I’m a little late posting this one here, but last month I wrote a story for Wired Playbook on how athletes, much like musicians, seem to have brains that are beefier in certain areas.

Instead of just comparing the brains of athletes to non-athletes — a correlation that wouldn’t necessarily show if sports causes the brain to gain mass or if people with a thicker cortex in these areas are more likely to excel in athletic competition in the first place — the researchers determined how each year of practice correlated to changes in the brain:

However, in one of the brain areas studied, the researchers found that the number of years each athlete competed as a diver nearly predicted how thick the subject’s brain would be. If the results of this small study hold, there may be some biological truth to the adage, “practice makes perfect.” It’s as if each year of sports experience becomes neatly folded as a new layer of neurons atop previously mastered skills, physical knowledge, and competition know-how that have already been crammed into the brain.

I think it’s interesting to think about how these findings could impact sports statistics in the future. I mused:

These findings provide a small glimpse of how biometric and neurological data may one day be used to gauge a player’s ability and performance. Granted, there’s still a lot of work to be done in understanding exactly what’s going on in an athlete’s head.

Read the entire story here.

Photo via Flickr / alandberning

Wei, G., Zhang, Y., Jiang, T., & Luo, J. (2011). Increased Cortical Thickness in Sports Experts: A Comparison of Diving Players with the Controls PLoS ONE, 6 (2) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017112

Sorry, but this post is nothing but shameless self-promotion!

My first short feature article was published in Scientific American today, which discusses the neurobiology of the father-child bond.  Give it a read!

Last May, I took a trip to San Diego for my brother-in-law’s graduation from college, and to meet his 4-month old son, Landon, for the first time. Throughout the weekend, I couldn’t suppress my inner science nerd, and often found myself probing my nephew’s foot reflexes. Pressured from my wife’s disapproving looks and the blank stares I received from her family as I explained why his toes curled this way or that, I dropped the shop-talk in favor of baby-talk.

Click here to read the rest.

Exercising people are happy people.

Nonsense. Ever see someone’s face at mile 20 of a marathon? Do they look happy to you?

OK, maybe people aren’t happy while exercising, but evidence shows they’re better off, in general, after the fact. Physical activity has a positive effect on mood, and is considered a valid treatment strategy to battle anxiety disorders and even depression. Although most explanations are somewhat wishy-washy, researchers believe that hedonistic value of exercise is important in mental health. Exercise simply makes us feel good about ourselves. And this is not only true in humans, but in animals, as well. Rats and mice that are given free access to a running wheel will use it, and lab rodents typically won’t do anything that doesn’t provide them some sort of pleasure.

Read more…

It’s 6am and my alarm clock is buzzing, but I don’t hear it. I don’t even move. But the incessant noise wakes my wife, and her gentle nudges (read: elbows) and soft whispers (read: expletives) eventually convince me to get out of bed. Read more…

On the heels of a post I did at The Scientist (“Amazing Rats”), where I proposed a new model of intelligence based on a animal’s ability to solve problems rather than its communication skill, I read a blog post by Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex where he gives his take on what intelligence really means.

Rather than smarts merely defined by how many facts someone can cram into their heads, Lehrer argues that a better measure of intelligence is to look at how well people (or animals) can shift their selective attention.  Facts are just facts, but the intelligent being can manipulate and organize the information for the task at hand, which places a high demand on the attention circuits in the brain.

Lehrer cites a study by Walter Mischel, which studied a group of children that had a marshmallow placed in front of them.  The kids were told that they could have the marshmallow now, or wait 15 minutes and get two marshmallows.  According to Lehrer, those children that were able to wait for the bigger reward payout had better SAT scores, were better behaved, and less stressed than their impulsive counterparts.

Mischel’s study is a classic test for discounting of delayed rewards, and I’m not surprised that the kids that were able to wait a short period of time for the bigger reward ultimately did better than those that couldn’t.  But are the kids that could wait more intelligent, or is there something else going on with the kids that cracked?

Numerous studies have shown that people prone to addiction continually discount delayed rewards.  They’re impulsive.  They can’t see past the immediate pleasure of the reward.

Defects in the dopamine reward system (e.g. addiction) interfere with other circuits in the brain.  Therefore, it doesn’t surprise me that very intelligent addicts make unwise decisions while seeking their next high.

I’m not saying all the kids in Mischel’s study who impulsively took the first marshmallow as a reward were all addicts.  But as Lehrer pointed out, these kids ended up more stressed out and with more behavioral problems than other children, which says there’s more to the story than simply an intelligence difference.

Ever since I saw the press releases yesterday telling of a new article to be released in Nature showing that brain-training software was ineffective, I knew a storm was brewing.  The paper was still under embargo at that point, so I was anxiously awaiting its release today.  Slowly, but surely, the mainstream media got wind of the paper, running headlines like “Brain Games Don’t Make You Smarter”.  Then the blogosphere lit up, with ongoing chatter throughout the day on this controversial paper.

I was stuck in the lab all day, and couldn’t put a post together, so I’m a little late to the party.  But I wanted to give you a rundown of what exactly the study found, and point out a few intricacies of their findings.

Read more…