Using NASA Technology to Increase Attention and Cognitive Function

Posted by Peter on April 14th, 2005 | Comments off

Play Attention CEO to Speak at NASA Benefits of Space Exploration Brought to Earth

ASHEVILLE, North Carolina April 13, 2005

WCU graduate, Peter Freer, Founder and CEO of Unique Logic and Technology, Inc. will speak at the National Space Society 2005 International Space Development Conference in Washington, DC. His presentation is entitled, “From Outer Space to Inner Space: Using NASA Technology to Increase Attention and Cognitive Function.”

Freer holds a Master’s degree in education from Western Carolina University. He is a former educator in both Jackson County Schools and Asheville City Schools in NC. During his tenure as a teacher, Freer encountered an increasing number of AD/HD students. Combining NASA research and his background in educational computer programming, he developed Play Attention®, the nations leading educational attention training system used in schools, homes, and professional offices.

NASA currently uses feedback technology to increase astronaut and pilot attention during flight simulator training. Freer augmented this technology to accommodate educational needs and received four patents for his pioneering efforts. Freer adapted sophisticated instrumentation to fit the personal computer and then incorporated a sensor lined space-age helmet to process brain output and translate it onto a computer screen. This new learning system allows control of game action via the powers of concentration alone – no keyboard, no mouse, no joystick! Users practice paying attention by making video games respond to their brainpower at home or under the guidance of a teacher at school.

Just as NASA astronauts and pilots train to increase attention, Play Attention literally teaches the user to increase concentration, complete tasks, visual tracking, short-term memory, and to filer out distractions – all the skills necessary to be successful in the classroom. The learner directly observes his mind’s ability to command the computer screen in real-time.

”Play Attention,” says Freer, “is popular with students because of its entertaining game format. It keeps the student engrossed while he or she practices reaching new levels of concentration.” The inventor adds, “The system is success based and includes behavioral shaping techniques.”

He further notes studies demonstrate that children trained on Play Attention experience a greater sense of self-esteem, enhanced social interactions, and improved grades as a result of their own newly developed abilities.

Freer says that, “Both NASA and Play Attention have proven that feedback-based learning empowers individuals to deal with their personal challenges by learning how to use their own resources. This produces a sense of accomplishment, self-worth, and success. We owe NASA a great debt.”

The National Space Society 2005 International Space Development Conference is scheduled for May 19 – 22 at the Sheraton National Hotel Arlington, Washington, DC. The conference theme, “Your Ticket to Space” refers to the new opportunities for citizens to participate in space exploration and realize the benefits on earth.

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Children Today: Multi-tasking or Multi-distracted?

Posted by Peter on April 13th, 2005 | Comments off

As I’ve qualitatively interviewed hundreds of people that I meet at conferences and seminars, I’ve found one underlying current especially relevant to the pace of life right now: most of us feel overwhelmed. We are exposed to information from cell phones, faxes, email, TV, radio, pagers, PDAs, print media, computers, the Internet, etc. This constant bombardment results in a feeling of information overload. It’s probably the brain’s natural response to being inundated by information non-related to its survival as most of the information transmitted to us is fairly useless; it’s throw-away, disposable information. Most people I’ve interviewed say that they cannot even recall what they received in their email or heard on the news the previous week. Throw away, disposable information.

According to USA Today in an article entitled, “So much media, so little attention span“, children that are exposed to 8½ hours of TV, video games, computers and other media a day — often at once — may be losing the ability to concentrate. The article questions, “Are their developing brains becoming hard-wired to “multi-task lite” rather than learn the focused critical thinking needed for a democracy?

These troubling questions are raised by a Kaiser Family Foundation media study this month, says educational psychologist David Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family, a Minneapolis non-profit. Even more troubling is the answer: We don’t know, Walsh and other experts in the field say.”

As I noted previously, adults feel inundated by information. Children respond differently. School psychologists and teachers typically report that children have a more difficult time attending now than every before. Children have a more difficult time staying still and listening if the presentation is not highly entertaining.

“The problem intensifies after third grade, when harder course work requires children to concentrate, adds Susan Ratteree, who supervises other public-school psychologists in suburban New Orleans. Diagnoses of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) “have gone through the roof,” she says. Though the disorder is more recognized these days, children seem to be different too, “and many teachers think the fast-paced media is having an effect.”

Children are more attuned to distractions around them. “They attend to everything — the air vents creaking, someone talking. They bounce from task to task. Teachers here say kids have more trouble getting organized, and their attention spans are not as good as they used to be,” says school psychologist Tamara Waters-Wheeler of the Bismarck-Mandan, N.D., public schools.

