Latest news with #cognitiveabilities
South China Morning Post
3 days ago
- Automotive
- South China Morning Post
Health checks on older Hong Kong taxi drivers should be ‘targeted': experts
Compulsory health checks on older taxi drivers in Hong Kong to evaluate their capacity to drive should be targeted to cover cabbies' cognitive abilities and take into account their medications, with clearer guidelines on specific conditions, industry experts have said. Advertisement Ringo Lee Yiu-pui, honorary life president of the Hong Kong, China Automobile Association, said on Monday that more regular health screenings for drivers aged 65 or above should be conducted, with specific and comprehensive tests, before they could renew their licences. 'We could introduce cognitive assessments because seniors might be weaker in their cognitive abilities for driving,' Lee told a radio programme, adding that those who only passed a physical examination might not necessarily be fit to drive long hours professionally. Hong Kong authorities have faced renewed calls for stricter health checks on older cabbies after a Filipino tourist was killed last week by a speeding taxi driven by an 80-year-old. On Saturday, Secretary for Transport and Logistics Mable Chan pledged to tighten requirements through legislation no later than the first quarter of next year Advertisement Under current regulations, only those aged 70 or older are required to submit health reports, while their driving licences can be renewed for up to three years. The fitness certification covers aspects such as the driver's eyesight and hearing, skeletal and muscular system, balance and coordination, and mental state, among others.
South China Morning Post
3 days ago
- Automotive
- South China Morning Post
Health checks on older Hong Kong taxi drivers should be ‘targeted': experts
Compulsory health checks on older taxi drivers in Hong Kong to evaluate their capacity to drive should be targeted to cover cabbies' cognitive abilities and take into account their medications, with clearer guidelines on specific conditions, industry experts have said. Ringo Lee Yiu-pui, honorary life president of the Hong Kong, China Automobile Association, said on Monday that more regular health screenings for drivers aged 65 or above should be conducted, with specific and comprehensive tests, before they could renew their licences. 'We could introduce cognitive assessments because seniors might be weaker in their cognitive abilities for driving,' Lee told a radio programme, adding that those who only passed a physical examination might not necessarily be fit to drive long hours professionally. Hong Kong authorities have faced renewed calls for stricter health checks on older cabbies after a Filipino tourist was killed last week by a speeding taxi driven by an 80-year-old. On Saturday, Secretary for Transport and Logistics Mable Chan pledged to tighten requirements through legislation no later than the first quarter of next year Under current regulations, only those aged 70 or older are required to submit health reports, while their driving licences can be renewed for up to three years. The fitness certification covers aspects such as the driver's eyesight and hearing, skeletal and muscular system, balance and coordination, and mental state, among others.
Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Longevity Experts Say That Mastering This One Skill Could Add Years to Your Life
A new study found that among four cognitive abilities tested in older adults, verbal fluency (the ability to use language quickly and effectively) was significantly associated with a longer life span. Experts believe verbal fluency may serve as a proxy for biological resilience, as it relies on multiple brain functions—including memory, attention, processing speed, and executive functioning—all working in sync. Improving verbal fluency is possible at any age with regular challenges like naming games, deep conversations, strategic board games, storytelling, and even learning a new language—all of which stimulate brain function and support healthy it comes to aging, research has shown that intelligence can predict your longevity. But intelligence is a vague concept, and it doesn't give us much of an idea of what we can do to exercise our brains. However, a new study published in the journal Psychological Science has pinpointed a more specific trait in people who live longer: verbal fluency. The researchers gave participants—aged 70 to 105—tests measuring four cognitive abilities: verbal fluency (mastery of language), perceptual speed (the ability to access patterns quickly), verbal knowledge (vocabulary), and episodic memory (ability to recall and remember personal experiences). They also developed a model that assessed their risk of death. After analyzing the data, researchers determined that out of the four cognitive abilities they tested, verbal fluency alone appeared to have a significant link to longevity—but they're not sure why. Although the link between verbal fluency and longevity is not yet understood, Paolo Ghisletta, PhD, lead author of the study, has two possible theories. The first is that the physical body is inextricably linked to mental, emotional, and cognitive processes. 