Fronto-parietal structural connectivity in childhood predicts development of functional connectivity and reasoning ability: a large-scale longitudinal investigation
Human beings have an internal clock that enables the subconscious perception and estimation of time periods. A research team under Dr. Roland Thomaschke of…
Although a small sample, this is still and interesting study. The results are consistent with the continued nexus of the g, Gf, Gwm, attentional control and speed of higher order processing (especially P300 in ERP’s), white matter tract integrity and the PFIT model of intelligence as well as the recent process overlap theory (POT) of g.
Anna-Lena Schubert, Dirk Hagemann, and Gidon T. Frischkorn Heidelberg University
ABSTRACT
Individual differences in the speed of information processing have been hypothesized to give rise to individual differences in general intelligence. Consistent with this hypothesis, reaction times (RTs) and latencies of event-related potential have been shown to be moderately associated with intelligence. These associations have been explained either in terms of individual differences in some brain-wide property such as myelination, the speed of neural oscillations, or white-matter tract integrity, or in terms of individual differences in specific processes such as the signal-to-noise ratio in evidence accumulation, executive control, or the cholinergic system. Here we show in a sample of 122 participants, who completed a battery of RT tasks at 2 laboratory sessions while an EEG was recorded, that more intelligent individuals have a higher speed of higher-order information processing that explains about 80% of the variance in general intelligence. Our results do not support the notion that individuals with higher levels of general intelligence show advantages in some brain-wide property. Instead, they suggest that more intelligent individuals benefit from a more efficient transmission of information from frontal attention and working memory processes to temporal-parietal processes of memory storage.
Keywords: ERP latencies, event-related potentials, intelligence, processing speed, reaction times
This is an excellent and thought provoking brain network review that addresses the push-pull between optimal (and necessary) brain network segregation and more transient and fluid integration “on demand” to meet new task demands. Excellent summary.
ABSTRACT
The organization of the brain network enables its function. Evaluation of this organization has revealed that large-scale brain networks consist of multiple segregated subnetworks of interacting brain areas. Descriptions of resting-state network architecture have provided clues for understanding the functional significance of these segregated subnetworks, many of which correspond to distinct brain systems. The present report synthesizes accumulating evidence to reveal how maintaining segregated brain systems renders the human brain network functionally specialized, adaptable to task demands, and largely resilient following focal brain damage. The organizational properties
that support system segregation are harmonious with the properties that promote integration across the network, but confer unique and important features to the brain network that are central to its function and behavior.
For context, organizations represented in past Summits include: AARP, Alegent Health Immanuel Medical Center, Allstate Insurance, Alzheimer's Association, BBC, Bon Secours New York Health System, Brain Injury Association of America, Campbell Soup Company, Greenville Hospital System, Harvard Business Review, HealthComm Inc., Human Dimension Taskforce, US Army, Institute For The Future, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Los Angeles County Dept of Public Health, McGovern Institute of Neurotechnology, MIT, National Resource Ctr. Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes, Nutrition Science Solutions, One Laptop Per Child, OptumHealth Behavioral Solutions, Piedmont Gardens, PsychologyToday, Procter & Gamble, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Stanford University, Sun Microsystems, UC Berkeley, UnitedHealth Group, Winter Park Health Foundation, Workers' Compensation Regulatory Authority, UCSF.
And the backgrounds of previous participants include: Biomedical Engineers, CEOs, Digital Media professionals, Entrepreneurs, Game publishers, Healthcare technologists, Marketing Executives, Medical Students, Neurologists, Neuropsychologists, Non profit board members, Occupational Therapists, Pharmaceutical Executives, Post doctorate researchers, Professors and Researchers, Psychiatrists, Psychologists, Psychotherapists, Scientific Publishers, Social Workers, Speech Pathologists, Talent management/HR, and Wellness professionals.
