Posts Tagged ‘Brain’

brain activity study

Duke University researchers say every brain activity study you’ve ever read is wrong

https://www.fastcompany.com/90520750/duke-university-researchers-say-every-brain-activity-study-youve-ever-read-is-wrong

The researchers reexamined 56 peer-reviewed, published papers that conducted 90 fMRI experiments, some by leaders in the field, and also looked at the results of so-called “test/retest” fMRIs, where 65 subjects were asked to do the same tasks months apart. They found that of seven measures of brain function, none had consistent readings.

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more on the brain in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=brain

meditation and stress

Participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress. from r/science

Eight weeks to a better brain

a team led by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)

“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says study senior author Sara Lazar of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology

“It is fascinating to see the brain’s plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life,” says Britta Hölzel, first author of the paper and a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in Germany.

Amishi Jha, a University of Miami neuroscientist who investigates mindfulness-training’s effects on individuals in high-stress situations, says, “These results shed light on the mechanisms of action of mindfulness-based training.

Video Game Design And Storytelling

The Future Of Mobile Web Design: Video Game Design And Storytelling

As attention spans shorten and visitors just want to get to the good stuff on a website, designers have to get more creative in how they communicate their website’s “story.”

By Suzanne Scacca  June 25, 2018

https://medium.com/@smashingmag/the-future-of-mobile-web-design-video-game-design-and-storytelling-11f5add41d25

What is truly impressive, however, is how we are now able to use design to tell a story. In other words, we no longer need to use long scrolls to set up plots or describe what a company does. This is especially great when designing for the mobile experience, which already sets pretty strict limits on how much we can “tell” versus “show.”

Three Video Game Storytelling Techniques We Need More Of In Web Design

1. Make Your Visitor the Hero

Create User Personas

Develop user personas before you do anything else when strategizing and planning for a website. Your personas should have a key “problem” they face.

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Use Relatable Content

In video game design, there is something known as “ludonarrative dissonance.”
the unpleasant situation where we’re asking players to do something they don’t want to do… or prevent them from doing what they want.

Spin a Fantasy

Here’s an interesting fact: people are 22 times more likely to remember data when it’s presented in a narrative form.

The brain digests visual content 60% more quickly than written content, so your web designs and other visuals (like video, animation, and so on) are the keys to doing this.

The Airbnb blog always does a great job of this type of visual storytelling.

2. Minimize Distractions by Using Symbols

As of August 2017, 52.64% of all visits to websites were done via a smartphone. And, starting in 2017, the most popular size for a smartphonewas between five and six inches and will only continue to grow in popularity as the years go on.

That’s not a lot of space to fill with content for the majority of site visitors, is it?

Functional minimalism is already something you’re doing in your own web design efforts, but have you thought about how it can tie into the storytelling aspect as well?

Here are some ways in which you might use symbols to declutter your site:

  • Hamburger icon (for the navigation)
  • Profile photo icon (for account details)
  • Pencil icon (for an editing interface)
  • Gear icon (for settings)
  • Shopping cart icon (to checkout)
  • Magnifying glass (to expand the search bar)
  • Connector icon (to open social sharing and RSS feed options)
  • Question mark (to expand live chat, search, or help options)
  • And so on.

3. Be Smart About How You Use Space

Use a Spotlight

In video games, you can use light and darkness to draw attention to important pathways. On websites, it’s not always easy to employ the use of lightness or darkness as too-dark of a design or too-light of text could lead to a bad user experience. What you want to do instead is create a “spotlight” of sorts. You can do this by infusing a key area of your design with a dramatic color or a boldly stylized font.

Add Clues

If you’ve ever played a horror video game before, you know how critical the element of sound can be for it.

That said, while you might not be able to direct visitors down the page with the sound of something playing down below, you can use other elements to lead them. For one, you can use interactive elements like animation to draw their attention to where it needs to go.

Employ a Mascot

For some brands, it might make sense to employ the use of an actual mascot to guide visitors through the story.

Summary

As attention spans shorten and visitors just want to get to the good stuff on a website, designers have to get more creative in how they communicate their website’s “story.” Ideally, your web design will do more showing of that story instead of telling, which is how video game design tends to succeed in this matter.

Remember: Storytelling isn’t just relegated to big brands that can weave bright and shiny tales about how consumers’ lives were changed with their products. Nor is it just for video game designers that have hours of gameplay to develop for their audiences. A story simply needs to convey to the end-user how their problem can be fixed by your site’s solution. Through subtle design strategies inspired by video game storytelling techniques, you can effectively share and shape your own story.

 

music and the brain

What’s Going On Inside the Brain When We Play Music?

Published on 

Humans love music, especially when there’s repetition that catches the attention.

“Playing music is the brain’s equivalent of a full body workout,” says educator Anita Collins in a TED-Ed video on how playing music benefits the brain. Playing music requires the visual, auditory, and motor cortices all at once

 

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more on the brain in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=brain

yoga by Western doctors

Why More Western Doctors Are Now Prescribing Yoga Therapy

With a growing body of research proving yoga’s healing benefits, it’s no wonder more Western doctors are prescribing this ancient practice. Learn what’s behind the trend.