'All of these domains are just declining together, whether it's cognition, personality, emotions, or biological, medical decline in general,' he said in a statement. In addition to that, Ghisletta recognizes that verbal fluency could be a good measure of well-being, because it's a complex process involving multiple cognitive abilities, potentially including long-term memory, vocabulary, efficiency, and visual memory. Dr. Kimberly Idoko, neurologist and medical director at Everwell Neuro, agrees, noting that verbal fluency utilizes multiple brain functions, like memory, attention, processing speed, and the ability to organize and express ideas quickly. It also depends on strong connections between different parts of the brain—especially the frontal and temporal lobes. 'When someone can find and use words with ease, it suggests that the brain's regions are connecting well,' Idoko says. 'And when fluency starts to decline, it often suggests broader issues in brain function. So, strong verbal fluency may reflect biological resilience.' Let's break it down a bit more. 'In order to express a word, you come up with an idea or a thought,' says Polina Shkadron, neurodivergent therapist and founder of Play to Learn Consulting. 'Then, to communicate that thought to someone else, you pull from your language resources to choose specific words in a particular order so that the listener is able to also comprehend what you are describing.' Essentially, you are using language to implant your idea into someone else's mind. 'As the speaker, you also have a feedback loop, meaning that once you express your idea, you are analyzing it simultaneously to make sure that the words are exactly what you wanted in that moment and in that context,' she explains. While having extensive knowledge of vocabulary is part of communicative interactions, it's not the only part. 'You also need to have knowledge of how language is formed and used,' Shkadron says. 'Language use, referred to as pragmatics, is the way in which we facilitate conversational interactions. We use specific terms depending on the situation and the people in that environment.' Verbal fluency is also determined by executive functioning capacities—especially verbal working memory—as well as impulse inhibition and cognitive flexibility, Shkadron notes. 'For instance, to have an extensive conversation with someone else, your brain needs the skills to hold onto specific information, process what the other person is telling you—without interrupting them—determine whether that information is relevant or irrelevant, and keep the conversation going based on the topic being discussed,' she explains. Related: Clear Brain Fog Instantly With These 12 Effective Strategies The good news is that you can start improving your verbal fluency today, and keep it up over the years. 'The most important ingredients are challenge, variety, and frequency,' Idoko says. To get you started, here are some suggestions from Idoko and Shkadron. Set a timer for one minute or 90 seconds, and pick a category—like animals, foods you'd find in a grocery store, or items you'd find outdoors in nature, things that start with the letter 'S'—and name as many as you can before the timer goes off. You can challenge yourself or others and make a game out of it. The person who named the highest number of things in the category wins. (It's also a perfect game for a road trip.) According to Idoko, this activity 'activate[s] the same circuits I test in clinical exams.' Both Idoko and Shkadron mentioned that staying verbally active through having conversations with others is a great way to stay social and keep up with your language skills. More specifically, Shkadron recommends conversations that are about individual interests. 'People who stay verbally active through conversation, reading, or teaching tend to live longer and maintain better cognitive function,' Idoko says. 'So verbal fluency may reflect how much someone is using their brain to stay connected.' According to Shkadron, strategic board games that require you to use all aspects of executive functioning are beneficial. She suggests Blokus, Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan, Rummikub, The Oregon Trail, and Bananagrams. 'The cognitive shifting and strategy that occurs involves language planning and deliberating your moves, as well as the moves of your opponents,' she explains. Related: Do Brain Games Really Work to Boost Cognitive Fitness? This ancient oral tradition is also a great way to flex your language skills, Idoko says. '[Storytelling] artistically uses language to develop all of the critical components involved in the communication process,' say the authors of a 2001 study on literacy techniques and storytelling. 