We’re not so much multitaskers — Try this out loud:

1. As fast as you can, say out loud the numbers 1 through 10.

2. As fast as you can, say the letters of the alphabet A to J.

3. Now, as fast as you can, alternate the numbers and letters: 1-A, 2-B, etc.

If we were true multitaskers, Case 3 would take us exactly the same time as Case 1 plus Case 2. For most of us in the audience, it took far longer. Why? Read my post at Dana Foundation’s blog.

Oh, to have gotten to do this in middle school — Harvard researchers are building virtual environments to help teach ecology (as well as “enhancements” for when you’re actually out on the bog). More about this, also on the Dana blog (and be sure to click on the videos; we couldn’t embed them but they really show the story).

Brain Awareness Week starts Monday! It’s the global campaign to increase public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research. Check out the international calendar of events at dan.org to find something near you. Or just follow the Facebook feed or Twitter, #brainweek. This year I’m experimenting with Pinterest, collecting photos from brainy events, so if you see (or take) a great one, give a shout and I’ll add it in.

Vancouver’s Convention Center is downtown directly on the water, and wow did the press office have great views. Above is the east side of the center: the blue sculpture is the “world’s biggest raindrop.” That corner of the building, on the second and third floors, was where they tried to corral us journalists. It almost worked (after all, that’s where the free coffee was), but I did wander down to the presentations and workshops as well. (click on the photos to see them bigger)

On the other side of the Convention Center is the “8-bit whale” sculpture designed by Douglas Coupland; from the water, I’m told, the bits blend into a smoother whale. In the center, in the water, is the last of Coal Harbour’s gas stations, a Chevron. From the meeting rooms, we could hear the rumble of the sea planes during morning and evening commutes.

Here’s the Convention Center from on high: the Vancouver Lookout; you can see the brown grass of the center’s “green” roof on the far left and the floating gas station beyond it; the circus-tent roof on the right is Canada Place. The Lookout also has a revolving restaurant, which carries a very nice Cab-Mer (cabernet + merlot) and the staff will let you sit and linger over it for an hour during slow season. Also highly recommended, if spendy, is L’Abattoir, in the city’s Gastown. It carries the common themes of wood and natural substances, building reuse (it’s really an old jail, but next to “Blood Alley”), and great food. I had a knock-your-socks-off seafood salad, and amazingly melty pork (because it had been cooked in milk, the server said). I also enjoyed staying at Vancouver Inn, up the hill from Gastown. The Inn is more like a rooming house than an impersonal hotel (although, much like a rooming house, you’ll want to bring earplugs if you’re a light sleeper).

I always have a lot to process at these science meetings; apparently that’s why I could not keep my eyes open for any city photos. It rained every day a little, and misted much; mainly tourists only used umbrellas, the locals wore knit or felt hats or went “commando.” My umbrella is in my bag.

Behind the Vancouver Art Gallery, I found a sunken ice rink running under Nelson Street. Sky-domes on either end offer light, but you can see the shade from the road.

At the Gallery’s cafeteria, I found an unusual napkin note.

Saturday afternoon I had a couple free hours between the science and the socials, and it was only raining a little, so headed to North Vancouver to hug some big trees and also challenge my fears by walking the Capilano suspension bridge. That woke me up.

The bridge is very wobbly, more like a little trampoline that what I would consider good bridge sturdiness. Still only one of the four dozen people I watched try to cross gave up and scurried back to safety. A brave bunch, we humans.

This year is rich with travel. Besides this conference, I have another neuroscience conference to cover in October, in New Orleans. But next up is an entire month traveling in Spain. That’s the little brown square above Africa in this giant spinning globe inside the Convention Center.

April in Spain! Half the time is vacation and research for The Spanish Patriot, and half the time working. Know any great tapas places in Barcelona, Madrid, or La Coruña?

How does school work, brain-wise? Do children teach themselves or is it something about the instruction that gets their brains firing and wiring faster? Last fall, a few hundred neuroscientists, teachers, and curriculum-makers met for a weekend to hash out what we know about learning and how we could use it to help every child succeed at school. One early answer: Play. 

The Aspen Brain Forum was sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, which has posted an extensive summary of the event as well as slides and audio from eighteen of the sessions. For an introductory taste of the event, though, try the 18-min podcast (which we sponsored). Science and the City’s Nadja Popovich talked with three of the presenters, who sketch the growing field and describe a few surprising results.  

Many of these results are connected to the cognitive properties of executive function, especially attention: inhibiting distraction, focusing on the correct aspect of a task, and maintaining focus. For example, Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia describes the “red-pencil technique” for children who are writing their letters or numbers the wrong way (mirrored). Asking them to remind themselves to stop before they have to write a “6″ and switch from their regular pencil to another one to write that number slows them down enough that they write the number correctly, a change that seems to last. Diamond also points out that learning programs that include social, emotional, and physical components (such as play) “are better for academic achievement and executive function” than those that focus solely on academics. “Addressing only the cognitive seems to be less beneficial,” she says.

