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AUSTIN, Texas - A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade.

Keep reading below, or see a slideshow of the most radical changes approved by Texas's education board:

 

 

Thomas Jefferson? Who's that?

1 of 12

 

 

 

The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum's world history standards on Enlightenment thinking, “replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.”

From the Texas Freedom Network's live-blog of the board hearing:

Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.

 

Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a "constitutional republic," rather than "democratic," and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard.

"We have been about conservatism versus liberalism," said Democrat Mavis Knight of Dallas, explaining her vote against the standards. "We have manipulated strands to insert what we want it to be in the document, regardless as to whether or not it's appropriate."

Following three days of impassioned and acrimonious debate, the board gave preliminary approval to the new standards with a 10-5 party line vote. A final vote is expected in May, after a public comment period that could produce additional amendments and arguments.
Decisions by the board -- made up of lawyers, a dentist and a weekly newspaper publisher among others -- can affect textbook content nationwide because Texas is one of publishers' biggest clients.

Ultraconservatives wielded their power over hundreds of subjects this week, introducing and rejecting amendments on everything from the civil rights movement to global politics. Hostilities flared and prompted a walkout Thursday by one of the board's most prominent Democrats, Mary Helen Berlanga of Corpus Christi, who accused her colleagues of "whitewashing" curriculum standards.

By late Thursday night, three other Democrats seemed to sense their futility and left, leaving Republicans to easily push through amendments heralding "American exceptionalism" and the U.S. free enterprise system, suggesting it thrives best absent excessive government intervention.

"Some board members themselves acknowledged this morning that the process for revising curriculum standards in Texas is seriously broken, with politics and personal agendas dominating just about every decision," said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, which advocates for religious freedom.

Republican Terri Leo, a member of the powerful Christian conservative voting bloc, called the standards "world class" and "exceptional."

Board members argued about the classification of historic periods (still B.C. and A.D., rather than B.C.E. and C.E.); whether students should be required to explain the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its impact on global politics (they will); and whether former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir should be required learning (she will).

In addition to learning the Bill of Rights, the board specified a reference to the Second Amendment right to bear arms in a section about citizenship in a U.S. government class.
Conservatives beat back multiple attempts to include hip-hop as an example of a significant cultural movement.

Numerous attempts to add the names or references to important Hispanics throughout history also were denied, inducing one amendment that would specify that Tejanos died at the Alamo alongside Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie. Another amendment deleted a requirement that sociology students "explain how institutional racism is evident in American society."

Democrats did score a victory by deleting a portion of an amendment by Republican Don McLeroy suggesting that the civil rights movement led to "unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes."

Fort Worth Republican Pat Hardy, a longtime teacher, voted for the new standards, but said she wished the board could work with a more cooperative spirit.

"What we've done is we've taken a document that by nature is too long to begin with and then we've lengthened it some more," Hardy said, shortly after the vote. "Those long lists of names that we've put in there ... it's just too long.

"I just think we failed to keep that in mind, it's hard for teachers to get through it all."

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By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News, San Diego

Singing words made it easier for stroke patients to communicate

Teaching stroke patients to sing "rewires" their brains, helping them recover their speech, say scientists.

By singing, patients use a different area of the brain from the area involved in speech.

If a person's "speech centre" is damaged by a stroke, they can learn to use their "singing centre" instead.

Researchers presented these findings at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego.

An ongoing clinical trial, they said, has shown how the brain responds to this "melodic intonation therapy".

Gottfried Schlaug, a neurology professor at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, US, led the trial.

The therapy is already established as a medical technique. Researchers first used it when it was discovered that stroke patients with brain damage that left them unable to speak were still able to sing.

Professor Schlaug explained that his was the first study to combine this therapy with brain imaging - "to show what is actually going on in the brain" as patients learn to sing their words.

Making connections

Most of the connections between brain areas that control movement and those that control hearing are on the left side of the brain.

"But there's a sort of corresponding hole on the right side," said Professor Schlaug.

Music engages huge swathes of the brain - it's not just lighting up a spot in the auditory cortex Dr Aniruddh Patel, neuroscientist

"For some reason, it's not as endowed with these connections, so the left side is used much more in speech.

"If you damage the left side, the right side has trouble [fulfilling that role]."

But as patients learn to put their words to melodies, the crucial connections form on the right side of their brains.

Previous brain imaging studies have shown that this "singing centre" is overdeveloped in the brains of professional singers.

During the therapy sessions, patients are taught to put their words to simple melodies.

Professor Schlaug said that after a single session, a stroke patients who was are not able to form any intelligible words learned to say the phrase "I am thirsty" by combining each syllable with the note of a melody.

The patients are also encouraged to tap out each syllable with their hands. Professor Schlaug said that this seemed to act as an "internal pace-maker" which made the therapy even more effective.

"Music might be an alternative medium to engage parts of the brain that are otherwise not engaged," he said.

Brain sounds

Dr Aniruddh Patel from the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, said the study was an example of the "explosion in research into music and the brain" over the last decade.

"People sometimes ask where in the brain music is processed and the answer is everywhere above the neck," said Dr Patel.

"Music engages huge swathes of the brain - it's not just lighting up a spot in the auditory cortex."

Dr Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist from Northwestern University in Chicago, also studies the effects of music on the brain.

In her research, she records the brain's response to music using electrodes on the scalp.

This work has enabled her to "play back" electrical activity from brain cells as they pick up sounds.

