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brain

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#1 Danail Bulgaria

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Posted 26 November 2015 - 05:17 PM


I heared about a study, that has shown, that the participants of the world memory contest receive enlargement of some regions of the brain. 

 

Can you find it? 


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#2 gamesguru

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Posted 26 November 2015 - 08:47 PM

I didn't find anything on increased size/hypertrophy.  Perhaps they exercise their right posterior hippocampus enough to cause hypertrophy?  But even so, they probably cause improved connectivity (at least as a byproduct).  So it's difficult to identify one cause as to their good memory.

How to Win the World Memory Championship

When the researchers analyzed the brain scans, they found that the memory champs were activating some brain regions that were different from those the control subjects were using. These regions, which included the right posterior hippocampus, are known to be involved in visual memory and spatial navigation.

It might seem odd that the memory contestants would use visual imagery and spatial navigation to remember numbers, but the activity makes sense when their techniques are revealed.

 

Memory Champions
A study of exceptional memorizers has revealed no superior cognitive abilities, and no structural differences in their brains.  It has revealed differences in brain activity that seem to reflect the use of a spatial mnemonic; 9 of the 10 memory champions confirmed their use of the method of loci.  Despite many years of practice in mnemonics, and impressive performances in memorizing, there were no increases in gray matter, as there have been in the cases of those with expert knowledge.

In 2002, a British study scanned the brains of ten "superior memorizers" — eight leading contenders in the World Memory Championships, and two individuals previously studied for their extraordinary memory accomplishments — all people that had demonstrated truly impressive feats of memory, in terms of the ability to quickly memorize hundreds of numbers or unrelated words. The ten "memory champions" were matched with ten controls, who had no memory capabilities out of the ordinary.  Testing revealed that the memory champs scored about the same as the controls on general cognitive ability, but did, unsurprisingly, score higher on working memory (link is external) and long-term verbal memory. They didn't differ in visual memory.

Participants in the study were shown three sets of images; faces, snowflakes and three-digit numbers. The numbers, being the sort of items which the memory champs excel at, were expected to show large performance differences between the two groups. Faces are a class of stimuli for which most people have a considerable expertise in, so a smaller difference was expected. And snowflakes are a very difficult visual pattern to verbalize, and it was expected that both groups would be equally poor at remembering them.

Their brains were scanned while the participants were asked them to remember which ones they had seen, and the order they were shown in. The expected differences in performance were indeed found, allowing the researchers to differentiate between brain activity that reflected the learning prowess itself from the activity reflecting the amount of information learned.  A number of brain regions were of course active in all tasks, for both groups. But there were differences between the two groups, both in terms of greater activity in some regions, and, more interestingly, in terms of the memory champs using brain regions not used by the controls. Most particularly, regardless of task and regardless of performance, the memory champs engaged the left medial superior parietal gyrus, bilateral retrosplenial cortex, and right posterior hippocampus. These areas are all known to be involved in spatial memory and navigation.

 

Connectivity and activity matter most.  Whole brain size, and even enlarged regions, aren't always indicative of increased function.  Consider that damage or shrinkage (usually to the left anterior temporal lobe) can cause savantism or increase function... presumably due to disconnection of an inhibitory pathway.

  1. Brain Size Has Nothing To Do With High IQ, New Meta-Analysis Finds
  2. IQ tests 'do not reflect intelligence'
  3. I.Q. scores don't predict success as much as motivation

The corpus callosum of Albert Einstein‘s brain: another clue to his high intelligence?
Weiwei Men,corresponding author1 Dean Falk,2,3 Tao Sun,4 Weibo Chen,1 Jianqi Li,1 Dazhi Yin,1 Lili Zang,1 and Mingxia Fan1.  2014.

In summary, to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the connectivity of Einstein’s cerebral hemispheres by comparing the morphology of his corpus callosum with that of 15 elderly healthy males and 52 young healthy males. We found that Einstein’s corpus callosum was thicker in the vast majority of subregions than their corresponding parts in the corpus callosum of elderly controls, and that Einstein’s corpus callosum was thicker in the rostrum, genu, midbody, isthmus, and (especially) the splenium compared with younger controls. These findings show that the connectivity between the two hemispheres was generally enhanced in Einstein compared with controls. The results of our study suggest that Einstein’s intellectual gifts were not only related to specializations of cortical folding and cytoarchitecture in certain brain regions, but also involved coordinated communication between the cerebral hemispheres. Last but not the least, the improved approach for corpus callosum measurement used in this study may have more general applications in corpus callosum studies.

The cerebral cortex of Albert Einstein: a description and preliminary analysis of unpublished photographs
Dean Falk,corresponding author1,2 Frederick E. Lepore,3,4 and Adrianne Noe5.  2013.

