Dances from Around the World: Children learn to program using KIWI robots

A robotics curricular unit integrating themes of dance, music, and culture with engineering, building, and programming. A research project directed Professor Marina Umaschi Bers at the DevTech Research Group at Tufts University.

The KIWI robotics construction set is designed to work with CHERP software (Creative Hybrid Environment for Robotic Programming). CHERP is a hybrid tangible/graphical computer language designed to provide an engaging introduction to computer programming for children in both formal and informal educational settings. CHERP was designed at Tufts University by the DevTech Research Group (NSF Grant No. DRL-0735657).

(Ready For Robotics)

Reading Rainbow Might Stop the iPad From Ruining the Brains of All Children

For a generation now creating advanced things and placed in corridors of power, LeVar Burton was a god-king: both Star Trek’s Geordi La Forge, and the guy who taught us to like books on Reading Rainbow. Now, the two Burtons are fused—and it’s pretty incredible.

LeVar Burton has an app—it’s available starting today. Sure. Lots of people have apps. But it’s doubtful anyone cares as much about their app as LeVar Burton. I step into an expensive hotel room in Midtown Manhattan, and Burton springs up, greeting me by name, shaking my hand, talking almost immediately about reading. There’s an iPad in front of him.

But this isn’t just any product pitch—which is good, because Burton lacks all the unctuousness of a salesman or marketing player. He just… cares. His enthusiasm for an app designed to encourage little kids to read is almost overwhelming. How many people care about anything this much? And how much can I possibly properly appreciate an app designed for tiny kiddo brains? I can’t—so we brought our own: two boys, 3 and 5-years-old, stuck in that valley of super-hyperactivity spanning the end of school and the beginning of summer camp. As Burton lays out the app’s basics—a free download, a $10 per month subscription for unlimited kid-friendly titles, a vibrant cartoonish interface with hot air balloons and floating islands that capture the original series’ acid trip charm—the kids fidget. The older immediately covers himself in pretzel crumbs, the young starts chirping for mom’s attention. The kids are kids. It’s summer and they’d rather not be in a Midtown Manhattan hotel room on a beautiful day. Nobody would.

But then something incredible happens. We hand the older boy the iPad and fire up the Reading Rainbow app. He’s transfixed. The only word is transfixed. The fussing and pretzel-crunching stops, and his little brother curls next to him. They don’t fight over who gets to hold it. They both know intuitively how to use it—complete naturals. He picks pirates, animals, and space as his three preferred topics to generate recommended books. He starts reading along with Burton’s pre-recorded narration. The Wi-Fi sucks and the download stalls. He doesn’t care. The kids are—patient? Attentive? About a book.

I ask Burton if he thinks this is ultimately good, this sticking of LCDs under the eyes of children. Having seen lots of absentee parenting by way of iOS—kids handed a stray iPhone as they might be handed a pacifier, to shut them up in public—could the ubiquitous computer hurt little heads? Can the touchscreen warp fingers that’ve been flipping (and smearing chocolate on) paper for hundreds of years? “We can try to sequester ourselves from technology,” Burton shakes his head. But this is pointless, he explains. Kids like those two mesmerized by an app are an inevitability—and if we can make them mesmerized by a book instead of a game, we have to take the chance. We must. Burton is emphatic. “Ed[ucational] tech!” Burton grunts, pounding his palm with his fist. It’s imperative to him that we get kids using these everywhere-screens to become readers, writers, and thinkers, before they become something else. “We’ve already lost an entire generation of children. Maybe two,” he laments. This one, for whom touch screens are a given, should be different. It must be different, and you can see in LeVar Burton’s almost crazed eyes that the dude really, really, really wants kids to read more. And it seems like they will—if there’s one young charm you can count on, it’s that a little boy will tell you something is stupid and is bad and smells like poop if he thinks so. They’re a brutally honest lot. But our kindergarten demo team gave shy smiles and thumbs up.

Burton doesn’t act surprised in the slightest. And why should he? He lived this world 30 years ago: “I mean, come on—Geordi was carrying an iPad around the Enterprise!”

Re-learning words lost to dementia

A simple word-training program has been found to restore key words in people with a type of dementia that attacks language and our memory for words.

This ability to relearn vocabulary indicates that even in brains affected by dementia, some recovery of function is possible.

The study, led by Ms Sharon Savage at NeuRA (Neuroscience Research Australia), utilised a simple computer training-program that paired images of household objects such as food, appliances, utensils, tools and clothing, with their names.