"Neurons work with electricity - so if you record the electricity from the brain you can play that back through speakers and hear how the brain deals with sounds," she explained.

Dr Kraus has also discovered that musical training seems to enhance the ability to perform other tasks, such as reading.

She said that the insights into how the brain responds to music provided evidence that musical training was an important part of children's education.

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Listen to reflections about The College School in a recent school video. You will hear students, parents, alum, administrators, high school admissions directors, and even university professors reflect upon the power and the importance of The College School on students' lives.

Click Here To Watch Video

A school that broke the mold a long time ago and found methods that work. By the way, I'm completely biased.

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The Brain: Humanity's Other Basic Instinct: Math

11.17.2009

New research suggests that math has evolved its way right into our neurons—and monkeys', too.

by Carl Zimmer

Image: iStockphoto

Numbers make modern life possible. “In a world without numbers,” University of Rochester neuroscientist Jessica Cantlon and her colleagues recently observed in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, “we would be unable to build a skyscraper, hold a national election, plan a wedding, or pay for a chicken at the market.”

The central role of numbers in our world testifies to the brain’s uncanny ability to recognize and understand them—and Cantlon is among the researchers trying to find out exactly how that skill works. Traditionally, scientists have thought that we learn to use numbers the same way we learn how to drive a car or to text with two thumbs. In this view, numbers are a kind of technology, a man-made invention to which our all-purpose brains can adapt. History provides some support. The oldest evidence of people using numbers dates back about 30,000 years: bones and antlers scored with notches that are considered by archaeologists to be tallying marks. More sophisticated uses of numbers arose only much later, coincident with the rise of other simple technologies. The Mesopotamians developed basic arithmetic about 5,000 years ago. Zero made its debut in A.D. 876. Arab scholars laid the foundations of algebra in the ninth century; calculus did not emerge in full flower until the late 1600s.

Despite the late appearance of higher mathematics, there is growing evidence that numbers are not really a recent invention—not even remotely. Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to have an innate skill for math, a skill that may have been shared by our ancestors going back least 30 million years.

One sign that this skill truly is innate: Children enter the world with a head for numbers. Veronique Izard, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, demonstrated this in a recent study of newborns. She and her colleagues played cooing sounds to babies, with varying numbers of sounds in each trial. The babies were then shown a set of shapes on a computer screen, and the scientists measured how long the babies gazed at it. (The length of time a baby spends looking at an object reflects its interest.) Newborns consistently looked longer at the screen when the number of shapes matched the number of sounds they had just heard. For example, a baby who heard “tuuu, tuuu, tuuu, tuuu” would look the longest at four shapes, less at eight, and still less at twelve. Izard’s study suggests that newborns already have a basic understanding of numbers. Moreover, their concept of numbers is abstract; they can transfer it across the senses from sounds to pictures.

Mathematical intuition develops as we grow up, but probing its growth is tricky because older children draw on both their innate skills and the ones they learn. So scientists have come up with ways to force people to rely on intuition alone. Cantlon, working with Elizabeth Brannon of Duke University, ran an experiment in which adult subjects see a set of dots on a computer screen for about half a second, followed by a second set. After a pause, the participants see two sets of dots side by side. They then have a little more than a second to pick the set that is the sum of the previous two pictures.

People do fairly well on these tests, which summons up a weird feeling in them: They know they are right, but they don’t know how they got the answer. Even in toddlers who cannot yet count, these studies reveal, the brain automatically processes numbers. From infancy to old age, mathematical intuition consistently follows two rules. One is that people score better when the numbers are small than when they are large. The other is that people score better when the ratio of the bigger number to the smaller one is greater. In other words, people are more likely to correctly tell 2 from 4 than they are to tell 6 from 8, even though both pairs of numbers differ by two. As we get older, our intuition becomes more precise. Other experiments have shown that a six-month-old baby can reliably distinguish between numbers that differ by as little as a factor of two (like 4 and 8). By nine months the ratio has dropped to 1.5 (8 and 12, for example). And by adulthood the ratio is just 10 to 15 percent. The fact that the same two rules always hold true suggests that we use the same mental algorithm throughout our lives.

Brain scans using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) are shedding some light on how our brains carry out that algorithm. Neuroscientists have found that when people do mathematical intuition problems, a strip of neurons near the top of the brain, surrounding a fold called the intraparietal sulcus, consistently becomes active. And when we confront more difficult problems—when the numbers are bigger or closer together—this region becomes more active.

Psychologists suspect that the mathematical intuition that these neurons help produce lays the foundation for all of our more sophisticated kinds of math. Justin Halberda of Johns Hopkins University and his colleagues recently carried out a telling study of mathematical intuition in a group of 14-year-olds. Some of the children demonstrated a more accurate intuition than others. Halberda then looked at the subjects’ scores on standardized school tests. Students who had a sharper mathematical intuition scored better on math tests from kindergarten onward.

The fact that children possess a mathematical intuition long before they even start school implies that our evolutionary ancestors had it too. Indeed, recent research indicates that our forebears possessed such an intuition long before they could walk upright. Scientists have found that many primates, including rhesus monkeys, can solve some of the same mathematical problems we can. Since monkeys and humans diverged 30 million years ago, mathematical intuition presumably is at least that old.

