Latest news with #fMRI
The Star
14-05-2025
- Health
- The Star
New study says infants form memories, but they are hard to retrieve later
Our earliest years are a time of rapid learning, yet we typically cannot recall specific experiences from that period – a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia. A new study published in Science recently challenges assumptions about infant memory, showing that young minds do indeed form memories. The question remains, however, why these memories become difficult to retrieve later in life. 'I've always been fascinated by this mysterious blank spot we have in our personal history,' Nick Turk-Browne, professor of psychology at Yale and the study's senior author said. Around the age of one, children become extraordinary learners – acquiring language, walking, recognising objects, understanding social bonds, and more. 'Yet we remember none of those experiences – so there's a sort of mismatch between this incredible plasticity and learning ability that we have,' he said. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, hypothesised that early memories are repressed, though science has since largely dismissed the idea of an active suppression process. Instead, modern theories focus on the hippocampus, a part of the brain critical for episodic memory, which is not fully developed in infancy. Turk-Browne, however, was intrigued by clues from previous behavioural research. Since babies cannot verbally report memories before acquiring language, their tendency to gaze longer at familiar things provides important hints. Recent rodent studies monitoring brain activity have also shown that engrams – patterns of cells that store memories – form in the infant hippocampus but become inaccessible over time – though they can be artificially reawakened through a technique that uses light to stimulate neurons. But until now, pairing observations of infants with brain imaging had been out of reach, as babies are famously uncooperative when it comes to sitting still inside a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine – the device that tracks blood flow to 'see' brain activity. Psychedelic patterns To overcome this challenge, Turk-Browne's team used methods his lab has refined over the years – working with families to incorporate pacifiers, blankets, and stuffed animals; holding babies still with pillows; and using psychedelic background patterns to keep them engaged. Still, inevitable wiggling led to blurry images that had to be discarded, but the team accounted for this by running hundreds of sessions. In total, 26 infants participated – half under a year old, half over – while their brains were scanned during a memory task adapted from adult studies. First, they were shown images of faces, scenes or objects. Later, after viewing other images, they were presented with a previously seen image alongside a new one. 'We quantify how much time they spend looking at the old thing they've seen before, and that's a measure of their memory for that image,' said Turk-Browne. By comparing brain activity during successful memory formation versus forgotten images, the researchers confirmed that the hippocampus is active in memory encoding from a young age. This was true for 11 of 13 infants over a year old but not for those under one. They also found that babies who performed best on memory tasks showed greater hippocampal activity. 'What we can conclude accurately from our study is that infants have the capacity to encode episodic memories in the hippocampus starting around one year of age,' said Turk-Browne. Forgotten memories 'The ingenuity of their experimental approach should not be understated,' researchers Adam Ramsaran and Paul Frankland wrote in an accompanying Science editorial. But what remains unresolved is what happens to these early memories. Perhaps they are never fully consolidated into long-term storage – or perhaps they persist but become inaccessible. Turk-Browne suspects the latter and is now leading a new study testing whether infants, toddlers and children can recognise video clips recorded from their own perspective as younger babies. Early, tentative results suggest these memories might persist until around age three before fading. Turk-Browne is particularly intrigued by the possibility that such fragments could one day be reactivated later in life. – AFP Relaxnews
Boston Globe
13-05-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
Planning for summer guests when prices are rising
J.B. / Millis There isn't a delicate way, so be upfront about the matter. Acknowledge the awkwardness of the situation and let people know that you can't afford to provide food this year. Figure out in advance what's easiest: Do you want people to contribute a flat rate? Split the bills 50/50 (or proportionally, if there's more or fewer of them than there are of you)? Do their own shopping? But don't just ask for 'help' with the food bills in some vague way, leaving your well-intentioned friends guessing about what they ought to do; good hosts and hostesses always let their guests know exactly what is expected of them. Depending on your friends' knowledge of one another, general level of formality, et cetera, decide if it's best to do a mass e-mail (which shows fairness and gets all the information out to everyone at the same time) or individual phone calls (more personal). We're all going to hell in the same expensive grocery basket this summer, so your friends should be sympathetic and willing to chip in. If some of them aren't, consider the possibility that they are not really friends after all. Advertisement Twice now, friends have announced their impending parenthood with mass e-mails with the ultrasound images attached. In my