Zombie Fud

Vitamin Supplements Are Good for Your Memory

Diet alone can give you only a moderate amount of promemory antioxidants, and supplementation with vitamins is necessary to boost your antioxidant intake for a promemory effect. I describe the role of antioxidant vitamins E, A, and C, as well as other medications, in your Memory Program later in this chapter.
Read More …

Hack 62. The Broken Escalator Phenomenon: When Autopilot Takes Over (2)

To try it out yourself, the best place to look is somewhere like the London Underground (where you’re sure to find plenty of broken escalators) or your favorite run-down mall. You need an escalator that is broken and not moving but that you’re still allowed to walk up. You could also use the moving walkways they have at airports; again, you need one that’s stationary but that you’re still permitted to walk onto. Now, try not to think about it too much and just go ahead and walk on up the escalator. You should find that you experience an odd sensation as you take your first step or two onto the escalator. People often report feeling as though they’ve been “sucked” onto the escalator. You might even lose your balance for a moment. If you keep trying it, the effect usually diminishes quite quickly.

6.2.2. How It Works
Unless we’ve lived our lives out in the wilderness, most of us will have encountered moving escalators or walkways at least a few times. And when we’ve done so, our brain has learned to adapt to the loss of balance caused by the escalator’s motion. It’s done this with little conscious effort on our part, automatically saving us from falling over. So when we step onto an escalator or moving walkway now, we barely notice the transition, and continue fluidly on our way. The thing is, when the escalator is broken, our brain adjusts our balance and posture anyway, and it seems we can’t stop it from doing so.

Until recently, evidence for this phenomenon was based only on urban anecdotes. But now the phenomenon has actually been investigated in the laboratory using a computer-controlled moving walkway.1,2 Special devices attached to the bodies and legs of 14 volunteers recorded their posture and muscle activity. Each volunteer then walked 20 times from a fixed platform onto the moving walkway. After that, the walkway was switched off, the volunteers were told it would no longer move, and they then walked from the platform onto the stationary walkway 10 times.

Taken from : Mind Hacks

6.3.2. How It Works

Charles Spence and colleagues1 have shown that we can update how we bind together vision and touch when we cross our hands over. They asked people to attend to and make judgments about vibrations that they felt on their hands, while ignoring lights presented at the same time. When feeling a vibration on their right hand, the lights on the right sideclosest to their right handinterfered much more (made people slower to carry out the task), than lights on their left side. That is, we tend to bind together vision and touch when they come from the same part of the outside world. So what happened when they crossed their hands over? The interaction between vision and touch changed over: lights over on the left side of their body were now closest to their right hand and interfered more with the right hand than the lights over on the right side. So, when we change where our hands are in space, we integrate different sets of visual and tactile signals.

But remapping can sometimes fail, even without intertwining our fingers. Two recent experiments2,3 have shown that we are particularly bad at dealing with information in quick succession. If your hands are in their usual uncrossed position and you are asked to judge which hand is touched first, it is relatively easy. On the other hand, if your hands are crossed, the same task becomes much more difficult. This difficulty in coping with stimuli presented in quick succession, suggests that remapping can be a time-consuming process. Shigeru Kitazawa4 has suggested we do not become conscious of a sensation on a particular part of our skin and then attribute it to a particular location in space. Rather, our conscious sensation of touch seems to be delayed until we can identify where it’s coming from.

So where in the brain do we remap and update our connections? Some clues have come from investigating the monkey brain. Cells that respond to both vision and touch have been found in the parietal and premotor cortexhigher areas, upstream of the somatosensory [Hack #12] and visual areas, which deal mainly with touch and vision alone.

The parietal cortex [Hack #8] contains areas that are concerned with visual and spatial representation. The premotor cortex is involved in representing and selecting movements

Taken from : Mind Hacks

Selenium

Selenium is an integral part of the enzyme glutathione peroxidase, which protects cell membranes. Selenium is a strong antioxidant, and therefore may work against memory loss, but this has not been tested systematically. The daily dietary requirement of selenium is 70 micrograms for men and 55 micrograms for women, and is easily obtained from grains, nuts, fish, and dairy products.
Read More …

Customize Your Memory Program

Classify Your Own Memory Status
Place yourself in one of the two categories of normal memory or mild memory loss based on your performance on the tests in the first chapter of this book, and not by relying only on your own subjective view or the opinion of family and friends.
Read More …

Hack 66. Trick Half Your Mind

When it comes to visual processing in the brain, it’s all about job delegation. We’ve got one pathway for consciously perceiving the worldrecognizing what’s whatand another for getting involvedusing our bodies to interact with the world out there.