SUSAN ENFIELDFEB 3, 2016

https://www.yogajournal.com/lifestyle/western-doctors-prescribing-yoga-therapy

With a growing body of research proving yoga’s healing benefits, it’s no wonder more doctors—including those with traditional Western training—are prescribing this ancient practice to their patients.

Yoga therapy is now recognized as a clinically viable treatment, with established programs at major health care centers, such as The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Cleveland Clinic, and many others. In 2003, there were just five yoga-therapy training programs in the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT) database. Today, there are more than 130 worldwide, including 24 rigorous multi-year programs newly accredited by IAYT, with 20 more under review. According to a 2015 survey, most IAYT members work in hospital settings, while others work in outpatient clinics or physical therapy, oncology, or rehabilitation departments (and in private practice).

Some therapists focus on physical mechanics, while others bring in Ayurvedic healing principles and factor in diet, psychological health, and spirituality to create a holistic, customized plan.

“Researchers take blood samples before and after yoga practice to see which genes have been turned on and which were deactivated,” says Khalsa. “We’re also able to see which areas of the brain are changing in structure and size due to yoga and meditation.” This kind of research is helping take yoga into the realm of “real science,” he says, by showing how the practice changes psycho-physiological function.

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more on contemplative practices in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=contemplative

sound and the brain

What Types of Sound Experiences Enable Children to Learn Best?

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/46824/what-types-of-sound-experiences-enable-children-to-learn-best
At Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Lab, Kraus and colleagues measure how the brain responds when various sounds enter the ear. They’ve found that the brain reacts to sound in microseconds, and that brain waves closely resemble the sound waves.
Making sense of sound is one of the most “computationally complex” functions of the brain, Kraus said, which explains why so many language and other disorders, including autism, reveal themselves in the way the brain processes sound. The way the brain responds to the “ingredients” of sound—pitching, timing and timbre—is a window into brain health and learning ability.

practical suggestions for creating space “activities that promote sound-to-meaning development,” whether at home or in school:
Reduce noise. Chronic background noise is associated with several auditory and learning problems: it contributes to “neural noise,” wherein brain neurons fire spontaneously in the absence of sound; it reduces the brain’s sensitivity to sound; and it slows auditory growth.
Read aloud. Even before kids are able to read themselves, hearing stories told by others develops vocabulary and builds working memory; to understand how a story unfolds, listeners, need to remember what was said before.
Encourage children to play a musical instrument. “There is an explicit link between making music and strengthening language skills, so that keeping music education at the center of curricula can pay big dividends for children’s cognitive, emotional, and educational health.Two years of music instruction in elementary and even secondary school can trigger biological changes in how the brain processes sound, which in turn affects language development.
Listen to audiobooks and podcasts. Well-told stories can draw kids in and build attention skills and working memory. The number and quality of these recordings has exploded in recent years, making it that much easier to find a good fit for individuals and classes.
Support learning a second language. Growing up in a bilingual environment causes a child’s brain to manage two languages at once.
Avoid white noise machines. In an effort to soothe children to sleep, some parents set up sound machines in bedrooms. These devices, which emit “meaningless sound,” as Kraus put it, can interfere with how the brain develops sound-processing circuitry.
Use the spread of technology to your advantage. Rather than bemoan the constant bleeping and chirping of everyday life, much of it the result of technological advances, welcome the new sound opportunities these developments provide. Technologies that shrink the globalized world enable second-language learning.

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More on the brain in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=brain

Limbic thought and artificial intelligence

Limbic thought and artificial intelligence

September 5, 2018  Siddharth (Sid) Pai

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/limbic-thought-artificial-intelligence-siddharth-sid-pai/

An AI programme “catastrophically forgets” the learnings from its first set of data and would have to be retrained from scratch with new data. The website futurism.com says a completely new set of algorithms would have to be written for a programme that has mastered face recognition, if it is now also expected to recognize emotions. Data on emotions would have to be manually relabelled and then fed into this completely different algorithm for the altered programme to have any use. The original facial recognition programme would have “catastrophically forgotten” the things it learnt about facial recognition as it takes on new code for recognizing emotions. According to the website, this is because computer programmes cannot understand the underlying logic that they have been coded with.
Irina Higgins, a senior researcher at Google DeepMind, has recently announced that she and her team have begun to crack the code on “catastrophic forgetting”.
As far as I am concerned, this limbic thinking is “catastrophic thinking” which is the only true antipode to AI’s “catastrophic forgetting”. It will be eons before AI thinks with a limbic brain, let alone has consciousness.
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Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540
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thank you Sarnath Ramnat (sarnath@stcloudstate.edu) for the finding

An AI Wake-Up Call From Ancient Greece

  https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/artificial-intelligence-pandoras-box-by-adrienne-mayor-2018-10

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more on AI in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artifical+intelligence

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