opinion, these ultrasound images are private and something that I would only want to share with my spouse and our closest friends and family. However, since sending these images out to a large group seems to be more commonplace, I'm wondering if I am being too sensitive. Advertisement L.M. / Boston Ugh, sounds dreadful to me. I don't even think ultrasounds ought to be shared with 'closest friends and family' unless they ask to see them, as otherwise they leave people wondering what to say: 'My, he certainly has your bumpy occipital bone, doesn't he?' But you don't have to look, of course, nor even make reference to the ultrasounds in your return 'congrats' e-mail, so it's hardly something to get worked up about. Would that all indiscretions were so easily ignored. You and I may be behind the curve, however. Doctors and psychologists and ordinary people are simply mad for imaging these days, whether ultrasound or magnetic resonance or what have you. I wonder how far this mania will go? Perhaps college students will start sending along fMRI brain scans to accompany their graduation announcements. 'Look how my neocortex lights up when I'm thinking about Kant!' It's possible to take MRI scans of a couple in the act of intercourse—a team of Dutch researchers won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 for doing so, and Mary Roach and her husband repeated the experiment for her 2008 book, Bonk . Let's hope it doesn't become a trend to send these pictures along with wedding invitations. Advertisement Miss Conduct is Robin Abrahams, a writer with a PhD in psychology.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
What's it like to be a baby? Scanning their brains can help us find out
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways Anyone who has tried to entertain a baby knows sitting in stillness and silence is probably not the best way to keep them engaged, which presents a challenge for neuroscientists who want to study the developing brain. Yet with the help of some TV, attentive parents and a lot of patience, researchers have designed protocols that help them keep babies awake and still in an fMRI machine. Doing so is important: Getting a clear reading on these brain scans can reveal never-before-seen details about what parts of the brain are active at a young age, helping researchers answer questions about memory, perception and cognition. 'The goal of this research is to try to understand the human mind, and a really valuable perspective on that question is understanding how it develops,' said Dr. Nick Turk-Browne, a psychology professor at Yale University studying infant cognition. Scientists are still discovering new parts of the brain, and what happens in the developing mind has historically been hard to pin down in neuroscience research. Most information we know about the infant brain has traditionally been based on behavioral measures of where babies look or what they reach for in experiments. Other data extrapolates from animal experiments or cases in which people have undergone brain damage to infer what is happening in functional brain regions. However, using an fMRI machine is considered the gold standard for mapping brain function, said Dr. Tristan Yates, a cognitive neuroscientist at Columbia University who studies perception and memory in early life. 'The reason why is it gives you whole brain coverage … including access to really deep brain regions,' Yates told Salon in a phone interview. This technology gives teachers access to more detailed information about certain brain regions that could answer some major questions about cognition, she added. When fMRI machines came online in the 1990s, researchers did use them to look at infant brains, but these scans were typically conducted when babies were sleeping, Yates said. This means they couldn't study how aspects of the waking brain like cognition were impacted by various stimuli. But in 2002, a research team in France successfully captured fMRI images of awake infants to measure how their brains responded to language. Another research team in Italy performed a similar experiment in 2015, and the first study scanning the brains of awake babies in the U.S. was published in 2017. In the near-decade since, various research teams have begun to explore what is going on in the infant mind to better understand neural development. 'This fMRI work is also in its infancy, and it's only really a handful of labs around the world that are doing it,' Yates said. 'We're excited that we're going to be able to start to disentangle what is going on here.' At birth, a baby's brain is roughly one-third the size of an adult brain. It nearly doubles in size in the first year of life, making millions of neural connections each second in an endless process of learning. Still, an infant brain's relatively small size doesn't mean that it is necessarily underdeveloped: Surprisingly, fMRIs have shown that baby brains in many ways remarkably resemble adult brains, said Dr. Cameron Ellis, a psychology professor at Stanford University who researches what it's like to be an infant. 'When I started this work over 10 years ago … I expected it to be an alien landscape where many of the assumptions that we had and many of the things that are true about the adult brain wouldn't apply,' Ellis told Salon in a phone interview. 'I have been proven wrong time and time again: Actually, the infant brain looks a lot like the adult brain.' Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes. Although baby fMRIs have been helpful in highlighting what regions of the brain are operating in infancy, one limitation with this data is that activity in certain brain regions does not necessarily translate to the same thing in infants as it does in adults, Ellis noted. 