Laughter and Learning: Humor Boosts Retention

E.B. White famously quipped, "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process." At the risk of committing some sort of "humor-cide," a type of scientific dissection must take place if teachers are to consider harnessing the powerful effects of humor, not only to increase joy and enhance the classroom environment, but also to improve learner outcomes.

The Funny Bone Is Connected to the Sense of Wonder

Teachers understand that humor is inherently social. How many times have you heard that same "Orange who?" knock-knock joke spread through your classroom? The contagious nature of humor naturally builds a sense of community (PDF, 731KB) by lowering defenses and bringing individuals together. If the brain is faced with an inconsistency, then laughter is the response when it is resolved in an unexpected way. This sentence, "Memorization is what we resort to when what we are learning makes no sense," may make us smile as our brains resolve its inconsistency.

Essentially, humor activates our sense of wonder, which is where learning begins, so it seems logical that humor could enhance retention. A Pew Research poll showed that viewers of humorous news shows such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report exhibited higher retention of news facts than those who got their news from newspapers, CNN, Fox News, or network stations. When Stephen Colbert demands, "If we don't cut expensive things like Head Start, child nutrition programs, and teachers, what sort of future are we leaving for our children?", viewers laugh and also retain the knowledge of that specific budget issue.

A substantial body of research explains why we remember things that make us laugh, such as our favorite, hilarious high school moment or the details of that funny movie we saw last weekend. Neuroscience research reveals that humor systematically activates the brain's dopamine reward system, and cognitive studies show that dopamine is important for both goal-oriented motivation and long-term memory, while educational research indicates that correctly-used humor can be an effective intervention to improve retention in students from kindergarten through college.

Foolishness as a Tool

What does "correctly used" mean? Let’s take a closer look at some of the classroom research to find out. In one study, researchers asked nearly 400 college students to document their teachers' appropriate or inappropriate use of humor, their effectiveness as teachers, and how students perceived the humor. The results of this study showed that related, appropriate humor resulted in increased retention, while inappropriate, cruel, or unrelated humor did not. The study also discovered that humor can be perceived and appreciated without improving retention -- essentially, the student can think a teacher is "funny" but not show an improvement in retention. So, just being silly may get your students' attention, but may not lead to better retention. These researchers concluded that for improved retention, appropriate, topic-related instructional humor is most effective.

The Musical Brain: Novel Study of Jazz Players Shows Common Brain Circuitry Processes Both Music and Language

Researchers scanned brains while musicians “traded fours"

The brains of jazz musicians engrossed in spontaneous, improvisational musical conversation showed robust activation of brain areas traditionally associated with spoken language and syntax, which are used to interpret the structure of phrases and sentences. But this musical conversation shut down brain areas linked to semantics - those that process the meaning of spoken language, according to results of a study by Johns Hopkins researchers.

The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track the brain activity of jazz musicians in the act of "trading fours," a process in which musicians participate in spontaneous back and forth instrumental exchanges, usually four bars in duration. The musicians introduce new melodies in response to each other's musical ideas, elaborating and modifying them over the course of a performance.

The results of the study suggest that the brain regions that process syntax aren't limited to spoken language, according to Charles Limb, M.D., an associate professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Rather, he says, the brain uses the syntactic areas to process communication in general, whether through language or through music.

Limb, who is himself a musician and holds a faculty appointment at the Peabody Conservatory, says the work sheds important new light on the complex relationship between music and language.

Want to learn faster? Stop multitasking and start daydreaming

Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains how students can avoid letting social media and multitasking ruin their study time.

Information is being created and disseminated faster than any of us can absorb it. Google estimates that humans have created more information in the past five years than in all of human history - 300 exabytes of information (300,000,000,000,000,000,000) to be precise. If all that information were written on 3x5 index cards, your personal share of it would wrap around the earth twice. The pile of cards would reach to the moon three times.

Social media, emails, texts, WhatsApp messsages and phone calls take up an increasing amount of time. Our to-do lists are so full that we can’t hope to complete every item on them. So what do we do? We multitask, juggling several things at once, trying to keep up by keeping busy.

