Brain Research

An extraordinary documentary on the brainpower of Daniel T, the young Englishman who could be the world’s greatest mental athlete. Daniel is not just a calculating wizard, but also a memory champion and super linguist. He speaks nine languages. Daniel, the oldest of seven children, has been able to do amazing calculations after an epileptic fit when he was 3 years old. He was even able to remember over 22,000 numbers in a public display of his ability. But how does he do it? Leading scientists explore the extraordinary world of this real-life Rainman. Daniel’s psychological make-up is explored by Cambridge University autism expert Professor Simon Baron Cohen who delves into his childhood experiences in an effort to explain his remarkable abilities. In America Daniel meets other extraordinary people like himself, known as “savants” --- including Kim Peek, whose story was the basis of the movie “Rainman”. Brain scientists at the Salk Institute in San Diego, including Professor V S Ramachandra, are astounded at his skills and discover the key to Daniel’s ability is his visual imagery which his brain “sees” when he hears a number, this condition is known as synaesthesia. To show it’s not just numbers Daniel can remember -- he also learns one of the world’s hardest languages, Icelandic, in just one week --- and gets interviewed on Icelandic TV after only 7 days of learning to speak it.  

  A brain device that can increase learning by up to 40 percent has been revealed by scientists funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).  While the device was originally tested on macaques, researchers said it could be a cheap and non-invasive way of “altering functional connectivity in humans” in the future.  The device is a non-invasive cap that stimulates parts of the brain via electrical currents. It was developed by researchers at HRL Laboratories, California, McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and Soterix Medical in New York. In their experiments, the team performed “non-invasive transcranial direct current stimulation or tDCS on a set of macaques.  They stimulated the prefrontal cortex and got them to perform a task based on associative learning.  In order to get a reward, they had to learn associations between a visual cue and a location. The macaques would forage for the reward after getting the visual cue. The findings, published in the journal Current Biology, showed that macaques in the control group took 22 trials before they had learned to get the reward straight away.  It took the tDCS group just 12 trials. The tDCS device accounted for a 40 percent increase in learning speed, the authors say. “In this experiment we targeted the prefrontal cortex with individualized non-invasive stimulation montages,” principal investigator Praveen Pilly, from HRL, said in a statement. “That is the region that controls many executive functions including decision-making, cognitive control, and contextual memory retrieval.  It is connected to almost all the other cortical areas of the brain, and stimulating it has widespread effects.” Their findings showed the simulation caused changes to the connections of different brain areas and that it was this increased connectivity, rather than neuron firing rates, that led to the improved performance. “The improved long-range connectivity between brain areas in the high frequency bands and reduced connectivity in the low frequency bands were the determining factors in our study that could explain the learning improvements,” Pilly said. Concluding, the team wrote: “These results are consistent with the idea that tDCS leads to widespread changes in brain activity and suggest that it may be a valuable method for cheaply and non-invasively altering functional connectivity in humans.” The research was carried out as part of DARPA’s Restoring Active Memory (RAM) program.    Source: Newseek