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Tag: cognition (page 1 of 2)

03.05.2013

does thinking wear you out?

The Thinker

Maybe. Maybe not.

From Popular Science:

That said, studies show that people do slow down after performing taxing mental tasks. One experiment, conducted by Samuele Marcora of the University of Kent, split subjects into two groups. Members of the first played a mentally challenging computer game. Those in the second group watched a documentary about trains or sports cars. Then everyone took an endurance test on an exercise bike. Marcora found that people who were “mentally exhausted” gave up pedaling more quickly than the documentary-watching controls. It was as if the heavy thinking had worn them out.

At the same time, Marcora found no correlation between the mental task and measures of their cardiovascular response, such as blood pressure, oxygen consumption, or cardiac output. In other words, the mental workout didn’t seem to slow their bodies so much as it appeared to skew their perception of how hard a given physical task might be.

02.28.2013

sleeping enhances memory more in children than adults

Sleeping child

Sleeping seems to enhance memory moreso for kids than adults. In a study children were able to turn implicit knowledge in to explicit knowledge at a higher rate than adults after 10-12 hours of sleep.

Popular Science offers this blurb on a study from Nature Neuroscience:

As a child, you sleep more deeply than an adult, and experience three times more slow-wave sleep and higher electrical activity in the brain during that sleep. This may help turn the large amount of information you accumulate during the day into knowledge you can recall intentionally.

The study, published in Nature Neuroscience this week, looked at 35 children between 8 and 11 years old, as well as 37 adults between 18 and 35. They were each asked to quickly press a sequence of buttons after they lit up. Half of them performed the activity before sleep, and half after. They were then asked to recall the sequence of the eight lights 10 to 12 hours later.

After sleeping, almost all of the children turned the implicit knowledge into explicitly and could remember the sequence they had pressed perfectly, while adults experienced smaller gains. Both groups remembered the sequence better after sleep than those who were asked to recall it right after their training.

02.28.2013

rat brain telepathy

One rat brain can control the decisions of another using a brain-to-brain interface. The brain activity of one rat is encoded and then transmitted to the matching area of another. The rat receiving the signal will usually perform in the same manner. Ed Yong describes the intercontinental telepathy in Nature News:

The brains of two rats on different continents have been made to act in tandem. When the first, in Brazil, uses its whiskers to choose between two stimuli, an implant records its brain activity and signals to a similar device in the brain of a rat in the United States. The US rat then usually makes the same choice on the same task.

Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says that this system allows one rat to use the senses of another, incorporating information from its far-away partner into its own representation of the world. “It’s not telepathy. It’s not the Borg,” he says. “But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.”

The original research is reported in Scientific Reports.

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