s faces!

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Categories brain, Interesting bits, Memory, science
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