Studies with college students and adults show that the brain doesn’t work as well when it focuses on more than one task, Walsh says. If the challenge demands a lot of attention, mental performance is particularly poor. But he says there are no such studies on today’s kids as they multi-task with new media — instant- messaging, plugged into an iPod and doing homework at the same time.”

Science Daily from a study that appeared in the May 13, 1999, issue of the journal Nature(1), relates multitasking behaviors to the prefrontal cortex. “Investigators have mapped a region of the brain responsible for a certain kind of multitasking behavior, the uniquely human ability to perform several separate tasks consecutively while keeping the goals of each task in mind. Using imaging technology, scientists from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) found that a specific type of multitasking behavior, called branching, can be mapped to a certain region of the brain that is especially well developed in humans compared to other primates.”

“The results of this study suggest that the anterior prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that is most developed in humans, mediates the ability to depart temporarily from a main task in order to explore alternative tasks before returning to the main task at the departed point,” says Jordan Grafman, Ph.D., Chief of the Cognitive Neuroscience Section at the NINDS and a co-author of the study.

“We believe that this finding is important because branching processes appear to play a key role in human cognition,” says Etienne Koechlin, Ph.D., also of the NINDS Cognitive Neuroscience Section and a co-author of the study. “In everyday life, we often need to interrupt an ongoing task to respond to external events and we all experience how demanding it is to react to these events while keeping our minds on the original task.”

According to previous studies, humans may be the only species capable of performing branching, which involves keeping a goal in mind over time (working memory) while at the same time being able to change focus among tasks (attentional resource allocation). For example, people who are interrupted by a phone call while reading must be able to keep in mind the memory of what they were reading just before talking on the phone. Once the phone call is over, they should be able to return to the last sentence read and continue reading.”

Almost everyone shifts attention from one task to the next during a normal day. ADHD people shift attention more so than others, but have lesser ability to focus for very long on mundane or ordinary levels of stimulation.

It is important to put the following question: how much can we shift our attention before the tasks at hand do not get completed or begin to suffer in performance. Given our differences as a species, this will likely vary among the population and the complexity of the tasks.

Recent research issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society,>indicates that our brains weren’t made to multitask. A splendid example is driving while speaking on a cell phone. Some states have outlawed this behavior due to increased accident rates. It seems that we are far too distracted to focus on driving if we’re talking or dialing.

The researchers explain the multi-tasking/distracting phenomenon using two terms: “passive queuing” and “active monitoring.” Passive queuing implies that new incoming information has to line up for a chance at being processed – a queue – just as you wait in a queue in the doctor’s office. A focal point in the brain receives and processes the information one piece at a time.

Active monitoring (people who swear they can multi-task) suggests that the brain can process two things at once – it just needs to use a complicated mechanism to keep the two processes separate.

Researchers from MIT think that the brain works by passive queuing, the non-multi- tasking approach. “…in a study to be published in the June issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society, [researchers] examined the brain activity involved in multitasking. They gave people two simple tasks. Task one was identifying shapes, and for some subjects, task two was identifying letters, for others it was identifying colors. The subjects were forced to switch from one task to the other in either one and a half seconds or one tenth of a second. When they had to switch faster, subjects would take as much as twice as long to respond than when switching more slowly.

Using MRI technology, Jiang, Saxe and Kanwisher examined subjects’ brain activity while performing these tasks. They observed no increase in the sort of activity that would be involved in keeping two thought processes separate when subjects had to switch faster. This suggests that there are no complicated mechanisms that allow people to perform two tasks at once. Instead, we have to perform the next task only after the last one is finished.”

It is logical to ask then, if we expose ourselves to enough high-input stimulation (media, computers, cell phones, etc.) will this rewire the brain to accommodate the input? The USA Today article suggests that some research on media-exposure “suggests that children’s brains might be changing so they can juggle and concentrate better than their elders.

Scores on intelligence tests have been steadily rising since the 1940s, says University of Utah neuropsychologist Sam Goldstein. The tests measure a child’s ability to shift and divide attention, but they also cover problem-solving and comprehension skills. “They’re smarter,” Goldstein says.

Another germane fact: In the Kaiser study, computer use and TV didn’t seem to affect grades, but more time playing video games and less time reading were linked to poorer grades. About half of kids have a video game player in their rooms; more than two-thirds have TV sets.

Violent video games and TV have been shown to encourage aggressive behavior, says Michael Rich, a Harvard pediatrician and director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. Also, the more TV watched, the more overweight a kid is likely to be, he says.”

Although no long-term research has been performed to verify brain changes, it is widely accepted that the brain changes due to the external environment (neuroplasticity). Therefore, it makes perfect sense that all initial indications point to the fact that we are changing as a species due to our technology.

