A friend asked me recently about whether and how using all the senses leads to better and more effective learning. The field of sensory integration is really interesting. There's a perceptual phenomenon called the McGurk effect, which is often used by scientists as an example showing that perceiving speech from others involves multiple senses. 

It's very simple - you watch a video of somebody pronouncing a phoneme, like /ga/. The audio, though, is /ba/. The brains of most people can't properly reconcile the shape of the lips and the audio, so they hear something in between - usually /da/. This happens even if you know about it! 

The effect is really strong even if you know all about it. To experience it for yourself, check out this video featuring Professor Lawrence Rosenblum from UC Riverside: 

That's the sensory integration happening in your brain. 

On the learning side, there's convincing evidence showing that multisensory environments give rise to much better learning than do unisensory environments. Studies done by cognitive psychologist Richard Mayer have shown that compared to a group that gets information through only hearing, a group that gets information through both sight and hearing have over 50% improved problem solving ability, as well as better recall even 20 years later. 

There's plenty of other evidence, and all of us should be thinking about learning environments and classrooms that go beyond just sight and hearing - what about pairing distinctive smells with lessons and using them to facilitate recall (e.g. associate the smell of lemons with math class)? Or allowing students to experience a wide variety of novel textures when learning subjects that lend themselves to that?

Besides attentional blink, there are many more very interesting effects of videogames on the brain. Again, imagine yourself looking at a screen. There is a circle on the screen, and various shapes can appear on it like numbers around a clock.

Your task is to hunt for a diamond that appears on the circle. Sometimes, the diamond is the only thing that appears, in which case the task is trivial, and sometimes there are other shapes that appear around the circle to make it harder. In addition to this, there is sometimes an additional distractor shape that shows up either inside or outside of the circle.

Your brain can't help but pay attention to this distractor, and interestingly, if the distractor is a diamond, it actually will help you find the diamond on the circle more quickly. If the distractor is not a diamond (e.g. a square or a circle), it will slow you down.

When the task becomes difficult (many other objects on the circle along with distractors), the diamond-shaped "helpful distractor" actually loses its effectiveness. Interestingly, this only happens in nongamers. Videogame players are still sped up by same-shape distractors and this happens no matter how hard the task is.

A reasonable explanation for this is that videogame players have higher attentional capacity. It seems that there’s less of an attentional bottleneck.

Are obese people obese because they eat too much, metabolize slowly, or both? Most studies show that overeating is the major factor, but what is the neuroscientific basis for this?

One of the leading hypotheses comes from studies on rats, and claims that blunted pleasure circuits in the brain result in overeating. Obesity-prone rats have a significantly lowered baseline level of dopamine and level of dopamine release. The practical result is that obesity-prone rats have to eat more to achieve the same pleasure from food as obesity-resistant rats can.

What about humans though? Do obese people have less dopamine release in their brain in response to food than thin people do? A study from the Oregon Research Institute conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging studies (brain scans) on young women, scanning their brains while they received chocolate milkshakes through syringe pumps. They found that the obese women showed blunted dorsal striatum responses to the food reward, likely prompting them to compensate for the blunted reward by overeating.

This sort of basic research into the pleasure circuits of the brain provides hope for conquering this enormous health problem that’s sweeping over the world, especially the United States. 

Attentional blink is an interesting phenomenon first described in 1992. Generally, it's about spotting salient and important items in a rapid sequence of other objects. The specific task that's used in an experiment would be where the subject is looking at a screen, where a bunch of black letters pop up and disappear in sequence. Once in a while, a white letter pops up, and a certain (short) amount of time after the white letter, an X may or may not pop up as well.

So the white letter notifies you that the X might pop up soon. If the X pops up immediately after the white letter does, your percentage of seeing it will be higher than average. This is due to an aspect of attentional blink called "lag one sparing." There's no super conclusive explanation for this, though it's thought that the brain releases a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine after the meaningful stimulus (the white letter), the effects of which last for around 100ms and allow the X to be processed together with the white letter.

