Memory Palaces & Avoiding Ancient Greek Dinner Parties

One night around 514 B.C., the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos was attending a dinner party. According to myth, it ended rather badly. The banquet hall buckled and collapsed, crushing everyone inside beyond recognition—except Simonides, who had stepped outside and was saved. (Okay, it ended very badly.) As the story goes, although the dead were too crushed to be identified by their physical features, Simonides was able to name each one by recalling where the unfortunate partygoers had been seated, and from the disastrous feast came an interesting mnemonic technique called the method of loci.

Simonides was apparently struck by the idea that one could remember anything by associating it with a mental image of a location. This method, also known as a memory palace or mind palace, links memories with specific spatial locations and activates brain regions such as the medial parietal cortex, the retrosplenial cortex and the hippocampus, which are all involved in spatial awareness.

The place a person chooses as a memory palace should be complex as well as well-known, for instance, his or her house. The important aspect of the technique is not the actual space chosen, but rather the visualization and the interaction of each part of a visualized memory with the surroundings. If, for example, a person were trying to remember a shopping list that included toothpaste, he might picture himself walking into the bathroom and squeezing an enormous tube of toothpaste into the sink. Creative, vivid and absurd visualizations add to the effectiveness of the method, so fully imagining the smell of the toothpaste and the feeling of squeezing the tube would help solidify the item at that particular locus.

The success of the method comes from its use of trigger locations along a familiar route—or, for more advanced memorizers, a route designed entirely in one’s mind. The technique has been employed by real and fictional people ranging from Simonides to Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter to Gary Shang, who took it upon himself to memorize pi to over 65, 536 digits and who makes my mind palace look like a mind hovel.

Though it might seem like a lot of work just to avoid writing down a grocery list, I suppose you never know when you might end up in a structurally unsound banquet hall and have to show off your visualization skills. Happy remembering.

—Kate Oksas

Sources

<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/secrets-sherlocks-mind-palace-180949567/?no-ist>.

<http://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/nervous-system/how-to-improve-your-memory7.htm>.

<http://remembereverything.org/memory-palace-the-method-of-loci/>.

An Optical Illusion: What do you mean that’s not a spiral?

We all have our own set of burning questions—those inquiries that sit in the back of our minds and refuse to leave us alone. They vary widely from person to person; Alessandro Volta was apparently tormented by the mystery, “What would happen if I completed the circuit of a 50-volt battery by sticking two metal rods into my ears?” while Paul Broca wondered (somewhat more prudently), “What does the brain’s left frontal lobe have to do with our ability to speak?”

A question that bothers me on occasion (while perhaps not quite as creative as Volta’s) is one regarding optical illusions. Specifically, “Why does my brain tell me that the picture below is a spiral?”

The image consists of concentric circles (you can trace one with your finger for proof). I know that the image consists of concentric circles, but no matter how I try to convince myself of the fact, all I can see is a spiral. The illusion, known a Fraser spiral or a false spiral, was first studied by British psychologist James Fraser in 1908. It combines a regular pattern of circles with misaligned, differently colored strands, which create visual distortion. And as if the tilted strands weren’t hard enough on our unsuspecting brains, the checkered background also contains spiral components to heighten the illusion.

The deception happens through a combination of simple image processing in the retina and more complex processing in the brain’s striate cortex, a primary visual receptive area. Orientation-sensitive cells in the cortex make horizontal connections with each other that change depending on context. In the case of this irritating not-spiral, the cells interpret the message of diagonal bands—that is, the misaligned black and white strands—that they receive from the retina as an unbroken line, creating the appearance of a spiral.

Maybe not the most dramatic answer, but at least it didn’t require closing an electrical circuit with my ears.

-Kate Oksas 

Sources

<http://www.psychologie.tu-dresden.de/

i1/kaw/diverses%20Material/www.illusionworks.com/html/fraser_spiral.html>.

<http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FrasersSpiral>.

