Students at a School in the Cloud lab in India investigate a big question on their own in a SOLE. At the newly-opened SOLE Central at Newcastle University, research will be conducted on this type of learning. Photo: School in the Cloud
Picture a classroom teacher without a lesson plan — a teacher who instead asks students an open-ended question to explore: Can animals think? Did dinosaurs exist? What is a soul?
With the opening of Newcastle University’s SOLE Central on Monday, this vision is coming to life, in a research center where the concept can be tweaked and improved as it rolls out to the wider world.
SOLE Central is the first global hub for research into self-organized learning environments (SOLEs) – the style of learning championed by TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra. In his 2013 prize-winning wish, Mitra offered up a vision of education that combines the resources of the Internet with a child’s own sense of curiosity. The School in the Cloud, as he calls it, is a global experiment where kids puzzle through big questions and ideas on their own with minimal assistance, teaching one another in the process. Mitra’s SOLE concept is being piloted at seven School in the Cloud labs in the UK and India, and SOLE Central will build on this, bringing together academic researchers, educators, policymakers and entrepreneurs to help test this concept as a model for primary education.
Mitra will serve as the Director of SOLE Central. His initial research suggests that children in SOLE environments can learn almost anything by themselves and that they truly absorb the subjects they research – often years ahead of their age group. But more research needs to be conducted, recorded and housed in one place. This is the reasoning behind SOLE Central at Newcastle.
Sugata Mitra looks dreamily in the distance at the opening of SOLE Central. Photo: Alexander Wilson/Zander Photography
“SOLE Central will enable us to make a valuable contribution to the education of children worldwide,” says Newcastle University Vice-Chancellor Chris Brink. “It will make a lasting legacy of what Sugata has started.”
James Stanfield, the director of the School in the Cloud project, played a major role in setting up SOLE Central. As he says: “While we love the no-nonsense approach of educators and practitioners who are just getting on and doing it, we also recognize the need to better understand the impact of SOLEs on children’s learning and development over time and how this differs in different contexts around the world. The new research center will allow us to catch up, so that the research continuously feeds into and informs practice, and vice versa.”
SOLE Central will host Ph.D. students exploring a range of subjects, including the impact of SOLEs on reading comprehension in schools in New York and the potential of SOLEs to improve learning after school. Researchers here will use sensors to observe students’ activity on computers, and look at the kinds of architecture that maximize self-organized learning. Other researchers have expressed interest in looking at self-organization in the work environment.
Data used for analysis at SOLE Central will come from the School in the Cloud project, as well as from collaborations with partners like Microsoft and Pencils of Promise. In all, this new research center represents an important step forward. Because, as Mitra puts it, “SOLEs are the first step towards preparing our children for a future we can barely imagine.”
Find out more about Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize wish »
Find out how you can bring SOLEs to your community with our SOLE toolkit and resources »
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Before Danielle Thomson was our TED Prize researcher, she wrote trivia for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and spent years finding difficult-to-source info for The Late Show with David Letterman. And she has quickly established herself as our staff secret weapon. When one of us can’t get our hands on a piece of information that we need, we turn to Danielle and — voila! — there it is.
We asked Danielle to share some of her best research tips to help you in those “why can’t I find this?” moments. Here’s what she had to say:
- There are no new questions. Have a research question? Trust me, it’s been asked before. Put your exact question into quotations as a search term, and you will find, at the very least, a lead to your answer. Want to find out how much of the ocean has been explored? Type “How much of the ocean has been explored” into your search engine, and you will likely get your answer.
. - Didn’t get your answer from the above? Try working backwards. If the answer you are looking for doesn’t pop up, then work backwards from how you think the answer would be phrased. Try out different chunks of the question to get you going in the right direction. With that ocean example, you are likely looking for a percentage — so instead, search the phrase “percent of the ocean” and see if that gets you any closer.
. - If searching for something less specific, channel your inner writer. If you are trying to research something that has the potential for multiple answers, then think about common phrasings that a writer would use to describe the subject. For example — if you were searching for stories about people who collaborated after meeting at TED, search for phrases like “first met at TED,” “were introduced at TED,” or “while attending TED,” as those terms would likely be used by a writer to explain the concept.
