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You Really Are What You Know
jd writes "There has been research for some time showing that London cab driver brains differ from other people's, with considerable enlargement of those areas dealing with spacial relationships and navigation. Follow-up work showed it wasn't simply a product of driving a lot (PDF). However, up until now it has been disputed as to whether the brain structure led people to become London cabbies or whether the brain structure changed as a result of their intensive training (which requires rote memorization of essentially the entire street map of one of the largest and least-organized cities in the world). Well, this latest study answers that. MRI scans before and after the training show that the regions of the brain substantially grow as a result of the training, and they're quite normal beforehand. The practical upshot of this research is that — even for adult brains, which aren't supposed to change much — what you learn structurally changes your brain. Significantly."
To navigate a city looks like it was planned by throwing spaghetti at a wall and calling it a map.
Okay. Now I *really* feel sorry for Windows programmers/admins :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Great... I wasted my space in my head on Star Trek...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
" Even for adult brains, which aren't supposed to change much"
How is it that this is still passed around as fact. This idea is incredibly outdated.
Really? I watched several Republican Primary Debates, and I have to disagree with you...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This is good news for you then, since it means that it's never too late to forget all that junk.
Anyone who meditates effectively for any length of time can attest to the fact that the brain can change quite dramatically as a result of what you do with it. Things that I did not even know were possible have happened to me as a result of it, and not in a subtle way, either.
Along the same lines, do some types of jobs lead to stable equilibrium configurations of some sort (which cannot be easily escaped)? For example, does learning to take orders and being a good employee reconfigure the brain in different ways than being an entrepreneur and making up your own decisions? Is it possible to become the latter if you've already spent 20 years being the former?
He still has a century on the people he's insulting, champ.
I have memorised a significant collection of porn sites over the years for "research". What happened to my brain?
The question is: How is the Brain of the people that study the Brain?
Related with the title, not the content of the article, probably there is very little of what is "you" that wasnt what you know or what you lived. Someone else that looked essentially like me (to not have different experiences based on looks) living exactly what i lived would probably think like me.
Well, neural plasticity does slow down considerably after early adulthood. I imagine you're responding to the theory that plasticity simply halted after childhood, which has been disproven many times. Neuroscience is a complex field that ties Philosophy of Mind, Psychology, Neurology etc together. It's hard to make any lasting broad statements about the brain and how it works.
"Sir your visual cortex is extremely complex. At these percentages of activity and size, you should be able to spot perfect-10 curves from 5000 feet in the air. Of course someday you'll just magically go blind, with no medical explanation, so there's that."
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Absolutely. There's a recent study, done at Mass Gen, that shows adults who practice mindfulness medication, such as tai chi, benefit from measurable physical changes to their brain in as little as 8 weeks of 20min/day meditation. Even older adults. And these changes occur to the regions of the brain that are associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and dealing with stress.
I teach Chinese martial arts, including tai chi chuan, and love to point this out to my students.
By the way, tai chi is really good for tech types like programmers. It's fun and the martial arts aspects are extremely cool. You also get to use swords (long swords (jian) and broadswords (dao)) as well as staffs and spears. Tai chi also puts lead in your pencil, if you catch my drift.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's actually a very good question. I'm not sure anyone has done that study, but I'd love to know the results.
If we go with current thinking (the Peter Principle, the idea that people generally will have their best ideas when young, the high failure rate of start-ups that appear to be by people moving out of regular industry, the apparent "strangeness" of inventors and innovators to those with a strong work ethic, etc) then the answer would be "almost certainly" for your first question, "quite likely" for your second and "yes but it's unimaginably rare" to your third.
However, you must bear in mind that until there's hard evidence of cause-and-effect, this is all supposition based on anecdotal evidence (which, if you remember your Dilbert videos, is only good for selling books) and apparent correlation. It seems very plausible, but without something a bit more solid I'm not confident anyone can give a real answer.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I am pretty sure Humans do not have the equivalent of software that works on generic brain hardware. Skills come about by the brain being hard wired to do certain tasks and this has been known for a long time.
The real question here is why do cabby's still have to go though such a intensive training regiment when you could just install a GPS.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
see how a moderator's brains don't change? Hard to teach the old dogs new tricks.
You can't handle the truth.
Here's a link to the press release from Massachusetts General Hospital about the study I referred to above.
And shame on you for not taking my word for it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This is old news and has been known by Neuroscience for a long time now...neurons move closer to other neurons based on how often certain movements and memories / thoughts are used so of course the makeup of your brain is going to be dependent on what you know and do on a consistent basis. There is nothing new about this discovery.
I spent from 15-25 being a retail slave. I design complex horticultural systems and LED lighting to match those systems, now. I'm about to be on the BBC.
I'd say it's not so stuck.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Mindfulness medication, such as tai chi? Am I to guess this is only legal in California and when prescribed by a registered physician?
Dummy, half of tai chi is meditation. Anybody who studies tai chi seriously spends as much time in various mindfulness meditations as he does in movement.
