Study: Taking a photo of something impairs your memory of it

"Around 50 undergraduates viewed paintings one at a time onscreen. In one block, participants took a photo of each painting with a smartphone, and then had 15 seconds to look at the painting itself. In a second experimental block, the participants took a photo of each painting, deleted the photo immediately (so they knew it could never been accessed in the future), then had 15 seconds to look at the painting. Finally, in another experimental block, they took no photos and simply viewed each painting for 15 seconds."

After a ten minute delay (during which phones were confiscated) came a multiple- choice memory test probing what the participants remembered about the various paintings. Compared to paintings that were simply viewed, performance was poorer for paintings that were photographed. Critically, this was true both for the condition where the photo was stored, and for the condition where it was deleted, meaning the participant knew they could not rely on it as a future memory partner.

This suggests that offloading may not be the cause of the memory disadvantage associated with taking photos. One alternative explanation is that using a camera forces us to disengage from properly taking in the stimulus, as our attention flows to the mechanics of operating buttons, checking brightness, exposure etc. This is something commonly reported by people as part of their photo-taking experience, and also tallies with the fact that automatic wearable cameras that store images for later don’t produce the memory impairment. However, in the current experiment, after taking pictures (or not), every participant had the same amount of time to take in the paintings without use of equipment, so any distraction effect would need to include some sort of delayed effect on memory processing even after the act of taking a photo was over.

Soares and Storm have a speculative second interpretation....

"Study Finds Where You Lost Your Train of Thought"

"An unexpected event appears to clear out what you were thinking," said Adam Aron, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who led the research.

"The radically new idea is that just as the brain's stopping mechanism is involved in stopping what we're doing with our bodies it might also be responsible for interrupting and flushing out our thoughts," Aron said.

"We are providing a neural mechanism by which that happens," he added. "The same stopping system that gives you that kind of jolt when you are getting out of the elevator, and someone else is in your way and you have to stop, that same stopping system is stopping your train of thought."...

"We've shown that unexpected, or surprising, events recruit the same brain system we use to actively stop our actions, which, in turn, appears to influence the degree to which such surprising events affect our ongoing trains of thought," said cognitive neurologist Jan Wessel, who worked on the study and who is now at the University of Iowa. (read the whole article?)

Study: Intelligent people's brains wired differently to those with fewer intellectual abilities

"Scientists claim to have found a correlation between how well wired-up some individuals were to their cognitive abilities and general success in life."

“We’ve tried to see how we can relate what we see in the brain to the behavioural skills we can measure in different people. In doing this, we hope to able to understand what goes on ‘under the bonnet’ of the brain,” said Professor Stephen Smith of Oxford University, who led the study published in Nature Neuroscience.

“You can think of it as a population-average map of 200 regions across the brain that are functionally distinct from one another. Then we looked at how much all of those regions communicated with each other, in every participant,” Professor Smith said.

“It may be that with hundreds of different brain circuits, the tests that are used to measure cognitive ability actually make use of different sets of overlapping circuits,” Professor Smith said.

“We hope that by looking at brain-imaging data we’ll be able to relate connections in the brain to the specific measures, and work out what these kinds of test actually require the brain to do,” he said.

It may also be possible to use the research to work out how to train people to improve their brain connectivity and therefore push than up the scale so that they achieve more than they otherwise would, he added.

“It’s a question of whether it’s possible to move people up the axis of connectivity. We know from other research that it is possible to improve cognitive performance with training, but what we don’t know yet is whether this is true of connectivity,” he explained.

These guys are distinguished scientists... you can tell.

"it was nearly identical from time to time to time—and the system worked from rat to rat to rat”

"Inside the Memory Machine"

Based on the activity they observed, they could even tell when the rats were going to make an error. “The rats are not making mistakes randomly. They’re responding the way they are because the hippocampus encoded the wrong information,” he adds.

Humans make similar errors when they try to look for their parked cars, Deadwyler says. Imagine if yesterday, you parked your car in the second row near the door, but today, you parked in the fourth row near the back. But today you were also preoccupied by a 9 a.m. meeting, and so you weren’t paying close attention to where you parked. If you tried to find your car in the second row of the lot, you would be making the same mistake as the rats because your hippocampus didn’t encode this morning’s parking spot very well.

rat hippocampus

Study: "Rote memorization plays crucial role in teaching students how to solve complex calculations"

"By tracking a group of young students over the course of a year, the authors show “that children learn to associate individual problems with the correct answers. Repeated problem solving during the early stages of arithmetic skill development also contributes to memory re-encoding and consolidation, thus resulting in enhanced hippocampal activity and ability to recall basic arithmetic facts… The maturation of problem-solving skills is characterized by a gradual decrease in the use of inefficient procedures such as counting and an increase in the use of memory-based strategies.”

