Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Tuesday, April 22, 2008 That's right, "maladaptive changes in event-related brain networks"Today's New York Times reported on some researchers who study what is going on in the brain when people make a mistake while playing a game. That caught my eye as something relevant to orienteering. Here is a bit of the NY Times story:The idea, Dr. Eichele said, was to see if there were “brain activity patterns that would predict whether or not a response would be erroneous.” As he and his colleagues report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, no single “blip” or event signals an error. Rather, brain patterns start to change about 30 seconds before an error is committed. “There are these linear gradients, gradual changes over time,” Dr. Eichele said. The changes were seen in two brain networks. One, called the default mode region, is normally active when a person is relaxed and at rest. When a person is doing something, like playing the game, this region becomes deactivated. But in their experiments, the researchers found that in the time leading up to an error, the region became active again — the subject was heading toward a relaxed state. Another network in the right frontal lobe gradually became less active, the researchers found. This is an area in the brain thought to be related to cognitive control, Dr. Eichele said, to keeping “on task.” If I understand it, what they found is that soon before you make a mistake, you relax and don't concentrate. Not exactly earth shattering, but still interesting. (And, of course, I may very well be misunderstanding the research). The researchers used something called "function MRI" to monitor people's brains as they played a simple game. Too bad they didn't make their subjects play Catching Features! You can find the research article online, "Prediction of human errors by maladaptive changes in event-related brain networks." Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 8:36 PM 
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