Straight out of Star Trek, scientists in Brazil and the U.S. recently announced that they may have captured the basis for the “Vulcan Mind Meld.”

Scientists are calling this latest development a “brain link,” but for any Star Trek fan, the concept is familiar—it’s the connection of brain waves between two people allowing for the exchange of thoughts, and in essence, allowing for the two participants to become one mind.

It got me thinking, what knowledge would I want to pull from someone else’s brain if I had the opportunity? What knowledge exists out there, that I currently don’t have, but would love to have (literally) instantly?

Before we go down that road, let’s lay out what’s actually been discovered: Scientists in Brazil captured, through electronic sensors (rather than telepathy, which was the Star Trek way), the thoughts of a rat in a lab and then sent the thoughts via the Internet to the brain of a rat in a Duke University lab in the U.S. The result was that the second rat received the thoughts of the first rat and instantly mimicked its behavior.

Amazing, yes, but it’s not the first time the Internet has been used to transmit thoughts. You may remember in 2008, when Duke University researchers captured the brain activity of a monkey and sent it via the Internet, ultimately controlling a robot arm in Japan. That drew media attention five years ago, but this discovery is different and it has the science world abuzz because it specifically involves direct brain-to-brain communication. And it raises the question—what could this mean for the future of how we learn? Think of the possibilities.

Personally, I have always wanted to be fluent in more than one language, and this discovery suggests that it might be possible to instantly exchange that knowledge with a native speaker.

Is there an aspect of your career that you wish you knew more about? How would it change your career if you could instantly learn something from someone else? How would this type of knowledge transfer affect how we learn in school and how would it affect how we learn at meetings and conferences?

We know some of these answers already.

“MPI’s research on the future of meetings shows that the future would see a focus on neuroscience and neural interactions and this would be based on enhanced understanding of how our brains work,” said researcher Jackie Mulligan, with Leeds Metropolitan University in London. “As more understanding emerges from studies [like this one] that explore neural communications, emotions, processes this area could grow in importance by supporting meetings to read audiences more effectively whether through face-to-face events or virtual events.”

Andrea Sullivan, neuroscience expert and president of BrainStrength Systems, says right now virtual and hybrid can’t even come close to face-to-face meetings, but she sees an opportunity to make better connections virtually.

“I see this as an opportunity that would further the ability for us to do long-distance work together. Not necessarily complete the shift to virtual meetings, but it would go a long way,” Sullivan says. “Right now our brains are just not capable of engaging completely with others virtually. It isn’t possible to accurately communicate any of the necessary emotions via digital communications—not like it is in a face-to-face meeting. We communicate so much through our bodies, so if the body is not there, we lose 90 percent of the value and the physiological information we need to understand each other.”

But again, this study suggests that the possibility to exchange such physiological information could exist. Could it in fact change the face of meetings? Mulligan thinks so.

“Imagine a Skype call now with an ability to read those neural signals,” Mulligan said. “These are all interesting possibilities to explore that could well deepen engagement in meetings in the future. However, one huge challenge with all of this which came out of the research was to what extent humans would be willing to engage and the ethical issues that would arise with these kinds of developments.”

Rhodri Thomas, professor of tourism and events policy at the International Centre for Research in Events, Tourism and Hospitality (ICRETH), suggests the ethical issues could take longer to manifest than the technology itself.

“The ethical issues are very complex and obviously require strict regulatory mechanisms internationally as medical scientists undertake research projects and develop their understanding of how the brain works. The likely outcomes for events practitioners will certainly be associated with enabling openness, consent and control for attendees over what is done to them or revealed about them. I’m sure there will be a myriad of other issues that we will need to give some serious thought to as these new insights and associated technologies emerge.”

This specific research is just the beginning, and as far as actual transfer of knowledge from one human brain to another, that’s much further down the road, Sullivan says.

“In terms of it being used for the normal population, we are talking way, way, way down the line,” she said. “It’s an interesting thought experiment, because we are learning more and more how to communicate with each other in ways other than face to face. We are headed toward some very interesting things, that’s for sure.”

The Duke research team is currently trying to expand their research to link four rat brains and two monkey brains to prove that the brain-to-brain communication can extend across multiple species.

But again, while the idea poses some interesting logistical and ethical questions for the meeting and event industry, we are still dreaming of a technology that’s at least a few years away. So for now, if you want to know my thoughts, you’ll just have to ask.

For more neuroscience news, visit www.dana.org.

Jeff Hurt is one of my favorite writers and presenters in the industry. He always offers great content on the Midcourse Corrections blog, and one of his recent entries is no different.

It caught my eye because of the neuroscience angle, and because he mentions David Rock, who offers seven daily activities we can do to have healthier minds. 

Let’s look at a couple of those activities.

