A Pill That Helps Adults Learn New Skills As Quickly As Children?

In 2011 thriller Limitless, Bradley Cooper, pictured centre, takes a pill that opens up closed regions of his brain. This boost his intelligence, motor skills and ability to learn new languages

The Real-Life Limitless Pill? Drug Helps Adults Learn As Fast As Children By Making The Brain More 'Elastic' -- Daily Mail

* Donepezil is used to improve memory function in Alzheimer’s patients
* Children learn skills quickly as their brains go through 'critical periods’
* Researchers found donepezil can revert adult brains to these periods
* It increases the 'elasticity' of the brain making it capable of learning rapidly
* Researchers rewired a visually impaired patient’s brain to process images
* The drug works by boosting chemicals in the brain that reduce with age

It may sound like something from 2011 thriller Limitless, but researchers have discovered a pill that helps adults learn new skills as quickly as children.

A professor at Harvard rewired the brain of a visually impaired women to process images by giving her Alzheimer’s drug donepezil.

The pill boosts chemicals in the brain, such as serotonin and acetylcholine, which are both found in high concentrations in the brains of young children.

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My Comment: Faster please. On a side note .... the 2011 thriller Limitless with Bradley Cooper is a great film.

Does Sugar Make You Stupid?

Does Sugar Make You Stupid? Study Suggests It Sabotages Learning And Memory -- Daily Mail

* Fructose is commonly added to processed foods such as soft drinks
* It was found to hamper memory and slow brain activity

Too much sugar could be making you stupid, according to researchers.

The suggestion follows tests in the laboratory comparing high-fructose corn syrup, which is six times sweeter than cane sugar and a common ingredient in processed foods, with omega-3 fatty acids, known to aid memory and learning.

In an experiment on rats, one group had a sugary diet for six weeks and another was fed healthily.

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My Comment: I will stick with the caffeine drinks to boost my learning and memory.

Naps And Dreams Boost Learning, Study Finds

From Live Science:

Scientists have long wondered why we sleep and why we dream. A new study provides evidence for some long-held notions that sleep and dreams boost learning and help us to make sense of the real world. Even naps can help, the researchers found.

Test subjects who dreamt about a challenging task performed it better than those who didn't have such dreams.

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Drug Treatment Could Sharpen Adult Brains

Where's Pinky? NARF! Medical College of Georgia, via Physorg

From Popular Science:

Tests in mice show potential for reversing the slowdown in learning that comes with puberty.

Anyone who's tried to learn a second language knows that the earlier in life you start, the easier it is to learn. Now, a scientist at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center (SUNY) has not only discovered why learning becomes much harder after puberty, but also how to fix it. The SUNY team found that learning difficulty resulted from the proliferation of special chemical receptors during adolescence, and that the stress steroid THP could reverse the problem.

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Magnesium May Boost Brainpower

From Live Science:

Mice given extra doses of a new magnesium compound had better working memory, long-term memory and greater learning ability.

Before you go popping heavy doses of magnesium, however, know that much more testing is needed. Though rodent brains work similarly to ours, animal studies do not always predict what will happen in humans.

"If MgT is shown to be safe and effective in humans, these results may have a significant impact on public health," said Guosong Liu, director of the Center for Learning and Memory at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

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Comic Books Are Good For Children's Learning

From The Telegraph:

Parents should not "look down" on comics as they are just as good for children as reading books, a new study claims.

Researchers believe they can benefit from tales about the caped crusader, Superman and even Dennis the Menace in the same way they can from reading other types of literature, despite teachers and parents often being snooty about comics, experts say.

According to the research, critics say that reading comics is actually a "simplified version" of reading that doesn't have the complexity of "real" books with their "dense columns of words and lack of pictures".

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Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips On How To Learn

CAN TWO WRONGS MAKE A RIGHT?: Not knowing the answer can be a good thing.
Magdalena Tworkowska

From Scientific American:

New research makes the case for hard tests, and suggests an unusual technique that anyone can use to learn.

For years, many educators have championed “errorless learning," advising teachers (and students) to create study conditions that do not permit errors. For example, a classroom teacher might drill students repeatedly on the same multiplication problem, with very little delay between the first and second presentations of the problem, ensuring that the student gets the answer correct each time.

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Protein That Enhances Long-term Memory By Controlling Rest Intervals Identified

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2009) — As most good students realize, repeated studying produces good memory. Those who study a lot realize, further, that what they learn tends to be preserved longer in memory if they space out learning sessions between rest intervals. Neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have now discovered how this so-called "spacing effect" is controlled in the brain at the level of individual molecules.

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Learning Disabilities In Males: Nine New X Chromosome Genes Linked To Learning Disabilities

Image: Family with missense variants in the CASK gene, one of the genes discovered in this study. Individuals with the missense variant are denoted by a *. Females are denoted with circles and males with squares. Black shading denotes individuals with learning disabilities. (Credit: Image courtesy of Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 20, 2009) — A collaboration between more than 70 researchers across the globe has uncovered nine new genes on the X chromosome that, when knocked-out, lead to learning disabilities. The international team studied almost all X chromosome genes in 208 families with learning disabilities - the largest screen of this type ever reported.

Remarkably, the team also found that approximately 1-2% of X chromosome genes, when knocked-out, have no apparent effect on an individual's ability to function in the ordinary world. The publication in Nature Genetics - a culmination of five years of scientific collaboration - emphasises the power of sequencing approaches to identify novel genes of clinical importance, but also highlights the challenges researchers face when carrying out this kind of study.

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Sleep May Help Clear Brain For New Learning

Washington University scientists used genetically modified fruit flies to track the creation of new brain synapses, junctures where two brain cells communicate. They found that two scenarios that give the fruit fly's brain a workout caused new synapses to arise. To their surprise, all of the new synapses originated from a group of 16 cells in the fly brain's internal timekeeping mechanism. The cells are highlighted in the encircled area above. (Credit: Image courtesy of Washington University School of Medicine)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 3, 2009) — A new theory about sleep's benefits for the brain gets a boost from fruit flies in the journal Science. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found evidence that sleep, already recognized as a promoter of long-term memories, also helps clear room in the brain for new learning.

The critical question: How many synapses, or junctures where nerve cells communicate with each other, are modified by sleep? Neurologists believe creation of new synapses is one key way the brain encodes memories and learning, but this cannot continue unabated and may be where sleep comes in.

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