'Storytelling develops listening skills, enhances verbal expression, increases comprehension, creates mental images, and highlights verbal reasoning.' Consider trying your hand at creative writing or journaling to get started—you don't have to be an expert to reap the benefits of storytelling. Do you regret not taking Spanish in high school? Have you always wanted to learn Japanese? Well, there's no time like the present, regardless of your age. A 2012 study found that learning a new language is associated with the growth of the hippocampus—an area of that brain that's involved with handling memories, learning, and dealing with emotion. This is important because the hippocampus is among the first parts of the brain affected by memory loss. Read the original article on Real Simple
WIRED
11-05-2025
- Science
- WIRED
Intelligence on Earth Evolved Independently at Least Twice
May 11, 2025 7:00 AM Complex neural circuits likely arose independently in birds and mammals, suggesting that vertebrates evolved intelligence multiple times. Illustration: Samantha Mash for Quanta Magazine The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Humans tend to put our own intelligence on a pedestal. Our brains can do math, employ logic, explore abstractions, and think critically. But we can't claim a monopoly on thought. Among a variety of nonhuman species known to display intelligent behavior, birds have been shown time and again to have advanced cognitive abilities. Ravens plan for the future, crows count and use tools, cockatoos open and pillage booby-trapped garbage cans, and chickadees keep track of tens of thousands of seeds cached across a landscape. Notably, birds achieve such feats with brains that look completely different from ours: They're smaller and lack the highly organized structures that scientists associate with mammalian intelligence. 'A bird with a 10-gram brain is doing pretty much the same as a chimp with a 400-gram brain,' said Onur Güntürkün, who studies brain structures at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. 'How is it possible?' Researchers have long debated about the relationship between avian and mammalian intelligences. One possibility is that intelligence in vertebrates—animals with backbones, including mammals and birds—evolved once. In that case, both groups would have inherited the complex neural pathways that support cognition from a common ancestor: a lizardlike creature that lived 320 million years ago, when Earth's continents were squished into one landmass. The other possibility is that the kinds of neural circuits that support vertebrate intelligence evolved independently in birds and mammals. It's hard to track down which path evolution took, given that any trace of the ancient ancestor's actual brain vanished in a geological blink. So biologists have taken other approaches—such as comparing brain structures in adult and developing animals today—to piece together how this kind of neurobiological complexity might have emerged. A series of studies published in Science in February 2025 provides the best evidence yet that birds and mammals did not inherit the neural pathways that generate intelligence from a common ancestor, but rather evolved them independently. This suggests that vertebrate intelligence arose not once, but multiple times. Still, their neural complexity didn't evolve in wildly different directions: Avian and mammalian brains display surprisingly similar circuits, the studies found. 'It's a milestone in the quest to understand and to integrate the different ideas about the evolution' of vertebrate intelligence, said Güntürkün, who was not involved in the new research. When Fernando García-Moreno started his lab at the Achucarro Basque Center for Neuroscience, he knew he wanted to probe how the pallium region of the vertebrate brain evolved using a breadth of different methods. Photograph: Tatiana Gallego Flores The findings emerge in a world enraptured by artificial forms of intelligence, and they could teach us something about how complex circuits in our own brains evolved. Perhaps most importantly, they could help us step 'away from the idea that we are the best creatures in the world,' said Niklas Kempynck, a graduate student at KU Leuven who led one of the studies. 'We are not this optimal solution to intelligence.' Birds got there too, on their own. Pecking Disorder For the first half of the 20th century, neuroanatomists assumed that birds were simply not that smart. The creatures lack anything resembling a neocortex—the highly ordered outermost structure in the brains of humans and other mammals where language, communication, and reasoning reside. The neocortex is organized into six layers of neurons, which receive sensory information from other parts of the brain, process it, and send it out to regions that determine our behavior and reactions. In the 1960s, the neuroanatomist Harvey Karten's research into avian neural circuits changed how the field viewed bird intelligence. 