Research by Earl Miller of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and others however shows that multitasking doesn’t work - simply because the brain doesn’t work that way. If you’re studying from a book and trying to listen in on a conversation at the same time, those are two separate projects, each started and maintained by distinct circuits in the brain. Pay more attention to one for a moment and you’re automatically paying less attention to the other. 

To make matters worse, learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain, as shown by Russ Poldrack of Stanford. If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their course work goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised, making it easier to retrieve it. 

“People can’t do [multitasking] very well, and when they say they can, they’re deluding themselves,” says Miller. And it turns out the brain is very good at this deluding business.

How anxiety scrambles your brain and makes it hard to learn

Levels of stress and anxiety are on the rise among students. Juliet Rix has tips to control the panic and thrive academically.

Olivia admits she’s always been a worrier – but when she started university, her anxiety steadily began to build. One day she was simply too frightened to leave the house. For two weeks she was stuck indoors, before she was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder and began to get the help she needed.

With support from her GP and university wellbeing service, and courses of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), she was able to stick with her university course and to start enjoying life again.

But Olivia is far from alone in her anxiety: the number of students declaring a mental health problem has doubled in the last five years, to at least 115,000.

“And that is a very small proportion of the students who are having mental health difficulties,” says Ruth Caleb, chair of Universities UK’s mental wellbeing working group.

A study of UK undergraduates has found that even among students symptom-free before starting university, some 20% are troubled by a clinically significant level of anxiety by the middle of second year.

What does anxiety do to students? It causes the body to prepare itself for fight or flight.

“If you are in a situation of imminent actual threat, then the increased alertness and body response can be lifesaving,” explains Chris Williams, professor of psychosocial psychiatry at the University of Glasgow, and medical advisor to Anxiety UK.

“But if it occurs when trying to revise, or present a talk, or at such a high level that it paralyses or causes errors, it can interfere with what we want to do.”

Nerves of endearment: how a gentle touch affects emotions

A soft and tender caress between two people can trigger a flood of emotions, and now we may have some idea why.

Research published in Neuron today suggests that certain sensory nerve cells, known as C tactile (CT) afferents, are involved in stimulating the emotions caused by gentle physical contact.

Francis McGlone, from Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, and colleagues argue that these cells, which are found in the skin of most mammals including humans, are critical for mediating social behaviours and even in giving beings a sense of “self”.

The senses of touch

There is a general tendency to lump all our somatic senses into a single classification: the “sense of touch”. This is inaccurate, since what we call touch actually comprises several distinct sensory systems.

Mammals sense pain and temperature changes via a primordial system of nerve cells that run within the spinal cord and brain. This system can signal the temperature in the environment or the presence of harmful stimuli, and typically trigger behaviours in the search of a suitable and safe environment.

Discriminative touch, a neural process operating in pathways well separated from these primordial systems, allows us and other mammals to localise tactile stimuli on our skin.

These sensors are incredibly sensitive: they can recognise tiny details of external materials, identify the shapes of objects and allow blind people to read Braille.

Music Makes You a Better Reader, Says Neuroscience

It’s known as the “musician’s advantage.”

For decades, educators, scientists, and researchers have observed that students who pick up musical instruments tend to excel in academics—taking the lead in measures of vocabulary, reading, and non-verbal reasoning and attention skills, just to name a few. But why musical training conferred such an advantage remained a bit of a mystery.

Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University and research collaborator on the Harmony Project has spent her life surrounded by music. And, today, she is studying how musical training can harness the brain’s natural plasticity, or adaptiveness, to help students become better overall students and readers, even when they grow up in impoverished environments.

The “musician’s advantage,” traditionally, has been difficult to study. Often, musical training is obtained privately in one-on-one instruction—something available only to kids of higher socio-economic status. This meant that researchers couldn’t say for certain whether music was responsible for the better academic outcomes observed or whether some unrelated factor, linked to living in a home in a higher income bracket, was behind any observed difference. After all, more affluent parents are often better educated themselves—and have more time and resources to help children with their reading and school work. Perhaps music wasn’t the true differentiator.

