Sex! Death! Food! - and Patterns!?

Now that should have grabbed your attention - well, your brain's attention anyway! And if you're unsure why...

...then don't miss out on a great podcast interview by Ginger Campbell with John Medina. (To download right click and Save Target As... Brain Rules with Dr. John Medina.) We could paraphrase things here - but our advice is simply listen and enjoy for yourself.

John's book (Brain Rules) is a must read, and certainly one of our current favourite 'brain' books at present. And the website for the book is certainly worth enjoying too. There are a number of things we could take on board from these points - and even the Doing E-learning podcasts will try to take account of the principles.

By the way, if having listened to the cast you want to see how your brain copes in the basketball catching counting experiment then click here to check it out at Illinois University's Visual Cognition Lab. Further experiments are here.

E-brain training

Next week on SharpBrains they'll be publishing a full interview with Martin Buschkühl, one of the researchers who recently published findings on how motivated people engaged in mental exercise had improved problem solving ability in unrelated areas. (See The Telegraph's article.)

It has to be said that the findings didn't come as any real surprise, but it will be interesting to hear about his research and ponder how it could benefit Instructional Design.

In a teaser to whet our appetite, Buschkühl comments on the adaptive, complex and transferable aspects of the technology based puzzle he used, stating: "technology, when designed and used well, can expand the realm of the possible."

Now that's the best endorsement for effective e-learning we here at Doing E-learning have heard in a long time.

Working memory... less is sometimes more

How good's your working memory? Better than a 7 year old chimpanzee called Ayumu?

We happened across a fascinating CNN article a while ago on research at the Primate Research Institute (Kyoto University), where a number of chimps have been learning linguistic skills.

The experiment below is on working memory and numerals. Ayumu is shown a series of unique numbers (between 1 to 9) in random locations on a screen. After 0.21s, each number is then covered by a blank square - at which point Ayumu has to press on the blank boxes to match the original numerical sequence.

Play the clip below before reading on - make sure you're concentrating :-)




Amazing - and Ayumu didn't even appear to be concentrating that hard!

When repeated with students (who spent 3 months practising) they couldn't equal this chimp's feat (80% accuracy, cf. 40% for the students).

One aspect of success was age: the ability to remember a 'snapshot' of information decreases with onset of adulthood (young chimp vs. adult human). A theory on top of this is that the human brain 'loses' some of its working memory abilities to be able to apply itself to bigger and better things - for example language, and higher order thinking.

There's a lot more at the excellent CNN article, where you can even try these tests out for yourself! And if you want to know more about Ayumu and his friends, click here.

Neurons and How They Work

We love this overview of Neurons and How They Work.

The analogy with web 2.0 and the many being smarter than the few springs to mind.