Is our change for the better or worse? If the answer is related to driving and speaking on a cell phone, the answer is obviously worse. If it’s related increased IQ scores it’s for the better.

Still, the fact that children want to be entertained more now than ever before, the fact that they have a more difficult time sitting still and listening, the fact that they cannot pay attention to something as simple and beautiful as a flower because “it’s boring” is most disturbing. Proponents of the technology evolution/revolution propose that children can now learn faster and must have more stimulating input. It’s difficult to argue against that. However, there exists a fine line between entertainment and education. Our finest discoveries have come from carefully examining the nuances of relationships, cells, atoms, and the cosmos. I would maintain that our survival as a species depends on our ability to fathom the great subtleties of life. This is not discovered through high stimulation, but by a careful, quiet examination of the world around us.

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Preschoolers’ motivation, temperament relate to attention skills, study finds

Posted by Peter on February 28th, 2005 | Comments off

The following press release was issued by researchers at the FPG Child Development Institute of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

CHAPEL HILL, NC — For decades, researchers have wondered why some children from poor, at-risk families manage to perform better in school than other children raised in similar environments.

Now, researchers from the FPG Child Development Institute (FPG) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill) and the University of Louisville in Kentucky find that children who have trouble paying attention exhibit different motivation patterns and temperament characteristics than children who don’t have problems paying attention.

This suggests that attention is more complicated than previously thought, according to lead researcher Dr. Florence Chang of FPG. “These findings provide evidence that helping children at risk for academic problems involves understanding more than a child’s attention and learning skills,” she said. “It also involves understanding their social and emotional make-up.”

The results of the study were published in the January/February 2005 issue of the journal Child Development.The researchers recruited 73 mothers and their preschool children, ranging in age from 3 to 5, all of whom attended a Head Start program and came from low-income backgrounds.

The children played a series of computerized games designed to measure their attention skills. The mothers completed a questionnaire that measured the temperament traits their children were born with, such as activity level and frustration.

To measure motivation, children were asked to complete a series of puzzles of varying difficulty levels. Children who preferred completing a challenging puzzle (deemed “mastery-oriented”) exhibited better attention skills than children who preferred completing an easier puzzle (deemed “performance-oriented”).

Previous research found that children who prefer more challenging tasks have more positive outcomes in school than children who avoid challenge and prefer easier tasks.

Overall, researchers found that temperament, motivation and attention are interrelated. This may indicate, said Chang, that screening tests that measure preschoolers’ school readiness, which today focus primarily on cognitive ability or developmental maturity, should be reexamined. Instead, it may also be important to consider other factors, such as how a child reacts to challenging tasks and his or her ability to adapt to new situations, she said.

“The findings from this study suggest problems that arise from attention difficulties are not limited to difficulty with concentration and sitting still, but are related to how children approach challenging or new situations,” said Chang. “Clearly, it is the case that much more needs to be understood about the nature and implications of having an attention problem.”

Perhaps the most significant statement the researchers claim is their final statement relating to a child’s response to challenging or new situations. When a child or an adult has diffused attention – attention spread over a wide area for short periods of time – their ability to command their environment is greatly reduced. Things happen out of their control. Accidents happen more frequently including traffic accidents. Indeed, there is some truth that some things are out of their control as they cannot control or manage things they do not perceive. Subsequently, the child or adult may develop a short temper as frustration easily sets in during new or challenging situations. Obviously, becoming quickly frustrated and shutting down during challenging situations may cause delays in emotional maturation and cognitive development. Adults experience organizational problems as they frequently do not manage things that are out of their immediate focus.

Generally, this research lends itself to a holistic perspective of diffused attention pointing not only at diffused attention, but at the subsequent problems it causes affecting daily function. It is not likely that medication can repair this as medication does not instruct the child how to manage challenging situations. It can place a child in a mental place where he might be able to learn to manage better, but who’s teaching management 101? This is where teaching tools like Play Attention play a major role in skill development both behaviorally and cognitively.

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Is the ADHD Brain Damaged?

Posted by Peter on February 14th, 2005 | Comments off

This will be a long post as it seems that researchers can find numerous parts of the ADHD brain that seem dysfunctional. A major flaw in virtually all of this research is that they use very small groups that cannot depict the vast spectrum brain variability among the human species. This published research confuses many people as it seems the brains of those with ADHD are smaller, have damage in the basal ganglia, putamen, frontal lobes, cerebellum, and brain stem. This amounts to little more than neophrenology.