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Providing evidence of that shared heritage, Cantlon and Brannon were able to teach monkeys to do addition by intuition the same way people do. The animals’ intuition is about as good as ours, and it follows the same rules. As the ratio between numbers gets larger, the monkeys are increasingly likely to pick the right one. And when monkeys use their mathematical intuition, they rely on the same region of the brain around the intraparietal sulcus that we do.

Monkeys can even learn written numbers, a skill children develop only around age 5. In order to make the link between a 2 and a pair of objects, children use a region of the brain located underneath the temple called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This region is like a blacksmith shop for forging associations between signs and concepts. Once the association has been formed, children recognize written numbers quickly, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex becomes quiet.

Monkeys can learn, with enough training, to pick out a 4 if they see four dots on a screen. Andreas Nieder, a physiologist at the University of Tübingen, and his colleagues have discovered that, like children, the monkeys use their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to make those associations. They have even found individual neurons in the region that fire strongly at both the number 4 and four dots.

But does a monkey actually understand what a written 4 signifies? To find out, Nieder and his former student Ilka Diester trained monkeys for a new experiment. The monkeys learned to press a lever, after which they saw one number followed by another. If the numbers matched, the monkeys could release the lever to get a squirt of juice. If the numbers didn’t match, the monkeys had to keep the lever pressed down until a new number appeared, which was always a match.

The monkeys were able to learn to release the lever for matching numbers and to keep it down for numbers that did not match. If they had succeeded simply by matching shapes, you would expect them to sometimes confuse similar-looking numbers: They might choose 1 as a match with 4 because both are made of straight lines, for example. But Diester and Nieder found that the monkeys got confused in a different way. The monkeys were most likely to mix up numbers that were numerically close to each other: the sticklike 1 and the curvaceous 2, for example. What’s more, the monkeys took more time to release the lever if larger numbers matched than if smaller ones did—another sign that the animals were responding to quantity, not shape.

Once our ancestors linked their natural instinct for numbers with an ability to understand symbols, everything changed. Math became a language of ideas and measurements.

To neuroscientists, these studies raise a deep question. If monkeys have such solid foundations for numbers, why can’t they per­form high-level mathematics? Finding an answer may help us understand what makes humans so much better with numbers than other animals. Nieder and Cantlon have both speculated that the difference lies in our ability to understand symbols, which enables us to transform our approximate intuition of numbers into a precise understanding. When we say “2,” we mean an exact quantity, not “probably 2 but maybe 1 or 3.” We can then learn rules for handling exact numbers quickly. And then we can generalize those rules from one number to the next, thus understanding general mathematical principles. Other primates, lacking our symbolic brains, take thousands of trials to learn a new rule.

The recent studies of monkeys and infants cast a new light on the old notched bones. The earliest recorded numbers coin­cide with the first appearance of many other expressions of abstract thought, from bone flutes to carvings of zaftig female figures. Before then, humans may have thought about numbers the way monkeys (and babies) still do today. But once our ancestors began to link their natural instinct for numbers with a new ability to understand symbols, everything changed. Math became a language of ideas, of measurements, and of engineering possibilities. The rest—the skyscrapers and supermarkets and weddings—were just a matter of derivation.

Grigori Perelman: The genius in hiding

Jennifer Ouellette, contributor

In November 2002, an obscure Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman caused a sensation in the mathematical community when he posted the first in a series of papers proving the most famous unsolved problem in topology: the Poincaré conjecture. He caused another sensation four years later when he was awarded the Fields medal - the "mathematics Nobel" - for his work, declined to accept it, and then left mathematics altogether. When last heard of, he was living a reclusive existence at his mother's home in St Petersburg.

In Perfect Rigor, Masha Gessen sets out to unravel the mystery of Perelman: what is it that has set him apart from mathematicians who came before him and allowed him to solve one of the most difficult mathematical problems of our time, and what made him become so disillusioned.

In deft, lucid prose, Gessen outlines Perelman's boyhood in Russia, his early training and his triumph at the 1982 International Mathematical Olympiad, when he achieved a perfect score and earned a gold medal. Through interviews with his past mentors and colleagues, she pieces together an intriguing psychological portrait of the mind of a genius, and the attributes that led him to solve a puzzle that had baffled mathematicians for generations - including the eccentricities and antisocial traits that would become so pronounced at the pinnacle of his career.

Gessen's achievement is all the more remarkable because she was unable to interview her subject in person; since 2006, Perelman has eschewed all communication with journalists. Non-mathematical readers will find the chapter outlining the details of the Poincaré conjecture to be among the most accessible summations of this difficult topic.

If Perfect Rigor has a flaw, it is that the narrative is a little slow out of the starting gate. Gessen opens with a rather dry chapter on the historical and cultural background of 20th-century Russian mathematics. Yet elsewhere she interweaves this context with the narrative of Perelman's life with such skill that one doesn't really need a detailed introductory history lesson to get a feel for what life would have been like for the gifted Jewish boy coming of age in the Soviet Union.

This year the Clay Mathematics Institute is expected to award Perelman $1 million for solving the Poincaré conjecture - one of several "Millennium Challenges" laid out at the turn of the 21st century. Will Perelman emerge from his self-imposed exile and accept the award, or will he once again refuse the accolades bestowed on him by what he perceives to be a corrupt system? If Gessen's portrait is an accurate one, my money is on the latter.