However, if the X appears between 0.2 and 0.5 seconds after the white letter, many people miss it. The visual system "blinks" after the relevant white letter stimulus and is blind to the X popping up.

A real-world example of attentional blink would be if you're driving outside, with many objects whizzing past you, and you have to respond quickly to a ball rolling onto the street. As you shift your attention and bring the ball to your conscious awareness, there's a half-second gap in which you might miss a child running out after that ball.

Studies, chiefly those done by Shawn Green during his graduate studies in Daphne Bavelier's lab, have shown that video game players have a much shorter attentional blink than nongame players. This is really interesting because it suggests that these fundamental phenomena are trainable and changeable by playing fast-paced computer games.

Now this is sort of the reciprocal of what people traditionally think of as educational games. Instead of learning material from games, we’re playing games to train our own visual skill, attention, enumeration skill, and so on. So it goes both ways - neuroscience can be used to design better games, and games can also be used to affect our own brains.

In preschool or elementary school you probably remember learning about the basic tastes, out of which every complex taste is constructed. The four most commonly known ones are sweetness, sourness, saltiness, and bitterness. The fifth, umami (or savoriness) is lesser known in the West, and is best described as a meaty or brothy taste with long-lasting, mouthwatering sesation on the tongue. Umami describes the tastes of glutamates and ribonucleotides - think MSG (monosodium glutamate).

The mechanism of taste perception is fascinating. It starts with the taste buds located on your tongue, soft palate, esophagus, and epiglottis. You might also have learned in school that different parts of your tongue are responsible for different tastes (sweetness on the top, saltiness and sourness on the sides, and bitterness way in the back) - this is a myth and is based on a mistranslation of a 1901 German study. All the taste qualities are found in all areas of the tongue, though some regions are more sensitive than others.

The different types of taste buds are activated by the various components of your food dissolved in your saliva, and these impulses travel up to your brainstem, where various structures control automatic eating-related behaviors like swallowing and salivation. The signals then travel up to the thalamus, the gateway structure to the cortex, and then fan out to higher-level primary gustatory cortex, which is responsible for the perception of taste. 

Finally, from the gustatory cortex, the signals travel back deeper into the brain, to limbic areas that associate the tastes with emotions, reward, and memories.

Now think about this in the context of an unborn baby. A fetus' tastebuds begin to mature in the second trimester of pregnancy, and she will begin her first automatic sucking and swallowing behaviors around this time as well, providing vital neural stimulation for the process of the taste buds becoming wired up to taste circuitry in the brain. 

The brainstem matures early, allowing the fetus to automatically salivate in response to sweets or protrude her tongue to expel bitter liquids. This happens even though her cortex hasn't finished developing yet, meaning she can't yet perceive the actual tastes.

By the third trimester, almost all of the taste circuitry has finished maturing, and the fetus will begin to develop lifelong taste preferences based on the eating habits of her mother. This also happens in rats, where studies have shown that if expecting mothers are fed high amounts of distinctive-tasting fluids like apple juice, their pups will show enhanced preference for the same taste.

Sure, innate preference for tastes is part of the story, but there is surprising potential for taste preferences resulting from what the fetus experienced in the womb. In fact, if a pregnant mother eats a wide variety of foods, exposing the fetus to many different tastes through the amniotic fluid, her baby will typically show increased acceptance of novel foods.

Expecting mothers, arm yourselves with this knowledge and give your child a leading edge and lifelong advantage over picky eaters who can’t eat as healthy!

Our capability for affective awareness and emotional expression is influenced by the evolutionary state of our brain, autonomic nervous system, and pathways through which they communicate. These capabilities are key to social communication with other humans. Of course, the systems underlying our sociality are tightly interwoven with neural circuits involved in survival, such as homeostatic, endocrine, and autonomic processes. Visceral homeostatic maintenance is vital for survival as well, therefore our social communication circuits are deeply dependent on those that regulate basic visceral homeostasis.