Brainstorm Enters the 21st Century

Like learning about the brain? Wish you could learn more? We've got you covered! The Brainstorm team is excited to announce the first ever Brainstorm twitter account! Follow @PennBrainstorm for daily facts on all things neuroscience!

To Be Another

I was hopping around the Internet, when a certain headline jumped out at me: “What’s it like to see through the eyes of Another?” This was either going to be about some bizarre alien conspiracy or some very enticing science experiment. What I found was a project called “The Machine to be Another”, which was conducted by a Barcelona design collective. A team of artists, programmers, and engineers sought to experiment with empathy, perspective, and reality.

Typically in labs that explore empathy, subjects use computer avatars and answer questions while sitting in front of a screen. Video games are a common tool of simulation to study racial or gender bias. In the Be Another lab, however, there is a new method to create integrative approaches to expand our concept of reality.

Using two large goggle and earpieces mounted on the two subjects’ heads, the user’s brain is essentially tricked into seeing a 3-D, lifelike video of the other person’s perspective. The goggles record the view from one user and then feed those images and sounds to the headset of the partner. When the two subject sync their movements—by touching objects, looking around the room, and feeling their respective bodes—the subject gets the complete sensation of being in the other’s body.

The goggles were designed based off of the Oculus VR, which is a virtual reality headset originally designed for immersive video gaming. The headset uses tracking technology that allows for 360 degree viewing. Every movement that the goggles pick up gets tracked in real time, which allows for optimal viewing. The Oculus rift captures unique and parallel images for both eyes, which is similar to the way our eyes view the world. The headset mimics reality as closely as possible.

Here’s the scene: a man and woman stand opposite each other. They are both naked save for a headset that is connected to a monitor for third-party viewing. The woman will look at her hands and see hairy knuckles and a bulge in her pants. The man is quick to explore his newfound breasts. As long as the pair stays roughly in sync, the Machine To Be Another can cheat the brain and convince people that they have switched bodies.

This sounds like some sort of sci-fi version of 13 going on 30, but the Be Another Lab is focused on studying issue of race, gender, and physical disability. The most startling aspect of the experiment of the lab is how quickly the brain changes its understanding of reality. After years and years of living in the same body, in fewer than ten seconds your can brain forget your old physique and accept a completely new reality. That’s pretty cool. A relatively low budget art science experiment can make brains forget sex, physical build, and the sound of your own voice.

The brain displays astounding plasticity in its ability to pick up new languages, patterns, and ideas, but this seems to strike another level of impressive. The brain is so able to blur the boundaries between self and other. What has been such a foundational human belief—that we are ourselves and everyone else is someone else—is being put to trial by this type of experimentation. Indeed we are developing new tools to study human sympathy that can affect human sympathy.

Perhaps with gizmos like this becoming less experimental and more practical, we will be forced to accept the existence of other people on an entirely new level. We will be able to interact with someone else’s existence, either a stranger or a brother. The ultimate scope of this experiment is far from over. Technologies like this will continue to proliferate, and as they grow, our minds will need to expand with them.

By: David Ney 

Insights from the Perspective of an Undergraduate Researcher

I recently completed my first semester of independent research. As a Biological Basis of Behavior major at Penn, I have the opportunity to work in a lab for 10-12 hours per week and earn credit. I currently work in Dr. Anjan Chatterjee’s lab, the details of which I will elaborate on in a separate post. I started working in the lab last July and plan on continuing the project during this upcoming semester.

Now that the semester is over, I have unsurprisingly been reflecting upon the things I learned. I’ve realized that I had many misconceptions about what “research” entails. I’m still not quite sure where my previous views of research originated from…maybe high school biology and chemistry labs or inaccurate stock photos in textbooks. Regardless, I hope to dispel some of these ideas which I know, after speaking to other undergrads, are not unique to myself.

Here are some of the things that surprised me the most.

1) Research takes a really, really, really long time.