. - Nexis is nice, but Google is great. Yes, there are pricy database research tools that are wonderful to have access to. But Google is my search engine of choice — with the advent of blogs and online archives, it is often actually better and more complete. While it depends on the scope and timeframe of your research project, if you are searching for breaking or current news issues, start with Google.
. - Google doesn’t have your answers? Google Books might. As much as I love — and begin all of my searches with — a simple Google search, Google Books is my favorite resource when a deeper dive is necessary. A majority of the books are fully readable within the digital database, and the ability to search for phrases within the books is a game changer. Use tips #1, 2, and 3 while searching through the pages of a book, and a wealth of information will appear.
. - Follow your leads — even if they don’t feel like leads! When you are searching for things on Google, never stop searching at page one. Not even page two. Follow the results to at least page six or seven as smaller, less popular articles that seemingly have less relevance might hold the key to what you are looking for. Never give up. The Internet, as we know it, holds all the answers!
. - Message boards aren’t just for sports fans and gossip. No matter what issue you are researching, there is very likely a community that has formed around that issue. It might feel a little old school, but if you hit a complete and total wall, consider joining a relevant message board and asking your question, or even calling up that association. There are many people with expertise in your subject who might be willing to put you on the right track.
. - If it feels creepy, it means you’re close. This advice pertains more to research about a public figure. Oftentimes, the accumulation of a lot of knowledge about a specific person can make you feel a little awkward. But the more you know that you didn’t know before just means that you are putting pieces together that others may have missed. On a down day at an old job, I (jokingly) committed to uncovering “Deep Throat” after reading rumors that the then-unnamed informant was in his final days. After an entire day of combing through information and feeling increasingly icky as I searched, I stood up and declared to the room that W. Mark Felt was my best guess. And I was right. I have witnesses.
. - Use multiple sources that appear to offer the same information. I know, I know, “use multiple sources” is Research 101. But don’t disregard sources that seem to relay the same information as your first. Sometimes articles that are 95% the same hold the crucial difference that you are looking for. For example, when I was at The Late Show, I was asked to construct a complete timeline of the “Miracle on the Hudson” flight for an appearance by Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and his flight crew. At that point, none existed. So after reading what felt like 50 versions of the same article, I was able to extract a small line from each that helped me create a complete list of events. Tedious, to be sure, but it’s effective.
. - Need someone’s email address? You can probably guess it. Hunting down e-mail addresses isn’t as hard as it may sound — they are usually pretty predictable. First, make sure you have the proper spelling of the person’s first and last name. Second, find the organization’s URL, then do a simple search of “@________.” Your search results will give you a sense of the organization’s e-mail structure: the options are usually first name, first initial/last name, and then the ever-popular first name dot last name. Would it be danielle@ted.com, d.thomson@ted.com, or danielle.thomson@ted.com? Chances are, it’ll be obvious after just a little bit of searching. Try sending a message — if it bounces back, guess again. If it doesn’t, the person you want will likely be reading it.
Have any research tips that you love? Share them in the comments.
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Scientific research is generating far more data than the average researcher can get through. Meanwhile, modern computing has yet to catch up with the superior discernment of the human eye. The solution? Enlist the help of citizen scientists. British astronomer and web developer Robert Simpson is part of the online platform Zooniverse, which lets more than one million volunteers from around the world lend a hand to a variety of projects — everything from mapping the Milky Way to hunting for exoplanets to counting elephants to identifying cancer cells — accelerating important research and making their own incredible discoveries along the way.
At TED2014, Simpson took us through a few of Zooniverse’s 20-plus projects (with more on the way), some of which have led to startling discoveries — including a planet with four suns. Below, an edited transcript of our conversation.
Are you a scientist?
Well, I’m a distracted astronomer. Yes, I’m an astronomer at University of Oxford. But I’m there to create crowdsourcing projects where we put data — usually images, but sometimes videos or sound — online, and ask the public to do research tasks that we used to ask postgrads to do. This helps us go through lots and lots and lots of data very quickly — which means scientists are free to concentrate on the hard, analytical parts of the problem.
So you’re giving volunteers the grunt work, basically?
