I will be taveling to Waterloo, Belgium to do a Day Of Intelegance on the 24th May.

Co-sponsored by the International Bilingual Academy, which will open in the autumn and will be the only school offering teaching in both French and English in Belgium, it is a day for four schools in the international community around Brussels. I am very grateful to the Anglican community in Waterloo and the Rev. Kempton Baldridge who are supplying the conference space and support.

It’s going to a great day…

From Wired.com

By Alexis Madrigal

Scientists used a modified version of the n-back test, which is schematized above, to achieve gains in fluid intelligence previously thought impossible. The image shows how users were forced to remember both visual and auditory information streams.
Courtesy Martin Buschkuehl

Brain researchers for the first time claim to have found a method for improving the general problem-solving ability scientists call fluid intelligence, otherwise known as “smarts.”

Fluid intelligence was previously thought to be genetically hard-wired, but the finding suggests that with about 25 minutes of rigorous mental training a day, healthy adults could improve their mental capacities.

The method, if commercialized, could be a boon to the growing, multimillion-dollar market for “brain fitness” software like Nintendo’s Brain Age.

“The most important point of our work is that we can show that it is possible to improve fluid intelligence,” said Martin Buschkuehl, a psychology researcher based at the University of Bern, Switzerland. “It was assumed that fluid intelligence was immutable.”

Fluid intelligence measures how people adapt to new situations and solve problems they’ve never seen before. Fluid intelligence differs from crystallized intelligence, which takes into account skills and knowledge that have been acquired — like vocabulary, grammar and math.

It’s not hard, for example, for students to improve their IQ scores by taking lots of IQ tests.

Trouble is, learning how to take IQ tests doesn’t improve the underlying smarts. The students just get better at taking tests. In practical terms, people can get better at taking tests, but in daily life, don’t have a blazingly quick new brain.

And that’s where Buschkuehl’s research, which appears today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claims to be groundbreaking.

In a limited trial, he and his team were able to make 34 test subjects significantly better at answering IQ test questions after training them on a completely separate memory task.

David Geary, a professor at the University of Missouri and author of The Origin of Mind, who was not involved with the study, said training in one test generally doesn’t generate gains on a different test.

“Transfer is tough to get,” Geary said. “Training in task A doesn’t typically improve performance on task B.”

But in this case, subjects trained on a complex version of the so-called “n-back task” — a difficult visual/auditory memory test — improved their scores on a set of IQ questions drawn from a German intelligence measure called the Bochumer Matrizen-Test. (The Bochumer Matrizen-Test is a harder version of the well-known Ravens Progressive Matrices).

Initially, the test subjects scored an average of 10 questions correctly on the IQ test.

But after the group trained on the n-back task for 25 minutes a day for 19 days, they averaged 14.7 correct answers, an increase of more than 40 percent. (A control group that was not trained showed only a very slight performance increase.)

Buschkuehl’s team postulates that the n-back task improves working memory — how many pieces of information subjects can keep in their head — as well as the ability to control the brain’s attention. Fluid intelligence tests require those types of thinking, and the training improved performance in these underlying skills.

“These are intriguing results,” Geary said. However, Geary noted that to claim actual increases in fluid intelligence, the subjects would have to show the performance gains over a long-term period — or even permanently.

The Michigan researchers are now engaged in studying the long-term effects of training. They are also working to increase the amount of training that users undergo. In the experiment reported in PNAS, the researchers did not find the upper-limit for improvement, suggesting that more training could yield even better mental performance gains.

“The improvement seems to be dosage dependent,” Buschkuehl said. “We saw a linear increase in performance with increase in training time.”

In the simplest version of the n-back task, a sequence of images is presented every few seconds and subjects are asked to match a picture to an identical one that came previously, say two pictures before it. (For example, in the picture above, the blue square should be in the same location.)

Buschkuehl’s subjects, however, also heard a second stream of letters and had to match the sounds at the same time as they matched the visuals. This makes the task very challenging. And as the subjects got better, the gap between matching pictures and letters got bigger, making the task progressively more difficult.

The team has developed a new n-back computer program called Brain Twister, which they have translated into English, but is not available online.

They do not plan to commercialize the software, but with mental gyms like Vibrant Brains in San Francisco springing up, and brain training software companies like Posit Science drawing big-name investors, you can bet you’ll be seeing the n-back task on sale sooner rather than later.

In fact, revenue from “brain-fitness software” reached $225 million in 2007, according to SharpBrains, a market-research firm.

Neurobehavioral Sciences also offers a 45-day free trial of their neuroscience stimuli program presentation, which is primarily a research tool, and only available for the PC.

From Medical Today:

Researchers in Norway and the UK found that by monitoring brain patterns they could predict when people were likely to make mistakes in carrying out tasks.

The discovery could one day help people at work, for example those who have monotonous or repetitive jobs, to anticipate when they are more susceptible to making mistakes. Perhaps a device that monitors their brain pattern could alert them, the researchers said. Some tasks like passport control, where attention to detail is important but the repetitive and monotonous nature of the work can cause loss of focus, could benefit from such a device, they said.

