Archive for the ‘Training’ Category

Daydreams may solve complex problems

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

This article published on the website Globe and Mail gives an interesting insight into daydreaming and how it may be useful to us.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/daydreams-may-solve-complex-problems/article1134033/

Letting your mind wander is not a waste of time, according to a new study 

Comments By Marina Jiménez Last updated on Thursday, May. 14, 2009 03:12AM EDT

People spend one third of their waking lives daydreaming. But letting your mind wander is not a waste of time, according to a new study. It’s a chance for the brain to stop focusing on immediate tasks, and subconsciously resolve important life problems.

The study, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that brain areas associated with complex problem solving, previously thought to go dormant during daydreaming, are in fact highly active.

“A lot of people reject daydreaming as a wasteful activity,” says Kalina Christoff, the study’s lead author and a University of British Columbia psychology professor. “But our study suggests that if you daydream, you might be able to advance some of your current concerns.”

The study put 15 research subjects through a functional MRI for 90 minutes, to examine the metabolic processes of their brains. They completed a simple, routine task of pushing a button when numbers appeared on a screen.

Prof. Christoff tracked the research subjects’ attentiveness through brain scans, subjective reports and by monitoring their performance of the task. She found that two key regions of the brain were active during daydreaming: the “default network,” associated with easy, routine mental activity, and the brain’s “executive network,” associated with high-level, complex problem-solving.

Usually when one network is working, the other isn’t. It is rare to see them working in tandem, the paper concludes. As well, the brain activity was most active when the research subjects weren’t aware they were daydreaming.

“When your mind wanders, a different kind of thinking occurs,” said Prof. Christoff. “When you aren’t trying to solve problems deliberately, it provides more mental space, you make connections and let your mind go wherever it wants.”

She has long been interested in spontaneous thought – but it is difficult to study because it doesn’t occur on cue. But now studies are being designed that permit scientists to look at the quantity and quality of brain activity during “mind wandering.”

Prof. Christoff says that many of her best research ideas have come to her when she is in the car, daydreaming.

“Driving is the perfect activity for letting your mind wander because it is highly automatized and requires only a small part of our attention,” she said. “When you daydream, you may not achieve your immediate goal, say reading a book or paying attention in class. But your mind may be taking that time to address more important questions in your life.”

She compares it to mulling over a life decision and letting it circulate in your brain, as opposed to deliberately weighing the pros and cons. Prof. Christoff runs UBC’s Cognitive Neuroscience of Thought Laboratory, which studies neural and cognitive mechanisms of human thought, reasoning and problem solving. Her research team for the study included members who are now at Stanford University and the University of California at Santa Barbara.

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Video Games Can Encourage Positive Behavior, Too

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

With so much bad press for video games and the people who partake in them, this article  from Miller-McCune makes a refreshing change

 By: Tom Jacobs  |  March 27, 2009  |  01:07 PM (PDT)  |  

 

If violent video games encourage violent behavior, as a series of studies suggests, do prosocial games — those that reward helpful behavior — inspire players to act in more constructive, cooperative ways? A newly published paper, featuring studies of three different age groups in three different countries, suggests the answer is yes.

“Video games are not inherently good or bad,” concludes the team of 12 researchers led by psychologist Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University. Their findings suggest this popular form of entertainment “can have both positive and negative effects.”

The paper, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, begins with a survey of secondary school students in Singapore (adolescents in the equivalent of seventh or eighth grade). They listed their favorite games, the number of hours they spend playing them each week and how often the games involve a) helping others, or b) hurting or killing others.

They were then asked a series of questions to measure their emotional awareness and empathy for others. After controlling for several variables, “prosocial game exposure was positively related to prosocial behavior,” the researchers report.

The second survey was of fifth-, eighth- and eleventh-grade students in Japan. They were asked how often in the past month they had played games in which characters help troubled people, or games in which friendship or a positive parent-child relationship was featured.

Finally, the youngsters were asked how often in the previous month they had acted in one of four specific helpful ways (such as “I helped a person who was in trouble”). The researchers discovered a strong relationship between playing prosocial games and self-reported prosocial behavior.

For the third study, the researchers conducted an experiment using 161 American college students, who were randomly assigned to play specific parts of one of six video games. Two of the games were violent (Ty2 and Crash Trinsanity), two were neutral (Pure Pinball and Super Monkey Ball Deluxe), and two were deemed prosocial: Chibi Robo, in which the goal is to make your family happy by cleaning up and helping out with the chores; and Super Mario Sunshine, in which players gain points by cleaning up a polluted island.

After playing one of the games for 20 minutes, participants were asked to assign a partner 11 puzzles to complete. They were told that if their partners completed 10 of the puzzles within 10 minutes, the partner would win a $10 gift certificate. They could choose puzzles from one of three difficulty levels, depending upon whether they were disposed to help their partner win the prize, or to place difficulties in his or her path.

The researchers found that “participants who played a prosocial game helped their partners significantly more than did either those who had played a violent game, or those who had played a neutral game.” Furthermore, “the violent gamers hurt their partners significantly more than did either those who had played a prosocial game or those who had played a neutral game.”

Taken together, the three studies found that “prosocial game play was significantly positively related to all four measured prosocial behaviors and traits” — helping behavior, cooperation and sharing, empathy and emotional awareness. These findings complement a 2008 study from Britain that found listening to songs with prosocial lyrics encourages charitable behavior.

According to Gentile and his colleagues, these results “make it clear how critical it is to separate amount of play from the content of play.” In other words, video game playing per se isn’t the issue: Rather, the important factor is the underlying messages contained in specific games.

“Content matters,” they conclude, “and games are excellent teachers.”

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Posted in Cognitive hypnotherapy, Training, brain, brain fitness, learning, mind, performance, positive psychology | 1 Comment »