Yeah, but what’s weird is that people love it. And not only do they enjoy it, and engage with each other online, they make discoveries, too. That’s what’s so special about it. We don’t just get the scientists’ science done. We open up the possibility for everyone to start participating in creating their own science projects using data.
We have really sophisticated computers. What can the human eye detect that a machine can’t?
A lot. I mean, a lot. With Zooniverse’s original project, Galaxy Zoo — which asked volunteers to discern between spiral galaxies versus elliptical galaxies — that was something that computers really couldn’t do at the time. Actually, they still really can’t do it unless we use the human data that we’ve gathered to train them. The computer can get it right maybe 85 percent of the time. But the 15 percent where it fails are the most interesting objects. So the reason it fails is they’re weird, funny shapes or funny colors. There’s something about them that’s slightly abnormal. These are the objects people can identify that the computer can’t — and those are precisely the ones that are scientifically interesting. So by definition, the computer isn’t doing the bit we want it to do.
Examples of the different types of galaxies Zooniverse volunteers help categorize. Image: GalaxyZoo.org
Having said that, we’ve been able to train the computer to do a much better job based on the human answer, which is great news. But still, we want to ask for more — we want to cover weird, harder galaxies. So that project will just keep going, because people will always be looking at the harder set.
In another example, our project Planet Hunters has people looking through light curve data from stars, gathered using Kepler. So we stare at 150,000 stars, and watch the light from them. The whole point of doing this is to occasionally catch a planet passing in front of the star, and see a dip in light as it goes past. That dip can tell you how big the planet is, how often the planet’s going around the star, all sorts of stuff. You’ve just got to stare for long enough, and you’ve got to do it with a really, really, really good instrument.
Now, NASA and the Kepler team have used computer algorithms to look through this data for years, and they find lots of planets. But based on our experience with galaxies, we thought there must be stuff in this data that people will see that the computer can’t, because a computer is trained to look for certain things. It’s programmed by a person. Sure enough, we found planets that they didn’t find. And we found ones that are in weird, amazing configurations — some of which don’t make any physical sense — but they exist. For example, we found a planet in a seven-planet system around a sun-like star. That was an amazing discovery, because the more planets you have, the more crazy and chaotic all these dips get as they go back and forth.
Do you give each volunteer one star to look at?
No, it’s a bit like the galaxies. There will be something like 10 or 15 people who look at each one. But we can email them and say, “You found a planet!” — which is quite a fun email to send. A lot of those people have become authors on papers, because we can’t offer the naming rights. But we can say, “You’re a planet discoverer, and without you, we wouldn’t know this planet exists.”
What’s the most extraordinary thing your volunteers have found?
With one of the first planets we found, there were two stars in the middle, orbiting around each other — and orbiting those was a planet. And then outside of all of that are two more stars that orbit each other, and orbit the entire thing, twisting around. So this planet has four suns — two of which go up and down together in the night sky, and are very bright. The other two are a bit fainter, and go around together on the outside. It’s an amazing idea, but it’s exactly the sort of system that a computer can’t find.
We also found a planet with two suns, like Tatooine. The Kepler team announced it, then we looked, and realized we had it too, we just hadn’t gotten there quick enough with the press release. So we’ve found weird and wonderful stuff.
When the human-generated data comes back, is there someone at Zooniverse that is responsible for analyzing it?
We rely on statistics to group and sort the crowd’s work. It used to be that we simply got everything looked at about 50 times, and the average or median answer was all we wanted. But now we’re a bit cleverer about it.
For example, Snapshot Serengeti is a biodiversity project about the interaction of species within Serengeti National Park. The researchers want to study the populations of lions, hyenas, cheetahs and leopards, so they placed 200 cameras in the park. Now, they knew this was a lot, but they never realized they’d end up with quite as much data as they did. The motion-triggered cameras go off because the sun comes up at a certain angle, hot-air balloons with tourists go past, the grass waves. They’re simply overwhelmed by the number of images generated. They have something like 1.7 million to go through — and two researchers. They can’t even try and do it on their own.
Examples of images from the Snapshot Serengeti project. Image: Zooniverse
I think 60 percent of the data turned out to be waving grass. So we said, “Okay, well, if three out of five people see an image and say it’s grass, we’ll just remove that one from the system.” Then you end up with more and more animals to see as the grass photos get deleted. But after that, everything’s just statistical. Each image is viewed something like 20 times. From there, we structure the database. All right: here’s all the giraffes.