If you speak Mandarin, your brain is different

We speak so effortlessly that most of us never think about it. But psychologists and neuroscientists are captivated by the human capacity to communicate with language. By the time a child can tie his or her shoes, enough words and rules have been mastered to allow the expression of an unlimited number of utterances. The uniqueness of this behaviour to the human species indicates its centrality to human psychology.

That this behaviour comes naturally and seemingly effortlessly in the first few years of life merely fascinates us further. Untangling the brain’s mechanisms for language has been a pillar of neuroscience since its inception. New research published in the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences about the different connections going on in the brains of Mandarin and English speakers, demonstrates just how flexible our ability to learn language really is.

Real-time brain networking

Before functional brain imaging was possible, two areas on the left side of the brain, called Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, had already revealed their importance for language. Victims of stroke or traumatic brain injury to either of these crucial areas on the left side of the brain exhibited profound disabilities for producing and understanding language. Modern theories on connectionism – the idea that knowledge is distributed across different parts of the brain and not tucked into dedicated modules like Broca’s area – have compelled researchers to take a closer look.

For example, language requires real-time mappings between words and their meanings. This requires that the sounds heard in speech – decoded in the auditory cortex – must be integrated with knowledge about what they mean – in the frontal cortex. Modern theories in neuroscience are enamoured with this type of “network” approach. Instead of pinning miracles of cognition to singular brain areas, complex processes are now viewed as distributed across different cortical areas, relying on several parts of the brain interacting dynamically.

How to use brain science to engage students after the holidays

Neurologist and former teacher Judy Willis explains how techniques such as walking backwards and changing the furniture in your classroom can motivate students on the first day back of term.

As the holidays come to an end, thoughts of students and lesson plans replace time spent indulging in puddings and turkey. But teachers know all too well that it’s challenging enough to motivate a class on a Monday morning after a weekend, nevermind after a longer break. To reignite energy levels this January here are my tips as a neurologist and former teacher:

What gets the brain’s attention?

All learning starts as information perceived by the five senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell. There are also millions of sensory nerve endings throughout the skin, muscles and internal organs. But the brain is only able to process about 1% of this information and it gives priority to certain things.

With the help of brain imaging, we can see that the sensory information that gets priority is that which helps mammals survive. This tends to be information that is unexpected – our attention filter first takes in sensory information about change and novelty.

On the first day back get your class to share stories

After a break, there is a higher than normal amount of new sensory information competing for access to the brain. Students have not seen each other for a while and the novelty of returning to school is enhanced by their interest in what classmates did during the holidays.

So beginning the first day back by returning immediately to routine is unlikely to get your students’ attention and can cause bad behavior and inattention. But if you know that a child’s brain is programmed to be curious about new experiences and what friends have done, you can use it to promote important qualities.

Students are likely to want to tell their class about what they got for Christmas or a trip they’ve been on. Tell them they can do this but only if they also share something that they did for others or generous acts that they saw or heard about.

Get class attention through curiosity

It’s essential that students remember the information you teach them. For this to happen, you can use strategies to make sure the sensory information you provide (through what you say, show, do or have them experience through physical movement) gets through their attention filters.

Once students have had the chance to satisfy their curiosity about classmates, you can redirect their focus to classroom instruction by starting with sensory input that is most likely to get through the attention filter. Through neuroimaging research, we know the types of novelty or change that get attention priority include movement, curious objects, pictures, videos, unexpected class visitors or speakers, changes of colour and things you do that are unusual. So why not wear something unusual? Have music playing when children enter class, open with a dynamic video clip, a curious picture, or an optical illusion?

What happens in the brain when you learn a language?

Scans and neuroscience are helping scientists understand what happens to the brain when you learn a second language.

 

 
Learning a foreign language can increase the size of your brain. This is what Swedish scientists discovered when they used brain scans to monitor what happens when someone learns a second language. The study is part of a growing body of research using brain imaging technologies to better understand the cognitive benefits of language learning. Tools like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electrophysiology, among others, can now tell us not only whether we need knee surgery or have irregularities with our heartbeat, but reveal what is happening in our brains when we hear, understand and produce second languages.