“People with this type of dementia lose semantic memory, the memory system we use to store and remember words and their meanings,” says Ms Savage.

“Even the simplest words around the house can be difficult to recall. For example, a person with this type of dementia usually knows what a kettle does, but they may not know what to call it and may not recognize the word ‘kettle’ when they hear it,” she says.

Ms Savage found that after just 3 weeks of training for 30–60 min each day, patients’ ability to recall the name of the items improved, even for patients with more advanced forms of the dementia.

“Semantic dementia is a younger-onset dementia and because sufferers lose everyday words life can be very frustrating for them and their families. By relearning some of these everyday words, day to day conversations around the house may become less frustrating, improving patient well-being,” Ms Savage concludes.

This paper is published in the journal Cortex.

Neuroplasticity

The brain’s ability to continue learning and making new connections even after our child-like stages and into old age.

Side note: This is just a bit of info I’ve been meaning to leave on here for myself. I often think that in terms of artificial intelligence in robots and understanding our own brains, we ought to implement more research and funding into neuroplasticity and ways we can alter it or reset it for those who may desperately need to literally rework the way they think due to some psychological problems. It may be helpful in the study of robots because I would imagine that a simulated version of neuroplasticity would allow for our robots to have a learning brain. So that when new tasks it never uploaded arise, it can still be taught no matter its conditions. Imagine the good we can do for people with severe brain damage or memory problems if we can somehow rearrange or edit the erroneous data and connections within their brains.

(from neural - pertaining to the nerves and/or brain and plastic - moldable or changeable in structure) refers to changes in neural pathways and synapses which are due to changes in behavior, environment and neural processes, as well as changes resulting from bodily injury. Neuroplasticity has replaced the formerly-held position that the brain is a physiologically static organ, and explores how - and in which ways - the brain changes throughout life.

Neuroplasticity occurs on a variety of levels, ranging from cellular changes due to learning, to large-scale changes involved in cortical remapping in response to injury. The role of neuroplasticity is widely recognized in healthy development, learning, memory, and recovery from brain damage. During most of the 20th century, the general consensus among neuroscientists was that brain structure is relatively immutable after a critical period during early childhood. This belief has been challenged by findings revealing that many aspects of the brain remain plastic even into adulthood.

Hubel and Wiesel had demonstrated that ocular dominance columns in the lowest neocortical visual area, V1, were largely immutable after the critical period in development. Critical periods also were studied with respect to language; the resulting data suggested that sensory pathways were fixed after the critical period. However, studies determined that environmental changes could alter behavior and cognition by modifying connections between existing neurons and via neurogenesis in the hippocampus and other parts of the brain, including the cerebellum.

Decades of research have now shown that substantial changes occur in the lowest neocortical processing areas, and that these changes can profoundly alter the pattern of neuronal activation in response to experience. Neuroscientific research indicates that experience can actually change both the brain’s physical structure (anatomy) and functional organization (physiology). Neuroscientists are currently engaged in a reconciliation of critical period studies demonstrating the immutability of the brain after development with the more recent research showing how the brain can, and does, change.

Here’s an additional quote from one of my favorite neuroplasticity enthusiasts:

We have plasticity but our neocortex has a limited capacity, it’s made up of pattern recognisers - I estimate about 300 million of them. People say we only use 10 percent of our brains, actually we use all of it. It’s just not organised that well. The reason that people, as they get older, have more difficulty learning things compared to a child, is that a child has all this virgin neocortex, all these pattern recognisers that can be filled up with information.

A newborn has twice as many connections as an adult, so it’s been pruned to reflect the knowledge that the person has gained. We have already filled it up with information; there is a process where we can learn new things but we actually have to abandon these patterns. There’s lot of redundancy, so we can give up some of the redundancy and still remember something, but that’s why memories fade. We do have plasticity but it’s a skill to essentially do “garbage collection” on your neocortex to get rid of patterns that are really no longer of use. — ‘Ray Kurzweil on Adjusting to Change & Neuroscience’

In short, it’s never too late to learn and you CAN teach an old dog new tricks.

scinerds:

Our Brain Can Do Unconscious Mathematics

What is nine plus six, plus eight? You may not realise it, but you already know the answer. It seems that we unconsciously perform more complicated feats of reasoning than previously thought – including reading and basic mathematics. The discovery raises questions about the necessity of consciousness for abstract thought, and supports the idea that maths might not be an exclusively human trait.