I actually have a poster in my office which is a big photo mosaic of a wildebeest — known as the “cheetah burgers” of the Serengeti, because they’re just eaten constantly by the cheetahs — made up of images of wildebeests, all identified by Zooniverse volunteers. We did the same with zebra, lions and elephants as well, just for fun. We’d suddenly realized we could just click a button and get 17,000 pictures of elephants.
What sorts of unusual things do human eyes detect on the Serengeti project?
In Snapshot Serengeti, we don’t ask people to tell us about the birds, because the researchers who are working on it don’t really care about them. So we just have a button called “bird.” There are a bunch of volunteers on the project who have said, well, we happen to know about birds. So they’ve been systematically tagging all the bird pictures, and because of their enthusiasm and participation, we’ve catalogued all the birds as well, for free.
And the bird data could be valuable to someone someday.
Exactly. They are really just adding another group of species to our list.
A good category is fire, actually. You get fire in the Serengeti a lot, and so people have been hashtagging fire as well. Humans is a fun one too, because there are humans in the pictures. There are the rangers who set the cameras up, do test shots with a clapperboard. The only time we’ve ever had to remove any data from a project was because some tourists set up camp, unwittingly, next to one of the cameras. Nothing too rude, but it was, you know, not dignified.
You should warn people.
We thought that no one would ever camp there. It’s in the middle of the Serengeti. It’s probably dangerous.
In the cancer research project Cell Slider, you mentioned that people are looking for patterns. What are these patterns made of?
Cell Slider takes data from anonymized medical research trials that were run out of Cambridge, UK, and they’ve been dyed certain colors. We ask people to look at the exact same images the researchers look at if they want to identify cancerous cells and tumors, or even size abnormalities in the tissue. We give examples to guide them, and there’s a brief tutorial. It’s just pattern recognition, but this one of those tasks that PhD students would have spent half their week doing. Now they have their whole week back, which is really is speeding up their work.
Examples of data to be classified on CellSlider.net. Image: Zooniverse.com
We have another medical project, called Worm Watch Lab. We watch nematode worms that lay eggs in petri dishes. A computer can do a lot of clever recognition around these worms, but it cannot tell you when it lays the eggs. And so we show volunteers video clips of the worms, and they have to hit the “Z” key — like a game almost — when they see an egg being laid. I think it’s absolutely disgusting, and it creeps me out to even watch them. They’re so horrible, these tiny, horrible microscopic worms — but this is again cancer research. The worms have been given various genetic mutations, and one of the phenotypes for the genetic mutation that seems to correlate with cancer has to do with egg-laying capabilities.
You’ve learned a lot about lots of different kinds of science that you wouldn’t otherwise have been exposed to.
Yes, and this is the amazing thing — once we stepped out of astronomy, all these people come to us with all these amazing scientific stories, and we can help them speed it up. And I get to be published in journals that are nowhere near my expertise, which is quite fun as well.
One of the appealing aspects of Zooniverse is its social platform. How is community-based discussion built in?
There’s a discussion platform alongside all of our projects called Talk. Once volunteers are finished “classifying” an object, we ask, “Do you want to discuss this object?” You leap onto the discussion platform, we see the same picture, and you can make a comment on it. So you might say “Ah, this is very nice.” Or you might say, “Is this a spiral galaxy?” Maybe you’re not sure. Or “Is that an elephant in the corner?” Or “Hey, this is really interesting: there’s three birds on this elephant’s back. Why is that?”
The same platform is used by everyone in the system, so the scientists see the same thing, and can answer people’s questions. You’ll also see everything anyone’s ever said about the picture. So you can land on something strange and it turns out 25 other people also noticed it, and you can begin a conversation about it. It’s through this process that unusual things have been discovered.
How do you monitor the community forum? Aren’t the scientists too busy with research to watch the boards?
We allow volunteers to say if they’d like to be a moderator, so at the beginning of each project, a couple of scientists will choose moderators. After that, it starts to take care of itself. The scientists are generally in there answering questions when possible, if they are not too overwhelmed. But often, there are whole groups of scientists eager to help people.
