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Tag Archives: learning
A species of jellyfish carrying one of the most deadly venoms in the world is capable of learning despite not having a brain, new research shows – Yahoo! Voices
- A species of jellyfish carrying one of the most deadly venoms in the world is capable of learning despite not having a brain, new research shows Yahoo! Voices
- Jellyfish are not the ‘simple creatures’ once thought: New study may change an understanding of our own brains Fox News
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Perceptual learning deficits mediated by somatostatin releasing inhibitory interneurons of olfactory bulb in an early life stress mouse model | Molecular Psychiatry – Nature.com
- Perceptual learning deficits mediated by somatostatin releasing inhibitory interneurons of olfactory bulb in an early life stress mouse model | Molecular Psychiatry Nature.com
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- College of Medicine researchers discover learning and memory deficits after ingestion of aspartame Florida State News
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Video of a Ka-52 attack helicopter being shot down in Ukraine hints Russia isn’t learning what it should have by now, former US general says – Yahoo News
- Video of a Ka-52 attack helicopter being shot down in Ukraine hints Russia isn’t learning what it should have by now, former US general says Yahoo News
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Microsoft AI Research Introduce a Novel Deep Learning Framework Called Distributional Graphormer (DiG) to Predict the Equilibrium Distribution of Molecular Systems. – MarkTechPost
- Microsoft AI Research Introduce a Novel Deep Learning Framework Called Distributional Graphormer (DiG) to Predict the Equilibrium Distribution of Molecular Systems. MarkTechPost
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Rob McElhenney, 46, diagnosed with ‘host of neurodevelopmental disorders and learning disabilities’ – Fox News
- Rob McElhenney, 46, diagnosed with ‘host of neurodevelopmental disorders and learning disabilities’ Fox News
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Tuning Into Brainwave Rhythms Speeds up Learning in Adults
Summary: Tuning into a person’s brain wave cycle before they perform a learning task can dramatically improve the speed at which cognitive skills improve.
Source: University of Cambridge
Scientists have shown for the first time that briefly tuning into a person’s individual brainwave cycle before they perform a learning task dramatically boosts the speed at which cognitive skills improve.
Calibrating rates of information delivery to match the natural tempo of our brains increases our capacity to absorb and adapt to new information, according to the team behind the study.
University of Cambridge researchers say that these techniques could help us retain “neuroplasticity” much later in life and advance lifelong learning.
“Each brain has its own natural rhythm, generated by the oscillation of neurons working together,” said Prof Zoe Kourtzi, senior author of the study from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology. “We simulated these fluctuations so the brain is in tune with itself – and in the best state to flourish.”
“Our brain’s plasticity is the ability to restructure and learn new things, continually building on previous patterns of neuronal interactions. By harnessing brainwave rhythms, it may be possible to enhance flexible learning across the lifespan, from infancy to older adulthood,” Kourtzi said.
The findings, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, will be explored as part of the Centre for Lifelong Learning and Individualised Cognition: a research collaboration between Cambridge and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.
The neuroscientists used electroencephalography – or EEG – sensors attached to the head to measure electrical activity in the brain of 80 study participants, and sample brainwave rhythms.
The team took alpha waves readings. The mid-range of the brainwave spectrum, this wave frequency tends to dominate when we are awake and relaxed.
Alpha waves oscillate between eight to twelve hertz: a full cycle every 85-125 milliseconds. However, every person has their own peak alpha frequency within that range.
Scientists used these readings to create an optical “pulse”: a white square flickering on a dark background at the same tempo as each person’s individual alpha wave.
Participants got a 1.5-second dose of personalised pulse to set their brain working at its natural rhythm – a technique called “entrainment” – before being presented with a tricky quick-fire cognitive task: trying to identify specific shapes within a barrage of visual clutter.
A brainwave cycle consists of a peak and trough. Some participants received pulses matching the peak of their waves, some the trough, while some got rhythms that were either random or at the wrong rate (a little faster or slower). Each participant repeated over 800 variations of the cognitive task, and the neuroscientists measured how quickly people improved.
The learning rate for those locked into the right rhythm was at least three times faster than for all the other groups. When participants returned the next day to complete another round of tasks, those who learned much faster under entrainment had maintained their higher performance level.
“It was exciting to uncover the specific conditions you need to get this impressive boost in learning,” said first author Dr Elizabeth Michael, now at Cambridge’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.