Small Brains

“It’s strong support for a very strong biological contribution to what causes ADHD.” Dr. Judith Rapoport, National Institute of Mental Health

(AP) Hyperactive children and teens have slightly smaller brains than those without the disorder, a study shows.

Exactly why this is so is not clear, but the researchers said the smaller brain volume does not appear to be related to the use of hyperactivity drugs such as Ritalin, as some parents had feared.

The finding could be reassuring to parents in another respect as well: It suggests that hyperactivity is biological in origin, not a product of bad parenting.

The researchers said it appears that that the brains of hyperactive children develop at a normal pace but never entirely catch up in size with the brains of other youngsters. However, they said that people with smaller brains are not necessarily less intelligent.

The findings were reported in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

Other studies also have suggested biological differences in the brains of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

“It’s strong support for a very strong biological contribution to what causes ADHD,” said one of the researchers, Dr. Judith Rapoport, chief of child psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md.

The 10-year study used MRIs to look at 152 patients ages 5 to 18 who had the disorder, and 139 people in about the same age range who did not. It also compared patients who were on medication and those who were not.

The study found the disorder is associated with about a 3 percent to 4 percent decrease in volume throughout the brain. The smaller their brains, the greater their symptoms.

“The first thought people have is that this is a product of bad parenting” or that it is environmental, said Dr. Daniel Coury, a professor of clinical pediatrics at the Ohio State University College of Medicine who was not involved in the research. “Having clear biological findings that this is something beyond the control of parents or the child themselves helps to remove that stigma.”

Dr. Bennett Leventhal, professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Chicago, said the findings regarding the effects of medication “should be reassuring to parents that you can treat your kids and not hurt their brains.”

The research was conducted between 1991 and 2001 at the National Institute of Mental Health, which funded it.

ADHD is one of the most common childhood psychiatric disorders. Its symptoms include short attention span, impulsive behavior, difficulty focusing and fidgetiness. The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates 4 percent to 12 percent of school-age children are affected.

Bad Basal Ganglia

Reading and attention disorders both seem to stem from the same primitive part of the brain that governs thinking and muscle control, Yale researchers have found.

A study of 27 people ages 18 to 24 revealed that participants with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, and those with reading disorders, displayed low activity in their basal ganglia.

The study, which was published in the November issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, is the first to use sophisticated functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural circuits involved with ADHD.

When both groups were given the drug methyl-phenidate (brand name Ritalin) activity in the basal ganglia was normal, said Keith Shafritz, lead author.

Shafritz performed the work as a Yale graduate student and is now a research associate at the Duke University Medical Center.

Shafritz said the results suggest that Ritalin does not produce a unique effect in people with ADHD and that ADHD and reading disorders are in some way equivalent.

Nationally about 5 percent of children have reading disorders, characterized by reading at a lower level than expected.

About 3 to 5 percent of children show symptoms of ADHD. These include inattention, impulsiveness, and hyperactivity.

Participants were placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging unit where they saw and heard a mixture of real and nonsense words.

The normal control group was about 80 percent accurate. People with ADHD and people with reading disorders both scored about 70 percent, Shafritz said.

Basal ganglia activity was higher in the control group.

When participants with ADHD or reading disorders were given methylphenidate and repeated the test their basal ganglia function rose to normal levels.

Shafritz said the basal ganglion is an inhibitory organ that can also activate areas of the brain. The neurotransmitter dopamine regulates the basal ganglion.

Ritalin apparently increases the inhibitory effect, dropping people with ADHD to a calmer and more attentive state.

The drug blocks the dopamine transporter, a system that clears away dopamine. With the transporter turned down dopamine accumulates.

“One driving question was, ‘Were the effects of Ritalin on the brain unique to kids with ADHD?’” Shafritz said. “The results suggest that Ritalin has similar effects in ADHD and other conditions. The idea that Ritalin is acting in a certain way in ADHD appears not to be the case.”

“The study also suggests that ADHD brains are not that different from everyone else’s brains,” Shafritz said.

Shafritz said the study was not designed to measure classroom behavior or reading skills. Also, medical ethics prevented giving Ritalin to the control group.

Bad Putamen

An inverse index of regional cerebral blood flow, T2 relaxometry (an fMRI procedure), was used to indirectly assess blood volume in the striatum (caudate and putamen) of boys ages 6 to 12 in steady-state conditions (Teicher et al., 2000). Boys with ADHD had higher T2 relaxation times bilaterally in the putamen than controls. Relaxation times strongly correlated with both the individual’s capacity to sit still and error performance on an attentional task. Daily treatment with methylphenidate significantly changed T2 relaxation times in the putamen of boys with ADHD, although the magnitude and direction of the effect was strongly dependent on unmedicated baseline activity.