Focus Time: “All conferences should have dedicated time where presenters and facilitators allow attendees to consider how they are going to apply the content they’ve received,” Hurt wrote. This is something that keeps getting brought up in research, and attendees clearly want it. Why, then, is it so hard to implement this into meetings and events?

Play Time: “Every conference needs dedicated time where attendees are allowed to be spontaneous and creative,” Hurt wrote. I’m a big supporter of play time, and without it we wouldn’t have such things as Gmail, Picasso paintings or any number of items created outside processes and procedures.

“What do most Nobel Laureates, innovative entrepreneurs, artists and performers, well-adjusted children, happy couples and families, and the most successfully adapted mammals have in common?,” asked Stuart Brown of the Institute of Play. “They play enthusiastically throughout their lives.” 

Hurt offers five other activities via Rock that we can apply to our meetings and events, and I encourage you to visit his site for more about them. And be sure to check out our upcoming April issue, where Hurt will be featured as one of our industry influencers. 

I've had it in my head for the past several months to learn French. I already know a little bit of Spanish (what I remember from high school and college courses). For some reason, though, I'm being drawn to learn French. I even bought study guides and audio CDs. What I haven't afforded myself yet, however, is time. But I should focus more on that aspect, because according to a recent study, learning a language makes your brain grow. 

At the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy in Uppsala, Sweden, people with a flair for languages go from having no knowledge of a language to speaking it fluently in the space of 13 months. From morning to evening, weekdays and weekends, the recruits study at a pace unlike on any other language course.

As a control group, researchers used medicine and cognitive science students at Umeå University—students who also study hard, but not languages. Both groups were given MRI scans before and after a three-month period of intensive study. While the brain structure of the control group remained unchanged, specific parts of the brain of the language students grew. The parts that developed in size were the hippocampus, a deep-lying brain structure that is involved in learning new material and spatial navigation, and three areas in the cerebral cortex.

“We were surprised that different parts of the brain developed to different degrees depending on how well the students performed and how much effort they had had to put in to keep up with the course,” said Johan Mårtensson, a researcher in psychology at Lund University in Sweden.

Students with greater growth in the hippocampus and areas of the cerebral cortex related to language learning (superior temporal gyrus) had better language skills than the other students. In students who had to put more effort into their learning, greater growth was seen in an area of the motor region of the cerebral cortex (middle frontal gyrus). The areas of the brain in which the changes take place are thus linked to how easy one finds it to learn a language, and development varies according to performance.

“Even if we cannot compare three months of intensive language study with a lifetime of being bilingual, there is a lot to suggest that learning languages is a good way to keep the brain in shape,” Mårtensson said.

So, who wants to learn French with me, or help me practice it? 

(Story materials provided by Lund University.)

Scientists have discovered proof that the evolution of intelligence and larger brain sizes can be driven by cooperation and teamwork, shedding new light on the origins of what it means to be human. The study appears online in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B and was led by scientists at Trinity College Dublin: Ph.D. student, Luke McNally, and Assistant Professor Dr. Andrew Jackson at the School of Natural Sciences in collaboration with Dr. Sam Brown of the University of Edinburgh.

The researchers constructed computer models of artificial organisms, endowed with artificial brains, which played each other in classic games, such as the "Prisoner's Dilemma," that encapsulate human social interaction. They used 50 simple brains, each with up to 10 internal processing and 10 associated memory nodes. The brains were pitted against each other in these classic games.

The game was treated as a competition, and just as real life favors successful individuals, the best of these digital organisms—defined as how high they scored in the games, less a penalty for the size of their brains—were allowed to reproduce and populate the next generation of organisms.

By allowing the brains of these digital organisms to evolve freely in their model, the researchers were able to show that the transition to cooperative society leads to the strongest selection for bigger brains. Bigger brains essentially did better as cooperation increased.

The social strategies that emerge spontaneously in these bigger, more intelligent brains show complex memory and decision making. Behaviors like forgiveness, patience, deceit and Machiavellian trickery all evolve within the game as individuals try to adapt to their social environment.

“The strongest selection for larger, more intelligent brains, occurred when the social groups were first beginning to start cooperating, which then kicked off an evolutionary Machiavellian arms race of one individual trying to outsmart the other by investing in a larger brain," Jackson said. "Our digital organisms typically start to evolve more complex ‘brains’ when their societies first begin to develop cooperation."

The idea that social interactions underlie the evolution of intelligence has been around since the mid-1970s, but support for this hypothesis has come largely from correlative studies where large brains were observed in more social animals. The authors of the current research provide the first evidence that mechanistically links decision making in social interactions with the evolution of intelligence. This study highlights the utility of evolutionary models of artificial intelligence in answering fundamental biological questions about our own origins.