Previous studies have shown that we can subliminally process single words and numbers. To identify whether we can unconsciously perform more complicated processing, Ran Hassin at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and his colleagues used a technique called continuous flash suppression.

The technique works by presenting a volunteer’s left eye with a stimulus – a mathematical sum, say – for a short period of time, while bombarding the right eye with rapidly changing colourful shapes. The volunteer’s awareness is dominated by what the right eye sees, so they remain unconscious of what is presented to the left eye.

In the team’s first experiment, a three-part calculation was flashed to the left eye. This was immediately followed by one number being presented to both eyes, which the volunteer had to say as fast as possible. When the number was the same as the answer to the sum, people were quicker to announce it, suggesting that they had subconsciously worked out the answer, and primed themselves with that number.

In the second experiment, participants were subliminally shown a sensible or nonsensical sentence such as “I drank the coffee” or “I ironed the coffee”. The sentences were presented to the left eye until the people highlighted that they had become aware of any of the words in the sentence. People noticed words in sentences that didn’t make sense more quickly than in those that did, which suggests that the sentences had been unconsciously processed.

“You’re integrating information from lots of different places,” says Hassin. “People thought you needed consciousness for this.”

“This study provides convincing evidence that people can perform complex rule-based operations unconsciously,” says François Ric at the University of Bordeaux, France. “This could change the way we think about how our brains work and what reason is.”

Since arithmetic and reading might work at a level below conscious awareness, the study adds support to the idea that such reasoning may not be a uniquely human trait. “This is consistent with the idea of there being a continuum between animal and human reasoning,” says Ric.

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1211645109

The Science Behind Our Strange, Spooky Dreams

The realm of sleep and dreams has long been associated with strangeness: omens or symbols, unconscious impulses and fears.

But this sometimes disturbing world of inner turmoil, fears and desires is grounded in our day-to-day experience, sleep researchers say.

“The structure and content of thinking looks very much like the structure and content of dreaming. They may be the product of the same machine,” said Matthew Wilson, a neuroscientist at MIT and a panelist at the New York Academy of Sciences discussion “The Strange Science of Sleep and Dreams” on Friday (Nov. 9).

His work and others’ explores the crucial link between dreams and learning and memory.

Dreams allow the brain to work through its conscious experiences. During them, the brain appears to apply the same neurological machinery used during the day to examine the past, the future and other aspects of a person’s (or animal’s) inner world at night. Memory is the manifestation of this inner world, Wilson said.

“What we remember is the result of dreams rather than the other way around,” he said.

Dreams as teachers

His work, and that of fellow panelist Erin Wamsley, a sleep scientist at Beth Israel Medical Center/Harvard Medical School, focuses on the relationship between memory and dreams in non-REM sleep. Vivid dreams often occur during REM sleep, named for the rapid eye movement associated with it, however, non-REM sleep also brings dreams but they are more fragmentary.

Wamsley’s research indicates dreams help people learn.

In a study published in the journal Current Biology in April 2010, she and colleagues found that study subjects who entered non-REM sleep and dreamed about a video game maze they had played hours earlier saw their performance increase dramatically more than those who slept but did not report any maze-related dreams. Meanwhile, thinking about the maze while awake did not improve the players’ performance.

Although this work focused on non-REM sleep, incorporation of learning happens in all stages of sleep, Wamsley told the audience.

Wamsley has also used another video game, this one of a downhill skiing, to probe the relationship between dreams and learning. Like the maze, this game was intended to be interactive and exciting for the subjects, Wamsley said.

Subjects reported their dreams after playing, and initially, their dreams put them directly back into the game, as if rehearsing. But as they fell deeper into sleep, their dreams became more extractive with less literal relationship to the game, she said. For instance, one subject described following boot prints in the snow.

This may be because in deeper sleep, the brain is trying to extract meaning from the experience earlier in the day. The subject’s dream about boot prints may have been a way to refine the dreamer’s concept of how to move through snow, she said.

Learning the maze

Like some of Wamsley’s subjects, Wilson’s also dreamed of mazes, but these mazes were real.

By accident, Wilson found when rats fall asleep their brains replay parts of their experience in a maze. By using fine electrodes to eavesdrop on the activity of single neurons in the hippocampus, a region of the brain associated with spatial memory, he saw this happen.