It’s evident from evolution as well that the autonomic nervous system is important for how we experience affect, behave socially, and communicate vocally and visually. This can be seen through polyvagal theory, where as mammals evolved from their reptilian ancestors, the vagal efferent pathway arose to produce more and more sophisticated behavioral functions – from immobilization and death feigning in the unymelinated vagus to advanced social communication, self-control, and calming in the modern myelinated vagus. This vagal pathway serves as a link between autonomic nervous system regulation and brain-stem-related cranial nerve control of facial muscles and expression, and social communication.

The field of game design is maturing. For the past several decades, games have experienced many revolutions, most of which up until recently were driven by technological advances and development of next-generation consoles. This process is still ongoing, but with graphics technology approaching photorealistic levels and the power of computer hardware today able to simulate highly detailed real-world environments, most future game advances will be driven not primarily by technology but mostly by development of new and innovative game mechanics. One of my strong beliefs is that the next major advance in games, and even entertainment in general, will come from the incorporation of neuroscience into game mechanics and player experience design.

Game designers have struggled for many, many years to understand how to produce fun games. There have been many successes and many failures as well. Designers deliver entertainment to their players, and they design games to be fun by instinct, but often cannot fully and precisely explain how they inject fun into games. Many great game designers work by “feel,” playing through their levels over and over again and tweaking the gameplay loops that don’t feel fun to them or that most people would not find fun.

There’s nothing wrong with using intuition as a design approach, but if designers cannot pinpoint what makes a game fun, the effectiveness of game design is compromised and we are then stuck in a more or less primitive stage of development. Game design is seen as an art, not a science. This means that what makes a game fun is not tightly and accurately defined and at least difficult to pass down to new game designers or the next generation in a systematic manner.

These concerns are reflected in the fact that over the past decade, the game industry has become increasingly hit-driven. World of Warcraft chomps up over 60% of MMO market share and the top 20 casual games occupy 75% of the market. This has forced the entire game industry to become conservative and very risk-averse, suppressing innovation and radical design and in so doing, making it difficult for new types of games to flourish.

I believe that the remedy to this problem lies in use of neuroscientific rigor in game design. Games, at their core, are systems that must be learned. According to Raph Koster (one of the MMO gods), games are “rule-based systems / simulations that facilitate and encourage a user to explore and learn the properties of their possibility space through the use of feedback mechanisms.” If your game isn’t quickly learnable, players will get frustrated and it will fail. It’s natural, then, that the origin of learning, the brain, should not only be taken into consideration, but regarded as a guiding light when designing learning-based systems like games, even purely entertainment-based games.

First of all, neuroscience can be used to study and understand the elusive concept of fun. Design of reward systems and schedules and understanding of player pleasure and motivations must obviously be based on how the brain works. As has been widely reported, World of Warcraft’s variable ratio reward schedule essentially hijacks the reward systems of the brain to keep players playing forever. There are many other ways to generate fun that have yet to be described in a scientific manner.

Secondly, neuroscience will provide general rules and formulas to explain what the best game designers have discovered by instinct. We need to improve the current “hit-or-miss through intuition and observation” attitude upon which many game are based and attempt to create the Holy Grail – a Neuroscience Theory of Fun. Finding these neuroscientific patterns in the world to explain how to make games fun to learn and play will drive the whole industry forward.

In a more broadly applicable sense, I firmly believe in the importance of Having a Theory. Understanding the patterns of behavior and design principles for success will provide a road map for greater achievements in the future. These aforementioned principles apply essentially to any industry, any business, and in fact, any single human being. If you collect and organize your experiences into a theory or an organizing philosophy or structure, you’ll be able to teach more effectively, spread the knowledge, and reproduce and expand your successes.

Malcolm Gladwell said in his New York Times interview, “People are experience-rich and theory-poor… people who are busy doing things don’t have opportunities to collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.” In that same spirit, neuroscience will change the whole game for the game industry and allow creation of a “neuroscientific theory of fun” that can be accurately and precisely applied in the future.

At age 10, when I first stepped foot into a pathology lab at the University of Washington, I was originally interested in molecular biology and pursuing stem cell research. Next year, when I entered college, I started off by majoring in Biochemistry, but one day I saw an ad in an elevator for the Neurobiology major, a competitive major that everybody was trying to get into. That was my first encounter with neuroscience.