When I started in July, I was expecting to have completed an entire project and sent out a paper to be published by the end of the semester. Long story short, I was wrong. Getting enough subjects was one of the initial hurdles. The practical challenges of finding people who met the criteria just hadn’t occurred to me. I learned the hard way that not everyone wants to come to the lab to participate in our study, even if they already signed up to do so. I was also overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data we collected. Each subject yielded a 30,000 line spread sheet with over 12 columns of numbers. With over 55 subjects, it took (and is still taking) awhile to format everything so that it can be analyzed using a statistical program. I’ve read many studies in the past, but I now have a better understanding of the sheer amount of time and effort that went into each article. A succinct 5-page paper could easily take thousands of hours to produce. Researchers are probably some of the most patient people out there.

2) Labs are not all sterile places filled with test tubes and pipets.

Look what comes up when I type in “research lab” on Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=research+lab&safe=active&espv=210&es_sm=91&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=4jTIUumNBsbNsQSAqIDgDQ&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1223&bih=651. This makes me feel slightly better about the fact that this was exactly how I envisioned a “lab.” Microscopes. Rubber gloves. Colorful chemicals. Lab coats. I could not have been further from the truth. I guess I never really considered cognitive neuroscience labs when I was younger. My research professor’s office overlooks a beautiful pond and has walls covered in modern art. There is no “lab” per se. The researchers who work for Dr. Chatterjee have their own offices and cubicles scattered throughout the 3^rd floor of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. There are some patient testing rooms, but all of our eye tracking trials were run in a regular office at a desk. If I were to walk into the building and remove all the neuroscience posters on the walls, it would look more like a scene from corporate America than a prestigious scientific institution, aside from the fact that no one wears a suit.

3) Labs are actually social places.

This one goes along with my previous misconception. In that sterile place, I imagined people in lab coats and goggles pipetting things into test tubes for hours without any human contact. While there are a lot of opportunities for individual work, there is almost just as much collaboration. I did not do anything without first consulting with my two co-workers and discussing what the best course of action would be. In weekly lab meetings, everyone updates the group on their progress and any problems they faced during the previous week. We even had lab dinners which, while not centered around the research, definitely allowed me to get to know people better which helps the overall chemistry of the group in the long run. I know that it’s cheesy and that we’ve all been hearing this from a young age, but cooperation really does yield to better results.

Working in a lab was not what I expected it to be, but I had a great experience overall and look forward to continuing my research in the future. While the excessively long excel spreadsheets continue to haunt me, I genuinely believe all this work will be worth it if I am able to provide some new insights to the scientific community. On top of that, I’ve met some extremely interesting people to look up to as I continue my undergraduate studies. I’m excited to see what challenges and successes next semester will bring.

Neuro-Food for Thought: Free Will and the Unconscious Mind

Happy winter break, Quakers! Hope you’ve enjoyed lots of food, family, and a long break from the countless finals hours spent cramming in Van Pelt. Relaxing over the break, I’ve finally had the chance to pick up a few books I’ve been meaning to read in my free time. On my reading list were two extremely interesting neuro-related books that I suggest everyone pick up when they get the chance! Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer are both two extremely well written books dealing with the popular topic of the true power of the human unconscious. Lately, there has been a vast amount of books, articles, and studies emerging focused on this rapidly growing topic, and I’ve definitely fallen subject to the craze myself. The volume of research in this topic is rapidly expanding as neuroscientists everywhere attempt to uncover the inner workings of the mind – the levels of the unconscious brain that work to form our decisions before we are even aware of them. As humans, we’d like to think that we are in control of our own decisions, consciously determining our own behavior and actions the way that we choose to. But what if this isn’t nearly as true as we think it is? Current research is aiming to expose the activity that occurs deep in the recesses of the brain long before we realize we’ve even made a decision at all. According to scientists, an actual decision occurs deep inside our brain before we realize it, and the consciousness of a decision is merely a biochemical afterthought, a result that has no effect on our choice to perform an action at all. So if we aren’t actually aware of our decisions, does free will exist? This is the core of the heated debate going on today between neuroscientists and philosophers alike.