More research, this time a meta-analysis, documenting the cognitive benefits of musical training. I better not show this to my mother who never liked the fact that I only took one year of piano:)
Musicians have better memory than nonmusicians: A meta-analysis
Francesca Talamini, Gianmarco Altoè, Barbara Carretti, Massimo Grassi
Abstract
The three meta-analyses revealed a small effect size for long-term memory, and a medium effect size for short-term and working memory, suggesting that musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks. Moreover, the effect of the moderator suggested that, the type of stimuli influences this advantage.
The authors describe the brain regions involved in the process of intelligence using as a basis, the models of the theory of frontoparietal integration (P-FIT Model). They also correlate the model described with functional areas of Brodmann, integrating them into the tertiary brain areas and address the subcortical structures involved in cognitive processes, including the memory. The studies performed by functional magnetic resonance, also unmask various regions related with intelligence, neither previously described by Brodmann nor even in conventional models of learning. The anterior insular cortex presents itself as the most recent tertiary area to be considered. Subcortical structures, when injured, mimick injuries to the cerebral cortex, demonstrating their great participation in cognition. The topographies of aphasia and the functioning mechanisms of the bearers of learning disorders, including dyslexic, dysgraphia and dyscalculic should be reconsidered. A better understanding of this topographic anatomy may clarify the mechanisms used in those individuals with cerebral lesions.
What Is White Matter? The brain's white matter is situated under the surface gray matter or cerebral cortex of the brain. White matter is composed of nerve cell…
"Time" is the most common noun in the English language, Dean Buonomano tells us on the first page of his new book, Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and…
The Meriam-Webster defines training as: "the skill, knowledge, or experience acquired by one that trains." In combination with the word "brain" it becomes a…
Motor control of handwriting in the developing brain: A review
Palmis, Sarah; Danna, Jeremy; Velay, Jean-Luc; Longcamp, Marieke
Cognitive Neuropsychology: Articles in press
Cerebellar Contributions to Language in Typical and Atypical Development: A Review
Vias, Carolina; Dick, Anthony Steven
Developmental Neuropsychology: Articles in press
"We may be born alone, but childhood ends with a synchrony of clocks, as we lend ourselves fully to the contagion of time."
When I was growing up, my father — a kind man of quick intellect and encyclopedic knowledge about esoteric subjects — had, and still has, one habit that never failed to make other people uneasy and to infuriate my mother: In conversation, the interval of time that elapses between the other person's sentiment or question and my father's response greatly exceeds the average, a lapse swelling with Kierkegaard's assertion that "the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity."
At first, one might suspect that my father is taking an incubatory pause to produce a considered response. But, soon, it becomes apparent that these disorienting durations have no correlation with the complexity of the question — even when asked something as simple as the time of day, he would often let miniature eternities pass and lasso the other person in anxiety as the contrast between the natural response time and my father's gapes its discomfiting abyss of ambiguity.
It turns out that my father's liberal pauses are so discomposing because our experience of time has a central social component — an internal clock inheres in our capacity for intersubjectivity, intuitively governing our social interactions and the interpersonal mirroring that undergirds the human capacity for empathy.
This social-synchronistic function of time is what New Yorker staff writer Alan Burdick examines in Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation (public library) — a layered, rigorously researched, lyrically narrated inquiry into the most befuddling dimension of existence.
Discus chronologicus, a German depiction of time from the early 1720s, from Cartographies of Time
Burdick begins at the beginning — the ur-question of how the universe originated from nothing and what this means for time, a question at the heart of the landmark 1922 debate between Einstein and Bergson that shaped our modern understanding of time. Burdick asks:
For argument's sake, I'll accept that perhaps the universe did not exist before the Big Bang — but it exploded in something, right? What was that? What was there before the beginning? Proposing such questions, the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has said, is like standing at the South Pole and asking which way is south: "Earlier times simply would not be defined."
Nearly a century after Borges's exquisite refutation of time in language — "Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire." — Burdick adds with an eye to the inherent limitations of our metaphors:
Perhaps Hawking is trying to be reassuring. What he seems to mean is that human language has a limit. We (or at least the rest of us) reach this boundary whenever we ponder the cosmic. We imagine by analogy and metaphor: that strange and vast thing is like this smaller, more familiar thing. The universe is a cathedral, a clockworks, an egg. But the parallels ultimately diverge; only an egg is an egg. Such analogies appeal precisely because they are tangible elements of the universe. As terms, they are self-contained — but they cannot contain the container that holds them. So it is with time. Whenever we talk about it, we do so in terms of something lesser. We find or lose time, like a set of keys; we save and spend it, like money. Time creeps, crawls, flies, flees, flows, and stands still; it is abundant or scarce; it weighs on us with palpable heft.