This means that the scientists get to know a lot of the more of the dedicated users, the people who come back again and again. And they can ask them for specific help, say, “Hey, I’ve got this project where I’m looking for worms at the bottom of the ocean. If you see any, can you hashtag it with ‘worms?’” So there’s a second layer of science that can go on, based on relationships made on the platform.
There’ll always be a group of enthusiastic people to help. And the nice thing is, we’ve had people go from playing about on the web to getting so involved that they are published as scientists in papers. Hundreds of dedicated Zooniverse volunteers have had their names listed as author on academic papers because they gave so much of their time and got to know the scientists.
Can anyone at all join in? Do children participate, for example?
Yes. I know for a fact that one of the people who obsessively categorized nearly a million galaxies was about 13 at the time, a home-schooled girl in the UK. She came and did work experience with us a couple of years ago and is awesome. All this stuff happened because she just got to know us. Anyone can participate: the sign-up requires an email address and a username, just to track people who are taking part, for user-weighting our statistical work, and so on.
It sounds like people are devoting an incredible amount of time to Zooniverse projects. In your talk, you contrasted time spent volunteering on Zooniverse to playing Angry Birds. But as Jane McGonigal famously points out, games alleviate stress, pain and so on. Do you think there’s something similar inherent in your system? What’s the reward?
Early on, we wondered the same thing: why does anyone give so much time? We’ve been doing this since 2007. In the first project, there were more than 900,000 galaxies that needed to be categorized. About 160,000 people took part in that, and of those, around 10 people categorized every single galaxy. That would have taken them months of effort, assuming they were working on it every day. But they did. We wondered why these people would make such an extraordinary effort.
Zooniverse’s one million volunteers across the planet. Image: Zooniverse.com
So we surveyed a lot of users. We gave them lots and lots of options. They could have said, “I like astronomy,” “I like to think about the universe,” “I like playing games.” All of these answers were available. But the one motivation common to nearly half the people involved was that they want to contribute to science. They want to be useful. We’ve taken that to heart and work very hard to ensure that the Zooniverse is always trying to be more efficient, and that every click helps.
]]>Pontin’s talk runs just days after the death of Ann Wolpert, his longtime mentor. We asked Pontin to write a few words about her.
Research libraries have a special role in our culture: they are the repository of our common cultural heritage, and especially of the scientific and technology literature. Ann asked whether the public should have unrestricted online access to the scholarly journals that university libraries house. Until recently, most peer-reviewed journals were published by large, highly profitable media organizations such as the Nature Publishing Group; and even though the research they feature was paid for by tax-payers and written by scholars working at universities like MIT, their material could only be read by individuals and organizations able to pay hefty subscription costs. (Cell costs $253 a year for a US subscription; the Journal of Co-ordination Chemistry costs $11,367 a year.)
Publishers justified their prices as necessary to recover the costs of peer-review publication. The reputations of the leading journals created a sort-of “lock-in” for scholars. But most people felt there had to be a better, open, more digital way.
What was Ann’s solution? First, beginning in 2000, Ann worked with Hewlett-Packard to build DSpace, an open-source digital archive for research that has been adopted by more than 1,000 institutions worldwide. DSpace ensured that there should be a common, permanent platform for library material. Then, in 2009, she conceived the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy, where professors give the Institute permission to disseminate journal articles for open access through DSpace@MIT. In turn, those articles can be republished on open Web sites like the Public Library of Science or PLOS. It was the first policy of its kind in the United States, and has been imitated by other universities around the globe.
By the time of her death, her solution was generally accepted to be the likely future of research libraries. (Although there is still much we don’t know.) She achieved her ends through patience, guile, deep knowledge of the challenges and technical virtuosity, but most of all through a spirit of collaboration. After all, it wasn’t enough to conceive of the Open Access Policy: she had to convince MIT’s Academic Council to pass the proposal, and the faculty to accept the idea.
She was the chair of MIT Technology Review’s board of directors, and everything good we’ve done was achieved with her support and help. She was fair, intelligent, and possessing of that rarest of qualities: discernment. She could turn a pretty compliment when we were deserving of praise, but was otherwise precise and specific in her criticism. She always told me when I was about to make a mistake, and how I could avoid it. She had the slyest of wits. .I couldn’t have wished for a better partner, and I don’t know what I’ll do without her.
