The study was headed by Howard Gardner, a Professor of cognition and education at the famed Harvard Graduate School of Education. Now, some of you might already be familiar with that name. Howard Gardner is indeed the ground-breaking psychologist who first laid out the theory of multiple intelligences.

Gardner claimed that IQ tests do not capture the full range of human intelligence and he was the first to define intelligence into seven different dimensions. His work revolutionized our understanding of intelligence. Today, it is common phrase to say “different types of intelligence” thanks to the work of Howard Gardner.

But his later work was far more important….

For a long time, people believed that types of intelligences were an inherited trait. Especially after Watson and Crick unravelled the mysteries of DNA that is the blueprint of life. With this discovery, people believed that you were either born with intelligence, or you weren’t. Just like how you’re either born with curly or straight hair.

What is Project Zero, & What Did They Discover That Is So Important?

Howard Gardner took his revolutionary theory of multiple intelligences even further. Leading a research group at Harvard called Project Zero, his team made another discovery that shook the world.

Now, you might think that Project Zero sounds like it is some sort of secret government co-op for intelligence. But far from that, Project Zero’s mission was to understand and enhance learning, thinking and creativity. In line with this mission, a main part of their programs were then devoted to studying gifted or genius children.

One of Project Zero’s key research programs in this field was a study that involved developing intelligence tests for babies. The researchers also tested the intelligence for older children. The babies and children were tested across multiple types of intelligence: spatial, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, mathematical, intrapersonal and linguistic.

And this is the mind-boggling discovery they made.

Up to the age of 4, almost all children were geniuses in multiple frames of intelligence.

This discovery from Project Zero wiped away any notion that hinted intelligence is an inherited trait. It also completely throws out the myth that “geniuses” are something eccentric that is far and few in between.

Almost every single child is born a genius across multiple intelligence. Yes, your child, as a baby, shows the very same capability for math, music, linguistic and other skills as so called “child geniuses”.

BUT… the Project Zero researchers found that by the age of 20, the percentage of geniuses within a population whittles down to 10%… and over the age of twenty, a mere 2% retained their genius ability.

SOMETHING happens during upbringing that causes 98% of children to have these abilities ERASED from their mind.

So What’s Going on? and is the cause the School System? Obsolete ideas of parentings? A natural evolutionary quirk?

Anyway - I heard about this from the report by Burt Goldman titled the Genius Dip. It’s a short read and very interesting. Download it from this page.

It’s a must read
Download it from this page

Brain waves pattern themselves after rhythms of nature

The same rules of physics that govern molecules as they condense from gas to liquid, or freeze from liquid to solid, also apply to the activity patterns of neurons in the human brain. University of Chicago mathematician Jack Cowan will offer this and related insights on the physics of brain activity this week in Boston during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“Structures built from a very large number of units can exhibit sharp transitions from one state to another state, which physicists call phase transitions,” said Cowan, a Professor in Mathematics and Neurology at Chicago. “Strange and interesting things happen in the neighborhood of a phase transition.”

When liquids undergo phase transitions, they evaporate into gas or freeze into ice. When the brain undergoes a phase transition, it moves from random to patterned activity. “The brain at rest produces random activity,” Cowan said, or what physicists call “Brownian motion.”

Although the bulk of his work involves deriving equations, Cowan’s findings mesh well with laboratory data generated on the cerebral cortex and electroencephalograms. His latest findings show that the same mathematical tools physicists use to describe the behavior of subatomic particles and the dynamics of liquids and solids can now be applied to understanding how the brain generates its various rhythms.

These include the delta waves generated during sleep, the alpha waves of the visual brain, and the gamma waves, discovered during the last decade, which seem related to information processing. “The resting state of brain activity seems to have a statistical structure that’s characteristic of a certain kind of phase transition,” Cowan said. “The brain likes to sit there because that’s the place where information processing is optimized.”

Cowan organized a session for AAAS on Mathematics and the Brain, which will take place from 8:30 to 10 a.m. EST Saturday, Feb. 16. He also will participate in a news briefing on the topic at 3 p.m. EST Friday, Feb. 15. Joining him at both events will be mathematician Nancy Kopell of Boston University and computational neuroscientist Tomaso Poggio of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At this stage of his research, Cowan said it would be premature and speculative for him to try to relate how phase transitions in the brain might relate to neurological conditions or states of human consciousness. “That’s for the future,” he said.