[…]
Yet whatever one calls it, we share a rough idea of what's meant: a lasting sense of one's self moving in a sea of selves, dependent yet alone; a sense, or perhaps a deep and common wish, that I somehow belongs to we, and that this we belongs to something even larger and less comprehensible; and the recurring thought, so easy to brush aside in the daily effort to cross the street safely and get through one's to-do list, much less to confront the world's true crises, that my time, our time, matters precisely because it ends.
Illustration by Harvey Weiss from Time Is When by Beth Youman Gleick, 1960
From the temporal meditations of the ancient philosophers to the last hundred years of ingenious psychological experiments, Burdick goes on to explore such aspects of his subject — a nearly infinite subject, to be sure, which makes his endeavor all the more impressive — as why time dilates and contracts depending on whether we are having fun or facing danger, how fetuses are able to coordinate their circadian activity, and what we are actually measuring when we speak of keeping time. In a fascinating chapter detailing the complex ecosystem of time-making — the inventions, standardizations, and global teams of scientists responsible for measuring and synchronizing earthly time — Burdick reflects on the tremendous coordination of human efforts keeping the world's clocks ticking:
Time is a social phenomenon. This property is not incidental to time; it is its essence. Time, equally in single cells as in their human conglomerates, is the engine of interaction. A single clock works only as long as it refers, sooner or later, obviously or not, to the other clocks around it. One can rage about it, and we do. But without a clock and the dais of time, we each rage in silence, alone.
But our technologies are always prosthetic extensions of our consciousness — time, it turns out, is an innately social phenomenon not only in how it is measured, but in how it is experienced. Burdick cites the research of French neuropsychologist Sylvie Droit-Volet, who studies the warping of our temporal perception. In one experiment, she presented people with images of human faces — some neutral, some happy, some angry, some frightened — each displayed on the screen for anywhere between half a second to a second and a half. The research subjects were then asked to evaluate how long the faces appeared for.
She found that across images displayed for the same duration, happy faces were perceived to last longer than neutral ones and shorter than angry or fearful ones. Burdick explains:
The key ingredient seems to be a physiological response called arousal, which isn't what you might think. In experimental psychology, "arousal" refers to the degree to which the body is preparing itself to act in some manner. It's measured through heart rate and the skin's electrical conductivity; sometimes subjects are asked to rate their own arousal in comparison to images of faces or puppet figures. Arousal can be thought of as the physiological expression of one's emotions or, perhaps, as a precursor of physical action; in practice there may be little difference. By standard measures, anger is the most arousing emotion, for viewer and angry person alike, followed by fear, then happiness, then sadness. Arousal is thought to accelerate the pacemaker, causing more ticks than usual to accumulate in a given interval, thereby making emotionally laden images seem to last longer than others of equal duration… Physiologists and psychologists think of arousal as a primed physical state — not moving but poised to move. When we see movement, even implied movement in a static image, the thinking goes, we enact that movement internally. In a sense, arousal is a measure of your ability to put yourself in another person's shoes.
We perform this kind of emotional mimicry intuitively and incessantly over the course of our daily social interactions, in some degree donning the emotional and mental outfit of each person with whom we come into close contact. But we are also, apparently, absorbing each other's sense of time, which is encoded in our psychoemotional states. In another study, Droit-Volet found that research subjects perceived images of elderly faces to last shorter than they actually did and misjudged the duration of young faces in the opposite direction — viewers were essentially embodying the typically slower movements of the elderly. Burdick explains:
A slower clock ticks less often in a given interval of time; fewer ticks accumulate, so the interval is judged to be briefer than it actually is. Perceiving or remembering an elderly person induces the viewer to reenact, or simulate, their bodily states, namely their slow movement.