The standing meditation, usually in the horse posture, is the quintessential mindfulness meditation, and mindfulness meditation is exactly the kind of meditation that this study showed to have physical effects on the brain.
Yang Lu Chan said that when you look at the tai chi symbol, aka the "yin/yang" symbol, the light half represents the movements of the tai chi form, pushing hands, and weapons forms. The dark half of the symbol represents the tai chi meditation. Together, the represent balance. Together, they represent the whole - the Tao.
Anyone who does tai chi and does not practice meditation daily is not really practicing tai chi.
Now, in the words of the great 12th century master, Zhang San Feng, "Go fuck yourself".
You are welcome on my lawn.
You are absolutely right, particularly as high-res MRI is extremely new and very limited. Almost all studies rely on either external observations or gross structural change that can be seen on the cheaper and commonplace MRIs, and of those it is exceedingly difficult to draw any sensible conclusion because of the sheer number of variables and the difficulty of knowing what is a cause and what is an effect - especially when you've a multitude of feedback loops that can turn one into the other.
Tests are also exceedingly hard to design well. The so-called "Mozart Effect" turned out to have an element of truth (listening to music you enjoy and listen to for a particular purpose will typically have that same effect any time you listen to it, even when it's not for that purpose) but not the effect that the original experimenters claimed (Mozart's music has no special properties beyond the one of being composed by Mozart).
IMHO, the best that can be said is that objective experimental data is more trustworthy than subjective experimental data, that multiple experiments to establish what is cause, what is effect and what is independent is absolutely essential, that science isn't about proving as much as falsifying, and that many groups should conduct overlapping but different experiments to eliminate error by flawed design. In this particular case, the first was done, the second can obviously go on forever but has been done to an extent, the third's a bit harder without analyzing the methods in depth, and the fourth hasn't happened but should.
For the plasticity, yes it's been known that plasticity doesn't stop after childhood, but this isn't simply the occasional neural connection forming, we're talking 14-20% growth in the hippocampus in adults. That's a hell of a lot. Yes, it's an area where neurogenesis happens, but that's... ...a lot. This third study in the series appears to have been aiming to determine if (a) there was growth and not just a lot of X-Men mutants becoming cabbies, and (b) that the growth was a function of the learning and not the experience after.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Most of us knew one or two of those people in college/university. They look at a whiteboard full of difficult content, note it down once without ornamentation, never rewrite their notes, maybe read through the night before an exam and then regurgitate the lot perfectly. They get called brilliant. We tell ourselves that it's not the same skill necessarily as inspired creative problem solving though they usually seem to be good at that too, so maybe they are brilliant.
I was friends with and studied alongside one of these creatures (he became a Rhodes scholar) so I observed his techniques. I became a straight A student myself that year partly from that. He had honed his learning skills, intentionally or not, all of his life. He had genuine interest in the material (except Comp Sci which he hated while getting A++ grades), and was ambitious, competitive and extremely motivated, even when appearing to be half asleep. He was a good classical pianist (correlates with high IQ) and basketball player (so was fit), and never wasted time. No mindless boozing or bonging, it was wholesome-vomitus Christian Youth Group for him once per week. He could solve problems or find where to go for a solution when no-one else could. When an exam required answering three out of five questions perfectly for a 100% score, he would answer all five in the time it took me to answer three. In short, he was a rare talent and knew everything. When a key reference work was unavailable in English, he read both volumes in French. I later met students who also had so-called "photographic memories" but none were as sharp as him. To add insult to injury, he was handsome.
By observing him I learned some very important things. (1) He had no fear of apparent complexity. Most people's brains freak when presented with a dense page of abstruse symbols. Something inside says "It's too hard" and "I hate this" and "I can't understand" - and they can't and they don't. I tried to relax while looking at complex material so I could get to the meaning instead of the fear. If I didn't get it then I'd ask questions and work it through it later. Even when this only half works your grades go up hugely and you start to enjoy it. (2) He could do working in his head, jumping ahead two lines in a proof. This skill is hard to cultivate. (3) He worked damn hard, really hard, but highly efficiently, reading through things but never re-writing. I admit I had to re-write things, that was the only way I was sure I knew the work. I think with enough practice and cleaner living I might have got this skill eventually though.
Firstly, a study with 16 participants is interesting, and can generate hypotheses, but nothing more than that.
Secondly, it seems the controls were simply non-intervention. How do we know whether it was meditation, relaxation or simply learning something new that had that effect if it is not controlled for? The senior author even says:"This study demonstrates that [...] people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing." It does no such thing, they haven't controlled for it!
Thirdly, I particularly like the part of "Although no change was seen in a self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. ". Ah, yes, we didn't find any effect, but if we had just kept on longer, I'm sure we would have! A beautiful example of special pleading. Do the test for longer and see if there is a difference, until then we can only state that we haven't seen an effect yet.
Really, they have a center for mindfulness, and they produce this kind of bullshit? Talk about cargo cult science.
Of course, none of this says anything bad about tai chi, which I am sure is fun and relaxing, and relaxation is something most people could do with more of.