Another component of his latest research is the close relationship between spontaneous pattern formation in brain circuits and in chemical reaction networks. In this research, he shows how mathematics can help explain visual hallucinations and how the visual cortex obtained its stripes, which are visible to the naked eye when removed from cadavers.

“This line of research on pattern formation can be traced back to Alan Turing, who also founded the modern science of computation,” said Terrence Sejnowski of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., who is a leading specialist in computational neurobiology.

Cowan’s quest to understand the brain’s workings using numerical methods spans more than four decades. Along the way he has collaborated with a series of Ph.D. students and colleagues in physics, mathematics, biology and neuroscience.

In 1972, he and postdoctoral fellow Hugh Wilson, now of Canada’s York University, formulated a set of equations that could describe the dynamics of neural networks. Now called “Wilson-Cowan equations,” they became a mainstay of neural network research. “But I always knew that those equations were inadequate, so I kept thinking about them,” Cowan said.

Then in 1985, he ran across an article in a Japanese journal that described a statistical physics approach to chemical reaction networks. “It took me years to understand how to use these tools for biological networks,” he said. “It so happens that there is an analogy between the behavior of chemical reaction networks and neural networks.”

His research career began in 1962, when as a graduate student in electrical engineering, he worked with the founders of neural network theory. These included Norbert Wiener, who died in 1964, before they could work jointly on the problem that Cowan continues to address.

“I didn’t really understand what he was saying to me until I worked it out myself. He was one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century,” Cowan said.

Source : University of Chicago
Image Source: HERE

Indigo children refers to a New Age belief that some children, especially those born after the late 1970s, represent a higher state of human evolution. The term itself is a reference to the belief that such children have an indigo colored aura. Beliefs concerning the exact nature of Indigo children vary, with some believing that they have paranormal abilities such as the ability to read minds, and others that they are distinguished from non-Indigo children merely by more conventional traits such as increased empathy and creativity.

Check out this awesome video from ABC, featuring Diane Sawyer investigating the issue:

Find out more about Indigo Children here

I was taken aback recently by a memory I had of as a teenager learning how to bake. Recently, I was treated to a lunch at a local cafe that specialized in pastries and other wonderful carbohydrates. Suddenly, an overwhelming wave of nostalgia hit me as I recognized the delicious scent of lightly crusted apple pies freshly baked from my common dorm kitchen.

Now STOP. Look at the following picture:

What do you remember? (Leave me a comment and let me know!)

As I reflected on these events, I came across this article published recently in time on how emotions and your scent of smell mysteriously work together…

Emotion Makes Nose a Sharper Smeller

By AP/LAURAN NEERGAARD

Know how a whiff of certain odors can take you back in time, either to a great memory or bad one? It turns out emotion plays an even bigger role with the nose, and that your sense of smell actually can sharpen when something bad happens.

Northwestern University researchers proved the surprising connection by giving volunteers electric shocks while they sniffed novel odors.

The discovery, reported in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, helps explain how our senses can steer us clear of danger. More intriguing, it could shed light on disorders such as post-traumatic stress syndrome.

“This is an incredibly unique study,” said Dr. David Zald, a Vanderbilt University neuroscientist who studies how the brain handles sensory and emotional learning. “We’re talking about a change in our perceptual abilities based on emotional learning.”

Scientists long have known of a strong link between the sense of smell and emotion. A certain perfume or scent of baking pie, for instance, can raise memories of a long-dead loved one. Conversely, a whiff of diesel fuel might trigger a flashback for a soldier suffering PTSD.

Could an emotionally charged situation make that initial cue be perceived more strongly in the first place?

The research team recruited 12 healthy young adults to find out.

Volunteers repeatedly smelled sets of laboratory chemicals with odors distinctly different from ones in everyday life. An “oily grassy” smell is the best description that lead researcher Wen Li, a Northwestern postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience, could give.

Two of the bottles in a set contained the same substance and the third had a mirror image of it, meaning its odor normally would be indistinguishable. By chance, the volunteers correctly guessed the odd odor about one-third of the time.