The Swedish MRI study showed that learning a foreign language has a visible effect on the brain. Young adult military recruits with a flair for languages learned Arabic, Russian or Dari intensively, while a control group of medical and cognitive science students also studied hard, but not at languages. MRI scans showed specific parts of the brains of the language students developed in size whereas the brain structures of the control group remained unchanged. Equally interesting was that learners whose brains grew in the hippocampus and areas of the cerebral cortex related to language learning had better language skills than other learners for whom the motor region of the cerebral cortex developed more.

In other words, the areas of the brain that grew were linked to how easy the learners found languages, and brain development varied according to performance. As the researchers noted, while it is not completely clear what changes after three months of intensive language study mean for the long term, brain growth sounds promising.

Looking at functional MRI brain scans can also tell us what parts of the brain are active during a specific learning task. For example, we can see why adult native speakers of a language like Japanese cannot easily hear the difference between the English “r” and “l” sounds (making it difficult for them to distinguish “river” and “liver” for example). Unlike English, Japanese does not distinguish between “r” and “l” as distinct sounds. Instead, a single sound unit (known as a phoneme) represents both sounds.

When presented with English words containing either of these sounds, brain imaging studies show that only a single region of a Japanese speaker’s brain is activated, whereas in English speakers, two different areas of activation show up, one for each unique sound.

For Japanese speakers, learning to hear and produce the differences between the two phonemes in English requires a rewiring of certain elements of the brain’s circuitry. What can be done? How can we learn these distinctions?

Strong body helps the mind

After a workout, muscles produce a do-gooder compound that protects the brain.

 

 
A good workout doesn't just make the body stronger. It also produces a chemical that may keep depression away, scientists report. Their findings come from a new study of mice and another in a small group of people. Doctors have often prescribed exercise to help treat people with depression. The new data points to why that can work.

“This paper really emphasizes 'strong body, strong mind,'” Andrew Miller told Science News. A psychiatrist at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., Miller did not work on the new study.

The researchers mapped out the protective activity of one chemical that the body makes during exercise. These data may help explain why exercise can heal a person in different ways, Miller says. The study also may point to new ways to treat brain disorders, he adds.

After a good workout, muscles produce a chemical called PGC-1 alpha 1. Scientists already knew that this stuff acts like a molecular Good Samaritan. It signals the body to make more blood vessels and more mitochondria (My-toh-KON-dree-ah). Those mitochondria are important features of cells. They convert food into the energy that powers cells.

The new study shows that this ramp up in PGC-1 alpha 1 has benefits that reach all the way to the brain. In one set of tests, the scientists exposed mice to several things that cause stress. For instance, they cut back on how much food the mice got to eat. They also exposed the animals to strobe lights and loud noises. After five weeks, the stressed mice showed signs of depression. Their symptoms: They consumed less sweet water and did not try to swim when placed in a tank of water.

Curiosity improves memory by tapping into the brain’s reward system

The brain’s dopamine reward circuitry fires up when people are curious about finding answers, making learning more effective.

 

Curiosity may tap into the same neural pathways that make people yearn for chocolate, nicotine or a win at the races. Photograph: Frank Baron/Guardian

Brain scans of college students have shed light on why people learn more effectively when their curiosity is piqued than when they are bored stiff.
Researchers in the US found evidence that curiosity ramped up the activity of a brain chemical called dopamine, which in turn seemed to strengthen people’s memories.
Students who took part in the study were better at remembering answers to trivia questions when they were curious, but their memories also improved for unrelated information they were shown at the same time.

The findings suggest that while grades may have their place in motivating students, stimulating their natural curiosity could help them even more.
Chara Ranganath, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, said curiosity seemed to be piqued when people had some knowledge of a subject but were then faced with a gap in their understanding. “We think curiosity is the drive to fill that gap. It’s like an itch you just have to scratch,” he said.