Bad Frontal Lobes

Investigators at UCLA used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compare the brains of 27 children with ADHD to those of 46 children without the disorder. They found that the region of the brain associated with attention and impulse control, located on the bottom of the frontal lobes of the brain, was smaller in the ADHD kids than in the other children.

“We would expect that the abnormalities would be in this region, and this is what we found,” lead investigator Elizabeth Sowell, PhD, tells WebMD.

The researchers also found that children with ADHD had larger areas of the outer layers of the brain.

Previous research has indicated that the differences were limited to the right side of the brain, but Sowell and colleagues found that they occurred on both sides.

Bad Cerebellum

Symptoms of ADHD in adults may include reading difficulties, poor concentration, clumsiness, and low self-esteem. Our research has shown that a medical condition we refer to as Cerebellar Developmental Delay (CDD) is a likely culprit of ADHD in adults. In CDD, the cerebellum is under-developed and not able to process information going to and coming from the cerebrum (often known as the “thinking brain”) efficiently. DORE has developed specific exercises that stimulate the cerebellum, thus allowing it to process information faster.

Bad Brain Stem and Other Parts

U.S. researchers reported brain scans of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder show anatomical abnormalities beyond a chemical imbalance.

The study by North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health Center was presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

A second study by the same authors showed stimulant medications prescribed to balance brain chemistry appear to normalize some of these brain irregularities.

“We found abnormality of the fiber pathways in the frontal cortex, basal ganglia, brain stem and cerebellum,” said lead author Manzar Ashtari.

“These areas are involved in the processes that regulate attention, impulsive behavior, motor activity and inhibition – the key symptoms in ADHD children.”

The study used diffusion tensor imaging to compare 18 children with diagnosed ADHD with 15 control children to evaluate the brain’s white-matter fiber development. Researchers found differences in the brain fiber pathways that transmit and receive information among brain areas.

Bad Reticular Formation

Usefulness of QEEG neurometrics in a clinical setting.

Chabot and colleagues found that generalized or focal theta/alpha excess was present in 76.2% of their sample of ADD, ADHD, and children with attentional problems. These theta and alpha excess children can be divided into two distinct neurophysiological subgroups .

The first and most common group consisting of 46.4% of the sample was characterised by theta and/or alpha excess, mostly at frontal and/or central regions with normal alpha mean frequency.

Excessively high output of thalamocortical alpha generators can result from (a) overactivation of the thalamus. The primary dopamine pathways originate in the substantia nigra in the brainstem and innervate the caudate nucleus and putamen and are largely responsible for sensorimotor integration. Down-regulation of nigrostriatal dopaminergic neurons results in overstimulation of the midbrain reticular formation and the production of excess alpha (b) underactivation of the prefrontal cortex resulting from disinhibition from nucleus reticularis.

Bad Cerebrum

The authors report a study to compare regional brain volumes at initial scan and their change over time in medicated and previously unmedicated male and female patients with ADHD and healthy controls. The case-control study was conducted from 1991-2001 at the National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Md, of 152 children and adolescents with ADHD (age range, 5-18 years) and 139 age- and sex-matched controls (age range, 4.5-19 years) recruited from the local community, who contributed 544 anatomic magnetic resonance images. Using completely automated methods, the main outcome measures were initial volumes and prospective age-related changes of total cerebrum, cerebellum, gray and white matter for the 4 major lobes, and caudate nucleus of the brain were compared in patients and controls.

Summary

It’s both significant and tragic to note that one can use a search engine and type in ‘ADHD’ and virtually any particular portion of the brain and find clinically controlled research that indicates related brain damage or abnormality.

Brain scans and QEEG are relatively nascent technologies that are currently more art than science when used to determine the source of ADHD. Obviously, the publishing of data on small groups may assist researchers in garnering grant funds. It may even help them retain their position at university in a publish or perish world. However, publishing of such data is not only unethical, it is also highly misleading if it does not explicitly define itself as highly preliminary. Even then it is questionable.

Publication of this neophrenology allows media to portray ADHD individuals as irreparably brain damaged which is both harmful and flagrantly untrue.

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What If Einstein Had Taken Ritalin?

Posted by Peter on February 10th, 2005 | Comments off

From a recent Wall Street Journal story:
What If Einstein Had Taken Ritalin? ADHD’s Impact on Creativity

In American schools these days, countless class clowns are sitting down and shutting up. In chemistry labs, students who used to mix chemicals haphazardly, out of an insatiable curiosity, now focus on their textbooks. In English classes, kids who once stared out the windows, concocting crazy life stories about passersby, now face the blackboard.

