Welcome 2010!

Happy New Year!

Sitting at home again, as we have done for many years... we'll make it to midnight only because we're waiting up for our youngest son!

I've often said that learning is important because the world is a fascinating place. As we hear over and over again about the 10 best this of the year and the ten worst that of the decade, NASA puts things in perspective.

The Hubble telescope provides us with this image of hundreds of thousands of stars moving about in the globular cluster M13, one of the brightest globular clusters in the northern sky. It can be found in the winter sky in the constellation Hercules, and can even be seen with the unaided eye under dark skies.

M13 is home to over 100,000 stars and is located at a distance of 25,000 light-years. In other words, the light in the picture left these stars in 22991 BCE! (For historical perspective, Abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac in around 1800 BCE. Where will you be in 22991 CE?)

These stars are packed closely together in a ball approximately 150 light-years across, and they spend their entire lives whirling around in the cluster. Near the core, the density of stars is about a hundred times greater than the density in the neighborhood of our sun. These stars are so crowded that they can slam into each other and form a new star, called a "blue straggler." The brightest reddish stars in the cluster are ancient red giants. These aging stars have expanded to many times their original diameters and cooled. The blue-white stars are the hottest in the cluster.

M13 is one of nearly 150 known globular clusters surrounding our Milky Way galaxy. Globular clusters have some of the oldest stars in the universe. Scientists believe they formed before the disk of our Milky Way, so they are older than nearly all other stars in our galaxy including our own sun.

This image is a composite of archival Hubble data taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowledgment: C. Bailyn (Yale University), W. Lewin (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), A. Sarajedini (University of Florida), and W. van Altena (Yale University)

Holiday Plagarism

or maybe not, as they cited their sources!

Happy Holidays

Only on the Internet, the most bizarre Nativity scenes... this egg timer is my favorite.

Hope you have a restful winter break... after digging out!

Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind

On Friday, November 20 at the Learning and the Brain Conference, Mara and I heard from Gary Small, MD, author of iBrain, who spoke about Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.

For years we’ve been hearing about the differences between Digital Natives (under 25), who have good tech skills, and Digital Immigrants (their parents), who have weaker tech skills. Small has studied the neural networks of the two groups, and finds that the Digital Natives have much less development in those that control social interaction.

He spoke of the Natives’ relationship to technology is personal, and had us do an experiment exchanging cell phones while we monitored our emotions. For those of us who only turn on our phones when making a call it wasn’t too exciting, but when I replicated the experiment at a faculty meeting, the younger faculty clearly felt the anxiety of disconnection and potential loss of privacy.

No real news here, our brains are changing moment to moment, with neural circuits strengthening with use and weakening with disuse. Giving teachers everywhere hope, Small told us that young brains are missing empathy not because kids are naturally rude, or that societal civility is on the decline, but because that part of their brains has not yet developed.

By adolescence, 60% of connections are pruned, and in a Darwinian twist, between the ages of 8 and 18 is tech time. Our kids have been born with access to limitless information, 24 hour news and entertainment, but with less time for face to face interactions and thus are slowed in their development of empathy and complex reasoning skills.

With social networking (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter), they are aware all the time of what everyone is doing, which leaves little time for reflection. As they are constantly reacting to others, their individuality and creativity are stifled. One of my favorite phrases to hear at Nora from kids just sitting around is “I’m bored,” because it means they’re having to create something out of nothing, rather than thoughtlessly respond to external stimuli.

Technology develops the Dopamine pathways which are precursors to addiction. In a 2007 Harris poll, 8.5% of college students showed multiple signs of addiction, including escaping problems through playing games, lying about play length, sensitization to fighting stimuli. The inflamation of these neural pathways is a major reason for Alzheimer’s Disease.

In one of Dr. Small’s studies on these neural pathways, he studied the effect of gaming on face to face interactions. Digital immigrants were better able to rapidly identify emotions than digital natives, who were only able to identify happy faces faster than angry, unless the face displayed violent emotions.

The connection with ADHD is not certain. Does video gaming cause the brain to display symptoms of ADHD, or do people with ADHD gravitate to the fast-paced stimulation of video games? Studies are ongoing.