Matthias Gruber, a colleague of Ranganath’s who led the study, asked students to work through a series of trivia questions. He then had them rate how confident they were that they knew the correct answer and how curious they were to find out. He then created bespoke lists of questions for each student that left out those they already knew the answers to. The remaining questions ranged from ones the students were highly curious about to others they found totally boring.

Gruber then used an fMRI scanner to monitor each student’s brain while their list of questions appeared one after another on a screen. After each question they faced a 14-second wait during which a random face flashed up for two seconds. The answer to the trivia question then appeared on the screen before the next question flashed up.

How neuroscience can teach children about mental health

At a recent talk I gave as a Sheffield NeuroGirl, a group of three female PhD students who aim to bring interesting and exciting research on the brain to the public, I carried out a little experiment. I asked everyone to get to their feet and then for everyone who either had, or knew someone with a mental illness to sit back down again. Amazingly, only two people were left standing.

This is by no means an unusual state of affairs. One in four people will experience some kind of mental health problem, including 10% of all children. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among 15 to 29-year-olds across the globe, with depression a major risk factor. And a breakdown in a healthy brain is indiscriminate in who it targets: rich, poor, all races and both sexes.

Yet negative attitudes from the stigma of mental health problems are still very prevalent, and the perception of those that seek help for mental ill health is that they are “crazy”, “weak”, “flawed” or “dangerous”.

A 2007 study found that anticipated negative attitudes – from peers, family members and even school staff – were crucial to whether they sought help for mental health problems. So why is there still so little education on the brain and how it works in schools? Lessons could teach children what our brains do and why they might go wrong. If mental health will likely touch us all at some point throughout our lives, can we not begin to understand it earlier?

If a child breaks their arm, everyone talks about it; from how it was broken, why it hurts, how it will mend, potential complications. No-one bats an eyelid about seeing a cast. However, if a child becomes depressed, there is usually no frank discussion about what might be wrong with their brain and why they could be feeling down. Although there are treatments available, there may be a big gap in explaining the processes happening in the brain.

Neuroscience, which investigates how the central nervous system and the brain functions in health and in disease, can inform education and reduce stigma. Those of us who study or work in neuroscience are aware of the many problems the brain can face throughout its lifetime.

Learning rewires the brain

In the process, some of the brain’s nerve cells change shape or even fire backwards.

Musicians, athletes and quiz bowl champions all have one thing in common: training. Learning to play an instrument or a sport requires time and patience. It is all about steadily mastering new skills. The same is true when it comes to learning information — preparing for that quiz bowl, say, or studying for a big test.

As teachers, coaches and parents everywhere like to say: Practice makes perfect.

Doing something over and over again doesn’t just make it easier. It actually changes the brain. That may not come as a surprise. But exactly how that process happens has long been a mystery. Scientists have known that the brain continues to develop through our teenage years. But these experts used to think that those changes stopped once the brain matured.

No more.

Recent data have been showing that the brain continues to change over the course of our lives. Cells grow. They form connections with new cells. Some stop talking to others. And it’s not just nerve cells that shift and change as we learn. Other brain cells also get into the act.
Scientists have begun unlocking these secrets of how we learn, not only in huge blocks of tissue, but even within individual cells.

Mistakes: A key to learning

Scientists discover that we remember our errors, which is a good thing.

 

Attempting a new task almost always involves trial and error. We pay attention to those errors, a new study shows. Our brains store memories of past blunders. We then use those memories to improve how well we do in future attempts, a new study finds. 
 

David Herzfeld discovered this newly identified type of memory. As a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md., he combines engineering and technology to aid public health.

In the new study, Herzfeld recruited people to play a simple video game. Participants were asked to move a cursor across a screen by manipulating a robotic arm. Critically, the robotic arm and the person’s hand were shielded from the player’s view. Participants instead had to focus on a computer screen. There, they saw a dot and a target. Their goal was to move the dot to the target.