"As a scientific justification of rote learning, the study seems likely to further polarize the controversy over math teaching styles, in which arithmetical fundamentalists are squared off against the popular and progressive forces of “discovery-based” learning, in which students are encouraged to find their own ways to the right answer." (read the whole thing)

Via Instapundit

"New Record for Human Brain: Fastest Time to See an Image"

"The human brain can achieve the remarkable feat of processing an image seen for just 13 milliseconds, scientists have found. This lightning speed obliterates the previous record speed of 100 milliseconds reported by previous studies."

"In the study, scientists showed people a series of images flashed for 13 to 80 milliseconds. Viewers successfully identified things like a "picnic" or "smiling couple" even after the briefest of glimpses."

"The fact that you can do that at these high speeds indicates to us that what vision does is find concepts," study leader Mary Potter, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., said in a statement." That's what the brain is doing all day long — trying to understand what we're looking at."

Livescience

"Biden: 'I've Never Found' Women in Workforce to Be 'Kinder and Gentler'"

"I've never found that to be the case," Biden told a Japanese audience. "They're as tough, they're as strong, they're as everything as a man is - and vice-versa."

Via the Associated Press:

At a roundtable later with business executives, Biden said he'd heard some say women are good in the workforce because they are kinder and gentler.

"I've never found that to be the case," Biden said to laughter. "They're as tough, they're as strong, they're as everything as a man is - and vice-versa."

The Weekly Standard.

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Elsewhere...

"The hardwired difference between male and female brains could explain why men are 'better at map reading'... And why women are 'better at remembering a conversation'"

Researchers found that many of the connections in a typical male brain run between the front and the back of the same side of the brain, whereas in women the connections are more likely to run from side to side between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

This difference in the way the nerve connections in the brain are “hardwired” occurs during adolescence when many of the secondary sexual characteristics such as facial hair in men and breasts in women develop under the influence of sex hormones, the study found.

“What we've identified is that, when looked at in groups, there are connections in the brain that are hardwired differently in men and women. Functional tests have already shown than when they carry out certain tasks, men and women engage different parts of the brain,” Professor Verma said.

The Independent

"... what's wrong with this picture?"

"The Cambridge University neuropsychiatrist Dr Valerie Voon has recently shown that men who describe themselves as addicted to porn (and who lost relationships because of it) develop changes in the same brain area – the reward centre – that changes in drug addicts. The study, not yet published, is featured next week in the Channel 4 TV show Porn on the Brain. Neurosceptics may argue that pictures of the brain lighting up in addicts tell us nothing new – we already know they are addicted. But they do help: knowing the reward centre is changed explains some porn paradoxes."

In the mid-1990s I, and other psychiatrists, began to notice the following. An adult male, in a happy relationship, being seen for some non-romantic issue, might describe getting curious about porn on the burgeoning internet. Most sites bored him, but he soon noticed several that fascinated him to the point he was craving them. The more he used the porn, the more he wanted to.

Yet, though he craved it, he didn't like it (porn paradox 1). The cravings were so intense, he might feel them while thinking about his computer (paradox 2). The patient would also report that, far from getting more turned on by the idea of sex with his partner, he was less attracted to her (paradox 3). Through porn he acquired new sexual tastes.

For the rest of the article click here.

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A romantic comedy, called Don Jon (2013) , now playing in theaters, is about the life of a young, middle class male who's addicted to pornography. The movie was written, directed and starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

 A favorable review ...

If you can handle the porn, go see this movie, if for nothing else than to experience how very talented Joseph Gordon-Levitt truly is. September 28, 2013 Full Review  Jeanne Kaplan, Kaplan vs. Kaplan

An unfavorable review ...

Filled with frank conversation and gutter language, mysogynistic with misandry thrown in, it's probably not possible to make a tasteful movie about a subject as distasteful as masturbation, but this movie doesn't even try. September 28, 2013 Full Review Tony Medley Tolucan Times

Is this movie an introduction of porn into the mainstream? Or is the mainstream more porn than anything else?

Don Jon (2013) Trailer after the jump