A check-engine light for your brain part 3

However, when the criteria in the first post of this topic are applied to the software in my second post you will see that there is not one single software program that meets all the requirements. So, until the innovators come up with one device that meets all of their criteria, here is a combination of tools and approaches that can collectively address most but not all of their criteria:

BrainHQ (https://www.brainhq.com/ ): BrainHQ offers cognitive training exercises and assessments. While it doesn't provide a single "cognition score," it offers various tests targeting different cognitive domains. Users can track their performance on these tests over time and receive feedback on their progress. The assessments cover multiple aspects of cognition, including memory, attention, and reasoning.

Cogstate (https://www.cogstate.com/ ): Cogstate provides digital cognitive assessments used in clinical trials. Although it doesn't have a specific user-facing interface for tracking individual progress, it offers validated tests that cover multiple cognitive domains. These tests can be administered periodically to assess changes in cognitive performance.

AlzBetter (https://www.alzbetter.com/ ): AlzBetter is a caregiver-focused platform that allows family members or caregivers to track and monitor an individual's cognition. While it doesn't provide a direct cognition score, it facilitates tracking cognitive changes over time through customizable assessments and data input from family members. It also offers educational resources for understanding and interpreting the results.

By utilizing a combination of these tools, seniors and their families can have a more comprehensive approach to tracking cognitive function and monitoring changes over time. These tools can serve as supportive measures but should not replace proper medical evaluation.

Ever hear voices?

Did you ever hear voices or your name being called, only to spin around and see absolutely no one? It has happened to most of us, some say it is fate, others say the voice is a vision, or a warning, or a omen, but hearing your name called is a relatively common experience.

Statistics vary, but it’s generally accepted that between 3 and 10% of the population hear voices that other people don’t. If you include one off experiences (like hearing someone call your name when you’re out shopping, or feeling your phone vibrate in your pocket) this figure goes up to 75%. So, having at least one experience of hearing or seeing something that others around you don’t is incredibly common. Those that have never had this experience are in the minority.

There are lots of different theories and ideas to explain why people hear voices or see visions. These include:

§  A special gift or sensitivity

§  Trauma or adverse life experiences

§  Dissociation

§  Spiritual experiences

§  Biochemical (e.g. excess dopamine)

§  Paranormal experiences

§  Emotional distress

§  Physical health problems

§  Cognitive error (misattribution of ‘internal speech’)

§  Individual difference

The truth is that we do not know why people hear voices or see visions. A study published in The Lancet Psychology is the result of an online survey and in-depth analysis of people who have heard voices. What the researchers found was that there is huge variation in ways that people "hear things." For example, the stereotype of a person with schizophrenia is that they hear angry voices telling them to do terrible things — we've all seen this in countless bad movies. But many people who hear voices say that they aren't so much "voices" as they are characters, with personalities, who are trying to hold conversations. Often, they are internal voices and don't say anything aloud. It's almost as if they are exaggerated of the kinds of internal dialogues we have in our heads every day, as we debate what to do after work or whether we should really blow a bunch of money on the new MacBook.

Indeed, Durham University researcher Angela Woods, who led the study, noted that as many as 15 percent of people who report hearing voices haven't been diagnosed with any psychological disorder. She and her colleagues believe that "hearing voices" is far more complicated than anyone had ever realized — sometimes they even involve physical sensations like tingling in the hands and feet. People who hear voices say that they can be troubling, but they can also be friendly. Often, therapies can help them understand the voices as parts of themselves, cluing them into subconscious concerns.

So, it may not be the Universe, or God or a Deity calling you, but it may be someone you miss and in the depths of your mind you know misses you that you think they are talking as if you can hear them.

So don’t worry, there is not a spirit waving about its arms excitedly as it speak, it is not getting so carried away that they have ended up volunteering you for "Dancing with the Angels" by blurting your name out so loud that it broke the time-space barrier. That would be exciting, but there is probably a relatively mundane reason for this voice calling to you.

The Power of ....Pausing

What  is one of the most important listening skills? The best communicators ask good questions and listen carefully to the answers. But what the excellent ones don is pause before they reply. When the person you are communicating with stops talking rather than jumping in with the first thing that you can think of, take three to five seconds to pause quietly and wait.

All excellent listeners are masters of the pause. Learn to be comfortable with silence. When the other person finishes speaking, they take a breath, relax and smile before saying anything. This pause is a key part of good communications.

Pausing has three specific benefits. The first is that you avoid the risk of interrupting the other person before they have stopped to gather his or her thoughts. Remember, your primary job is to build and maintain a high level of trust, and listening builds trust. When you pause you often find the person will continue speaking. She will give you more information and further opportunity to listen, enabling you to gather more of the information so you can understand what the person really needs.

The second benefit is that your silence tells the person that you are giving careful consideration to what he or she has just said. By carefully considering the other person's words, you are paying him or her a compliment. You are implicitly saying that you consider what he or she has said to be important and worthy of quiet reflection. You make the person feel more valuable with your silence. You raise self-esteem and make them feel better about themselves.

The third benefit of pausing before replying is that you will actually hear and understand the person better if you give his or her words a few seconds to soak into your mind. The more time you take to reflect upon what has just been said, the more conscious you will be of the their real meaning. You will be more alert to how his words can connect with other things you know about the person

When you pause, not only do you become a more thoughtful person, but you convey this to the people around you. By extension, you become a more valuable person to be with. And you achieve this by simply pausing for a few seconds before you reply.