John-Dylan Haynes, a researcher at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, performed an experiment in 2007 that forever changed his outlook on life. Haynes put subjects into a brain scanner in which a screen flashed a succession of random letters, and told them to press a button with either their right or left index finger whenever they felt the urge to. An fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) test was used to show brain activity in real time as the subjects used either their left or right fingers to hit the button. The results were so surprising that Haynes’ first thought was to question the reality of his data. Haynes and his team found that the conscious decision to push the button could be seen in brain activity about a second before the actual act, but the team also discovered that a pattern of unconscious brain activity seemed to predict the action by as many as seven seconds. This led Haynes and colleagues to challenge the idea that decisions are under our conscious control. According to their logic, they argue that free will is in fact an illusion. “We feel we choose, but we don’t,” says neuroscientist Patrick Haggard from University College London. For example, you may have thought this morning that you decided whether to have coffee or tea, but the decision might have been made long before you were even aware of it.
Just as well, Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book, Blink, an experiment performed by researchers at the University of Iowa in which individuals are placed in a simple gambling game. In front of them are placed four decks of cards, two blue and two red. Each card in any of the decks will cause them to either lose money or win money, and their task is to turn over cards in such a way that will maximize their winnings. What the subjects don't know is that the red cards are a minefield, and can cause them to win large sums of money, but likewise lose much more money than the blue decks. It's designed so that the only way to win is by taking cards from the blue decks. The question is, how long did it take for them to figure it out? The scientists found that after they've overturned about 50 cards, most people start to develop a hunch that they should avoid the red decks, and after about 80 have figured it out and can explain exactly why. But interestingly enough, the scientists also did something else: they hooked up each gambler to a machine which measured the activity of the sweat glands in the palms below the skin's surface. These glands respond to stress and temperature in situations when we get nervous. Interestingly enough, scientists found that gamblers began to generate stress responses in their hands to the red cards and avoid them by the tenth card -- forty before they were consciously aware of any kind of hunch. In other words, the subjects figured out the game before they realized they figured out the game, and behaved accordingly.

            Philosophers, however, aren’t convinced that findings like these can abolish the idea of free will quite so easily. Many question the results and interpretations, arguing that researchers haven’t quite grasped the ideas they are trying to disprove. A group of research projects bridging theology, philosophy, and natural sciences are currently being funded to (hopefully) fully identify the biological processes underlying conscious intention and better understand the brain activity that precedes it. If unconscious brain activity is found to predict decisions with perfect accuracy, the research will truly rattle the notion of free will.

            However, neuroscience experiments usually have a controllable input and output, a “push this button” or “watch this screen” that can easily be measured but are relatively basic actions. Many critics also question whether such simple actions can be comparable to complex behaviors – pressing a button is far removed from making a cup of coffee, running for president, or committing a crime. Just as well, many philosophers also believe that there doesn’t have to be such delineation and divide between mind and body. Sure, every process must have a neural basis, and many philosophers believe this research just proves physical basis that the brain has to first work through a decision before it is made. In particular, scientists tend to see preparatory brain activity as proceeding step-by-step to a decision, whereas neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga suggests that researchers view the processes as working in parallel. He views the process instead as a complex network with interactions happening continually. "I think if we do a new generation of studies with better design, we'll get better evidence about what goes on in the brain when people make decisions," says philosopher Al Mele. However, philosophers are willing to admit that one day in the future, neuroscience could definitely disturb the concept of free will. With further research, imagine a world where researchers could always accurately predict what someone would decide from their brain activity before the person was even aware of their decision. It’s a little bit unsettling. 

So, whether you buy into the research or not, it's simply some neuro-food for thought! Next time you choose coffee over tea, maybe your unconscious mind already knew you would.