Book Information:
Perfect Rigor: A genius and the mathematical breakthrough of the century by Masha Gessen
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26

See Also

• h+ Magazine Current Issue
• Will We Eventually Upload Our Minds?
• Mind Uploading and Mind Children
• The Future of Machine Intelligence

When surveying the goals of transhumanists, I found it striking how heavily many of them favor conventional engineering. This seems inefficient and inelegant, since such engineering reproduces slowly, clumsily and imperfectly, what biological systems have fine-tuned for eons, from nanobots (enzymes and miRNAs) to virtual reality (lucid dreaming). Recently, I was reading an article about memory chips. (See Resources) In it, the primary researcher makes two statements that fall in the “not even wrong” category: “Brain cells are nothing but leaky bags of salt solution,” and “I don’t need a grand theory of the mind to fix what is essentially a signal-processing problem.”

And it came to me in a flash that many transhumanists are uncomfortable with biology and would rather bypass it altogether for two reasons, each exemplified by these sentences. The first is that biological systems are squishy — they exude blood, sweat and tears, which are deemed proper only for women and weaklings. The second is that, unlike silicon systems, biological software is inseparable from hardware. And therein lies the major stumbling block to personal immortality.

The quest to restore damaged cognitive functions with electronic parts begins with a small dish of living rat brains [above], located inside a lab at the University of Southern California. Photo credit: John B. Carnett

The analogy du siècle equates the human brain with a computer -- a vast, complex one performing dizzying feats of parallel processing, but still a computer. However, that is incorrect for several crucial reasons that bear directly upon mind portability. A human is not born as a tabula rasa, but with a brain that’s already wired and functioning as a mind. Furthermore, the brain forms as the embryo develops. It cannot be inserted after the fact, like an engine in a car chassis or software programs in an empty computer box.

Theoretically speaking, how could we manage to live forever while remaining recognizably ourselves to us? One way is to ensure that the brain remains fully functional indefinitely. Another is to move the brain into a new and/or indestructible "container,” whether carbon, silicon, metal or a combination thereof. Not surprisingly, these notions have received extensive play in science fiction, from the messianic angst of The Matrix to Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs trilogy.

To give you the punch line up front, the first alternative may eventually become feasible but the second one is intrinsically impossible. Recall that a particular mind is an emergent property (an artifact, if you prefer the term) of its specific brain –- nothing more, but also nothing less. Unless the transfer of a mind retains the brain, there will be no continuity of consciousness. Regardless of what the post-transfer identity may think, the original mind with its associated brain and body will still die –- and be aware of the death process. Furthermore, the newly minted person/ality will start diverging from the original the moment it gains consciousness. This is an excellent way to leave a detailed memorial or a clone-like descendant, but not to become immortal.

What I just mentioned essentially takes care of all versions of mind uploading, if by uploading we mean recreation of an individual brain by physical transfer rather than a simulation that passes Searle’s Chinese room test. However, even if we ever attain the infinite technical and financial resources required to scan a brain/mind 1) non-destructively and 2) at a resolution that will indeed recreate the original, several additional obstacles still loom.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - Photo courtesy of: horrorstew.com

The act of placing a brain into another biological body, à la Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, could arise as the endpoint extension of appropriating blood, sperm, ova, wombs or other organs in a heavily stratified society. Besides being de facto murder of the original occupant, it would also require that the incoming brain be completely intact, and be able to rewire for all physical and mental functions. After electrochemical activity ceases in the brain, neuronal integrity deteriorates in a matter of seconds. The slightest delay in preserving the tissue seriously skews in vitro research results, which tells you how well this method would work in maintaining details of the original’s personality.

To recreate a brain/mind in silico, whether a cyborg body or a computer frame, is equally problematic. Large portions of the brain process and interpret signals from the body and the environment. Without a body, these functions will flail around and can result in the brain... well, losing its mind. Without corrective “pingbacks” from the environment that are filtered by the body, the brain can easily misjudge to the point of hallucination, as seen in phenomena like phantom limb pain or fibromyalgia. Additionally, processing at light speed will probably result in madness, as everything will appear to happen simultaneously or will change order arbitrarily.

Finally, without context we may lose the ability for empathy, as is shown in Bacigalupi’s disturbing story People of Sand and Slag. Empathy is as instrumental to high-order intelligence as it is to survival: without it, we are at best idiot savants, at worst psychotic killers. Of course, someone can argue that the entire universe can be recreated in VR. At that point, we’re in god territory… except that even if some of us manage to live the perfect Second Life, there’s still the danger of someone unplugging the computer or deleting the noomorphs. So there go the Star Trek transporters, there go the Battlestar Galactica Cylon resurrection tanks.

Let’s now discuss the possible: in situ replacement. Many people argue that replacing brain cells is not a threat to identity because we change cells rapidly and routinely during our lives -- and that, in fact, this is imperative if we're to remain capable of learning throughout our lifespan.

It's true that our somatic cells recycle, each type on a slightly different timetable, but there are two prominent exceptions. The germ cells are one, which is why both genders — not just women — are progressively likelier to have children with congenital problems as they age. Our neurons are another. We’re born with as many of these as we’re ever going to have and we lose them steadily during our life. There is a tiny bit of novel neurogenesis in the olfactory system, but the rest of our 100 billion microprocessors neither multiply nor divide. What changes are the neuronal processes (axons and dendrites) and their contacts with each other and with other cells (synapses).