'It's something we have to be careful in this field of not over-interpreting similarity between infants and adults as meaning something about their cognitive capacity in its own self,' Ellis said. Nevertheless, this research has changed the way researchers think about the developing mind in many ways. For example, neuroscientists often have the intuition that earlier in development, the infant experience is limited to more sensory processes like vision, hearing and touch, but that things that require one to attribute meaning or connect two things occur later in development, said Dr. Rebecca Saxe, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, in a study Saxe authored last month in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, she and her colleagues found something that challenges previous assumptions about how infant brains develop. Specifically, the areas of the medial prefrontal cortex responsible for processing social environments were active when infants were exposed to faces. In adults, this region is also active with ideas of the self, like when you see your own phone number versus a random phone number, Saxe explained. 'Maybe it's not that first babies do visual processing and only later are connected to social meaning,' Saxe told Salon in a phone interview. 'Maybe these brain regions are active because babies are responding to the social meaning of people and faces as early on as we can measure their brains.' In one study Turk-Browne, Ellis and Yates authored in Neuron in 2021, fMRI data showed activity in infants' visual cortex when presented with different visual cues, indicating that babies are able to map out the world in front of them in their minds in a process called retinotopy as early as five months old. This is impressive that their process so closely resembles the adult brain's considering a baby's vision is still developing in the first few months of life. In another study, a research team found that parts of infants' brains in charge of shifting attention in the frontal parietal cortex were activated in infants as young as three months old. 'What's surprising about that is these are some of the parts of the brain that are thought to be the slowest to develop,' Turk-Browne told Salon in a phone interview. 'You've probably heard about this idea that our frontal lobe continues developing through adolescence, and that's true, but what we were showing is that some of the more rudimentary kinds of things like how we shift our attention and control our minds may be supported by those brain regions even in infancy.' However, there are important differences between infant and adult brains. In one 2022 study published by Turk-Browne, Ellis and Yates, infants were shown to process events on longer time scales than adults. This could be an important learning tool to help infants absorb more information about their environment before making a judgment about it based on their past experience, Yates said. For example, infants can distinguish between sounds made in various languages at birth, but at around six to 12 months, they start to narrow in on the language they are around most often and lose the ability to distinguish between sounds made in other languages. 'We haven't related this to learning yet, but it makes sense that it might be helpful to start kind of a big picture and then narrow it down,' Yates said. 'One thing that happens in infancy is this process of perceptual narrowing, where babies in some ways have broader perceptual abilities than adults.' There also seems to be a difference in processing memories in infancy and adulthood. After all, people don't remember their infancy, with the first memories typically reported around the age of three or four. The hippocampus is the brain structure responsible for memory, and it helps us remember specific memories of events that occurred at a certain time and place, as well as a more general sense of memory called statistical learning, where the brain detects patterns in the environment. For example, as children start going to different kinds of restaurants, statistical learning helps them understand what kinds of foods are served at a Mexican restaurant, a Thai restaurant and so on. Infants have been shown to be good statistical learners. After all, that's how they pick up language, learn to recognize their family members and begin to understand the subtleties of their cultures. But it wasn't clear if this type of memory also happened in the hippocampus in infants, especially because the hippocampus doubles in size across infancy. To investigate this question, the research team showed infants a series of random and structured images while they were hooked up to the fMRI machine to see whether these areas of the brain were active when infants remembered the structured images over time. What they found was that these same regions of the brain were indeed active in infants as young as three-months old. 'That's a surprising finding because the alternative was that maybe in infants, the rest of the brain, or another part of the brain, is important for that kind of learning,' Turk-Browne said. 'But in fact, we found that the adult mechanisms for statistical learning may be functional in babies.' This finding didn't explain why we can't remember being babies, but it did help researchers narrow down what questions they needed to ask to find out. Memories were activating the same regions in the brain in infants as they were in adults, but it could be that these memories cannot be stored in infancy. Or, it could be that the memories are stored in infancy but that they become inaccessible to us later on in life. In another study, published in March in Science, the research team studied the hippocampus of infants hooked up to an fMRI machine was able to store specific episodic memories — not just statistical patterns — as early as 12 months of age. This suggests that the reason we don't remember our earliest years is related to how they are encoded in the brain. 