Individual neurons in rats’ and humans’ hippocampuses fire in response to spatial location, so each time a rat passes a certain point within the maze a single neuron fires. Once the rats fell asleep, Wilson found these neurons would fire as they were reactivated in patterns that represented brief segments of the maze, which could be run forward or in reverse, Wilson found.

In the future, science may develop ways to control cognitive functions enhanced by sleep, “using sleep and dreams as a tool the way we use learning and teaching while we are conscious,” he said.

In one study, he and colleagues successfully manipulated the content of rats’ dreams with a tone they had used earlier to direct the animals as they navigated a maze. The tone caused the rats to dream of the section of the maze they had been taught to associate with that tone.

Going without

No one can speak to the value of sleep more than someone deprived of it. Alan Berliner, a filmmaker who explored his own insomnia in his 2006 documentary “Wide Awake.” offered that perspective to the discussion.

“Every night when I put my head on the pillow, it’s like an adventure,” Berliner says in a clip of the film played during the discussion. He described songs, particularly Leonard Cohen’s “In My Secret Life,” looping in his head and his thoughts racing uncontrollably.

“I started to think the expression human error means sleepiness,” he said in the film.

The discussion, presented in collaboration with the Imagine Science Film Festival, was moderated by Tim McHenry of the Rubin Museum of Art.

For More on The Science of Dreams

exploratorium:

Icy Bodies

At the Exploratorium exhibit Icy Bodies, thin shavings of dry ice, warmed by the water they are floating in, emit cold jets of carbon dioxide gas. As the jets of gas shoot out, they spin the dry ice in a spiral pattern. As water vapor in the nearby air condenses into clouds, the pattern is revealed.

Photo by Amy Snyder
© Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu/downloads/wallpaper

thenewenlightenmentage:

Babies Are Born Scientists

Very young children’s learning and thinking is strikingly similar to much learning and thinking in science, according to Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Gopnik’s findings are described in the Sept 28 issue of the journal Science. She spoke about her work in a video briefing with NSF. New research methods and mathematical models provide a more precise and formal way to characterize children’s learning mechanisms than in the past. Gopnik and her colleagues found that young children, in their play and interactions with their surroundings, learn from statistics, experiments and from the actions of others in much the same way that scientists do.

Continue Reading

scinerds:

Learning In Your Sleep

Image: Your brain is so eager to learn that it does so even while you sleep, scientists recently found. Credit: National Institute of General Medical Sciences

Sleeping and learning go hand in hand, studies have shown for years. Even a brief nap can boost your memory and sharpen your thinking. But the relationship goes deeper than that. In a new study, scientists report that the brain can actually learn something new during sleep.

Scientists used to believe that a sleeping brain was taking a break. But it turns out it can be taught a thing or two, scientists reported in a scientific journal published in August.

“The brain is not passive while you sleep,” neuroscientist Anat Arzi told Science News. “It’s quite active. You can do quite a lot of things while you are asleep.” Arzi researches olfaction, or the sense of smell, at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. She worked on the new study.

Arzi and her coworkers didn’t try to teach the sleeping volunteers any complex information, like new words or facts. (So sleeping on top of your study notes won’t boost your grades.) Instead, the scientists taught snoozing volunteers to make new connections between smells and sounds.

When we smell something nice, like a flower, we automatically take deep breaths. When we smell something bad, like the stench of a dumpster, we automatically take short breaths. These natural reactions maximize our exposure to good smells and minimize our exposure to bad ones. Arzi and her coworkers based their experiment on these reactions and the knowledge that our senses don’t turn off while we slumber.

Once the volunteers fell asleep in the lab, the scientists went to work. They gave the volunteers a whiff of something pleasant, like shampoo, and at the same time played a particular musical note. The volunteers didn’t wake up, but they did hear — and sniff deeply. Then the scientists gave the volunteers a whiff of something repulsive, like rotten fish, and played a different musical note. Again, the volunteers heard and smelled — a short snort this time — but didn’t wake up. The researchers repeated the experiment while the volunteers slept.

After just four repetitions, volunteers made a connection between the musical notes and their paired smells. When the scientists played the musical tone that went with good smells, the sleepers inhaled deeply — even though there was no good smell to sniff. And when the scientists played the musical tone that went with foul odors, the sleepers inhaled briefly — despite there being no bad smell.

“They learned what the tone signified,” Arzi concluded.