These tiny processes make and unmake us as individuals. We are capable of learning as long as we live, though with decreasing ease and speed, because our axons and synapses are plastic as long as the neurons that generate them last. But although many functions of the brain are diffuse, they are organized in localized clusters (which can differ from person to person, sometimes radically). Removal of a large portion of a brain structure results in irreversible deficits, unless it happens in very early infancy. We know this from watching people go through transient or permanent personality and ability changes after head trauma, stroke, extensive brain surgery or during the agonizing process of various neurodegenerative diseases, dementia in particular.

However, intrepid immortaleers need not give up. There’s real hope in the horizon for renewing a brain and other body parts: embryonic stem cells (ESCs). Depending on the stage of isolation, ESCs are truly totipotent – something, incidentally, not true of adult stem cells that can only differentiate into a small set of related cell types. If neuronal precursors can be introduced to the right spot and coaxed to survive, differentiate and form synapses, we will gain the ability to extend the lifespan of a brain and its mind.

Having brain replacement would rank way higher in the trauma scale.

It will take an enormous amount of fine-tuning to induce ESCs to do the right thing. Each step that I casually listed in the previous sentence (localized introduction, persistence, differentiation, synaptogenesis) is still barely achievable in the lab with isolated cell cultures, let alone the brain of a living human. Primary neurons live about three weeks in the dish, even though they are fed better than most children in developing countries -- and if cultured as precursors, they never attain full differentiation. The ordeals of Christopher Reeve and Stephen Hawking illustrate how hard it is to solve even “simple” problems of either grey or white brain matter.

The technical hurdles will eventually be solved. A larger obstacle is that each round of ESC replacement will have to be very slow and small-scale, to fulfill the requirement of continuous consciousness and guarantee the recreation of pre-existing neuronal and synaptic networks. As a result, renewal of large brain swaths will require such a lengthy lifespan that the replacements may never catch up. Not surprisingly, the efforts in this direction have begun with such neurodegenerative diseases as Parkinson’s, whose causes are not only well defined but also highly localized: the dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra.

Joss Whedon's Dollhouse - Courtesy of eu.amazon.com

Renewing the hippocampus or cortex of a Alzheimer’s sufferer is several orders of magnitude more complicated and in stark contrast to the “black box” assumption of the memory chip researcher we will need to know exactly what and where to repair. To go through the literally mind-altering feats shown in Whedon’s Dollhouse would be the brain equivalent of insect metamorphosis. It would take a very long time – and the person undergoing the procedure would resemble Terry Schiavo at best, if not the interior of a pupating larva.

Dollhouse gets one fact right: if such rewiring is too extensive or too fast, the person will have no memory of their prior life, desirable or otherwise. But as is typical in Hollywood science (an oxymoron, but we’ll let it stand), it gets a more crucial fact wrong: such a person is unlikely to function like a fully aware human or even a physically well-coordinated one for a significant length of time -- because her brain pathways will need to be validated by physical and mental feedback before they stabilize. Many people never recover full physical or mental capacity after prolonged periods of anesthesia. Having brain replacement would rank way higher in the trauma scale.

The most common ecological, social and ethical argument against individual quasi-eternal life is that the resulting overcrowding will mean certain and unpleasant death by other means unless we are able to access extraterrestrial resources. Also, those who visualize infinite lifespan invariably think of it in connection with themselves and those whom they like -- choosing to ignore that others will also be around forever, from genocidal maniacs to cult followers, to say nothing of annoying in-laws or predatory bosses. At the same time, long lifespan will almost certainly be a requirement for long-term crewed space expeditions, although such longevity will have to be augmented by sophisticated molecular repair of somatic and germ mutations caused by cosmic radiation. So if we want eternal life, we had better first have the Elysian fields and chariots of the gods that go with it.

See Also

• h+ Magazine Current Issue
• Will We Eventually Upload Our Minds?
• Mind Uploading and Mind Children
• The Future of Machine Intelligence

Resources: 

The Memory Hacker (Memory Chips)
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2007-04/memory-hacker

Athena Andreadis
http://www.starshipreckless.com/
http://www.toseekoutnewlife.com/
The Quantum Choice: You Can Have Either Sex or Immortality

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Out with the old. New neurons in the hippocampus (pink label, top panel) may help clear out old memory traces, according to research with rodents with impaired neurogenesis (bottom).

Credit: Adapted from T. Kitamura et al., Cell (13 November 2009)

New Neurons Make Room for New Memories

By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News
12 November 2009

The discovery that new neurons are born in the adult brain overturned decades-old dogma in neuroscience. But it also raised a host of questions about what exactly these neurons do (Science, 17 February 2006, p. 938). Now the authors of a new study suggest that the newcomers clear away the remnants of old memories to make room for new ones.

The brain's hippocampus is a bit like a secretary's inbox: Although many memories start out here, they eventually get filed to the neocortex for permanent storage. That's why the famous patient H.M., who had his hippocampus removed in experimental surgery for epilepsy, could remember events prior to his operation despite being unable to form any new memories afterward (Science, 26 June, p. 1634).