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Photo: James Duncan Davidson
“In the middle of my PhD, I was hopelessly stuck,” confesses scientist Uri Alon. “Every research direction I tried led to a dead end. It seemed my basic assumptions stopped working.” Alon felt like a failure. And even though he got through it, the experience stuck with him … especially when it happened again.
While Alon was studying physics by day, at night he was studying improvisation theater. Like science, this discipline plunges into the unknown. “Unlike science, in improvisation theater they tell you what will happen when you get on stage: you will fail miserably. You’ll get stuck.” Indeed, he and his improv friends even practiced what to do when they were stuck.
When Alon became a professor with students of his own, he decided to try to bring some of the insights from improv to his teaching. He wanted to help his students see that the traditional schema or pattern of research was actually unhelpful. Science is never a simple equation, an arrow leading from a to b. There’s a big fuzzy area in the middle, while the answer is actually often c, an entirely unexpected result. He draws on a blackboard to explain what he’s saying, and the image that emerges makes it clear why he has dubbed that fuzzy area “the cloud.”
The new way of thinking illuminated an important point for Alon, who realized that too often, in science, the unclear process is entirely overlooked in the excitement of publishing results. But, he says, “In science, you do something quite heroic; you face the boundary between the known and the unknown. You face the cloud.” Now, when his students tell him they’re in the cloud, he congratulates them. “I say ‘great! You must be feeling miserable!'” he laughs. “But it’s happy, because they must be close to that boundary between the known and the unknown.”
Another trick from improv: not to shut down ideas or suggestions with a terse “no,” but instead always to say “yes, and…” Scientists are prone to shutting down ideas, and saying “yes, and” helps them to bypass fear and skepticism, and in so doing unlock creativity. In his own lab, it has paid off handsomely. He shares an example: “We were trying to understand intricate biochemical networks,” he says. “We were deeply in the cloud. So one student said ‘Let’s draw it on a piece of paper.’ Instead of saying ‘We’ve done that so many times, it doesn’t work,’ I said ‘Yes, and let’s use a really big piece of paper.'” Looking at that drawing, it turns out, helped them to make an important discovery about biological systems that he has since presented at conferences around the world.
Photo: James Duncan Davidson
Alon is still keen to see and hear scientists talk about the process of science, including the hidden complications. But whenever he tried to introduce the topic at conferences, he got shut down. Scientists didn’t want to talk about the subjective, emotional side of their field. That would be unscientific, somehow unseemly. So he wrote a blues song about the fear and sadness of being scooped when someone publishes before you do. Alon has a guitar with him, and he sings us that song, asking the crowd to sing backup: “Scooped! Scooped!” We all laugh. And even though it’s a silly song, we grasp that there’s a serious message here.
“Remember, the next time you face a problem you can’t solve in work or in life, there’s a word for what you’re going through: the cloud,” Alon concludes. “Go through it not alone but together, with someone who can say ‘yes, and’ to your fears. Through the wisps of the cloud you’ll find calmness and get your first glimpse of your unexpected discovery, your C.”
]]>Today’s TED Talk, however, might actually convince me to give meditation another shot.
“We live in an incredibly busy world. Our pace of life is often frantic, our minds are always busy, and we’re always doing something,” says Andy Puddicombe at the TEDSalon London Fall 2012. “The sad fact is that we’re so distracted that we are no longer present in the world in which we live. We miss out on the things that are most important to us. The crazy thing is, people assume that’s just the way life is. But that’s not really how it has to be.”
In this talk, Puddicombe — who is as equally as turned off by incense as me — shares the fascinating story of how he become a monk, and gives a convincing argument for why it is worth it to take 10 minutes a day to refresh the mind.
“Most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind, but actually it’s much different than that,” says Puddicombe. “It’s more about stepping back, seeing the thought clearly — witnessing it coming and going — without judgment, but with a relaxed, focus mind.”
To see a demonstration, with juggling, watch this surprising talk. And after the jump, four recent scientific studies that bear out that there might actually be something to this meditation thing.
