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Facebook Use Can Increase Cognitive Performance

Posted on 2013/03/202013/03/20 by Jason Hensel

Jokes about elderly people using technology are plentiful. Yes, it can be humorous to tease those that have a hard time with technology. But the truth is that there are benefits if the elderly (really, any age) are willing to learn something new. Let’s take Facebook, for instance.

Janelle Wohltmann, a psychology graduate student at the University of Arizona, found that people over the age of 65 who learned to use Facebook saw an increase in cognitive performance and became more connected socially.

Yes, you read that correctly. Being connected socially increases cognitive skills. The kicker is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a face-to-face connection.

“The idea evolved from two bodies of research,” Wohltmann said. “One, there is evidence to suggest that staying more cognitively engaged – learning new skills, not just becoming a couch potato when you retire but staying active – leads to better cognitive performing. It’s kind of this ‘use it or lose it’ hypothesis.

“There’s also a large body of literature showing that people who are more socially engaged, are less lonely, have more social support and are more socially integrated are also doing better cognitively in older age,” she continued.

More research is needed to determine if Facebook’s social aspect truly contributed to better cognitive performances. Still, Wohltmann feels that the site’s complex interaction is a key component in boosting cognitive behaviors.

“The Facebook interface is actually quite complex,” she said. “The big difference between the online diary and Facebook is that when you create a diary entry, you create the entry, you save it and that’s all you see, versus if you’re on Facebook, several people are posting new things, so new information is constantly getting posted.

“You’re seeing this new information coming in, and you need to focus on the new information and get rid of the old information, or keep it in mind if you want to go back and reference it later, so you have to constantly update what’s there in your attention,” she continued.

This gives hope to anyone that isn’t able to get out and meet people, either by situation or choice. If you can be social online, then you can boost your cognitive abilities. And I’m sure this can expand to include anyone who plays games such as Call of Duty, where you’re playing alongside or against other players.

No, this doesn’t take away from the value of face-to-face interaction and its many benefits, but it does show that our brains can clearly define “social” in more ways than we usually allow in our minds.

(Story materials from the University of Arizona/Alexis Blue. Image via Flickr: Sean Dreilinger/Creative Commons.)

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Exhausted Women are Hypersensitive to Sound

Posted on 2013/01/25 by Jason Hensel

FYI, guys, if an exhausted woman is stressed out, keep the noise level to a minimum.

According a study from Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University’s Stress Research Institute, women suffering from stress-related exhaustion show hypersensitivity to sounds.

The study exposed 208 women and 140 men, ages 23 to 71–all emotionally exhausted–to five minutes of physical stress, such as hands in ice, mental stress tests, and observational stress.

The researchers found that exhausted women found sounds–some as low as 60 decibel (level of normal conversation)–more uncomfortably loud than non-exhausted women. The same results were found in men, but the differences weren’t statistically significant. The researchers say that there was no difference in sensitivity to sounds between the groups before the stress exposure.

“When you are hypersensitive to sound, some normal sounds, such as the rattle of cutlery or the sound of a car engine, can feel ear-piercing,” said Dan Hasson, associate professor at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Physiology and Pharmacology and affiliated with Stockholm University’s Stress Research Institute. “Given how common it is for people to work in environments with different kinds of disturbing sounds, this hypersensitivity can be really disabling for certain individuals.”

Do sounds disable you when you’re exhausted?

(Image via Flickr: Steve Hall / Creative Commons)

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Hot Chocolate’s Taste Influenced by Cup Color

Posted on 2013/01/032013/01/03 by Jason Hensel

Color is a powerful persuader. Red cars appear faster than other cars. Blue rooms are relaxing and help spur creativity. Now you can add that orange or cream-colored containers cause hot chocolate to taste better.

“The color of the container which serves food and drinks can enhance some of its attributes, such as taste or odor,” said Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, a researcher at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. The researcher worked with Charles Spence of Oxford University on the study.

The researchers conducted an experiment where 57 participants had to evaluate samples of hot chocolate served in four types of plastic cups, all the same size but of different colors: white, cream, red, and orange with white inside.

The results, published in Journal of Sensory Studies, showed that participants liked best the hot chocolate served in orange and cream-colored containers.

However, the sweetness (not the flavor) and aroma were not influenced by the cup’s color.