'There may be some of our early memories present in our brain, at least for some of our life, despite the fact that we can't access them,' Turk-Browne said. Turk-Browne's research lab is currently conducting studies to better understand how long those memories last in an infant's mind and how detailed they are. This could help explain the disconnect between how we experience memories as infants and as adults. What they find could help prove or disprove several theories on why we don't remember being babies. It could be, for example, that the way infants experience the world is different before they learn how to talk, and that labeling things with words and language helps shape our memories with more longevity. For example, a six-month old child may remember being at a birthday party and hearing their family members talking, but if they can't make sense of the words and haven't yet learned about birthdays, they might not sort this memory with the kind of detail that their older self would use to recollect it later on. 'It's like the memory is there, but you don't know how to find it, like an indexing problem,' Ellis said. 'It's as if you went to the library and then someone changed all of the numbers so the book are not where they used to be.' Nevertheless, understanding why could help us better understand how things like early childhood experiences can be so influential later in life, even if they cannot be explicitly recalled, Yates said. It could also help us better understand how memory conditions like dementia or Alzheimer's develop, Ellis said. 'For patients with Alzheimer's, the breakdown that might be happening in their brain could perhaps be repaired by implementing some of the changes that the infant brain goes through as it acquires learning and memory,' Ellie said. 'It's entirely speculative at this point because we don't know what those changes are, but that is a potential hope in the future.'
Time of India
01-05-2025
- Science
- Time of India
IISc scientists find a new brain region for property-based visual tasks
SP Arun, Georgin Jacob and Pramod RT BENGALURU: Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science ( IISc ) have identified a specific brain region that appears to play a crucial role in how humans solve visual tasks based on properties rather than features—such as spotting an odd one out, telling if two objects are the same, or detecting symmetry. The study, led by Georgin Jacob, RT Pramod and SP Arun and published in eLife, introduces the concept of 'visual homogeneity' — a measure of how uniform or repetitive elements in an image are — as a decision variable that the brain may use to tackle a wide range of visual problems. Unlike conventional visual tasks that rely on identifying specific features (such as colour or shape), property-based tasks involve comparing the structure or layout of items. 'You might not know what the odd object looks like, but you can still spot it because the rest of the scene looks uniform,' said Georgin Jacob, the first author of the team from the Centre for Neuroscience at IISc. To test their hypothesis, the researchers ran a series of experiments combining behavioural data and brain imaging. In one set, participants were shown arrays of objects and asked whether a unique 'oddball' item was present. In another, they judged whether a shape was symmetric. Crucially, these tasks were performed while their brain activity was being recorded using fMRI. The team found that response times in both tasks could be predicted using a single computational principle: the 'distance' of a display from the centre of a perceptual space—what they call visual homogeneity . Displays with more repetition (i.e. higher homogeneity) were associated with faster or slower responses, depending on the task. For instance, in symmetry detection, more homogeneous images (symmetrical ones) produced shorter response times, and during oddball search, arrays without a target produced shorter responses. What stood out was that this measure also mapped onto brain activity. The researchers identified a localised region, just anterior to the lateral occipital cortex, that was activated by visual homogeneity in both visual search and symmetry tasks. This region, referred to as VH (for Visual Homogeneity), showed little correlation with overall task difficulty or response time, suggesting it was selectively encoding this specific visual property. 'This is possibly the first evidence that such a general-purpose visual computation—homogeneity—has a dedicated brain area,' said Prof Arun. The study also showed that visual homogeneity could explain performance in 'same-different' tasks and even object categorisation, hinting at its broader relevance in visual cognition . Importantly, the authors note that visual homogeneity does not fully determine how we perform such tasks but likely serves as an early-stage cue that guides our attention. The model offers a falsifiable framework for understanding a class of visual reasoning problems that are challenging for both humans and machine vision systems. 'We are excited for future studies exploring how visual homogeneity is computed from sensory representations and used for decision making', said Pramod RT from the team. The findings open up possibilities for studying how such computations develop and vary between individuals. They may also aid in refining machine vision algorithms by incorporating principles of perceptual homogeneity.