'For the longest time, it was thought that this is the center of cognition, and you need this kind of anatomy to develop advanced cognitive abilities,' said Bastienne Zaremba, a postdoctoral researcher studying the evolution of the brain at Heidelberg University. Rather than neat layers, birds have 'unspecified balls of neurons without landmarks or distinctions,' said Fernando García-Moreno, a neurobiologist at the Achucarro Basque Center for Neuroscience in Spain. These structures compelled neuroanatomists a century ago to suggest that much of bird behavior is reflexive, and not driven by learning and decision-making. This 'implies that what a mammal can learn easily, a bird will never learn,' Güntürkün said. The conventional thinking started to change in the 1960s when Harvey Karten, a young neuroanatomist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, mapped and compared brain circuits in mammals and pigeons, and later in owls, chickens, and other birds. What he found was a surprise: The brain regions thought to be involved only in reflexive movements were built from neural circuits—networks of interconnected neurons—that resembled those found in the mammalian neocortex. This region in the bird brain, the dorsal ventricular ridge (DVR), seemed to be comparable to a neocortex; it just didn't look like it. In 1969, Karten wrote a 'very influential paper that completely changed the discussion in the field,' said Maria Tosches, who studies vertebrate brain development at Columbia University. 'His work was really revolutionary.' He concluded that because avian and mammalian circuits are similar, they were inherited from a common ancestor. That thinking dominated the field for decades, said Güntürkün, a former postdoc in Karten's lab. It 'sparked quite a lot of interest in the bird brain.' 'We are not this optimal solution to intelligence.' A few decades later, Luis Puelles, an anatomist at the University of Murcia in Spain, drew the opposite conclusion. By comparing embryos at various stages of development, he found that the mammalian neocortex and the avian DVR developed from distinct areas of the embryo's pallium—a brain region shared by all vertebrates. He concluded that the structures must have evolved independently. Karten and Puelles were 'giving completely different answers to this big question,' Tosches said. The debate continued for decades. During this time, biologists also began to appreciate bird intelligence, starting with their studies of Alex, an African gray parrot who could count and identify objects. They realized just how smart birds could be. However, neither group seemed to want to resolve the discrepancy between their two theories of how vertebrate palliums evolved, according to García-Moreno. 'No, they kept working on their own method,' he said. One camp continued to compare the circuitry in adult vertebrate brains; the other focused on embryonic development. In the new studies, he said, 'we tried to put everything together.' Same but Not the Same Two new studies, which were conducted by independent teams of researchers, relied on the same powerful tool for identifying cell types, known as single-cell RNA sequencing. This technique lets researchers compare neuronal circuits, as Karten did, not only in adult brains but all the way through embryonic development, following Puelles. In this way, they could see where the cells started growing in the embryo and where they ended up in the mature animal—a developmental journey that can reveal evolutionary pathways. For their study, García-Moreno and his team wanted to watch how brain circuitry develops. Using RNA sequencing and other techniques, they tracked cells in the palliums of chickens, mice, and geckos at various embryonic stages to time-stamp when different types of neurons were generated and where they matured. They found that the mature circuits looked remarkably alike across animals, just as Karten and others had noted, but they were built differently, as Puelles had found. The circuits that composed the mammalian neocortex and the avian DVR developed at different times, in different orders, and in different regions of the brain. Illustration: Mark Belan/Quanta Magazine; source: Science 387, 732 (2025) At the same time, García-Moreno was collaborating with Zaremba and her colleagues at Heidelberg University. Using RNA sequencing, they created 'the most comprehensive atlas of the bird pallium that we have,' said Tosches, who wrote a related perspective piece published in Science. By comparing the bird pallium to lizard and mouse palliums, they also found that the neocortex and DVR were built with similar circuitry—however, the neurons that composed those neural circuits were distinct. 