For years, meditation fans have said that the practice keeps them healthy. But a new study, published in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes in November 2012, actually tested this. For the study, 201 people with coronary heart disease were asked to either (a) take a health education class promoting better diet and exercise or (b) take a class on transcendental meditation. Researchers followed up with participants for the next five years and found that those who took the meditation class had a 48% reduction in their overall risk of heart attack, stroke and death. It’s an initial study, but a promising one. [Time]
Is meditating a good way to increase creativity? Maybe, but it depends on what kind. Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands looked at the way two types of meditation — focused-attention (for example, focusing on your breath) and open-monitoring (where participants focus on the both the internal and external) — affected two types of creative thinking — the ability to generate new ideas and solutions to problems. In a study published in April 2012 in Frontiers in Cognition, they revealed that the participants who practiced focused-attention meditation did not show improved results in the two creativity tasks. However, those who practiced open-monitoring meditation did perform better at task related to coming up with new ideas. [Meditation Research]
Researchers at UCLA wanted to study the brains of people who had been meditating for years, versus those who had never meditated or who had only done it for a short period of time. They took MRI scans of 100 people — half meditators and half non-meditators. They were fascinated to find that long-time meditators showed higher levels of gyrification (a folding of the cerebral cortex that may be associated with faster information processing). In a study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in February of 2012, they shared that, the more years a person had been meditating, the more gyrification their MRIs revealed. [UCLA Newsroom]
Distractions are everywhere. But can meditation help a person better navigate through them? A computer scientist at the University of Washington teamed up with a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona to test this. The pair recruited 45 human resources managers, and gave a third of them eight weeks of mindfulness-based meditation training, a third of them eight weeks of body relaxation training and a third of them no training at all. All the groups were given a stressful multitasking test before and after the eight weeks. In a study published in the Proceedings of Graphics Interface in May of 2012, they showed that the mindful-mediation group reported less stress as they performed the multitasking test than both of the other groups. [Washington.edu]
So, how do you feel about meditation?
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Neuroscientist Molly Crockett has a secret to share: if you want to make better decisions, eat a grilled cheese sandwich.
In today’s talk, filmed at the TEDSalon in London, Crockett shares how she accidentally had a part in circulating this message. Several years ago, Crockett and her fellow researchers set out to study how serotonin would effect reactions when a person felt that they were treated unfairly. They manipulated serotonin in a study by giving participants a beverage designed to deplete the brain of the amino acid tryptophan, which gets converted into serotonin. The study found that, when tryptophan was low, people were more likely to seek revenge when they felt mistreated.
“That’s the study we did. And here are some of the headlines that came out afterwards,” says Crockett, revealing these doozies:
- “A cheese sandwich is all you need for strong decision making,” The Hindustan Times (June 6, 2008)
- “Eating cheese and meat may boost self-control,” Discover Magazine (June 6, 2008)
- “Official! Chocolate stops you being grumpy,” The West Australian (June 10, 2008)
“At this point you might be wondering, ‘Did I miss something? Cheese? Chocolate? Where did that come from?’” says Crockett. “I thought the same thing when these things came out, because our study had nothing to do with cheese or chocolate — we gave people a horrible-tasting drink. But it turns out that tryptophan also happens to be found in cheese and chocolate. And when science says that cheese and chocolate help you make better decisions, well that’s sure to grab people’s attention.”
This kind elision happens all the time as the press reports on neuroscience. From there, manufacturers latch on to overblown claims as they develop new products.
“Neuroscience is turning up more and more in marketing,” says Crockett. “Do you want to sell it? Put a brain on it.”
Crockett stresses that neuroscience is advancing quickly and leading to some truly amazing discoveries.
“I am more excited than most people for the potential of neuroscience to treat mental illness and even maybe make us better and smarter,” says Crockett. “But we’re not there yet … We have to be careful that we don’t let overblown claims detract the resources and attention away from the real science that’s playing a much longer game.”