To investigate whether newly born neurons play a role in memory transfer to the neocortex, researchers led by Kaoru Inokuchi of the University of Toyama in Japan examined rats and mice with impaired hippocampal neurogenesis. The researchers trained the rodents to associate a particular chamber with a mild shock. Like normal animals, they remembered the association for weeks, freezing up any time they were placed in the chamber. This type of memory usually hangs out in the hippocampus for less than a month: When the researchers injected the brains of normal rodents with a drug that essentially turned off the hippocampus after 28 days, it had little to no effect on their freezing behavior--presumably because the memory had already moved on to the neocortex. But in the rats and mice with impaired neurogenesis, the same treatment substantially reduced freezing behavior, suggesting that the fearful memory had lingered longer than usual in the hippocampus instead of being transferred to the neocortex. A similar set of experiments with mice that exercised on a running wheel--an activity previously shown to boost neurogenesis--bolstered the idea that neurogenesis plays a role in transferring memories. In that case, memories appeared to shift from the hippocampus to the neocortex faster than usual.

Finally, recordings of neural activity indicated that that long-term potentiation, a physiological strengthening of neural connections thought to underlie this type of learning and memory, persists longer than usual in the hippocampus of the neurogenesis-impaired rodents. Altogether, the findings—reported tomorrow in Cell--suggest that new neurons act like an efficient secretary, making sure the physiological traces of old memories are promptly removed from the hippocampus inbox to make room for new ones.

"The authors went through a lot of experiments to prove their case," says Gerd Kempermann, an expert on neurogenesis at the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden in Germany. But Kempermann is not quite convinced that the specific job of new neurons is to clear the hippocampus for new information. An alternative explanation, he says, is that new neurons simply enable the hippocampus to work more quickly. "But their conclusion is certainly interesting and great food for thought."

Christopher, a 15 year old boy in "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time", suffers from autism. The left half of his brain is undeveloped so that the right half has to make up for that deficiency. His left brain has literally taken over his right brain and he has lost all the abilities that right brain is associated with. He cannot understand why his father is angry with him or why his actions annoy others. He takes things literally and is not able to understand the nuances or intonations in speech. When asked by a policeman how old he was, he replies, "I am 15 years and 3 months and 2 days".

Our left brain is associated with things that require logic, reasoning, words, grammer, list making etc and other verbal things while right brain deals with imagination, drawing, music, feelings, and other non-verbal things. Being a left-brained kid, Christopher is very good in mathematics and reasoning. He can solve complex puzzles in an instant but cannot understand why hitting a policeman is wrong. And he'd certainly be very poor in writing fiction.

Writing is essentially a right-brain activity constrained by left-brain rules. Some people are naturally gifted writers (Saki) while some acquire this art through hardwork (Stephen King). But can the medium of writing, the means of putting words on paper, make a difference in the quality of the resulting prose? Can you write a higher quality essay by composing it in a word processor than on a notepad? And how is it affected by left/right division of human brain functionality?

Editing on-the-fly:
One of the rules (or rather the only rule) for writing well is to write first and edit later. i.e. don't worry about grammer or spelling or coherency while writing your first draft. Just let your thoughts run wild. Do not pause to re-read; do not judge the quality of your prose; and certainly do not try to rephrase your sentences. In other words, write with your right brain and edit with your left brain. Notepad and typewriter are more conducive to this type of writing than a word processor. Once you comming something to paper using a notepad or a typewriter, it's not easy to go back and change it. So you are forced to move forward and let your right brain take control. But with a word processor, the tendency to edit on the fly is very strong; the words there are not concrete, unlike paper. The left brain takes over and this interrupts the flow of thought and slows you down.

Writing speed:
Human brain thinks at a very fast pace and it is not possible to write down those thoughts at the same speed. Out of five ideas that occur to you, you might be able to wtire down only one or two of them, losing the rest. Some ideas so ephemeral or so unique that they never occur again. So for taking down your thoughts fast, word processor is the tool of choice. It is common to achieve typing speeds of 60 wpm or more with a little practice. Notepad fares worst in this regard. Some typewriters do allow you to type fast but a mechanical typewriter cannot hope to compete with an electronic computer.

Thinking while writing:
Some people think as they write. I.e. they don't have any well formed thoughts before they put the pen to the paper. They just let the plot develop as their pen moves. This type of writing is best done on a word processor because typing with both hands engages both halves of the brain, thus maximizing your creativity. A notepad or a typewriter is better suited for those who like to think first and write later. For them, the act of writing is not so much writing but recording of their thoughts.

Writing as drawing:
People with a very strong right brain tend to think of writing (with a pen) as an expressive act. When they write in cursive, it's like they are drawing, like they are moving brush on a painting. This helps them connect with their inner artist and makes them much more articulative. J. K. Rowling, author of Harry Potter series of books, prefers to write on a lined paper in longhand. She calls laptops 'so eighteenth century'.

A programmer, on the other hand, would do best as a writer when he thinks of writing as coding. Though coding is not strictly a traditional artistic field, it requires creativity nonetheless. This way of thinking adapts natually to writing on a computer.

Writing being stressful:
Some people find the act of writing on a paper to be too stressful. You have to take care of margins, spacing between words, spacing between letters, keeping a straight line etc. This puts so much pressure on the brain that there is no energy left to do the actual thinking. An extreme case of this is called Dysgraphia. So a dysgraphic person would write much better using a word processor where all these things are taken care of for him. Same goes for people who are too lazy to write on paper or are just not used to it.

Adopting a wrong style:
Whatever an author writes has to be submitted to the copy editors at the publishing house. And in today's wired world, this invariably means emailing your manuscript. This forces the writer to compose using a word processor as it would be too tedious to transcribe from a notepad later. In fact, most publishing houses provide MS Word templates which are to be used to compose your manuscripts! If a writer is forced to adopt a writing style that does not suit him, the result is bound to be of inferior quality.

