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Busting Some of the Myths of Attention: Multitasking, ADHD, and optimal study times were among the topics as scientists and educators shared their expertise during the “Attention and Engagement in Learning” summit this week.

The second event was the 3-day Learning & the Brain conference, held at the Capitol Hill Hyatt in DC. The topic this year also was attention and motivation; I learned a lot more science this year than the one last year. Another writer is doing the story on that one, but I’ll have some short stuff for the blogs later on it.

For example, the idea that our bodies’ involuntary stress reactions serve us well in the case of acute stress (short-term) but can cause harm when the stress is continued or chronic, may not be true for most of us, suggested Victoria Luine of Hunter College. She was one of the three main speakers during the session, called “Stress and the Brain: Effects on Addiction, Cognition and Well Being” and held at the Cosmos Club (which for its first 110 years was the most exclusive male-only club in Washington, DC).

    “These relationships were determined scientifically in adult males,”
she said. “The male response is fight or flight, but is the female’s?” She and others have been testing these other populations (in the rat world), and in some memory tasks, some cell-level investigations, and other work, they have found big differences.

[See the rest of this post at the Dana Foundation blog]

On a recent rainy Sunday afternoon in Baltimore, I joined a couple dozen people participating in an experiment in neuroaesthetics, helping researchers try to take a reading on what art does to our brains.

The exhibit/experiment “Beauty and the Brain: A Neural Approach to Aesthetics” at the Walters Art Museum is a collaboration between the museum and the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University. As part of a series of experiments, Institute researchers are collecting nearly three months’ worth of museumgoer experiences and compare them with the reactions of a far smaller number of subjects on campus viewing similar shapes while they are in an fMRI brain scanner.

Outside the single gray-walled room stood a sculpture by Jean Arp, “The Woman of Delos,” finished in 1959. Inside, the two long walls each held five posters containing 25 computer-generated modifications of the work, stretching it, compressing it, re-orienting it, and taking a slice out of it.

As we entered the exhibit, we picked up 3-D glasses, pencils, a score sheet, and directions: “Look at the arrays (picture groups), fill out the answer sheet and leave your response for the scientists to analyze.” For each array, we circled the dot corresponding to the position of the shape on the poster we found “most pleasing” and marked an X over the dot for the shape we found “least pleasing.” I filled in my age and gender, and set off. With me were about 15 other “research subjects,” ranging from middle-school age to retired folks.

The directions said to stand a foot or so away from the images; younger people often stood much closer, older people a little farther away. Sometimes I needed to move forward or back or side-to-side to see the 3-D effect.

Some of the images looked to me like misshapen clown-faces, others (as in the photo) were sloping shapes a little too reminiscent of all the snow I’d been shoveling this winter. Some images seemed to be reaching out to embrace me in soft, bulbous arms; others, with sharper edges, looked more likely to slice me. Guess which ones I preferred.

The distinctions are so small, the images so similar, I had a hard time discriminating among them, and the longer I took the harder it became to decide which I truly preferred. Most of the time, I ended up choosing extremes, usually an image along the edge of the frame.

The researchers hypothesize that our basic three-dimensional shape preferences are determined in part by neuronal responses in visual regions of the brain; by collecting and aggregating a large number of responses, perhaps they hope to find the limits of our sense of aesthetic pleasure. I like the idea that artists are “intuitive neuroscientists,” as Walters director Gary Vikan puts it, but I’m not sure how much this testing will expand our knowledge.

For example, would I have answered differently if I had not seen the actual piece just before I saw all its modifications? Even as a sometime art-goer, I know that Arp pieces usually are rounded and robust; if I hadn’t known that would my choices have changed? Just before my exhibit-going, I had enjoyed a brunch with friends and was in a good mood; if I had been in a different mood, say, angry, would the “pointier” pieces have appealed to me more? My companion, who had not been to the brunch, found more flaws than I did with the experimental procedure (and liked the pointy ones better, too). 

Also, I prefer to view this Arp piece from the back, and follow the line making up its “shoulder” as it flows to form the front. I couldn’t tell for sure, but there seemed to be no views from that angle. The images on the posters were 3-D, but only from one angle; our experience is surely different as we walk around a sculpture.

On the other hand, I’m willing to be proven wrong, and the exhibit did pull a swath of non-scientists into the curious mode of scientific experimenters. What a great way to introduce neuroscience and something like the scientific method to the general public. I’ll keep an eye out for results of this research and others in the series, and, I expect, so will some of the others whose responses filled the “answer box” at the end of the day.