The next day, the volunteers woke up with the sound-smell connection intact. They inhaled deeply when hearing one tone and cut their breaths short when hearing the other. Which must have been odd for them: Imagine walking down the street and taking a deep breath upon hearing a particular sound!

gjmueller:

Resting After Learning Aids Memory

A new study suggests that maybe all they really need to do to cement new learning is to sit and close their eyes for a few minutes. Psychological scientist Michaela Dewar, Ph.D.,  and her colleagues show that memory can be boosted by taking a brief wakeful rest after learning something verbally new.

“Our findings support the view that the formation of new memories is not completed within seconds. Indeed, our work demonstrates that activities that we are engaged in for the first few minutes after learning new information really affect how well we remember this information after a week,” says Dewar.

photo via flickr:CC | PatrickYHC

scinerds:

Ray Kurzweil on Adjusting to Change & Neuroscience

Here’s an article I found really interesting on Wired science. The full article is actually ‘on prediction accuracy, adjusting to change and neuroscience’, but I wanted to focus on the bit that struck me as most interesting which was their discussion of the neocortex and brain plasticity, which is essentially learning fresh new things as you get older.

I’ve always had a problem with the notion “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”, mainly because it came off as something so.. absolute, so definite. So this idea being implied here and in other studies that show this is far from the truth is a refreshing new look at this learning problem. To me, it shows that it doesn’t matter what age you’re in, what matter’s most is how you acquire the information. Here’s an excerpt from the Q & A within the article:

Wired: One of the limits of human flexibility is brain plasticity, to keep learning things as you get older. You yourself have excellent plasticity…

Kurzweil: I’m actually just writing a book about that, about how the mind works and how to build on it. We have plasticity but our neocortex has a limited capacity, it’s made up of pattern recognisers - I estimate about 300 million of them. People say we only use 10 percent of our brains, actually we use all of it. It’s just not organised that well. The reason that people, as they get older, have more difficulty learning things compared to a child, is that a child has all this virgin neocortex, all these pattern recognisers that can be filled up with information.

A newborn has twice as many connections as an adult, so it’s been pruned to reflect the knowledge that the person has gained. We have already filled it up with information; there is a process where we can learn new things but we actually have to abandon these patterns. There’s lot of redundancy, so we can give up some of the redundancy and still remember something, but that’s why memories fade. We do have plasticity but it’s a skill to essentially do “garbage collection” on your neocortex to get rid of patterns that are really no longer of use.

Wired: One of the biggest takeaways I got from your original book on the Singularity was that neuroscience is going to be incredibly important. I have friends who work in it now but the technology is still mostly primitive - using giant magnets to temporarily knock out bits of the brain, for example…

Kurzweil: No, there’s actually a tremendous amount of information but very few people are trying to create a coherent theory as to what the overall mechanism of the neocortex is. The mind is 80 percent neocortex and the neocortex is remarkably uniform; that’s been known for several decades. It’s basically one algorithim that recognises and remembers a pattern. It predicts that pattern from having seen part of it.

And the patterns are organised in hierarchies and thinking is inherently hierarchical, which reflects the natural hierarchy of the world. It’s useful to look at the various findings in neuroscience from that framework. So much neuroscience is reported with no framework at all and no perspective on whether or not it fits together. We need that and we have enough information to create it, and that’s what this book is about.

Wired: Given the exponential increase in technology, I know the brain plasticity is there, but still not everyone is able or willing to adapt. Do you think those people will be left behind?

Kurzweil: Well, you know, the technology adapts to people, not the other way around. [Mobile] phones and smartphones have reached an incredible mass audience. There’s 5 billion phones, a billion smartphones, and all phones will be smartphones in the next few years. Also, we have ways of getting increased wisdom from crowds even if individuals are limited in their curiosity.

The wisdom of crowds is an important factor in the growth of technology. But the neocortex has actually limitations which is why people believe in superstition, have prejudice — there’s nothing inherent in the neocortex that these ideas have to be consistent. For example, some people have an idea about the equality of people as well as having ideas that are prejudicial about certain people. There’s nothing that goes through and makes sure that your ideas are consistent. That’s something we could do with non-biological intelligence.

Wired: From a philosophical point of view, that’s similar to Spinoza’s ethics, where he sought to turn all thought into logical propositions. But to do that with all knowledge…?

Kurzweil: If we codify knowledge, we do have an opportunity to explore its broad implications and how it all fits together, and whether it’s rational.