Now I understand why I write better using a word processor. I am a programmer, I think as I write, and I am too lazy to write using a pen. So there you go!

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Right brain, left brain…
• Right Brain vs Left Brain
• Right Brain vs Left Brain Creativity Test at The Art Institute of Vancouver

There have been prior clues that creativity benefits from ample cross-talk between the brain hemispheres. For example, patients who've had a commissurotomy - the severing of the thick bundle of nerve fibres that joins the two hemispheres - show deficits on creative tasks. Now Elizabeth Shobe and colleagues have provided the first evidence that creativity is boosted by an intervention designed to increase hemispheric cross-talk.

Shobe's team tested 62 participants on a version of the "Alternative Uses Test", a divergent thinking challenge that involves dreaming up unconventional uses for everyday objects such as bricks and newspapers.

An important factor that the researchers took note of was the participants' handedness. Prior research has suggested that people who have one hand that is particularly dominant, so-called "strong-handers", have less cross-talk between their brain hemispheres compared with people who are more ambidextrous or "mixed handed".

After an initial attempt at the creativity task, half the participants spent thirty seconds shifting their eyes horizontally back and forth. This exercise is thought to help increase inter-hemispheric communication. The remaining participants acted as controls and just stared straight ahead for 30 seconds.

The key finding is that on their second creativity attempt, strong-handers who'd performed the horizontal eye movements subsequently showed a significant improvement in their creativity, in terms of being more original (i.e. suggesting ideas not proposed by others) and coming up with more categories of use. Staring straight ahead, by contrast, had no effect on creativity.

Another finding was that, overall, the mixed-handed participants performed better on the creativity task than the strong-handers, thus providing further evidence for a link between inter-hemispheric interaction, which mixed-handers have more of, and creativity. But it also turned out that mixed-handers didn't benefit from the horizontal eye movement task. It's as if they already have an optimum amount of hemispheric cross-talk so that the eye movements make no difference. This meant that after the strong-handers had performed the horizontal eye movements, their performance matched that of the mixed-handed participants.

The researchers also showed that, for strong-handers, the beneficial effects of the eye movement exercise lasted nine minutes for originality, but just three to six minutes in terms of coming up with more categories of use.

"Our findings may not apply to more unique populations who are characterised as 'highly creative'," the researchers said, "nor can we conclude ... that the thirty seconds bilateral eye movement task will turn an average individual into an artist, poet, scientist, philosopher, actor or sculptor. However, we certainly do propose that the ... eye movement task will result in a temporary increase in strong-hander's ability to think of creative uses for various house-hold objects."

These new findings complement research published in 2008 showing that horizontal eye movements aid memory performance for strongly-right handed people, but impair the performance of left-handers and mixed-handers.
_________________________________

Shobe ER, Ross NM, & Fleck JI (2009). Influence of handedness and bilateral eye movements on creativity. Brain and cognition, 71 (3), 204-14 PMID: 19800726

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Leading Innovation: 21 Things that Great Bosses Believe and Do

As I blogged about awhile back, this week, Perry Klebhan, Alex Kazaks,Huggy Rao and I are running rather intense executive program called Customer-Focused Innovation.  As you can see from the schedule, we are keeping the 21 executives in the program mighty busy. We kicked off with a tire-changing  exercise led by Andy Papa, who among other things leads the pit crews at Hendrick's Motor Sports, where one team established the all time CFI speed record, changing in a tire on a NASCAR racing car in under 13 seconds. Yesterday, the group spent the day at the Tesla dealer in Menlo Park talking to owners, potential customers, people in sales and marketing at Tesla, and people who didn't like the idea of owning a Tesla at all. In the picture above, the two executives on the left are interviewing George Kembel, the d.school's executive director (he is the tall guy facing the camera) and the group on the right is interviewing one of the Tesla salespeople (the woman in black with sunglasses in her hair).

The idea is to use their observations, empathy for others, and identified needs to develop prototype solutions to improve the Tesla car ownership experience.  The group focuses on cases, theories, and models in the mornings, and applying design thinking in the Tesla project in the afternoon. It is a lively and motivated group, and we all are very curious to see the suggestions and prototypes they offer to Tesla executives on Thursday.

Huggy Rao and I kicked off yesterday morning by doing case discussions and a bit of lecture on the hallmarks of innovative organizations. As part of that session, I put together the list below for the executives. I've also included links for anyone who wants to dig into the subject a bit further. I will add a few more ideas and links during the course of the week.  I would love to hear some additional ways that great bosses spark innovation and comments -- and extensions -- on the ideas below.

Leading Innovation: 21 Things that Great Bosses Believe and Do

1. Creativity means doing new things with old ideas.

2. Treat innovation as an import-export business.  Keep trying to bring in ideas from outside your group or organization, keep trying to show and tell others about your ideas, and blend them all together.

3. Look for and build “intersections” places where people with diverse ideas gather together. And when you go there, talk to the people you don’t know, who have ideas you know nothing about, and ideas you find weird, don’t like, or useless.

4.  Treat your beliefs as “strong opinions, weakly held.”

5. Learn how to listen, watch, and keep your mouth shut.

6.  Say “I don’t know” on a regular basis.

7.  Have the courage to act on what you know, and the humility to doubt your beliefs and actions.

8. Reward success and (intelligent) failure, but punish inaction.

9. Make it safe for people to take risky actions and “fail forward,” by developing a “forgive and remember culture.”

10. Encourage people to learn from others’ failures – it is faster, easier, and less painful.

11. Eliminate hiring and reward practices that reinforce cultures where “the best you can be is a perfect imitation of those who came before you.”