On the subject of play, Daphne Bavalier of the University of Rochester offers tantalizing research into the benefits of often-denigrated video games. Studies done on undergraduate non-gamers who played games for the first time for a few dozen hours seem to show they have improved vision acuity and speed as well as attention. How might programmers tweak games to foster improvements that could last?

Bruce McCandliss of Vanderbilt University describes research that suggests that differences in learning abilities and styles may have a grounding in attention, too—or rather, what we focus our attention on. Brain scans of young people focusing on the beginnings and endings of spoken words differ in predictable ways from the scans of those who focus on the melody of the sentences, for example. Might “poor” readers be focusing on a less-helpful aspect of the language, perhaps enjoying the music of the language and missing its meaning? “Different learning styles may rely on different styles of attention,” he says, and might benefit from different methods of instruction.

Like most of neuroscience, questions are more plentiful than answers. We do know some things work better than others, though; Diamond cites the Montessori, Tools of the Mind, and Path curriculums; Jump Math also seems to be making mathematicians of entire classrooms, not just a lucky few, according to John Mighton (who was not on the podcast but did attend the meeting).

The main take-away? Everyone learns a little differently, so relax about it. As Diamond says, “stress impairs executive function.”

–Nicky Penttila

How Do You Get Involved in Neuroethics?
During a workshop at the annual meeting of the International Neuroethics Society, panelists advised ethical wannabes to just get started.

Sex (differences) and Brain Science
Is the study of sex differences gaining traction in neuroscience? It was the topic of the very first Social Issues Roundtable at the Society for Neuroscience, in 1983, and it was the topic again this year.

Generating Obesity
The obesity epidemic was the topic of the Public Advocacy Forum at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting on Wednesday, and it was nearly two hours of scary data with a little bit of hope.

New vocabulary

This is my sixth time attending (as a member of the press, not a brain expert), and I love to soak up the enthusiasm and cheerful argumentitiveness of these passionate folks. And boy, do I learn a lot. The event is organized by the people at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), whom we work with on many projects, especially Brain Awareness Week (BAW). On Saturday, we’ll be presenting during the Brain Awareness campaign meeting, at 3 pm in the Convention Center’s Room 151.

There is always a ton of new research at the conference; some of it is incremental or not-yet-ready-for-publication, but don’t be surprised if you see a lot of news stories on brain topics this weekend.

At the Dana Foundation blog, we’ll be reporting from the event over the next few weeks, but if you want to follow an up-to-the-minute feed hop onto Twitter: The official conference hashtag is #sfn11. Nature is planning a lot of coverage, starting at its blog Action Potential and via Google+. If you’re interested in specific topics, you might follow one of SfN’s official neurobloggers, who are focusing on various themes, from nervous-system disorders to history and teaching.

I attended one of the auxiliary events already, on Thursday and Friday, the annual meeting of the International Neuroethics Society. My story, “How do you get a job in neuroethics?” is up, at dana.org.

Despite falling SAT scores and employers reporting that high-school grads can’t run the cash register, researchers, educators, and parents each have some pieces of the puzzle of how children learn best. But somehow, all these experts don’t always share what they know.

Consider the power of playful learning. While research shows that unstructured play promotes attention and critical thinking skills and exercise can reduce stress and help prevent obesity, some schools are dropping recess and cutting back on playtime. At home, some parents equate playtime with wasted time, even though imaginative play, like planning and holding a pretend tea party, helps children practice social conversation and completing tasks in order.

How do we change their minds? That’s the task the Learning Resources Network, or L_rn, has taken on. Its first big project was the highly successful Ultimate Block Party in New York’s Central Park last fall; event planners expected a few thousand families and instead drew more than 50,000. Even The New York Times took notice, albeit a few months later. Local leaders repeated its success recently in Toronto, and on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 2, Baltimore Public Schools will host the third party, on Rash field in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

“We want to share the science,” said Roberta Michnick Golinkoff of the University of Delaware during a forum on the project on Wednesday. “We know how kids learn best; it’s out there, it’s not a secret anymore.”

This four-minute video from last year tells their story, from problems to solutions:

“We want to show the science of learning through play,” said L-rn’s Publisher Susan Magsamen of Johns Hopkins University during a forum on Wednesday. The Ultimate Block Party is an application of these principles in the real world, and next month the group will launch an application in the virtual world, the Web portal l-rn.com.