Then Li gave the volunteers mild electric shocks while they smelled just the odd chemical. In later smell tests, they could correctly pick out the odd odor 70 percent of the time.

MRI scans showed the improvement was more than coincidence. There were changes in how the brain’s main olfactory region stored the odor information, essentially better imprinting the shock-linked scent so it could be distinguished more quickly from a similar odor.

In other words, the brain seems to have a mechanism to sniff out threats.

That almost is certainly a survival trait evolved to help humans rapidly and subconsciously pick a dangerous odor from the sea of scents constantly surrounding us, Li said. Today, that might mean someone who has been through a kitchen fire can tell immediately if a whiff of smoke has that greasy undertone or simply comes from the fireplace.

But the MRI scans found the brain’s emotional regions did not better discriminate among the different odors, Li noted. That discrepancy between brain regions is where anxiety disorders may come in. If someone’s olfactory region does not distinguish a dangerous odor signal from a similar one, the brain’s emotional fight-or-flight region can overreact.

Researchers say that is a theory not yet tested.

For now, Northwestern neuroscientist Jay Gottfried, the study’s senior author, says the work illuminates a sense that society too often gives short shrift.

“People really dismiss the sense of smell,” said Gottfried, who researches “how the brain can put together perceptions of hundreds of thousands of different smells. … Work like this really says that the human sense of smell has much more capacity than people usually give it credit.”

Find this article here.

(Image Source)

I found this on the BBC website last night, and I re-read the page just to make sure it wasn’t some tabloid journalism.

Who would have thought?

Low self-esteem ’shrinks brain’

By Pallab Ghosh
BBC Science Correspondent

People with a low sense of self worth are more likely to suffer from memory loss as they get older, say researchers.

The study, presented at a conference at the Royal Society in London, also found that the brains of these people were more likely to shrink compared with those who have a high sense of self esteem.

Dr Sonia Lupien, of McGill University in Montreal surveyed 92 senior citizens over 15 years and studied their brain scans.

She found that the brains of those with low self-worth were up to a fifth smaller than those who felt good about themselves.

These people also performed worse in memory and learning tests.

Retraining

Dr Lupien believes that if those with a negative mind set were taught to change the way they think they could reverse their mental decline.

He said: “This atrophy of the brain that we thought was irreversible is reversible - some data on animals and some data on humans shows that that if you enrich the environment if you change some factors this brain structure can come back to normal levels”

Researchers are studying which psychological treatments work best.

According to Dr Felicia Huppert of Cambridge University - the early signs are that fairly simple techniques can have an enormous impact:

“There are interventions which talk about focusing on positive things in everyday life and savouring good moments even at times when life is difficult little tiny things may give you pleasure so there are skills involved in how to derive pleasure from the ordinary things in life”.

‘Reversed’

According to Dr Lupien, the fear of memory loss may be a self fulfilling prophesy as anxiety leads to negative thinking which leads to mental impairment.

“If you always think it’s normal to lose something, then you will never work to increase it because doctors have always told you that. I’m saying that it is not normal.

“So this might impact positvely on the public by saying that its possible to impact on increasing your memory performance and by saying that it is normal to have a fulfilling life, we may be able to increase self esteem among the general public - and prevent a lot of these deficits related to age”.

Story from BBC NEWS

The recent Authors@Google talks have produced some of the most enlightening talks available on the Internet.

One such talk I came across comes from Sonja Lyubomirsky, Professor of Psychology at the University of California . She’s a ‘positive’ psychologist that proposes a few life-changing strategies that you can employ to achieving a regular supply of joy and happiness into your life.

How do you pursue happiness?

How do you identify happiness?

I highly recommend this video:

A special congratulations to Edouard Chambon, who last month broke the World Record for fastest single time on a 3×3x3 Rubik’s Cube with a time of 9.18 seconds and fastest average time of 11.48 seconds.

That’s right he SOLVED a cube in 9.18 seconds. My head hurt after watching him solve it, and my jaw was hanging for hours afterwards.

Intriguing? Pay attention to kirlian photography towards the end of the video. Facinating stuff!