That sounds easy enough. But the researchers could impose some challenges along the way. For instance, in one trial, participants had to move the robotic arm straight forward. But in some cases, the cursor moved a little more than the arm did. Other times, the cursor moved a little less. When those errors occurred in the same direction each time, participants remembered them. With each new attempt, the test participants corrected their movements a bit. And this slowly improved their ability to hit the target. But when those errors kept switching direction — being a little too far, then not far enough — participants ignored them.

Children’s brains shaped by music training

Two years of enrichment program better than one.

 

 


Musical training tunes the developing brain, scientists report in the Sept. 3 Journal of Neuroscience. After two years in a music enrichment program, children in Los Angeles had more sophisticated brain responses to spoken syllables than kids who had only a year of training.
Researchers led by neuroscientist Nina Kraus of Northwestern University studied 44 children enrolled with the Harmony Project, an organization that brings music training to kids in low-income communities. The children began music lessons when they were on average 8 years old. After two years of lessons, but not one, kids’ brains showed distinct responses to the rapidly spoken sounds “ba” and “ga.”

Electrodes placed on the kids’ scalps revealed millisecond-scale differences in brain activity in response to the syllables, suggesting that the more musically trained brains were better at distinguishing between the sounds. This neural distinction has been linked to real-life skills such as reading and the ability to pick out speech from a noisy din, says Kraus.

She and her colleagues hope to expand their research and bring musical training to more children. “We’ve opened the window a crack, but I’m hoping it can be thrown wide open,” she says. 

 

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/children%E2%80%99s-brains-shaped-music-training 

This Is Your Brain on Silence

Contrary to popular belief, peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head.

 
 
One icy night in March 2010, 100 marketing experts piled into the Sea Horse Restaurant in Helsinki, with the modest goal of making a remote and medium-sized country a world-famous tourist destination. The problem was that Finland was known as a rather quiet country, and since 2008, the Country Brand Delegation had been looking for a national brand that would make some noise.

Over drinks at the Sea Horse, the experts puzzled over the various strengths of their nation. Here was a country with exceptional teachers, an abundance of wild berries and mushrooms, and a vibrant cultural capital the size of Nashville, Tennessee. These things fell a bit short of a compelling national identity. Someone jokingly suggested that nudity could be named a national theme—it would emphasize the honesty of Finns. Someone else, less jokingly, proposed that perhaps quiet wasn’t such a bad thing. That got them thinking.

A few months later, the delegation issued a slick “Country Brand Report.” It highlighted a host of marketable themes, including Finland’s renowned educational system and school of functional design. One key theme was brand new: silence. As the report explained, modern society often seems intolerably loud and busy. “Silence is a resource,” it said. It could be marketed just like clean water or wild mushrooms. “In the future, people will be prepared to pay for the experience of silence.”

People already do. In a loud world, silence sells. Noise-canceling headphones retail for hundreds of dollars; the cost of some weeklong silent meditation courses can run into the thousands. Finland saw that it was possible to quite literally make something out of nothing.

There’s a method to the madness of the teenage brain.

Dude, Where’s My Frontal Cortex?

In the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, a few hours east of San Francisco, are the Moaning Caverns, a cave system that begins, after a narrow, twisting descent of 30-some feet, with an abrupt 180-foot drop. The Park Service has found ancient human skeletons at the bottom of the drop. Native Americans living there at the time didn’t make human sacrifices. Instead, these explorers took one step too far in the gloom. The skeletons belonged to adolescents.

No surprises there. After all, adolescence is the time of life when someone is most likely to join a cult, kill, be killed, invent an art form, help overthrow a dictator, ethnically cleanse a village, care for the needy, transform physics, adopt a hideous fashion style, commit to God, and be convinced that all the forces of history have converged to make this moment the most consequential ever, fraught with peril and promise.

For all this we can thank the teenage brain. Some have argued adolescence is a cultural construct. In traditional cultures, there is typically a single qualitative transition to puberty. After that, the individual is a young adult. Yet the progression from birth to adulthood is not smoothly linear. The teenage brain is unique. It’s not merely an adult brain that is half-cooked or a child’s brain left unrefrigerated for too long. Its distinctiveness arises from a key region, the frontal cortex, not being fully developed. This largely explains the turbulence of adolescence. It also reflects an important evolutionary pressure.