“The intervention itself is very simple, just a brief flicker on a screen, but when we hit the right frequency plus the right phase alignment, it seems to have a strong and lasting effect.”
Importantly, entrainment pulses need to chime with the trough of a brainwave. Scientists believe this is the point in a cycle when neurons are in a state of “high receptivity”.
“We feel as if we constantly attend to the world, but in fact our brains take rapid snapshots and then our neurons communicate with each other to string the information together,” said co-author Prof Victoria Leong, from NTU and Cambridge’s Department of Paediatrics.
“Our hypothesis is that by matching information delivery to the optimal phase of a brainwave, we maximise information capture because this is when our neurons are at the height of excitability.”
Previous work from Leong’s Baby-LINC lab shows that brainwaves of mothers and babies will synchronise when they communicate. Leong believes the mechanism in this latest study is so effective because it mirrors the way we learn as infants.
“We are tapping into a mechanism that allows our brain to align to temporal stimuli in our environment, especially communicative cues like speech, gaze and gesture that are naturally exchanged during interactions between parents and babies,” said Leong.
“When adults speak to young children they adopt child-directed speech – a slow and exaggerated form of speaking. This study suggests that child-directed speech may be a spontaneous way of rate-matching and entraining the slower brainwaves of children to support learning.”
The researchers say that, while the new study tested visual perception, these mechanisms are likely to be “domain general”: applying to a wide range of tasks and situations, including auditory learning.
See also
They argue that potential applications for brainwave entrainment may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but are increasingly achievable. “While our study used complex EEG machines, there are now simple headband systems that allow you to gauge brain frequencies quite easily,” said Kourtzi.
“Children now do so much of their learning in front of screens. One can imagine using brainwave rhythms to enhance aspects of learning for children who struggle in regular classrooms, perhaps due to attentional deficits.”
Other early applications of brainwave entrainment to boost learning could involve training in professions where fast learning and quick decision-making is vital, such as pilots or surgeons. “Virtual reality simulations are now an effective part of training in many professions,” said Kourtzi.
“Implementing pulses that sync with brainwaves in these virtual environments could give new learners an edge, or help those retraining later in life.”
About this learning research news
Author: Fred Lewsey
Source: University of Cambridge
Contact: Fred Lewsey – University of Cambridge
Image: The image is credited to University of Cambridge
Original Research: Open access.
“Learning at your brain’s rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions” by Zoe Kourtzi et al. Cerebral Cortex
Abstract
Learning at your brain’s rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions
Training is known to improve our ability to make decisions when interacting in complex environments. However, individuals vary in their ability to learn new tasks and acquire new skills in different settings. Here, we test whether this variability in learning ability relates to individual brain oscillatory states.
We use a visual flicker paradigm to entrain individuals at their own brain rhythm (i.e. peak alpha frequency) as measured by resting-state electroencephalography (EEG). We demonstrate that this individual frequency-matched brain entrainment results in faster learning in a visual identification task (i.e. detecting targets embedded in background clutter) compared to entrainment that does not match an individual’s alpha frequency.
Further, we show that learning is specific to the phase relationship between the entraining flicker and the visual target stimulus. EEG during entrainment showed that individualized alpha entrainment boosts alpha power, induces phase alignment in the pre-stimulus period, and results in shorter latency of early visual evoked potentials, suggesting that brain entrainment facilitates early visual processing to support improved perceptual decisions.
These findings suggest that individualized brain entrainment may boost perceptual learning by altering gain control mechanisms in the visual cortex, indicating a key role for individual neural oscillatory states in learning and brain plasticity.
Google Employee On Learning She Was Fired
Sunder Pichai has stressed the cuts were made after careful consideration.
A former Google employee has documented the moment she got to know she has been laid off by the tech giant. In a video uploaded on YouTube and TikTok, Nicole Tsai, who was a Program Manager at Google, revealed that she figured out she had been fired when she woke up to an “ominous” text message from her boss and found her access to the company properties had been cut off.
“I rushed downstairs to find out that I had lost access to basically everything. I couldn’t log into my email or even check my calendar,” Ms Tsai said in the YouTube video titled ‘Day in my life getting laid off at Google’. “I called my boss back and we just sobbed over the phone because she was also finding out about my layoff for the first time today too,” she added.
Watch the video below:
The former Google employee said that she spent most of her day crying and scrolling through LinkedIn to read about other employees who were also impacted by the layoffs. She said that she started receiving calls from her co-workers as well as she discovered who else was let go.