Try it yourself: “Beauty and the Brain” runs through April 11 at the Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays; admission is free.

[This post appeared first at the Dana Foundation blog]

When she started working as a music therapist 32 years ago, “there was no neuroscience in music therapy,” she said. No one could explain why the people with severe dementia she worked with would respond to music and little else. But “lucky for us,” she said, the neuroscience community grew intrigued with the idea of using music as therapy and started investigating it, and “it’s only now that we’re able to say how this works.”

Tomaino is the latest in a string of lecturers at the Library this season who have described the power of music to improve, maintain, and retrain brain function. She referred to the research presented by Gottfried Schlaug in December and Petr Janata in January while concentrating on how what we are learning has improved therapy in the real world for people with stroke, Parkinson’s disease, aphasia, and other motor and speech troubles. [She also wrote a piece for Cerebrum in 2002, “How Music Can Reach the Silenced Brain.”]

“Music is a whole-brain exercise,” she said. Because it is processed in many parts of the brain and uses many brain networks, music can offer alternate gateways to an area that might have become cut off. For example, networks for rhythm and timing are, if not innate, laid down before a child is born. At four months’ gestation, a fetus can respond to “beat induction” (matching movement to a beat); as early as two days after birth, babies can distinguish the beat in a piece of music. This is a critical function, Tomaino said, because “sound gives instruction to the world around us.” Babies must quickly learn to respond to verbal commands, tone, speech patterns, and other aural cues. They also must learn to move in time, including the basic rhythm of walking.

That this capacity is so ingrained also means that if people lose their ability to move, as when their motor networks are damaged by Parkinson’s or after a stroke, their subcortical regions might be tapped to retrain or rewire the motor system. “Using auditory cues, we can reimbue them with this ability,” she said. Tomaino showed a video clip of a woman with Parkinson’s shuffling toward the camera; when the music starts, the woman’s posture straightens, her stride improves, her arms swing in time, and she executes a pivot-turn, all movements she hadn’t seemed able to do moments before. Part of the improvement may be due to where the command to move is processed, Tomaino suggested. By “letting music take over,” the patient may be dimming her conscious processing of a now-difficult maneuver and letting the brain automatically fill in the proper form. [more examples in a video by of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function]

In therapy, “we bypass, believe it or not, fear,” Tomaino said. “When they stop their thinking about it, making it less conscious, their fluidity of movement comes back. It looks amazing, and it is. But this is so true with many people with Parkinson’s disease.”

It also can help process language and speech. People with speech difficulties can improve their breath control by singing, and music’s rhythmic cues can help extend a person’s phrasing and access lost pockets of memory. Tomaino showed a video of a woman who could string together only three syllables at a time; after two months of twice-a-week training, she could speak 19 syllables at a time. “The motor timing, the contour and the timing of the singing, helped retrain the ability of speech,”Tomaino said. And the breath-control exercise helped her regain strength enough that doctors could remove her tracheal tube and she
could breathe on her own.

“I don’t think that everyone with aphasia is singing, but they should be,” she said.

[This post appeared first at the Dana Foundation blog]

Here are some of the things you can do during Brain Awareness Week, the global campaign to increase public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research. The video is from a BAW tour for school groups at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC, in 2009. The photos are from events all over the world. This year, Brain Awareness Week is March 15-21. [see my earlier post, "I touched a brain," for more]

The Dana Foundation supports this annual world-wide campaign to increase public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research by hosting an international calendar of events, sponsoring some events and offering a clearinghouse of ideas for people to put on their own events. See more at dana.org/brainweek.

Brain Project scientists plan to Webcast the slicing and preservation of brain matter on thousands of slides; extra-high-resolution digital images of the slides will eventually be posted on the open-access site. The operation is scheduled to start Wednesday mid-morning and will at least through Thursday, during roughly office hours, Pacific time. Part of this project is supported by a grant from the Dana Foundation.

On Monday, the San Diego Union-Tribune published a nice explanatory story on Mr. Molaison and the work of the Brain Project, which is based at the University of California, San Diego. I also wrote a short piece (with an audio link) about him for Dana’s 2008 annual report.

[A version of this post also is on the Dana Foundation blog. See more cool brain news there!]