“Our model differs in that we exploit the use of theoretical experimental evolution combined with artificial neural networks to actually prove that yes, there is an actual cause-and-effect link between needing a large brain to compete against and cooperate with your social group mates," McNally said. "Our extraordinary level of intelligence defines mankind and sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. It has given us the arts, science and language, and above all else the ability to question our very existence and ponder the origins of what makes us unique both as individuals and as a species."

(Story materials and image provided by Trinity College Dublin.)

I've been on a kick lately about how we should take more responsibility for our actions, that what we do are personal choices and not actions out of our control. 

You may think, too, that forgetfulness is something that we can't control, that it's something our minds do subconsciously. Not true. According to psychology researcher Gerd Thomas Waldhauser at Lund University in Sweden, we can control our memory the same way we control our motor functions. 

Waldhauser’s neuroimaging studies were carried out in a laboratory environment where volunteers were asked to practice forgetting, or attempt to forget facts. Through EEG measurements, Waldhauser showed that the same parts of the brain are activated when we restrain a motor impulse and when we suppress a memory. And just as we can practice restraining motor impulses, we can also train ourselves to repress memories.

Waldhauser has not only shown that we can deliberately forget things. Through EEG measurements, he has also managed to capture the exact moment when a memory is inhibited, when the forgetfulness is imposed.

The inhibition of memory eases off after a few hours. But the more often information is suppressed, the more difficult it becomes to retrieve it.

“If the memories have been suppressed over a long period of time, they could be extremely difficult to retrieve,” Waldhauser said.

Remember this next time you meet someone who says she's forgotten your name. She may actually have done that on purpose.

(Story materials provided by Lund University.)

A new study published in the journal Cognition overturns a decades-old theory about the nature of attention and demonstrates that even brief diversions from a task can dramatically improve one’s ability to focus on that task for prolonged periods.

The study pinpoints a phenomenon known to anyone who’s ever had trouble doing the same task for a long time: After a while, you begin to lose your focus, and your performance on the task declines.

Some researchers believe that this “vigilance decrement,” as they describe it, is the result of a drop in one’s “attentional resources,” said University of Illinois psychology professor Alejandro Lleras, who led the new study. “For 40 or 50 years, most papers published on the vigilance decrement treated attention as a limited resource that would get used up over time, and I believe that to be wrong. You start performing poorly on a task because you’ve stopped paying attention to it. But you are always paying attention to something. Attention is not the problem.”

Lleras had noticed that a similar phenomenon occurs in sensory perception: The brain gradually stops registering a sight, sound or feeling if that stimulus remains constant over time. For example, most people are not aware of the sensation of clothing touching their skin. The body becomes habituated to the feeling, and the stimulus no longer registers in any meaningful way in the brain.

“Constant stimulation is registered by our brains as unimportant, to the point that the brain erases it from our awareness,” Lleras said. “So I thought, well, if there’s some kind of analogy about the ways the brain fundamentally processes information, things that are true for sensations ought to be true for thoughts. If sustained attention to a sensation makes that sensation vanish from our awareness, sustained attention to a thought should also lead to that thought’s disappearance from our mind.”

In the new study, Lleras and postdoctoral fellow Atsunori Ariga tested participants’ ability to focus on a repetitive computerized task for about an hour under various conditions. The 84 study subjects were divided into four groups:

• The control group performed the 50-minute task without breaks or diversions.
• The “switch” group and the “no-switch” group memorized four digits prior to performing the task, and were told to respond if they saw one of the digits on the screen during the task. Only the switch group was actually presented with the digits (twice) during the 50-minute experiment. Both groups were tested on their memory of the digits at the end of the task.
• The “digit-ignored” group was shown the same digits presented to the switch group during the task, but was told to ignore them. 

As expected, most participants’ performance declined significantly over the course of the task. But most critically, Lleras says, those in the switch group saw no drop in their performance over time. Simply having them take two brief breaks from their main task (to respond to the digits) allowed them to stay focused during the entire experiment.

“It was amazing that performance seemed to be unimpaired by time, while for the other groups, performance was so clearly dropping off,” he said.

This study is consistent with the idea that the brain is built to detect and respond to change, Lleras says, and suggests that prolonged attention to a single task actually hinders performance. 

“We propose that deactivating and reactivating your goals allows you to stay focused,” he said. “From a practical standpoint, our research suggests that, when faced with long tasks, it is best to impose brief breaks on yourself. Brief mental breaks will actually help you stay focused on your task.”

(Story materials provided by the University of Illinois.)

New research by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that the impacts of jet lag (memory loss and learning problems) may alter your brain’s structure for a month, according to an article on MSNBC.

Their study involved female hamsters that were subjected to six-hour time shifts that mimicked a flight from New York to Paris (like humans, hamsters follow precise circadian rhythms, so changes in time will similarly throw off their internal clocks). In the jet lag period immediately following the time difference, they had trouble learning simple tasks that a control group easily mastered. And the learning difficulties continued for the next month.