“There is no fixed rule to say that a taste or flavor is enhanced with a particular color or tone,” Piqueras-Fiszman said. “This actually varies with the type of food, but the fact is that, as the effect occurs, more attention should be paid to the color of the packaging, as it has more potential than you can imagine.”

This should encourage chefs and hospitality professionals to think more about the color of the tableware and packaging. For example, blue cups seem to quench thirst better, while pink packaging makes items seem more sweet.

(Story materials from SINC. Image via Flickr: Smokers High Life / Creative Commons)

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Greed Is More Often Paid Forward Than Generosity

Posted on 2013/01/022013/01/02 by Jason Hensel

Paying it forward is a great concept and one that should be practiced more often. However, it’s more common to find people repaying greed with greed.

“The idea of paying it forward is this cascade of goodwill will turn into a utopia with everyone helping everyone,” said lead researcher Kurt Gray, PhD. “Unfortunately, greed or looking out for ourselves is more powerful than true acts of generosity.”

The study, published online in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, is the first of its kind to examine the notion of paying forward generosity, equality, or greed.

“The bulk of the scientific research on this concept has focused on good behavior, and we wondered what would happen when you looked at the entire gamut of human behaviors,” said Gray, an assistant professor of social psychology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who conducted the study with researchers at Harvard University.

According to the study:

In five experiments involving money or work, participants who received an act of generosity didn’t pay generosity forward any more than those who had been treated equally. But participants who had been the victims of greed were more likely to pay greed forward to a future recipient, creating a negative chain reaction. Women and men showed the same levels of generosity and greed in the study.

In one experiment, researchers recruited 100 people from subway stations and tourist areas in Cambridge, Mass., to play an economic game. They told participants that someone had split $6 with them and then gave them an envelope that contained the entire $6 for a generous split, $3 for an equal split, or nothing for a greedy split. The participants then received an additional $6 that they could split in another envelope with a future recipient, essentially paying it forward.

Receiving a generous split didn’t prompt any greater generosity than receiving equal treatment, but people who received nothing in the first envelope were more likely to put little or nothing in the second envelope, depriving future recipients because of the greed they had experienced. The average amount paid forward by participants who received a greedy split was $1.32, well below an equal split of $3.

The results confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis that greed would prevail because negative stimuli have more powerful effects on thoughts and actions than positive stimuli. Focusing on the negative may cause unhappiness, but it makes sense as an evolutionary survival skill, Gray said. “If there is a tiger nearby, you really have to take notice or you’ll get eaten,” he said. “If there is a beautiful sunset or delicious food, it’s not a life-or-death situation.”

The study also examined whether people would have similar reactions involving work rather than money. In one online experiment, researchers told 60 participants that four tasks needed to be completed, including two easy word association games and two boring, repetitive tasks that involved circling vowels in dense Italian text. They explained to the participants that someone had already split the work with them, leaving them the two fun tasks in a generous split, one fun task and one boring task in an equal split, or both boring tasks in a greedy split. The participants then had to complete those tasks and split an additional four tasks with a future recipient. The results were the same, with greed being paid forward more than generosity.

“We all like to think that being generous will influence others to treat someone nicely, but it doesn’t automatically create a chain of goodwill,” Gray said. “To create chains of positive behavior, people should focus less on performing random acts of generosity and more on treating others equally — while refraining from random acts of greed.”

(Story materials from the American Psychological Association. Image via Flickr: Scabeater / Creative Commons)

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Take One Step at a Time on Stairs

Posted on 2013/01/012013/01/01 by Jason Hensel

My office is located on the 17th floor of a glass building in Dallas. There are four elevators that can take me to my floor quickly, depending on the time of day. During times that I’m waiting for an elevator’s doors to open, I’ve often considered taking the stairs and walking up all 17 flights to my office. Then, of course, an open elevator appears.

Starting tomorrow, though, I’m walking up those stairs one step at a time. Sure, I can bound up them and reach my floor quicker, but according to recent research in PLoS, taking them one at a time burns more calories.

“The advice to those seeking to utilise stair climbing specifically as a method to control or reduce weight is to ascend stairways one step at a time; more calories are burned through this form of stair climbing,” the study’s authors wrote. “For example, climbing just a 15 m high stairway five times a day represents an energy expenditure of on average 302 kcal per week using the one step strategy and 266 kcal using the two step strategy.”