A book, Rebecca Solnit memorably wrote, is "a heart that only beats in the chest of another." In a very real sense, we are each a temporally open book and empathy a clock that only ticks in the consciousness of another. Burdick writes:
Our shared temporal distortions can be thought of as manifestations of empathy; after all, to embody another's time is to place oneself in his or her skin. We imitate each other's gestures and emotions — but we're more likely to do so, studies find, with people with whom we identify or whose company we would like to share.
[…]
Life dictates that we possess some sort of internal mechanism to keep time and monitor brief durations — yet the one we carry around can be thrown off course by the least emotional breeze. What's the point of owning such a fallible clock? … Maybe there's another way to think about it, Droit-Volet suggests. It's not that our clock doesn't run well; on the contrary, it's superb at adapting to the ever-changing social and emotional environment that we navigate every day. The time that I perceive in social settings isn't solely mine, nor is there just one cast to it, which is part of what gives our social interactions their shading. "There is thus no unique, homogeneous time but instead multiple experiences of time," Droit-Volet writes in one paper. "Our temporal distortions directly reflect the way our brain and body adapt to these multiple times." She quotes the philosopher Henri Bergson: "On doit mettre de côte le temps unique, seuls comptent les temps multiples, ceux de l'expérience." We must put aside the idea of a single time, all that counts are the multiple times that make up experience.
Our slightest social exchanges — our glances, our smiles and frowns — gain potency from our ability to synchronize them among ourselves, Droit-Volet notes. We bend time to make time with one another, and the many temporal distortions we experience are indicators of empathy; the better able I am to envisage myself in your body and your state of mind, and you in mine, the better we can each recognize a threat, an ally, a friend, or someone in need. But empathy is a fairly sophisticated trait, a mark of emotional adulthood; it takes learning and time. As children grow and develop empathy, they gain a better sense of how to navigate the social world. Put another way, it may be that a critical aspect of growing up is learning how to bend our time in step with others. We may be born alone, but childhood ends with a synchrony of clocks, as we lend ourselves fully to the contagion of time.
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Fronto-parietal structural connectivity in childhood predicts development of functional connectivity and reasoning ability: a large-scale longitudinal investigation | Journal of Neuroscience
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******************************************************
Kevin McGrew, PhD
Educational Psychologist
Director, Institute for Applied Psychometrics
IAP
www.themindhub.com ******************************************************
Excellent summary of contemporary research on mind wandering
The science of mind wandering
Some feel that spontaneous thought occurring without specific stimulation is closest to understanding how we define ourselves. These seemingly random self-produced…
A wandering mind isn't a bad thing; your brain remains active when it woolgathers.
Sometimes our minds don't cooperate. Have you ever found yourself sitting at your desk with the intention of getting some work done but instead your mind keeps going in other directions? When this happens, don't assume that your brain isn't still hard at work.
When your mind wanders, it is using nearly as much energy as when it is focused and concentrating.
This is because only certain regions of your brain are active when focused on a specific task. But when your mind begins to wander, the default-mode network is activated. This network, named by neurologist Marcus Raichle, is spread out across the brain in regions that are not involved with the more direct interaction focused on what's in front of you.
But despite being spread out, there is still plenty of activity going on.
You can think of your brain as a small town: When there's a big event at the town square, all the people show up in one location. But afterward, when everyone splits up and goes about their own business, there's still nearly as much activity, it's just distributed around town. This is what happens when your mind wanders.
So the wandering mind may have some drawbacks, but it isn't all bad.
It's true that a wandering mind can distract you from finishing a task, and research also suggests that it can lead to less happiness and premature aging.
But wait! Mind wandering is also vital to creative thinking and allowing inventors and artists to make the world a better place. Because when your mind drifts it can free-associate and find connections and solutions to problems that might otherwise stay hidden.
Maybe you've had inspiration strike while you were spacing out in the shower or, perhaps, on a hike through nature. This is where George de Mestral was inspired to invent Velcro when he was walking along and noticed how burrs stuck to his clothes.
