Dan Hurley Quotes

I’ve now interviewed a couple hundred researchers in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and China. I visited Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where I met brain-injured veterans. I went to the San Francisco offices of Lumosity, the biggest online provider of these cognitive games aimed at improving intelligence. And I met twice with the guy who leads the funding in this area at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA. It’s a government intelligence agency, like DARPA for spies.

After weaning, the only food proved to enhance cognition is coffee. It’s not just that the caffeine in coffee is a stimulant; a study published in the journal Neuropharmacology in January 2013 found that caffeine improves working memory in middle-aged men independent of its stimulating effect. It’s not just the caffeine that’s beneficial, either; another study, published that same month in the journal Age, found that the working memory of elderly rats fed coffee showed significantly more improvements than those fed caffeine alone. And the benefits of coffee last far longer than the couple of hours during which its effects can be felt;

Mensa does not permit applicants to take its IQ test twice, because the organization ascribes to the view that intelligence doesn’t change much, so there’s really no point in retaking it. Either you got it or you don’t. And they require test takers to show a license or other official photo identification. That put a crimp in my plan to take the same test before and after my training regimen,

She’s probably going to be chair of our department in a couple years. She’s the editor of the journal Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience. She’s involved with basically every committee possible at the university. She’s the kind of person who wakes at four in the morning and writes a couple manuscripts before the kids wake up at seven. And she’s the leader of our daughter’s Girl Scout troop. She’s just the kind of person who makes everybody feel like: What am I doing wrong? And she’s an incredibly nice person, too. She’s not arrogant or egotistical. And she picked me. That’s the one thing that stops me from feeling insecure. She must have seen something.

Two recent studies led by Sophia Vinogradov, vice chair of psychiatry at UCSF, have shown that fifty to eighty hours of training significantly improved patients’ verbal working memory and learning, their ability to distinguish reality from fantasy, and their overall social functioning up to six months later. Vinogradov is now leading three studies involving a total of 260 people, in hopes of meeting criteria set by the FDA for approval of the training program as a treatment for the disorder’s cognitive symptoms.

Not only do the games improve visual attention; Bavelier and Green have found similar effects on auditory attention. Bevalier has even shown that video-game training can improve eyesight, as measured by an individual’s ability to perceive subtle differences in shades of gray, something that had previously been demonstrated only with surgery or glasses. Incredibly, that improved ability to perceive shading gradients might even be life-extending: poor contrast sensitivity was found to be among the strongest risk factors for dying in the subsequent nineteen years in a study of 4,097 women who were in their sixties when researchers first met them.

What Susanne Jaeggi has found with the N-back, what Torkel has shown with working memory training, what others have found with meditation, and what we have shown with video games—they are all different ways of getting at the same underlying mechanisms,” she said. “We’re all training the flexible allocation of executive and attentional resources.

There’s been a sea change in our ability to understand and treat Down syndrome,” said Mobley. “There’s just been an explosion of information. As recently as the year 2000, no drug company would possibly have thought about developing therapies for Down syndrome. I am now in contact with no less than four companies that are pursuing treatments.

as more attention is given to distinguishing between pinpoint differences in touch, sound, or sight, the area of the brain devoted to that distinction expands and, in the process, gets better at it.

My competitive instincts flaring, I started shouting to get myself pumped up between the twenty-item sequences. Laugh if you like, but I actually began imitating the voice of a preacher. “Reach up to touch heaven! Reach now, brother Daniel!” And when I finally did reach and remain at 3-back for a couple sequences in a row—then was promoted to 4-back a single time—I sang out, “I have been to the mountaintop!” But progress was in fits and starts.

While children are routinely forced by their teachers and life in general to do things they’re not good at, by middle age many of us have figured out what our strengths and weaknesses are and have learned to stick with what we do best. We’ve found careers we’re good at; we hang out with people we like and who enjoy our company; our hobbies are things we’ve been doing for years. We are no longer, as Michael Merzenich put it, engaging our mind at the cutting edge of its abilities; we have become users of mastered skills.

But don’t let the trendiness fool you. A multitude of studies suggest that the ancient practice of mindfulness meditation actually holds promise as a way to improve cognitive abilities, to increase attention, expand working memory, and raise fluid intelligence. Some of the best are by one of the most respected psychologists in the United States, Michael Posner, professor emeritus at the University of Oregon and former chair of its psychology department.

The overturning of the pernicious dogma that our intelligence is unchangeable holds enormous implications for every level of society: young and old, rich and poor, genius and cognitively disabled alike. No one is saying that cognitive training can turn an intellectually disabled person into a genius.