Einstein’s brain has an extraordinary prefrontal cortex, which may have contributed to the neurological substrates for some of his remarkable cognitive abilities. The primary somatosensory and motor cortices near the regions that typically represent face and tongue are greatly expanded in the left hemisphere. Einstein’s parietal lobes are also unusual and may have provided some of the neurological underpinnings for his visuospatial and mathematical skills, as others have hypothesized. Einstein’s brain has typical frontal and occipital shape asymmetries (petalias) and grossly asymmetrical inferior and superior parietal lobules.


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#3 Danail Bulgaria

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Posted 27 November 2015 - 07:39 AM

Alright.

 

"A study of exceptional memorizers has revealed no superior cognitive abilities, and no structural differences in their brains."

That answers directly my question.

 

So, it is just the next stupid rumor.

 

There is another thing in my mind then - if the brain memorizing superiors had no chance of making new neurons, and didn't provoke a brain hypertrophy, then why the brain training games have to do that in our minds, and stop the age related dementia? Sooner or later our brain cells will die away no matter if we train them or not, and after +/- five years delay due to connectivity we will loose enough brain cells to become demented. Brain training games in terms of age related dementia seem to be also just the next useless thing.



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#4 gamesguru

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Posted 27 November 2015 - 04:56 PM

Partaking in an ongoing education certainly has its benefits ('use it or lose it'... though, not to be exaggerated) in reducing cognitive decline.  Before we cure general cognitive decline (you know, above age 100-120... this is a tougher problem), we'll cure dementias (genetic and environmental, such as LBD/AD/vascular dementia).

Hippocampal connectivity and Alzheimer's dementia: effects of synapse loss and tangle frequency in a two-component model.
Samuel W1, Masliah E, Hill LR, Butters N, Terry R.  1994.
Our prior research on patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) found a high correspondence between premortem dementia and accumulation of neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) with concurrent loss of synapse density in several brain regions. In the present study, we examined these same clinicopathologic relationships in the context of seven subregions of the hippocampal formation using a sample of 16 AD patients who had been administered three well-known mental status tests antemortem. We found NFT counts to be most strongly correlated with degree of dementia when they were seen in CA1, the subiculum, and CA4; NFTs in these subregions appeared significantly clustered on factor analysis. Synapse loss was most strongly correlated with dementia when it occurred in the molecular layers of the dentate fasciculus and stratum lacunosum, CA2/3, and CA4; synapse loss in these subregions appeared significantly clustered on factor analysis. In general, these results were compatible with a two-component model of hippocampal connectivity and function in the context of AD. The first component consists of subregions preceding CA1 in a hypothesized input-processing sequence intrinsic to the hippocampus that summates neuronal excitation and that influences cognition primarily through synapse density. The second component consists of an "output module," mainly CA1 and the subiculum, that receives the processed signal, passes it on to extrahippocampal cortical and subcortical targets, and affects cognition primarily by NFT accumulation in output neurons. A "net pathology" score combining standardized z-scores for synapse density and NFTs was significantly correlated with all three mental status measures in all hippocampal subregions except the entorhinal cortex, and stepwise regressions on these data found net pathology in CA4 to be the most independent significant predictor of premortem dementia.

Linking white matter integrity loss to associated cortical regions using structural connectivity information in Alzheimer's disease and fronto-temporal dementia: the Loss in Connectivity (LoCo) score.
Kuceyeski A1, Zhang Y, Raj A.  2012.
It is well known that gray matter changes occur in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's (AD) and fronto-temporal dementia (FTD), and several studies have investigated their respective patterns of atrophy progression. Recent work, however, has revealed that diffusion MRI that is able to detect white matter integrity changes may be an earlier or more sensitive biomarker in both diseases. However, studies that examine white matter changes only are limited in that they do not provide the functional specificity of GM region-based analysis. In this study, we develop a new metric called the Loss in Connectivity (LoCo) score that gives the amount of structural network disruption incurred by a gray matter region for a particular pattern of white matter integrity loss. Leveraging the relative strengths of WM and GM markers, this metric links areas of WM integrity loss to their connected GM regions as a first step in understanding their functional implications. The LoCo score is calculated for three groups: 18AD, 18 FTD, and 19 age-matched normal controls. We show significant correlations of the LoCo with the respective atrophy patterns in AD (R=0.51, p=2.2 × 10(-9)) and FTD (R=0.49, p=2.5 × 10(-8)) for a standard 116 region gray matter atlas. In addition, we demonstrate that the LoCo outperforms a measure of gray matter atrophy when classifying individuals into AD, FTD, and normal groups.

 


Edited by gamesguru, 27 November 2015 - 04:59 PM.






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