I became curious about how the brain thinks, and realized that neuroscience is one of the most powerful fields because the brain governs the entire fabric of society and human behavior. Everything is connected to the brain.

I applied for the major and luckily, got in – since then, I’ve been fascinated by the brain and wanted to understand its mysteries. It’s a young field and to say that we’ve charted a small fraction of its vastness would be an overstatement. In my travels and speeches, I’ve been asked a lot of questions from all disciplines and directions, and all of them to some degree are traceable back to how the brain perceives the world.

Nowadays, I’ve gravitated toward the broad topics of how the brain learns through play and games and how the brain makes decisions and experiences the world, including these subtopics of neuroscience:

• neuroscience and games
• reward and motivation
• play, pleasure and emotions (affective neuroscience)
• how the brain learns
• decision making
• how the brain buys
• interactive design
• neuro-branding
• user and player experience
• addiction

My training in brain research makes me reflect back to my education and it suddenly hit me that much of the school education I received in elementary school was not taking advantage of how the brain learns. It’s clear that the schools and teachers don’t understand, don’t have the tools to teach according to how brains learn. No wonder kids today in general are falling behind.

My parents believe that the education available in school was too narrow and had an inordinate emphasis on the traditional skills of math and language. Emphasis on math and verbal skills are not the problem. The problem is lack of attention and training in other areas that are very crucial for children’s success. They believed that there are many other values and abilities that are required for success once a person is out of school. In practice, they divided our curriculum into a more detailed categorization scheme to ensure that all the abilities needed for success are adequately prepared for and trained.

I see all too often from letters or emails written to me by students and schoolchildren that they are obviously very smart but are struggling in today’s rigid educational system. Once they start lagging behind, they feel they are without support in an uphill fight to catch up. They give up before long, as anyone would. They lose confidence, self-esteem, and passion for learning and school.

The idea of a new and unique learning system stems from my own experiences in learning and neuroscience, my parents’ educational philosophy, and the many correspondences my parents and I have had with other parents and students. We would like to build a learning environment where children will actually find learning fun and be fully engaged and immersed.

Combining neuroscience research findings on how people learn with the philosophy and practices of our version of what students need for success, we are constructing an online social game world where kids can engage in learning with peer-to-peer stimulation in a friendly and fun environment.

In addition to neuroeducational principles, multiple intelligence methodology, and social networking environment, we choose to deliver the core curriculum through games. This is the best format for kids to learn – just ask them.

Our vision is a world where kids can completely relax to focus on learning in a social network gaming environment. They will be engaged and happy. You will see learning at its full force on the learning platform we build for them. They will get smarter. And happier.

Humans take a long time to start walking

The onset of walking is thought to represent a critical milestone in development of the nervous system, when neuronal systems mature enough to coordinate the complex movements of multiple limbs and prevent the animal from falling over. How long it takes for babies to start walking is one area that scientists originally thought that humans differ from other mammals.

A human baby only starts to walk on shaky legs around a year after birth, but a foal can get up almost immediately and rodents like mice only require a few hours to start moving around. In a new study published in PNAS, a group from Lund University in Sweden has found why this difference exists – and surprisingly, it’s not because humans are uniquely different.

Most mammals start walking around the same developmental time!

They showed that human babies actually start walking at the same brain developmental stage as most other mammals that walk. If you look at progression of brain development after conception, and not birth, humans start walking at the same relative point in time.

This shows that the neural mechanisms that underlie the ability to walk are very similar across animals and the neural building blocks of human brains come together in a similar manner as even lower mammals that diverged in evolution many millions of years ago.

Analyzing brain development data from other animals allowed them to predict quite accurately when humans would start to walk. Though humans may be different in many ways, motor development of the brain is not one of them.

These findings shed new light on how developmental paths in early life could have been conserved evolutionarily from lower organisms all the way up to humans, and they lead to better understanding of the developmental clock and what events occur at what stage of development, which may have relevance for treating developmental disorders in the future.