Gulf Insider
23-03-2025
- Health
- Gulf Insider
The Power Of Single-Tasking
Multi-taskers are less productive, because our brains have a cognitive bottleneck. Time-boxing, time-blocking, and 'deep work' productivity techniques are based on single-tasking. Simple changes to your daily routine can help you make better use of your time by single-tasking. Distractions are everywhere. Emails pop up while you try to finish a task. You remember that your taxes are due soon, but you are busy trying to meet a deadline. It often feels like we should be doing a dozen things at the same time. The temptation is to multi-task — answering your email while monitoring social media and listening to a presentation. Our brains do not work that way. For example, a number of studies have looked at the cognitive performance of heavy (media) multi-taskers (Ophir, Nass, and Wagner 2009, Uncapher and Wagner 2018). Those are people used to working with lots of distractions, permanently on their smartphones while reading on the computer and listening to music. Heavy multi-taskers thought that they were more productive than light multi-taskers, but they were wrong. Multi-taskers are less productive. The problem is that our brains cannot engage in two cognitive tasks at once (anything involving thinking). Research has shown that our minds have a 'cognitive bottleneck,' first described by Pashler (1992). You essentially work by iterating a see-think-move loop. First, you see stuff (perception phase). Then, you process it, think about it, and decide what to do (cognition or 'central processing' phase). Finally, you do something about what you have decided, maybe by typing a sentence or grabbing an object (motor phase). Alas, your brain can only engage in one cognition phase at once. You can monitor a waiting room while working on a report, and you can walk while thinking about a problem, but you cannot answer an email while you follow and actually understand a presentation. When you try to multitask, your brain just queues the cognitive phases of the different tasks, never managing to engage in more than one at a time (for example, see Lee and Chabris, 2013). If you try to work on two cognitive tasks at the same time, your brain just switches back and forth between them, never really concentrating on either one and making mistakes. The meeting ends, you have missed half of what the speaker said, and there are mistakes in every email you sent. Multi-tasking taxes your (working) memory, which is limited. A study by Colom et al (2010) found that people with larger working memory capacity are better at multitasking. But even those people would probably have been more productive by giving their undivided attention to each task, one after the other. One fMRI study worryingly suggested that multi-tasking for long periods of time might even result in permanent brain alterations, including lowered gray-matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain associated with cognitive control (Loh and Kanai, 2014). If multi-tasking does not work, how can we be more effective? Productivity experts like Cal Newport speak about 'deep work' and distraction-free environments. But you don't need to completely reorganize your life to reap the benefits of that. You simply need to realize that single-tasking is often more effective. Many modern time-management techniques are all about concentrating on a single task at a time. For example, time-boxing means setting a block (or 'box') of time where you will work only on one specific task, making sure that you stop when the time is up. For instance, you schedule answering emails from 9 to 9:30 and from 16:00 to 16:30, but you stop (and close the email program) once the alarm clock sounds. Or you clean and organize your desk every Thursday from 16:30 to 17:00. Or you work on that report you need to write from 10:00 to 12:00, with every program in your computer shut down except for the word processor and whatever you actually need for the report. If time-boxing seems too rigid for you, try task-batching . Instead of scheduling individual tasks, think about the different kinds of work and chores you do, and set longer time blocks for each kind of work. This will look very different depending on the kind of work you do. For instance, a writer might do research in the mornings and distraction-free writing in the afternoons. If you work on a schedule (9 to 5 or similar), talk to your supervisor about lumping together all the tasks that you can do alone and keeping all your meetings within two fixed days of the week. Time-blocking is taking time-boxing to the extreme, and filling your entire (work) schedule with boxes for specific tasks so that you always know what you are supposed to do. This might sound daunting, but it can work if you approach it as a preliminary schedule and keep tweaking and adjusting it (maybe with a 15-minute review at the end of each day) until it clicks into place. For instance, if your 30-minute email slots keep spilling over, make them 45-minute slots. Some advocates of time-blocking will tell you to time-block your entire life, including leisure and family time. That might not be a good idea for everybody. Research has shown that, if you schedule leisure activities the same way you schedule work, you will enjoy them less (Malkoc and Tonietto, 2019). If you treat having coffee with a friend the same way you treat a dentist's appointment, you will end up seeing pleasurable activities as chores. Click here to read more…
