pseudonym/neuroscience

From the page: "Researcher seeks repair for brain injuries, while colleagues explore other health benefits of stem cell bio-technology."

From the page: "So what, you might wonder, does all this mean for you, a boomer with brain rot who sometimes leaves his phone in the freezer and his glasses God knows where? What must you do?

The short answer -- and the one on which all are agreed -- is: use it or lose it. The plasticity of the brain means that it is able, in the face of injury or decay, to find ways of adapting itself to preserve strong patterns of activity. So, if you play chess all the time, you probably will be almost as good at 80 as you were at 40. You would probably also be almost as good at Dr Kawashima's Brain Training games. But so what? Read books, good books -- nothing works better.

The longer answer is that there are potentially beneficial techniques suggested by our still- limited knowledge of the workings of the brain. Jaeggi's fluid-intelligence game works, but it's lab-based at the moment and has yet to be adapted for general use.

Nancy Andreasen offers four suggestions to which you should allocate 30 minutes a day -- choose a new and unfamiliar area of knowledge and explore it in depth, spend some time meditating or just thinking, practise observing and describing things, and practise imagining. This is quite a punishing workout but it makes perfect sense and, unlike the Nintendo DS, it does seem to describe a better way of life.

Ian Robertson, professor of psychology at Trinity College, Dublin, suggests reading out loud at breakfast, making lists of related objects (say, yellow ones, or those beginning with A), and change hands -- brush your teeth with your left hand if you're right-handed. Again, this makes perfect sense: these tricks make your brain deal with the unfamiliar as opposed to getting locked in old patterns of thought."

Utterly fascinating and almost unbelievable video!

Beats the humans in short-term memory tasks every time! Great job indeed!

From the page: "Some of the most startling breakthroughs have had their origins in exactly these types of novel circumstances. Chemist Kary Mullis came up with the basic principle of the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR -- the fundamental technology that makes genetic tests possible -- not hunched over his lab bench, but on a spring evening while he was driving up the northern California coast. Walt Disney was a decent illustrator, but he didn't imagine the possibilities of animation until he saw his advertising illustrations projected onto the screen in a movie theater. In an extreme example, the preeminent glass artist Dale Chihuly didn't discover his sculptural genius until a car accident led to the loss of an eye and literally forced him to see the world differently. Only when the brain is confronted with stimuli that it has not encountered before does it start to reorganize perception. The surest way to provoke the imagination, then, is to seek out environments you have no experience with. They may have nothing to do with your area of expertise. It doesn't matter. Because the same systems in the brain carry out both perception and imagination, there will be cross talk."

This eye-opening article reveals new insight into creativity.