12. Hire people who make your squirm.

13. Create teams composed of both experts and novices.

14. Make it safe for people to fight as if they are right, and listen as if they wrong.

15. Encourage your people to be “happy worriers.”

16.  Sometimes, the best management is no management at all.  Know when and how to get out of the way.

17. Have the confidence and resolve to make tough decisions, stop your people from whining about the decisions made, and to get on with implementing them.

18. Kill a lot of ideas, including a lot of good ideas.

19.  Innovation entails creativity + implementation.  Developing or finding a great idea is useless if you can't implement it or sell it to someone who believes they can.

20. Remember Rao’s Recipe for Innovation: Will +Ideas + Tools.

21. Innovation requires selling your ideas.  The greatest innovators, from Edison to Jobs, are gifted at generating excitement and sales.  If you can't or won't sell, team-up with someone who can.

As I edited this list a bit, I realized it is important to remind people that there is a lot about innovation that sucks.  Yes, it is necessary, but innovator beware, it is an inefficient and distressing process plagued by a high failure rate -- and a lot of self-delusion. And that is when you are doing it right!

Sources:  Huggy Rao’s book  Market Rebels, Bob Sutton’s book Weird Ideas that Work,  and Bob Sutton’s blog Work Matters (www.bobsutton.net).

November 10, 2009 in Innovation | Permalink ShareThis

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Dan Pink was kind enough to mention this about our new book at his blog recently:

Yesterday afternoon, I was reading Jerry de Jaager and Jim Ericson’s smart new book, See New Now, and came across this stunner:

“A study of the top fifty game-changing innovations over a hundred-year period showed that nearly 80 percent of those innovations were sparked by someone whose primary expertise was outside the field in which the innovation breakthrough took place.”

Anyone who wants to read and download (for free) the part of the book where that reference appears can do so by going to our website, http://www.seenewnow.com, clicking on the Look Inside icon, and then scrolling to the eighth item, "The Louis Armstrong Effect." Clicking on the image there opens a pdf that can be read and downloaded.

(The book -- a sizable chunk of which can be read at the site -- consists of 24 new ways of seeing to spark insight and innovation.)

Jerry de Jaager

Posted by: Jerry de Jaager | November 11, 2009 at 01:01 PM

A theme through this list of 21 diverse and insightful points is the leader's responsibility to create and sustain a social environment that fosters new ideas. Leaders recruit people on the basis of creativity rather than comfort. Leaders welcome new perspectives despite their potential disruption. But leaders are not a consistently sympathetic ear, but instead provide a critical evaluation.
I like 18 because it implies that moving on can be more important than being right. A bias towards action is a valuable thing.

Michael
www.workengagement.com

Posted by: Michael Leiter | November 11, 2009 at 06:30 AM

- Be open. Great leaders, like Steve Jobs, see opportunities long before anyone else does.

- Listen to the whispers. There are great ideas out there that can be drowned in the noise from loud voices of pundits and gurus.

- Keep your inner child and nurture your curiosity. Appreciate your creative sides and develop them. Put the Accountant and Enforcer in the closet.

- Refine ideas. Push them to the edge. Be bold. But be practical.

- Steal from others. Also known as inspiration.

- Great products release dopamine in peoples brains. Understand this mechanism.

Posted by: Jan | November 11, 2009 at 12:22 AM

To point #12: My mom used to say, 'First rate managers hire first rate people. Second rate managers hire third rate people.'

Posted by: working girl | November 10, 2009 at 11:23 PM

I just found this blog through a google search on assholes who try to out asshole each other. I have been in the private equity business, I am now in the retail business where the store manager is much younger than me and is constantly beating me down, I start to feel like I am in a parallel universe. Long story, won't go into but I love the company, its goals and values mirror mine and I am at the largest store of a global brand and I meet people from all over the world. That said the entrenched people really dislike me and are mean, I have never gotten more negative feedback in my life and at this point feel powerless, discouraged, needless to say I have far more education, business experience, and knowledge about the actual business that the store is about than anybody else in the store but when I go into the store at this point I have been belittled for so long I just want to go and hide because I feel totally worthless. I obviously have been looking for another job, but it is a shame, my customer interactions are great but anyways, I have gone to business school and now see that it doesn't matter really who manages the store and who the store employs the sales of the store are driven by amazing global branding, conventions, location of the store and weather, the company is an outdoor products primarily clothing and it is perfectly positioned for global chilling. My whole situation would be funny if I weren't desperate for a new job, money because I now feel that I have donated my time to the company because retail pays so ridiculously low. THe thing that I have realized, granted I have never worked at such a low level(I didn't look at it that way when I took the job) but I have never interacted with people who are so street tough and mean is that business school does not teach personal interaction and how to make job decisions and the bare facts about politics be it at the low level street people I have to deal with in retail or the soulless, highly aggressive male dominated environment I dealt with in bond sales.The retail company misses out on so much information that we as sales people get from the customer but I have seen how management expects little from the sales people, just no problems and the ability of 100% control over the employees. Anyways, TMI(Too much info for this blog) but since it seems like you are all about management and I did like your post on assholes.

Posted by: Jeannie | November 10, 2009 at 04:02 PM

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