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The Mere Presence of Your Smartphone Reduces Brain Power, Study Shows (utexas.edu)
An anonymous reader shares a study:
Your cognitive capacity is significantly reduced when your smartphone is within reach -- even if it's off. That's the takeaway finding from a new study from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. McCombs Assistant Professor Adrian Ward and co-authors conducted experiments with nearly 800 smartphone users in an attempt to measure, for the first time, how well people can complete tasks when they have their smartphones nearby even when they're not using them. In one experiment, the researchers asked study participants to sit at a computer and take a series of tests that required full concentration in order to score well. The tests were geared to measure participants' available cognitive capacity -- that is, the brain's ability to hold and process data at any given time. Before beginning, participants were randomly instructed to place their smartphones either on the desk face down, in their pocket or personal bag, or in another room. All participants were instructed to turn their phones to silent. The researchers found that participants with their phones in another room significantly outperformed those with their phones on the desk, and they also slightly outperformed those participants who had kept their phones in a pocket or bag. |
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| Annie Jacobsen |
Back in the 1950s, there was a top-secret program code-named SUNTAN being conducted at a top-secret facility called Skunk Works. Its objective? To develop a liquid-hydrogen-powered spy plane. Because liquid hydrogen is incredibly volatile, early experiments were conducted inside a bomb shelter with eight-foot-thick walls. |
| Thomas R. Insel |
Most of our brain cells are glial cells, once thought to be mere support cells, but now understood as having a critical role in brain function. Glial cells in the human brain are markedly different from glial cells in other brains, suggesting that they may be important in the evolution of brain function. |
| Jeff Abbott |
I do think Austin is a great town for writers; we have a lot of them here. But I grew up in Austin, and so I didn't move here because it was a creative mecca; I was just lucky to live here. |
| Gerald Edelman |
Many cognitive psychologists see the brain as a computer. But every single brain is absolutely individual, both in its development and in the way it encounters the world. |
| Ben Affleck |
I went to the University of Vermont because I had a kind of unrequited love for this high school girlfriend. She wasn't even at the University but at another school nearby. But I thought if went to a school near her, just maybe... I was really remedial about girls in so many ways. |
| John Francis Daley |
I'm avoiding having an assistant because then I would become the horrible boss. I can't justify having an assistant as a 25-year-old; I just can't do it! |
| Spencer Bachus |
Harvard Medical School, the University of South Florida and the American Psychiatric Association have all conducted studies showing that the earlier one begins gambling, the more likely it is he or she will become an addicted, problem gambler. |
| Gilbert K. Chesterton |
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. |
| Ariel Garten |
Muse is the brain-sensing headband that allows you to track your cognitive and emotional activity. It boosts your attention and helps you become more aware of the emotions that you're having. |
| Thomas R. Insel |
We have to remain humble about our understanding of the brain, because even our most powerful tools remain pretty blunt instruments for decoding the brain. In fact, we still do not know how to decipher the basic language of how the brain works. |
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Screen Time Changes Structure of Kids' Brains, NIH Study Shows
Brain scans of adolescents who are heavy users of smartphones, tablets and video games look different from those of less active screen users, preliminary results from an ongoing study funded by the National Institutes of Health show, according to a report on Sunday by "60 Minutes." That's the finding of the first batch of scans of 4,500 nine- to 10-year-olds. Scientists will follow those children and thousands more for a decade to see how childhood experiences, including the use of digital devices, affect their brains, emotional development and mental health.
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Sleep Deprivation Disrupts Brain-Cell Communication, Study Finds (npr.org)
A new study published in the journal Nature Medicine found that sleep deprivation causes the bursts of electrical activity that brain cells use to communicate to become slower and weaker. "The finding could help explain why a lack of sleep impairs a range of mental functions, says Dr. Itzhak Fried, an author of the study and a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles," reports NPR. From the report:
The finding comes from an unusual study of patients being evaluated for surgery to correct severe epilepsy. As part of the evaluation, doctors place wires in the brain to find out where a pat...
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i just got a good smartphone
This post is a comment.
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What a Trip: First Evidence for Higher State of Consciousness Found
Summary: Researchers observe a sustained increase in neural signal diversity in people under the influence of psychedelics.
Source: University of Sussex.
Scientific evidence of a ‘higher’ state of consciousness has been found in a study led by the University of Sussex.
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Russian Trolls Tried -- and Failed -- To Push Divisive Content On Vaccines (fortune.com) 190
Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday August 25, 2018 @10:34AM from the thinking-of-the-children dept.
Russian trolls "seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society," according to a new study shared by long-time Slashdot reader skam240. "The topic became another issue the Russian trolls seized upon to widen existing rifts in America and turn citizens against each other," reports NBC News.
But Fortune reports there's more to the story:...
This post is a comment.
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Bees Can Link Symbols To Numbers, Study Finds (phys.org)
Researchers have trained honeybees to match a character to a specific quantity, revealing they are able to learn that a symbol represents a numerical amount. The discovery, from the same Australian-French team that found bees get the concept of zero and can do simple arithmetic, also points to new approaches for bio-inspired computing that can replicate the brain's highly efficient approach to processing. Associate Professor Adrian Dyer said while humans were the only species to have developed systems to represent numbers, like the Arabic numerals we use each day, the research shows the concept can be grasped by brains far smaller ...
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Cramming Software With Thousands of Fake Bugs Could Make It More Secure, Researchers Say
It sounds like a joke, but the idea actually makes sense: More bugs, not less, could theoretically make a system safer. From a report:
Carefully scatter non-exploitable decoy bugs in software, and attackers will waste time and resources on trying to exploit them. The hope is that attackers will get bored, overwhelmed, or run out of time and patience before finding an actual vulnerability. Computer science researchers at NYU suggested this strategy in a study published August 2, and call these fake-vulnerabilities "chaff bugs." Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, assistant professor at NYU Tandon and one of the rese...
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Mars Had Big Rivers For Billions of Years, Study Suggests
A new study suggests that Mars once had giant rivers larger than anything on Earth after the planet lost most of its atmosphere to space. "That great thinning, which was driven by air-stripping solar particles, was mostly complete by 3.7 billion years ago, leaving Mars with an atmosphere far wispier than Earth's," reports Space.com. "But Martian rivers likely didn't totally dry out until less than 1 billion years ago, the new study found." From the report:
"We can start to see that Mars didn't just have one wet period early in its history and then dried out," study lead author Edwin Kite, an assistant professor of geophysical scien...
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New Study Finds It's Harder To Turn Off a Robot When It's Begging For Its Life
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge:
[A] recent experiment by German researchers demonstrates that people will refuse to turn a robot off if it begs for its life. In the study, published in the open access journal PLOS One, 89 volunteers were recruited to complete a pair of tasks with the help of Nao, a small humanoid robot. The participants were told that the tasks (which involved answering a series of either / or questions, like "Do you prefer pasta or pizza?"; and organizing a weekly schedule) were to improve Nao's learning algorithms. But this was just a cover story, and the real test came af...
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As a cell biologist, Sundar Balasubramanian never forgot his rural southern Indian roots, or the traditional practices his uncle, the village healer, exposed him to. Today, as a researcher and assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, Balasubramanian has turned his focus back to those roots — specifically, to pranayama, a deep-breathing relaxation technique. He’s showing that this ancient yoga practice is about more than relaxing — it can change us at the cellular level.
Q: What made you examine this technique through a cellular biology lens?
A: In 2005, I noticed whi...
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