'How we end up with similar circuitry was more flexible than I would have expected,' Zaremba said. 'You can build the same circuits from different cell types.' Zaremba and her team also found that in the bird pallium, neurons that start development in different regions can mature into the same type of neuron in the adult. This pushed against previous views, which held that distinct regions of the embryo must generate different types of neurons. There's limited degrees of freedom into which you can generate an intelligent brain, at least within vertebrates. In mammals, brain development follows an intuitive path: The cells in the embryo's amygdala region at the start of development end up in the adult amygdala. The cells in the embryo's cortex region end up in the adult cortex. But in birds, 'there is a fantastic reorganization of the forebrain,' Güntürkün said, that is 'nothing that we had expected.' Taken together, the studies provide the clearest evidence yet that birds and mammals independently evolved brain regions for complex cognition. They also echo previous research from Tosches' lab, which found that the mammalian neocortex evolved independently from the reptile DVR. Still, it seems likely there was some inheritance from a common ancestor. In a third study that used deep learning, Kempynck and his coauthor Nikolai Hecker found that mice, chickens, and humans share some stretches of DNA that influence the development of the neocortex or DVR, suggesting that similar genetic tools are at work in both types of animals. And as previous studies had suggested, the research groups found that inhibitory neurons, or those that silence and modulate neural signals, were conserved across birds and mammals. The findings haven't completely resolved Karten and Puelles' debate, however. Whose ideas were closer to the truth? Tosches said that Puelles was right, while Güntürkün thought the findings better reflect Karten's ideas, though would partly please Puelles. García-Moreno split the difference: 'Both of them were right; none of them was wrong,' he said. How to Build Intelligence Intelligence doesn't come with an instruction manual. It is hard to define, there are no ideal steps toward it, and it doesn't have an optimal design, Tosches said. Innovations can happen throughout an animal's biology, whether in new genes and their regulation, or in new neuron types, circuits, and brain regions. But similar innovations can evolve multiple times independently—a phenomenon known as convergent evolution—and this is seen across life. 'One of the reasons I kind of like these papers is that they really highlight a lot of differences,' said Bradley Colquitt, a molecular neuroscientist at UC Santa Cruz. 'It allows you to say: What are the different neural solutions that these organisms have come up with to solve similar problems of living in a complex world and being able to adapt in a rapidly changing terrestrial environment?' Octopuses and squids, independently of mammals, evolved camera-like eyes. Birds, bats and insects all took to the skies on their own. Ancient people in Egypt and South America independently built pyramids—the most structurally efficient shape that will stand the test of time, García-Moreno said: 'If they make a tower, it will fall. If they make a wall, it won't work.' Similarly, 'there's limited degrees of freedom into which you can generate an intelligent brain, at least within vertebrates,' Tosches said. Drift outside the realm of vertebrates, however, and you can generate an intelligent brain in much weirder ways—from our perspective, anyway. 'It's a Wild West,' she said. Octopuses, for example, 'evolved intelligence in a way that's completely independent.' Their cognitive structures look nothing like ours, except that they're built from the same broad type of cell: the neuron. Yet octopuses have been caught performing incredible feats such as escaping aquarium tanks, solving puzzles, unscrewing jar lids and carrying shells as shields. It would be exciting to figure out how octopuses evolved intelligence using really divergent neural structures, Colquitt said. That way, it might be possible to pinpoint any absolute constraints on evolving intelligence across all animal species, not just vertebrates. Such findings could eventually reveal shared features of various intelligences, Zaremba said. What are the building blocks of a brain that can think critically, use tools, or form abstract ideas? That understanding could help in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence—and help improve our artificial intelligence. For example, the way we currently think about using insights from evolution to improve AI is very anthropocentric. 'I would be really curious to see if we can build like artificial intelligence from a bird perspective,' Kempynck said. 'How does a bird think? Can we mimic that?' Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