The question is whether the Ritalin Revolution will sap tomorrow’s work force of some of its potential genius. What will be the repercussions in corporations, comedy clubs, and research labs?

Some researchers now wonder if would-be Einsteins and Edisons will choose different career paths because their creativity and drive are dulled by ADHD drugs.

Too many kids, especially boys who are merely rambunctious, are being given the drugs with just cursory evaluations, says William Pollack, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School.

In his ongoing research into boyhood, Dr. Pollack has found anecdotal evidence that Ritalin renders some kids less interested in pursuing creative opportunities. One boy he studied had been active in his school’s science club. After he was put on Ritalin, he felt like the spark inside him was extinguished. He lost interest in the science club and dropped out. Eventually, he stopped taking Ritalin, returned to the club, and developed a flashlight alarm system that won a major science competition.

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Re-wiring Your Brain, Meditation & ADHD, A Self-service Guide

Posted by Peter on February 10th, 2005 | Comments off

In his January 3, 2005 Washington Post article, staff writer Marc Kaufman says, “Meditation Gives Brain a Charge, Study Finds”

“Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness.”

“What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain activation on a scale we have never seen before,” said Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the university’s new $10 million W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior. ”Their mental practice is having an effect on the brain in the same way golf or tennis practice will enhance performance.” It demonstrates,” he said, “that the brain is capable of being trained and physically modified in ways few people can imagine.”

It seems that science is finally catching up to practices that are literally thousands of years old. It is always amazing and somewhat frustrating that for centuries, millions of people have realized they can rewire their brains; however, science is just now beginning to understand the process and accept that it can actually occur.

Biofeedback and neurofeedback practitioners use equipment to undergo the same changes that the Buddhist monks undergo through training in the process of meditation. The machines used in biofeedback and neurofeedback allow the user to move into the same states as Buddhist monks. Sensors are attached to the scalp which permit the neurofeedback practitioner to view what the brain is doing, called brainwave activity, as it immediately happens via the computer screen. Repeating the practice of neurofeedback can be very similar to meditation. The Keck Laboratory verifies that physical activities or training can actually rewire the brain and this has been demonstrated for feedback practitioners too.

“The brain uses an enormous amount of the body’s energy. Even under normal circumstances it uses about 20 percent of your body’s entire energy production. When you work your brain harder, [meditate, use neurofeedback or biofeedback] you use more. The blood flow goes to the brain and it’s really like working out,” says Duke University neurobiologist Dr. Lawrence Katz.

Executive Director of the Center for Brain Health and professor of behavioral and brain sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, Dr. Sandra Chapman says she wants to dispel the myth that the brain is “an untouchable black box. The brain is highly modifiable by everything we do.” Everything we do includes physical exercise, social interaction, meditation, prayer, or playing. Chapman says, “Whatever you spend time doing is what part of your brain is going to strengthen. Don’t do random things. Ask yourself if that’s the part of your brain you want to build. We see people who lose a lot of their ability, but the first thing to come back is the thing that they did the most.”

From our new knowledge of the working brain, it is evident that the opportunity exists to rewire the circuits that are weakest in persons with ADHD, i.e., those circuits that don’t allow attention to low-level stimuli like balancing a checkbook, cleaning your room, finishing homework, staying organized, or finishing a project at work. The object is to practice mindfulness and work on the aforementioned specific tasks. I developed Play Attention for just this purpose and science is finally catching up to us.

In referring to rewiring and strengthening the brain, research psychiatrist, Jeffrey Schwartz, of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute says, “The key really is the refocusing. When you refocus you activate alternative brain machinery… [It] really is like going to the gym; you’re strengthening your brain. When you stop doing it, you have a stronger brain.”

So, to rewire the circuits that are weak and strengthen them, we must repeatedly practice. For people with ADHD, this practice is clear: we must practice attention and those subordinate skill sets that are conspicuously missing. That’s the foundation of Play Attention. It is the only feedback based learning system that incorporates attention training with cognitive skills training. Our patents guarantee that. The scientific community IS finally catching up.

Portions of this blog were derived from Sky Magazine’s Brain’s World by Sophia Dembling (Feb. 2005)

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The Controversy Over Brain Imaging – Introduction

Posted by Peter on December 18th, 2004 | Comments off

Has brain scanning become the new phrenology? It’s an interesting prospect that may be clarified by an historical perspective.

In the early 1600’s, Rene Descartes’ quest to find truth caused him to explore his consciousness and question reality. He became aware that his perception of his environment could be deceptive and depended on his sobriety, fatigue, etc. Therefore, all external things could be doubted but the consciousness that perceived those external things could not be doubted. Thus, he concluded, cogito, ergo, sum; I think, therefore I am. Consciousness was self-evidently different from and more important than the external world. This was perhaps the historical beginning of mind/brain separation or mind as separate from matter which later became known as Cartesian dualism.