The frontal cortex is the most recently evolved part of the human brain. It’s where the sensible mature stuff happens: long-term planning, executive function, impulse control, and emotional regulation. It’s what makes you do the right thing when it’s the harder thing to do. But its neurons are not fully wired up until your mid-20s. Why?

Can you learn to taste and smell the letter B?

Synaesthesia is a relatively rare condition that gives people extraordinary perceptual experiences from everyday normal sensory input. For example, someone with synaesthesia might be able to taste or hear colours.

Scientific studies have identified many different types of synaesthesia such as spatial associations for numbers, days, and months, or even colours experiences for different swimming styles. Although not all of these experiences have been scientifically validated, there exist about 60 different reported forms of synaesthesia including grapheme-colour synaesthesia, where a letter printed in black triggers a highly specific and consistent colour experience.

What is common to all the different forms of synaesthesia is that the experiences are involuntarily and automatically triggered by something, a so-called inducing stimulus or what is simply called an “inducer”.

Although idiosyncratic, synaesthetic experiences are consistent over time within the same individual. So while “A” may elicit a red colour experience for one synaesthete and a blue colour for another, it will always elicit the same colour experience for a specific individual. For most synaesthetic individuals, synaesthetic experiences have perceptual qualities. For instance, grapheme-colour synaesthesia entails the subjective experience of seeing colours.

Owww! The science of pain

Scientists are homing in on how and why people experience this vital sensation.

 

Imagine a life without pain. No throbbing headaches. No stinging sunburns. No aching joints. If you think that sounds great, think again.

Some people can’t feel pain. They’re born that way. They also tend to die young — unlike, say, people who cannot see or hear, notes Luda Diatchenko. “Pain is much more important for survival,” explains the pain researcher at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Pain protects us. When you touch a hot stove, you recoil in pain. That sensation helps you avoid getting a burn that could be dangerous — even deadly. The throbbing of a broken foot tells you to stay off it until it heals, so you don’t do more damage. Without those signals, we’d all be in trouble. Big trouble.

Pain from an injury — such as a broken hand — serves an important purpose. That pain warns us to protect the injured tissue from further damage.

Some pain is straightforward. Burn your skin, pull a muscle or break a bone, and you feel discomfort. This short-term effect is called acute pain. Other pain can last months or years. Called chronic pain, its cause often remains a mystery. In fact, “sometimes the nervous system can get it wrong,” says Steve Prescott. “You have pain that shouldn’t be there,” explains this pain researcher at the University of Toronto, Canada, and the local Hospital for Sick Children.

Scientists are still working out the different causes of pain, and the best treatment for each type. The biology of pain is complex. But the good news: Researchers are learning more about it every day.

Our dependence on digital devices may affect sleep and memory

As smartphones have become ubiquitous, parents and teachers have voiced concerns that a technology-rich lifestyle is doing youngsters harm. Research on this question is still in its infancy, but other branches of study can give us a clue to what we are likely to find. Studies on stress, sleep and memory suggest how modern technology might influence our brains and behaviour.

Need for speed

The speed of modern technology requires us to process more information in a given amount of time than before. This effect is enhanced when we use multiple devices at once. This intensity of stimulation, and the speed of information processing it requires, affect the nervous system in different ways.

Such stimulation activates the body’s stress response system in order to allow us to deal effectively with the situation. That response evolved in humans to deal with immediate stressors, such as being chased by a predator. It is beneficial when the stress, or intense stimulation, is short term. For an athlete about to compete, a student about to sit an exam, or a lawyer about to cross-examine a witness, the burst of adrenaline and focus that the stress response provides are useful to successfully completing the task at hand.

However, there is a growing body of evidence that chronic activation of this system can be damaging to our health. The stress response affects all sorts of body functions, from how we store energy to how our immune systems work, and continuous activation of this response may influence our susceptibility to eating disorders, autoimmune diseases, depression and addiction.