The most basic aspects of the visual world are processed altogether at the back of your brain. After that, however, the same visual information is used for different purposes by two separate pathways. One pathway flows forward from the back of your brain to the inferior temporal cortex near your ears, where memories are stored about what things are. The other pathway flows forward and upward toward the crown of your head, to the posterior parietal cortex, where your mental models of the outside world reside. Crudely speaking, the first pathway (the “ventral” pathway) is for recognizing things and consciously perceiving them, whereas the second (the “dorsal” pathway) is for interacting with them. (Well, that’s according to the dual-stream theory of visual processing [Hack #13] .)

The idea was developed by David Milner and Melvyn Goodale in the 1990s, inspired in part by observation of neurological patients with damage to one pathway but not the other. Patients with damage to the temporal lobe often have difficulty recognizing thingsa toothbrush, saybut when asked to interact with the brush they have no problems. In contrast, patients with damage to the parietal lobe show the opposite pattern; they often have no trouble recognizing an object but are unable to reach out and grasp it appropriately.

Since then, psychologists have found behavioral evidence for this separation of function in people without neurological problems, using visual illusions.

Taken from : Mind Hacks

8.4.2. How It Works

The effect is obvious. That we can perceive the human formeven mood and genderjust from moving lights demonstrates that we automatically extract underlying patterns from the normal human forms we see every day.

Through a combination of experience and specialized neural modules, we have learned the underlying commonalities of moving human formsthe relationships in time and space between the important features (the joints) of the human body. Our brain can then use this template to facilitate recognition of new examples of moving bodies. Being able to do this provides (for free) the ability to perceive a whole just from abstracted parts that move in the right way. A similar process underlies the perception of expressions in emoticons [Hack #93] . It’s the reason cartoonists and caricaturists can make a livingshowing just the essentials is as expressive, maybe even more expressive, than the full image with all its irrelevant details.

Given our brains are so good at detecting human forms, it’s surprising that emoticons are so common and stick people aren’t. Perhaps it’s because posture is secondary to facial expression, and anyway you’d need to articulate the limbs to get the full effect. Mind you, that’s not to say you can’t have dancing stick people in plain text online chat (http://bash.org/?4281).

Taken from : Mind Hacks

8.3.2. How It Works (2)

All these demonstrations show just how effective correlations over time are in molding our perception. And not just perceptionsynchronizing stimuli can actually alter your body image, where your brain believes your hands are [Hack #64], for instance. The heart of the thing is similarif two things correlate exactly, our perception treats them as part of the same object. For our brains, isolated inside the skull, perceived correlation is the only way we’ve ever had for deducing what sensations should be associated together as part of the same object.

Common fate can also draw inferences from points of light moving in much more complex ways than rotating spheres. For the case of biological motion [Hack #77], the visual system is specifically prepared to fit moving points into a schema based upon the human body to help perception of the human form. Alais et al. have suggested that the importance of common fate reflects a deeper principle of the brain’s organization.2 Neuroscientists talk about the binding problem, the question of how the brain correctly connects together all the information it is dealing with: all the things that are happening in different parts of the world, detected by different senses, whose component parts have properties represented in different cortical areas (such as color, contrast, sounds, and so on), all of which have to be knitted together into a coherent perception. The suggestion is that common fate reflects synchronization of neuron firingand that is this same mechanism that may underlie the brain’s solution to the binding problem.

8.3.3. End Notes
Part of Jim Levin’s “Gestalt Principles & Web Design” (http://tepserver.ucsd.edu:16080/~jlevin/gp). Applet developed by Adam Doppelt.

Alais, D., Blake, R., & Lee, S. (1998). Visual features that vary together over time group together over space. Nature Neuroscience. 1(2), 160-164.

Taken from : Mind Hacks

Hack 76. To Be Noticed, Synchronize in Time

We tend to group together things that happen at the same time or move in the same way. It’s poor logic but a great hack for spotting patterns.

It’s a confusing, noisy world out there. It’s easier to understand the world if we perceive a set of objects rather than just a raw mass of sensations, and one way to do this is to group together perceptions that appear to have the same cause. The underlying assumptions involved manifest as the gestalt grouping principles, a set of heuristics used by the brain to lump things together (see [Hack #75] for the simplest of these, used for vision).

Perhaps the most powerful of these assumptions is termed common fate. We group together events that occur at the same time, change in the same way, or move in the same direction. Imagine if you saw, from far off, two points of light that looked a bit like eyes in the dark. You might think they were eyes or you could just put it down to a coincidence of two unrelated lights. But if the points of light moved at the same time, in the same direction, bounced with the characteristic bounce of a person walking, you’d know they were eyes. Using behavior over time allows you to stringently test spatial data for possible common cause. If the bouncing lights pass the common fate test, they’re almost certainly a single object. Visual system tags this certainty by providing you with a correspondingly strong perceptual experience; if some things move together, it is almost impossible to see them as separate items instead of a coherent whole.

Taken from : Mind Hacks