If you’re using a two-step strategy, you’ll have a much harder and quicker workout, expending more energy. However, if you take one step at a time, you’ll expend less energy but take longer to reach your destination, thus ensuring burning more calories.

What exercise routines are you starting this year?

(h/t to Scientific American. Image via Flickr: Dan Eckert / Creative Commons)

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An IQ Test Alone Can’t Explain Intelligence

Posted on 2012/12/192012/12/20 by Jason Hensel

We, as humans, tend to ascribe a lot of weight to numbers. Perhaps that’s an easy way for us to make sense of the world. Consider, though, IQ scores. Can you accurately judge a person’s intelligence by an IQ test?

Not according to a recent study from Western University scientists who found that measuring a person’s IQ by a single, standardized test is misleading.

The scientists–who used an online study open to everyone worldwide and included more than 100,000 participants–asked people to complete 12 cognitive tests on memory, reason, attention and planning abilities. Participants were also asked about their backgrounds and lifestyle habits.

“The uptake was astonishing,” said Adrian M. Owen, the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging and senior investigator on the project at Western’s Brain and Mind Institute in London, Canada. “We expected a few hundred responses, but thousands and thousands of people took part, including people of all ages, cultures and creeds from every corner of the world.”

Result’s from the study showed

that when a wide range of cognitive abilities are explored, the observed variations in performance can only be explained with at least three distinct components: short-term memory, reasoning and a verbal component.

No one component, or IQ, explained everything. Furthermore, the scientists used a brain scanning technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to show that these differences in cognitive ability map onto distinct circuits in the brain.

With so many respondents, the results also provided a wealth of new information about how factors such as age, gender and the tendency to play computer games influence our brain function.

“Regular brain training didn’t help people’s cognitive performance at all yet aging had a profound negative effect on both memory and reasoning abilities,” Owen said.

“Intriguingly, people who regularly played computer games did perform significantly better in terms of both reasoning and short-term memory,” said Adam Hampshire from Western’s Brain and Mind Institute. “And smokers performed poorly on the short-term memory and the verbal factors, while people who frequently suffer from anxiety performed badly on the short-term memory factor in particular.”

If you’re interested in helping with this research, the scientists have launched a new version of the tests at http://www.cambridgebrainsciences.com/theIQchallenge.

(Story materials and image from Western University.)

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Learn a Language Easily Via Memrise

Posted on 2012/12/042012/12/05 by Jason Hensel

I’ve been wanting to learn a new language for months. However, I don’t want to take a in-person class, primarily because of time and money constrictions. I tried out different audio CDs and free online courses, but nothing stuck with me.

Finally, though, I’ve come across one website that has caught my interest. It’s called Memrise, and it makes learning a language fun. My gosh, I just realized how much this post is starting to sound like sales pitch. It’s not, I promise. I just really like the site, and I originally found it via Lifehacker.

Memrise uses a three-prong approach to teaching you languages: science, fun, and community.

“We’re obsessed with using brain science to help you learn faster,” reads the site’s About Us section. “This isn’t a marketing ploy–we’re really experts in this stuff. And from day one we’ve built Memrise to embody the very best knowledge about how your brain works, and so help you learn as quickly and effortlessly as possible. We use ‘mems’ to help you form vivid, sensory memories. We test you continuously, always making sure to give your brain just the right workout. We remind you of what you’ve learned at scientifically optimized times so your memories are always growing stronger, and never forgotten.”

Concerning the fun part: “We want to make learning your favourite playtime activity. That’s how it should be: we learn best when we’re relaxed, curious and confident, and, after all, the world is a very interesting place. So we’ve turned learning facts and language into a game where you grow a colourful garden of memory. You grow and water your memories in a garden of memory, you zoom up the leaderboards, and you learn alongside your mempals. It’s like a guiltless video-game.”

Finally, let’s find out about the community part: “We believe learning should be as rich and varied as the world you’re learning about. So with our community we’re building a kind of multimedia wonderland of learning, where videos, audio, usage, mnemonics, etymologies and much more bring your learning to life. We believe that every learner is partly a teacher, and we hope that once you get started, you’ll soon be supplying little nuggets of wit and wisdom to help the rest of the community as they learn!”

I’ve been interested in learning French for a long time (I’m not sure why), and Memrise has been the most helpful learning site I’ve come across in learning it. There are many other languages and courses available on the site, so I’m sure you’ll find something of interest. Check it out, and please let me know what you think about it in the comments.

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