The study is published in the 21st April online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and is the work of Dr Tom Eichele at the University of Bergen in Norway and Dr Stefan Debener at the University of Southampton in the UK, and colleagues.

Boring and monotonous work makes humans susceptible to mistakes that can lead to serious consequences, wrote the researchers, but scientists know little about what happens in the brain in the time leading up to the making of such errors.

Eichele, Debener and colleagues got participants to carry out tasks in rapid response to visual cues, while monitoring their brain activity using functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and other advanced techniques.

To their astonishment, the researchers found there was a noticeable change in brain activity that started about 30 seconds before an individual made a mistake in the task.

In particular, they noticed reduced activity in a part of the forebrain called the prefrontal cortex, which is normally active when performing tasks involving organising and planning.

And they also observed increased activity in the Default Mode Network (DMN), which is normally more active when the brain is at rest.

According to a BBC News report, Debener said:

“Up to 30 seconds before the mistake we could detect a distinct shift in activity.”

“The brain begins to economise, by investing less effort to complete the same task,” he explained.

The researchers found they were able to predict future errors based on what they observed in the brain patterns about 30 seconds before.

They concluded that:

“Our findings provide insights into the brain network dynamics preceding human performance errors and suggest that monitoring of the identified precursor states may help in avoiding human errors in critical real-world situations.”

However Debener emphasized that it could be another 10 to 15 years before a working device based on their discovery is available. In that time there also needs to be a lot more research, particularly in finding the underlying mechanisms that link changes in brain pattern to increased risk of mistakes and whether that link is causal or associated with a yet unknown third factor.

“Prediction of human errors by maladaptive changes in event-related brain networks.”
Tom Eichele, Stefan Debener, Vince D Calhoun, Karsten Specht, Andreas K Engel, Kenneth Hugdahl, D Yves von Cramon, and Markus Ullsperger.
PNAS published online on 22 April 2008, vol. 105, no. 16, pp 6173-6178.
10.1073/pnas.0708965105.

Click here for Abstract.

You may think that you’re a pretty positive person. But we’re betting no matter how hard you try, you wouldn’t be able to out-happy Matthieu Ricard, a French Buddhist monk who’s been nicknamed “the happiest man on earth.”

Seem like a stretch? We’re not just claiming that title based on the fact that Ricard is never seen without a smile, or that monks are generally a pretty beatific bunch – he’s got science on his side, too. In 2004, researchers at University of Wisconsin conducted a study on the brain patterns of hundreds of volunteers from different walks of life. The bell curve of the MRI measurements fell between +0.3 (a Sylvia Plath acolyte, no doubt) to -0.3 (Richard Simmons, perhaps?). But Ricard alone achieved an astonishing score of -0.45 – a level of joy so far above the others that his score was nearly off the chart.

So how did Ricard become the world’s happiest man? The 60-year-old monk didn’t always live a quiet life in the Himalayan mountains – as a young man, he was lauded as one of the world’s most promising biologists. But in 1972, he dropped out of the stressful world of French academia, trading in his laboratory for a monastery in Darjeeling, India, where he studied under Tibetan master Kangyur Rinpoche. In the years since, he has become well known as an author and photographer, and he serves as the Dalai Lama’s personal translator in France. He has devoted his life to the study of Buddhist philosophy and the art of happiness – and he firmly believes that the rest of us can achieve his incredible level of joy, too.

“The mind is malleable,” Ricard told The Independent. “Our life can be greatly transformed by even a minimal change in how we manage our thoughts and perceive and interpret the world. Happiness is a skill. It requires effort and time.”

To fill your life with joy, he said, you must recognize what already makes you happy, and work to change your mental balance. “You have to identify what it is in that situation that makes you happy. It’s as though you’re making a journey, and you look in your rucksack to find it half filled with provisions, half with stones. You need to take out the stones and put in more provisions.”

In his new book, Happiness, Ricard serves as your own personal cross-trainer in the art of happiness, with advice on meditative exercises to increase peace of mind, and his own philosophies on how to fill your life with joy. With his help, you might just be able to tune out your noisy neighbor’s Metallica cover band for a few minutes, and imagine you’re relaxing on a private beach instead. If you can’t make it out to visit a Buddhist monastery any time soon, his book might just be the relief you need.

<a href=http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/191>Here</a> is video of Ricard speaking at the 2004 TED conference.

I go to speak on leadership to the World Maritime University, a branch of the United Nations, on Tuesday. Given that 90% of the world’s cargo travels by shipping, the job the WMU does in training government officials at a Master’s and Ph.D level to take charge of the some of the more important harbours and waters.

This is a terrific opportunity to talk and listen to a new generation of global influencers. I am extremely grateful to Prof Patrick Donner, and in particular, Max Mejia for sponsoring this event.

Lund University is Sweden’s answer to Cambridge or Princeton. Established in 1666 it is ranked as one of the top 100 universities globally.

I have been asked to speak by the Arbetlivscentrum and will speak on “Leadership in the 21st Century” this coming Monday. It is a wonderful occasion to meet some of the brighter minds of their generation and listen to their opinion.