Child development and music part two

Young people learn to communicate effortlessly via conversation. music, and computers, but many in our society seemingly don't consider music an integral element of language. The reduction (and even elimination) of school music instruction is an enigma, given its ancient human roots and current cultural ubiquity.

It's even possible that music predated human language, since scientists have discovered 50,000-year-old flutes made from bear bones—and a flute is an advanced musical instrument. Further, adults universally interact with infants via a musical form called motherese—a high-pitched, exaggerated, repetitive, melodic format that engages the rapt attention and mimicked response of infants who cannot understand the words. Music thus introduces infants to speech by preparing their brain to process effectively its complexities and improvisations.

Two fascinating informative new books explain the ancient roots and underlying neurobiology of music and the key role it plays in human life and communication. They are thus a valuable resource for those who seek credible evidence that music has all but ben abandoned as a tool for communication because we live in a culture that does not understand it anymore.

In The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body , Steven Mithen leads readers through the considerable evidence from archeology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and musicology that supports the growing belief that musical capabilities within early humans led to language (the opposing belief being that music is basically a pleasant evolutionary by-product of human language).

Mithen is an early pre-history scholar, and his book makes demands on readers with a limited background in the several research areas it explores. Notes and references comprise almost 100 pages of the 400-page book. Still, its breadth, passion, and conversational writing make it fascinating and informative.

For example, language and music are related in that both can be vocal (as in speech and song) and gestural (as in sign language, instrumental music, and dance), and both can exist in a written format. Music and language are both a product of body/head movements that transmit information from one brain to another. Both music and language are hierarchical in that acoustic elements (words, tones) combine into phrases (utterances, melodies) that can further combine into larger entities (stories, symphonies). These and other similarities are possible because of specific related brain properties that Mithen explains and explores to support his belief in the co-evolution of our music and language capabilities.

Daniel Levitin approaches the music/language issue from a career that led him from session musician to sound engineer to record producer to neuroscientist to his current position as a professor of the psychology of electronic communication. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (2006) is a marvelous book for folks with a reasonable understanding of music who want to understand its underlying neurobiology—what occurs within our brain when we're listening to or making music.

Levitin rejects the widespread belief that music is something experts do, and that the rest of us should simply appreciate their musical virtuosity. He argues rather that music is an innate human property that develops as easily in children as other forms of language. Preschool children playfully explore the elements of both music and language.

Levitin thus begins his book with an intriguing informative introduction to the elements of music (rhythm, pitch, melody, harmony, tempo, timbre, harmony) that most of us should have learned in school but did not. He connects these elements to specific well-known musical works from classical to jazz to hip-hop (and to almost everything in between).

He further connects these musical elements to the appropriate brain systems and functions—demonstrating in the process that music integrates our brain's emotional, rational, and movement systems in a way that no other activity does. Music is central to the development and maintenance of our brain.

These two persuasive books left me wondering how a supposedly enlightened culture like ours could consciously neglect the development of a definitive brain property. Spoken and written language are obviously superior to music in the transmission of information, but music trumps adjectives and adverbs in the transmission of qualities and feelings. Further, we began life with the music of motherese, and we often return to music when words alone fail us. We truly need to develop both forms of language to be fully human. Do folks really believe that knowing how to harmonize or play an oboe or improvise jazz or analyze a symphony is innate? Do such folks also believe that language is only about knowing, and not about feeling?

Source: http://brainconnection.positscience.com/content/262_4

http://brainconnection.positscience.com/content/237_1

Good Connection Really Does Lead to Mind Meld

by By Brandon Keim July 26, 2010
I thought this was interesting and hop you do as well

When two people experience a deep connection, they’re informally described as being on the same wavelength. There may be neurological truth to that.

Brain scans of a speaker and listener showed their neural activity synchronizing during storytelling. The stronger their reported connection, the closer the coupling.

The experiment was the first to use fMRI, which measures blood flow changes in the brain, on two people as they talked. Different brain regions have been linked to both speaking and listening, but “the ongoing interaction between the two systems during everyday communication remains largely unknown,” wrote Princeton University neuroscientists Greg Stephens and Uri Hasson in the July 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They found that speaking and listening used common rather than separate neural subsystems inside each brain. Even more striking was an overlap between the brains of speaker and listener. When post-scan interviews found that stories had resonated, scans showed a complex interplay of neural call and response, as if language were a wire between test subjects’ brains.

The findings don’t explain why any two people “click,” as synchronization is a result of that connection, not its cause. And while the brain regions involved are linked to language, their precise functions are not clear. But even if the findings are general, they support what psychologists call the “theory of interactive linguistic alignment” — a fancy way of saying that talking brings people closer by making them share a common conceptual ground.

“If I say, ‘Do you want a coffee?’ you say, ‘Yes please, two sugars.’ You don’t say, ‘Yes, please put two sugars in the cup of coffee that is between us,’” said Hasson. “You’re sharing the same lexical items, grammatical constructs and contextual framework. And this is happening not just abstractly, but literally in the brain.”

The researchers didn’t test brain synchronization during phone calls or video conferencing, but Hasson speculates that “coupling would be stronger face-to-face.” He also thinks dialogue will produce especially strong forms of synchronization, and plans to run scans of people engaged in deep conversation, rather than telling or listening to long stories.

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