Undead Astronauts

only in china would a researcher be willing to openly study this:

[BGI] is about to embark on a search for the genetic underpinning of intelligence. Two thousand Chinese schoolchildren will have 2,000 of their protein-coding genes sampled, and the results correlated with their test scores at school. Though it will cover less than a tenth of the total number of protein-coding genes, it will be the largest-scale examination to date of the idea that differences between individuals’ intelligence scores are partly due to differences in their DNA.

Dr Yang is also candid about the possibility of the 1,000-genome project revealing systematic geographical differences in human genetics—or, to put it politically incorrectly, racial differences. The differences that have come to light so far are not in sensitive areas such as intelligence. But if his study of schoolchildren does find genes that help control intelligence, a comparison with the results of the 1,000-genome project will be only a mouse-click away.

(first seen at steve hsu’s site)

in a story sure to get the attention of the rpg crowd, a harvard study has shown that a person who believes he is good or evil actually enhances their physical strength.

“People perceive those who do good and evil to have more efficacy, more willpower, and less sensitivity to discomfort,” Gray said. “By perceiving themselves as good or evil, people embody these perceptions, actually becoming more capable of physical endurance.”

(more…)

another nytimes mental test. supposedly gadgets make us stoopid. we’re supposed to lose focus and screw up the focus test. i frankly don’t understand how anyone could not ace it.

anyways, see how u do.

there are some really interesting results from neuroscience investigations into sports. as with videogaming, it looks like the brain changes with practice in sports, and athletes’ brains are more efficient than non-athletes’ brains.

The brain begins by setting a goal—pick up the fork, say, or deliver the tennis serve—and calculates the best course of action to reach it. As the brain starts issuing commands, it also begins to make predictions about what sort of sensations should come back from the body if it achieves the goal. If those predictions don’t match the actual sensations, the brain then revises its plan to reduce error. Shadmehr and Krakauer’s work demonstrates that the brain does not merely issue rigid commands; it also continually updates its solution to the problem of how to move the body. Athletes may perform better than the rest of us because their brains can find better solutions than ours do.

sports geniuses may be born, but they are also made. practice is required to optimize neural pathways for efficient calculation.

Even as practice changes the brain’s anatomy, it also helps different regions of the brain talk to one another. Some neurons strengthen their connections to other neurons and weaken their connections to still others. Early on, neurons in the front of the brain (the prefrontal cortex) are active. That region is vital for top-down control, which enables us to focus on a task and consider a range of responses. With practice, the prefrontal cortex grows quiet. Our predictions get faster and more accurate, so we don’t need so much careful oversight about how to respond.

the cool thing is that a group of researchers found a way to overclock practice sessions. they attached electrodes across relevant neural regions and had ppl practice a certain physical operation. the group w/ electrodes showed greater performance and longer lasting results after a period with no practice. this is potentially a huge deal. it’s somewhat akin to using performance enhancing drugs b/c an athlete can achieve greater results with the same amount of practice.

i’d imagine that this would most affect very technical sports and sports requiring reaction time, but less so pure performance sports. diving and ping-pong might get a boost from this research, but the 100m dash and weight lifting might not. this would have to affect videogaming as well.

pro-players of the future might have to jack-up when practicing to stay competitive b/c of the difficulty in banning such a practice. i mean how could u tell if someone has jacked if there aren’t chemical residues?

haven’t read the entire thing yet, but i’ll try to this weekend. the abstract suggests a very strange result however at first glance. the researchers found that heritability of IQ depends of the socio-economic status of the parents. wtf?

Scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children were analyzed in a sample of 7-year-old twins from the National Collaborative Perinatal Project. A substantial proportion of the twins were raised in families living near or below the poverty level. Biometric analyses were conducted using models allowing for components attributable to the additive effects of genotype, shared environment, and non-shared environment to interact with socioeconomic status (SES) measured as a continuous variable. Results demonstrate that the proportions of IQ variance attributable to genes and environment vary nonlinearly with SES. The models suggest that in impoverished families, 60% of the variance in IQ is accounted for by the shared environment, and the contribution of genes is close to zero; in affluent families, the result is almost exactly the reverse.

cultural neuroscience has continued to find differences between eastern and western minds (see previous finding here). a 2006 study found that chinese and whites use different parts of the brain to process arabic numbers. the chinese in the study processed numbers through the visuospatial regions of their brain while the whites used regions involved in language.

it’s beyond strange to me that an entire swath of humanity uses the language pathway to think about mathematical computations rather than visuospatial pathways, but maybe that’s only because i’ve been conditioned to think visuospatial iq is correlated to mathematical ability. it would be interesting to see which pathway was more computationally efficient for the brain.

once the most efficient pathway was determined, researchers could study how to train students to use the best pathway for mathematical problems. another possibility is that there is no universally efficient pathway. perhaps whichever pathway has the highest comparative iq (visuospatial or verbal) is going to be the most efficient. that would take education into experimental science. each student would need a brainscan to see which educational method he needed. if this turns out to be true for math, then what about other subjects?

as a gift to all the disabled veterans (and comic book fans), scientists have found a single gene that when disabled, allows for regen to occur in mice. where normally scar tissue forms, the cells become like embryonic stem cells and heal completely with no scar like salamanders that lose their tail.

there must be some evolutionary reason why this powerful trait was lost in most animals. if the reason is that cancer is more likely to develop, then this treatment might be limited in the future to the severely injured. most ppl wouldn’t want to trade a scar for cancer or other genetic anomaly.

but if it’s due to the high energy costs of rebuilding body parts as an adult, then this could change our way of life.  this could be the lazarus pit of our day. no scars, no lost limbs, being able to rebuild organs, grow new skin, etc.