Descartes wrote in The Passions of the Soul, “Let us then conceive here that the soul has its principal seat in the little gland which exists in the middle of the brain, from whence it radiates forth through all the remainder of the body…” Most likely, Descartes was referring to the pineal gland as location of the mind in the brain. Again, mind is definitively separate from the brain and thus could ostensibly exist without the brain. Cartesian dualism has persisted in the medical profession, as well as others, to this day. If one suffers from depression, social anxiety, or insomnia, we’ll seek out the guidance of a psychiatrist – one who specializes in the mind. However, if we suffer a stroke, have a palsy or migraine, then we seek out the guidance of a neurologist. It has been only recently that this schism seems to be constringing as psychiatrists embrace neurophysiology and neurologists embrace the fact that unacceptable behaviors are not solely the product of nervous system dysfunction. Cartesian dualism has been embedded in our consciousness for over 300 years and will only slowly die away.

While hot debate ensued regarding consciousness and God – and still does in some circles – another interesting figure appeared in the early 1800s who would directly influence brain research. Anatomist Franz Joseph Gall published Anatomie et Physiologie du Systeme Nerveux. Gall was convinced that the brain was the epicenter of all mental functioning. He classified twenty-seven distinct functions associating each with a specific area of the brain. All this was surmised on a predilection for observation Gall experienced since childhood. Gall meticulously studied the skulls of the famous, infamous, mentally handicapped, scholarly, gifted musician, and artist. He made hundreds of casts. By looking at the similarities of all of these skulls, their bumps, contours, and general shapes, he convinced himself and much of the general public that he could determine brain function by observation of the superficial.

Gall’s phrenological approach has since become a laughable topic. However, it did influence brain research in creating the notion of locality – the notion that certain functions in the brain occur in specific areas. This notion seemed to be reinforced by medical doctors treating injured soldiers. Certain areas of the brain that were damaged by concussion or shrapnel caused blindness, memory loss, or loss of function in a specific region of the body.

While the connection between phrenology and brain scanning may not be readily apparent, certain similarities will be explored in upcoming blogs.

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Boston Globe: Playing their Way to Improved Concentration

Posted by Peter on November 16th, 2004 | Comments off

The November 13, 2004 Boston Globe article, Playing their Way to Improved Concentration, refers to Play Attention, a feedback based learning system I created for persons with attention problems. It uses a video game format to teach cognitive skills typically deficit in children and adults with diffused attention.

I have always considered attention problems to be learning disabilities rather than brain damage (minimal brain dysfunction). In an evolutionary sense, people with diffused attention have always existed among us. In primitive times, they were likely the people standing or walking the perimeter of the camp fire while the rest of us ate our catch. Their orienting reflexes quickly triggered at the slightest sign of danger.

I synthesized my experience in education, computer education, and psychology to devise a system to optimize human potential. However, at the time I began this journey, my university training was of little help. None of my classes mentioned attention problems and therefore I received no training to assist my students.

The Globe cites that ‘…Peter Freer, who developed the product, used to teach school in West Virginia [actually Western Carolina] in the 1980s. Confronted with hyperactive students, Freer didn’t know how to help them. “At that point, at university level, they didn’t even teach anything about how to cope with these kids,” he said.’

I researched experimental data from NASA regarding astronaut performance and attention. I founded Unique Logic and Technology (ULT) in 1994 to provide technology to educators and the general public.

As the Globe points out,‘Freer was trained in computer programming, and he wondered whether technology might help his hyperactive students. While researching the matter, he found that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had developed computer systems for improving the concentration skills of astronauts and test pilots. NASA scientists attached electrodes to pilots’ heads to capture their brain waves. They learned to identify the kind of brain activity that occurs when a person is concentrating on a task. Then they wrote software that lets pilots control images on a computer screen. The more they focused their minds, the better they performed. In the process, they learned how to how to set aside distractions and concentrate on the task at hand.’

I vastly altered and advanced NASA’s technology to make it appropriate for educational use. I did this by incorporating cognitive skill training and behavior shaping. ULT has been awarded three patents with others pending based on the advancements.

Everything we know about the brain indicates that it can restructure provided the right challenge is provided. The difficulty is that this process takes time. Play Attention takes time, too – perhaps forty to sixty hours of training to gain permanency. ‘Hours of practice can teach a child what it feels like – and looks like – to pay attention. As Joyce Bowen put it, “after you do it a couple of times, you develop muscle memory in your brain.”’