For a primer on how to spot what Crockett calls “neuro-bunk,” “neuro-bullocks,” or “neuro-flapdoodle,” watch her engaging talk. And below, a selection of headlines that readers should be wary of. Note: Inclusion here doesn’t mean that the science behind a study is bad, or that a news source intentionally overstated a claim. It’s simply that these pieces give conclusive answers to concepts that scientists are only beginning to understand. As Crockett says, “The answers shouldn’t be simple because the brain isn’t simple.”
“You Love Your iPhone. Literally,” The New York Times (Sept. 30, 2011)
In her talk, Crockett debunks this op-ed, about a study in which 16 subjects were shown audio and video of a ringing iPhone while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to map their brain activity. The article notes a “flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion.” Crockett says to be very skeptical of claims that a brain scan can show emotions or thoughts. Yes, there might be activity in the insular cortex — but this region is also associated with memory, language, attention, anger, disgust and pain. Says Crockett, “By the same logic, I could equally conclude, ‘You hate your iPhone.’ When you see activation in the insula, you can’t just pick and choose your favorite explanation off the list.”
“Study: ‘Love hormone’ roused by social media,” Fox News (July 12, 2012)
Oxytocin is often referred to as the “love molecule” or “moral molecule,” because it’s associated with trust, cooperation and bonding. But any articles that refer to it as such should be taken with a grain of salt, says Crockett. According to Crockett, studies on oxytocin “are scientifically valid and they have been replicated, but they’re not the full story.” She explains, “Other studies have shown that boosting oxytocin increases envy, it increases gloating. Oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group at the expense of other groups.”
“Hormone Oxytocin May Keep Men Faithful,” ABC News (Nov. 14, 2012)
Last month, a flurry of articles appeared based on a study in which male participants were given “a sniff” of oxytocin before being introduced to an “attractive” experimenter. The study found that men in monogamous relationships who received said sniff kept their distance from the researcher. The hormone didn’t appear to have an effect on single men. So what’s the problem with this study circulating in the press? That it is a very big leap to say that oxytocin might “keep men faithful.” Keeping physical distance from an attractive woman in a single situation is hardly a measure of fidelity.
“Neuro boosts minds, moods and more — A drink review,” Lifenut.com (Sept. 26, 2011)
Neuro is a brand of beverages that makes bold claims on its bottles. “Using the power of science, each Neuro enhances the body’s reaction to all the ways you live your life in color,” reads their website, “from providing the spark that ignites your passions and stimulates your mind, to the fuel for your dreams and inner peace.” Naturally, Crockett is skeptical about this brand and, with it, any positive reviews. “When this came up in my local shop, naturally I was curious about some of the research backing these claims. I went to the company’s website looking to find some controlled trials of their products — but I didn’t find any,” says Crockett. “Trial or no trial, these claims are front and center on their products.”
“Brain scans can detect lying,” PreventDisease.com (undated)
This article quotes research that could “put the lie detector machine out of business.” It shares the results of a study in which fMRI was used to scan students’ brains as they were asked to lie and tell the truth in a lab setting. And when they were lying, subjects showed increased brain activity. While this study is interesting, much more research needs to be done before this headline could be considered true. Jumping to this conclusion is dangerous, as the issue of whether to use brain scans as evidence courtrooms is currently being debated.
“Red wine and chocolate can boost your brain power,” The Telegraph (May 6, 2011)
As Crockett notes in her talk, the media flocks to science that says decadent food and beverages have benefits for the brain. The claims are usually overstated — or made through tangential facts — as happened with Crockett’s study that morphed pro-chocolate in the press. In general, headlines like these should always set off warning bells.
Below, a few other recent headlines which have us wary of neuro-bunk:
- “All that stress is shrinking your brain, new study finds,” NBC News (Nov. 26, 2012)
- “Internet pornography can make you lose your memory,” The Independent (Dec. 17, 2012)
- “Go take a hike — it’s good for your brain,” Chicago Tribune (Dec. 19, 2012)
- “Study: Sex can make you smarter,” CBS Local (Sept. 14, 2012)
And some more great reading on the bounds of extrapolating from neuroscience research:
- “Neuroscience Fiction: What neuroscience really teaches us and what it doesn’t,” The New Yorker (Dec. 2, 2012)
- “Winter of Discontent: Is the hot affair between neuroscience and science journalism cooling down?” Knight Science Journalism Tracker (Dec. 3, 2012)