Five years and 250 mice later, she concluded that the sixty-fifth attempt was her keeper, with the best combination of Down-like qualities, even including, incredibly, some of the distinctive facial characteristics associated with the disease, and the same slightly uncoordinated gait.

And that is the same problem that researchers would run into if they tried to test the cognitive effects of a diet full of junk food, say, or fast food: it’s very, very difficult to get people to agree to change their diet at the request of a scientist and then to follow that diet for weeks or months, let alone years.

American spirit: it was in the United States, after all, that the pseudoscience of eugenics had its birthplace, where some sixty thousand sterilizations were performed in the twentieth century, continuing into the 1960s, most of them forced, many of them involving people deemed to be “imbeciles” or “feeble-minded.” Championed by the likes of Margaret Sanger, J. H. Kellogg, and Alexander Graham Bell, sanctioned for a time by the U.S. Supreme Court, and funded by such august bodies as the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation,

Results have now been seen not only in elementary-school children, but in preschoolers, college students, the middle-aged, and the elderly. Healthy volunteers have benefited, as have people with disorders including Down syndrome, schizophrenia, traumatic brain injury, alcohol abuse, Parkinson’s disease, chemotherapy-treated cancer, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and mild cognitive impairment (a common forerunner of Alzheimer’s disease). Gains have been seen to persist for up to eight months after the completion of training.

Yet in Jaeggi and Buschkuehl’s study, after just four weeks of doing the N-back, the students’ scores on a measure of fluid intelligence increased, on average, by 40 percent.

Those who worked out at least once a week performed 9.8 percent faster, solved 5.8 percent more math problems, and had 2.7 percent better spatial memory than those who never exercise.

Twenty-two of those studies specifically found improvements in fluid intelligence or reasoning, while the remaining fifty-three found a variety of other significant benefits in abilities such as attention, executive function, working memory, and reading.

But he had a problem: other psychologists had already supposedly proved that Klingberg’s experiment would never work—that practice on one short-term memory task never transfers to improvement on another.

If you think about most genetic diseases, they’re caused by one gene, and in fact one mutation at one amino acid,” said Roger Reeves, a leading researcher in the field and professor at the Institute for Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “With Down syndrome, you have an extra copy of all five hundred or so genes on chromosome 21.” For decades, Lejeune’s discovery served to scare off scientists from any serious effort to find a medical treatment for what they were soon calling “trisomy 21.” It just seemed impossibly complex.

IN CLOSING, LET’S TAKE a brief look back at where we began: with 10 children who developed type 1 diabetes in 24 months within two miles of one another in the upscale suburbs of Boston. Rather than bemoan their fate, parents there organized and asked for an investigation to be conducted by the state, which is ongoing. Among those who have participated in organizing meetings are Ray Allen, the Celtics star, and his wife, Shannon, whose son, Walker, was the seventh child diagnosed there. “Shannon and Ray have turned out to be the most incredible advocates,” Ann Marie Kreft recently told me. “We have fabulous people on board who are spending inordinate amounts of their time on advocacy.” I asked her what they are advocating for. “I think we all agree that mandatory case reporting would be the ideal,” she said. “That would be the dream come true. I think we may be building up to that.” Rather than have to design a special survey every time an apparent cluster of type 1 cases emerges, mandatory case reporting, on a national level, would permit the CDC to automatically track cases as they emerge, to see not only the big national picture, but also local variations that could prove crucial in unraveling the riddle of why type 1 diabetes continues to rise, each and every year, by 3 percent. Presently, however, no national organization is advocating for mandated case reporting of type 1. Where is the line of protesters holding placards, marching outside the Atlanta offices of the CDC? Perhaps we need to look farther back, to the period before the diabetes pandemic began. In 1866, you might recall, the death rate from diabetes in New York City was 1.3 per 100,000 residents. If that rate held today for the 306 million residents of the United States, there would be 4,284 deaths due to diabetes each year. Instead, in 2006, there were 72,507 death certificates on which diabetes was listed as the underlying cause. The official national death rate from diabetes now stands at 23.3 per 100,000, according to the CDC — nearly 19 times higher than it was following the Civil War. And that doesn’t count the additional 200,000 or so deaths each year for which diabetes is listed as a “contributing” cause.

Taking it one step further, as Kabat-Zinn’s voice murmured along, I realized I was not just noticing myself and my own thoughts and feelings and sensations but, in so doing, I was also observing myself observing myself. How bizarre: 3-back consciousness.

But it wasn’t money they were going to keep,” Brewer said. “We’ve now collected data on 150 participants. Animals need a reward to motivate them, but humans usually find motivation in just trying to succeed at a task. That’s a big difference between rats and humans.