Even though I’m not a kid anymore, I’m planning to go to the party in Baltimore. Learning is lifelong, after all. And, as I wrote for the Baltimore magazine Urbanite back in 2006, many of us, of all ages, could use more play in our lives.

While we have made enormous progress in promoting survival after injury and great advances in rehabilitation, he said, “in fact an area that has really lagged behind relates to the pain associated with combat injury.” I wanted to know more: Where are we in our ability to identify and treat this very common but frustratingly individual ailment?

I assigned reporter and author Kayt Sukel to investigate further. We’ve just posted her story “Is the Neuroscientific Study of Pain Lagging?” Short answer: We have been stuck but now with new tools we might tease out some answers sooner rather than later. Find out more at www.dana.org.

–Nicky Penttila

I saw him again last month when he spoke to the researchers, biotech workers, and advocates at the “Next Frontier of the Brain” forum in Boston. Instead of relaxing after his decades of public service, Cleland had spiraled down into the abyss of PTSD—more than 40 years after he was grievously wounded in Vietnam.

“People who overcome, especially, physical injuries…usually do it by means of having some kind of purpose in their life. I had a strong meaning and purpose; it was called politics, government service.”

“But then I lost [the election]. I lost my sense of meaning and purpose and destiny, vision. And at that point, then the reality of the wounding came into play. Then I realized, only recently, I was dealing with something that was much bigger than I was. And that was the basic, fundamental aspect of your brain.

“I went down into a massive, deep, dark depression sparked by massive anxiety and what we now know flooding of adrenaline and cortisol into the system—and all of that stuff came flooding back from forty-some-odd years ago, just like I was on the battlefield again, dying, overwhelmed, overcome.” At one point, he said, he was so disabled, emotionally and cognitively, that he lost the ability to read.

Cleland went back to Walter Reed hospital, where he had first recovered from the loss of parts of three limbs in 1968. This time, the doctors helped him start to heal his inner wounds. “Thank God, patient help, trauma counseling at Walter Reed…anti-depressant for a while, I began to recover. And I’m beginning to restore my sense of self and all these other things, and then, you know, magically the emotions come back, and the cerebral capability comes back, and then you begin to start thinking again about meaning and purpose.”

Cleland also tells his story in the documentary film Halfway Home, which follows several veterans through their first years home from war. The film had its Boston premiere as part of the forum; its director, Paul Freedman, and narrator, Martin Sheen, joined Cleland to talk about the film after the showing.

In the film, Cleland describes one of his low moments at Walter Reed, sitting and sobbing uncontrollably and then hearing, through the wall, his own voice, cheerful. It was from a video he had recorded long ago to inspire newly wounded patients to not give up.

“I had no idea for years, for decades, that I might have some kind of something called post-traumatic stress disorder,” he said at the forum. “For those who have been wounded, whether they have been physically wounded or not, when they have been traumatized, that old horse, that thousand-pound steed in your mind, has been spooked. It has been spooked. And if it has been spooked numerous times, it ain’t ever forgetting.”

“And so anything that comes along and spooks that horse—we call it triggers, nowadays—then you’re off and running. You’re liable to be thrown off the horse and dragged along the ground.”

Now Cleland is secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission and, as always, a strong advocate for veterans. And he wrote a book about his journey, Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove. He ended his remarks with a plea to the audience: “Those of us that have made that journey and hundreds of thousands, really, millions of young Americans who have put their lives on the line for the rest of us, need you. We need you.”

His remarks start just after the first minute of this video; researchers on pain, PTSD, and concussion follow (here you can find a description of those presentations). Video and mp3 audio also available on The Science Network site.

The forum was held in Boston May 23–25 by the One Mind for Research campaign, whose goal is “to significantly reduce the U.S. burden of disability due to brain disorders.” The campaigners released a blueprint of research goals at the event: “A Ten-Year Plan for Neuroscience: From Molecules to Brain Health” (PDF). Videos of all the sessions and interviews are collected on the Science Network site.

Just before I left to travel to the conference, I read in my local paper of a hit-and-run driver who had killed a pedestrian in the dark of night. The top of the story described the accident and suggested alcohol was involved. In the middle of the story, I read that the driver, who was found disoriented in a nearby field, was a friend of the person he had allegedly hit; they were both headed home in the same neighborhood. At the end of the story, I learned that the driver was recently returned from a war zone. Now when I hear these stories, I wonder: Was he showing symptoms of PTSD? Was he getting the re-entry care he needed? Are there others like him we must help?

[This post first appeared on the Dana Foundation blog; find more great stuff there!]

Want more? I also heard from writer Sue Diaz, whose son, a Purple Heart veteran, served two tours of duty in Iraq. “While he was there I chronicled that experience from the perspective of the home front for several publications,” she wrote, including as a book, Minefields of the Heart. She sent a link to a 3-minute video, too.