Joyce’s child has rewired his brain to perform quite well at school. He no longer strikes his sister impulsively. He’s a normal, might one say, average kid – bright and happy. Sometimes it’s great to be average.

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Stimulation and Continued Brain Development

Posted by Peter on November 11th, 2004 | Comments off

Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.
–Hebrew Proverb

Learning takes place by construction of neural networks. Neural networks are the “whispering” of neurons to each other. Neurons are brain cells that communicate with each other via an electrochemical process that carries neurotransmitters across the division between the neurons (the synapse). Our five senses process information (external stimuli) and then select certain neural connections to become active.

In the recent past, scientists believed this network building or neural activation to be deterministic – the genes you are born with would determine the networks that could develop. However, it has been proved that activation is a random selection among many possible neural connections that could occur. It is not something that happens by deterministic design.

The ADHD Connection

No one, that’s right, no one, knows why people have attention problems. Theories abound, but since there is no real pathology associated with attention problems (other than theoretical) it cannot be physically located to be surgically corrected. However, we do know that new information (sensory input) enters the brain through preexisting networks, which is why it is imperative to provide challenging stimulation in early childhood. If the input is not new, it can trigger memory. If it is new it can trigger learning. Cognitive psychology refers to this process as constructivism: The learner builds his or her own knowledge on his current knowledge base, but only in response to a challenge. It is evident that some persons are not born with the neural networks that facilitate focused attention.

Furthermore, the old notion that early childhood experiences have little impact on later development has been proven false. We now know that the brain is directly and decisively affected by early experiences. This includes the architecture of the brain and the nature and extent of adult capacities; the actual capacity to form new neural networks is directly affected by early childhood experiences.

It was also thought that brain development is linear: the brain’s capacity to learn and change grows steadily as an infant matures into adulthood. It is now known that brain development is non-linear: there are optimum times for acquiring different kinds of knowledge and skills. For example, it is often easier for a very young child to learn a new language than a person past the age of 25.

However, the brain can grow and continue development through death provided the right conditions are met. In light of this, a recent research study quoted by WebMD Medical News shows that fluency in two languages or more prevents some of the effects of aging on brain function. The study reports that bilingual people have a greater capacity to stay focused on a task than people who spoke only one language. Inability to stay focused on a task is a hallmark of the aging brain’s decline. Bilingual people also seemed more readily able to filter out distraction or irrelevant data. This suggests that the function, capacity, or neural network involved in bilingual language processing may be the same processing needed to stay attentive. The study appears in the June, 2004 issue of the Journal Psychology and Aging.

It’s essential that early stimulation be provided as it seems to lay the foundation for growth and capacity in later life. It appears that stimulation in utero may be a good beginning.

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Neurogenesis: Mechanisms of Change

Posted by Peter on November 11th, 2004 | Comments off

Until the recent past, the exact mechanism of the brain’s reorganization, learning, and memory was unknown. With the advent of the human genome project and its subsequent research findings, we now have a greater understanding of how genetic factors contribute to human learning. The draft sequence of the human genome provides us a fundamental roadmap to understanding how the brain stores information beginning from at the genetic level which alters neural networking (our cognitive faculties), and culminates in behavioral change. In upcoming articles, I’ll shine a light on various mechanisms of change beginning with neurogenesis.

Neurogenesis

In the past, it was thought that the brain did not create new brain cells after early childhood development. Scientists were convinced that humans were born with a set of brain cells that steadily decrease as we age. Research at the Salk Institute found that patients as mature as 72 were actually creating new brain cells. The formation of new brain cells is termed neurogenesis. Furthermore, the Salk Institute’s research revealed that mice that were stimulated environmentally – for instance made to run – produced more new cells than did their counterparts who were sedentary. This growth was witnessed significantly in the hippocampus, the brain’s center for memory and learning.

While Dr. Fred Gage of the Salk Institute found neurogenesis commonplace, he did not know whether the new cells became functional neurons taking an active role in the brain to aid in learning or memory until it was revealed in later research that these cells do indeed become active neurons that grow axons for communication between other neurons and produce dendrites to receive more messages from other neurons.

Use it or lose it!

This finding presents possibility that the mature brain may be more flexible and dynamic than had previously been thought. Experience seems to shape this flexibility – we have a use it or lose it proposition. This new growth may be due to the brain’s need to replace dying cells. However, Dr. Gage says, “Another possibility is that young neurons provide a greater degree of plasticity to the mature brain. This enhanced plasticity would become apparent from the integration of new functional units whose connectivity may be shaped by experience.”

Dr. Gage’s work coincides with our current understanding of neuroplasticity and is but one wonderful example of how the brain grows and adapts to environmental challenges.

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