“I think the worst part is that it seems like no one was consulted on this decision, and everyone was just finding out about the layoffs at the same time. It just felt like a really bad game of Russian roulette,” Ms Tsai said in the video. “There was no consistency around who was let go. It was also not performance based so it just felt really random,” she added.
At the end of her video, Ms Tsai also stated that she felt “so tired from being sad” that she decided to visit Disneyland to lift her mood. She also stated that she is not sure what she will do next.
Also Read | “Google A Year Or Two Away From Disruption”: Gmail Creator On ChatGPT
Meanwhile, according to her LinkedIn page, Ms Tsai had been working at Google since July 2021. In her post, she said that she was “completely blindsided” after finding out she was being let go, but added that “there is some comfort knowing I’m not the only one”.
Google last week announced it’s in the process of laying off 12,000 employees. Some of the staff realised they lost their jobs when they were unable to access the systems. Chief executive officer (CEO) Sunder Pichai has stressed the cuts were made after careful consideration. He also stated that Google will “support” employees as they look for other opportunities.
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Kids’ Incredible Learning May All Be Down to 1 Chemical in The Brain : ScienceAlert
Compared to adults, kids learn fast, their developing brains sopping up information at a mind-boggling pace. Somehow their neurons not only incorporate new knowledge more easily, they hold onto it firmly, even in a constant torrent of new experiences.
Now, a team of neuroscientists from the University of Regensburg in Germany and Brown University in the US may have discovered what makes young brains so efficient.
It’s all down to a brain chemical known as GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) which surges in children during and after learning, turning their young brains into ‘uber-sponges’.
“It’s often assumed that children learn more efficiently than adults, although the scientific support for this assumption has, at best, been weak,” says study co-author Takeo Watanabe, a cognitive psychologist from Brown University.
Searching for the brain mechanisms involved, the team used an advanced neuroimaging technique called functional MRS (fMRS) to indirectly measure concentrations of GABA in the visual cortex of kids during a visual learning activity to see how it differed from adults.
Measurements were taken in 55 children aged 8 to 11 years and 56 adults aged between 18 and 35 years of age, covering three different periods: before the visual learning task began, during the learning process, and after the activity had ended.
The results showed that GABA levels in adults remain consistent over the whole experiment. Meanwhile, the GABA levels in children were much more adventurous.
“What we found is a rapid increase in GABA in children, associated with learning,” says Watanabe. And not just during learning – the high levels of GABA lasted into the post-learning period too.
It’s a revelatory finding, Watanabe says.
GABA is a chemical messenger in the brain known to be important in the process of learning new information. It also plays a key role in stabilization, a ‘cooling-off period’ after learning whereby the fragile new neural networks are consolidated and the information successfully stored.
But if something new is learned during the cooling-off period, a phenomenon called ‘retrograde interference’ kicks in, where the previously learned information is overridden or destroyed – it slips out of our brains.
Think of it as like leaving a pie to cool off after it’s been taken from the oven. Resting it gives the starches in the filling a chance to set into a gel that will hold everything neatly in place. If you cut into the pie during cooling period, though, the piping hot filling is runny and spills out.
With the new knowledge of GABA levels in kids on board, the team then conducted behavioral experiments to see if this was what allowed visual learning to be stabilized more rapidly. What they found was astonishing.
Adults needed a ‘cooling off period’ of an hour to allow for stabilization. However, the children were able to learn again within 10 minutes without overriding what they had previously learnt. In other words, thanks to their lofty GABA levels, their pie sets a whole lot quicker.
“We found that resilience to retrograde interference and therefore stabilization indeed occurred within minutes after training ended in children, whereas learning was in a fragile state in adults for at least one hour after training,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
“This rapid stabilization of learning in children enables them to learn more items within a given period of time and makes learning more efficient in children than adults,” explains psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Sebastian Frank, a co-author on the study now at the University of Regensburg in Germany.
The researchers also found consecutive sessions of learning seemed to further increase the GABA concentration in children, allowing even more rapid stabilization of previous learning.
“Our results therefore point to GABA as a key player in making learning efficient in children,” says Frank.
While it should be noted that this study was done in visual learning, Watanabe believes these findings could be generalized to other types of learning involving memory.
Excitingly, these findings could be used to help adults learn more efficiently.
“For example, a new technology or therapy could be developed to increase the amount of GABA in the brains of adults,” Watanabe says. “That is one possible application.”
This research was published in Current Biology.