Basket Weaving May Have Taught Humans To Count

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ScienceDaily (June 3, 2009) — Did animals teach us one of the oldest forms of human technology? Did this technology contribute to our ability to count? These are just two of the themes due to be explored at a conference on basketry at the University of East Anglia.

The event, which takes place today and tomorrow (June 5-6), is part of Beyond the Basket, a major new research project led by the university exploring the development and use of basketry in human culture over 10,000 years.
Basketry has been practised for millennia and ranges from mats for sitting on, containers and traps for hunting, to fencing and barriers for animals or land, partitions and walls - all of which have been central to culture.
Beyond the Basket is a two-and-a-half year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of its Beyond Text programme. The research will explore the role of basketry in human culture and focus on various parts of the world, both in the past and present, from Europe to Amazonia, central Africa and Papua New Guinea.
The aim is to identify the mechanical traditions of making and the ways in which basketry is implicated in wider patterns of understanding, for example the order of society or the design of the universe. It will also show the impact of woven forms on other media, such as pottery, painting, and stone sculpture and architecture, and look at the future of basketry and the solutions it could offer to current issues, whether technical or social.
Project leader Sandy Heslop, of the School of World Art and Museology at UEA, said: “Basketry is a worldwide technology and is the interaction between human ingenuity and the environment. It tends to make use of, and therefore has to be adapted to, local conditions in terms of resources and environment.
“Without basketry there would be no civilisations. You can’t bring thousands of people together unless you can supply them, you can’t bring in supplies to feed populations without containers. In the early days of civilisations these containers were basketry.
“We may think of baskets as humble, but other people and cultures don’t. They have been used for storage, for important religious and ceremonial processes, even for bodies in the form of coffins.”
It is about 10,000 years ago that evidence for basketry starts to appear in North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Today its uses and influences are still seen, from the bamboo scaffolding often used in Asia, to contemporary architecture, for example the ‘Boiler Suit’ - the name given to the ‘woven’ steel tiles encasing the boiler room at Guy’s Hospital in London.
Mr Heslop said: “Beyond its practical uses, basketry has arguably been even more influential on our lives, since it relies on the relationship of number, pattern and structure. It therefore provides a model for disciplines such as mathematics and engineering and for the organisation of social and political life.
“Given the range of uses of basketry the associations of the technology are very varied. Some are aggressive, others protective, some help create social hierarchies others are recreational.”
The conference, Beyond the Basket: Construction, Order and Understanding, will look at various themes including: design and production, environmental issues, commercial and historical perspectives, weaving in architecture, and the mathematics of basketry, as well as more anthropological and archaeological topics. Among the speakers will be experts from North and South America, as well as the UK.
Beyond the Basket will culminate in an exhibition and accompanying book in 2011. The exhibition will include ancient material recovered by excavation as well as more recent examples of basketry from around the world and will enable people to experience basketry directly.
For further information about Beyond the Basket and to view images visit http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/beyondthebasket
Adapted from materials provided by University of East Anglia, via AlphaGalileo.

Why Emotionally Charged Events Are So Memorable

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071004121045.htm

Science Daily — Both extensive psychological research and personal experiences confirm that events that happen during heightened states of emotion such as fear, anger and joy are far more memorable than less dramatic occurrences.

"This phenomenon is something everyone can identify with," said Roberto Malinow of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. "You can probably remember where you were when you heard about 9/11, but you probably don't know where you were on 9/10. We've identified one mechanism that may underlie this effect."
The parts of the brain where memories are stored need to distinguish between significant experiences and those that carry less importance, giving priority to the transformation of the former into long-term memory, the researchers explained.
One factor that scientists believe to be critical in that process is the emotional load of an event. Indeed, studies have shown that heightened states of emotion can facilitate learning and memory. In some situations, this process can even become pathological, Malinow said, as occurs in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition characterized by persistent vivid memories of traumatic events.
In a report in Cell, Johns Hopkins researchers and their collaborators at Cold Spring Harbor and New York University have identified the likely biological basis for this: a hormone released during emotional arousal "primes" nerve cells to remember events by increasing their chemical sensitivity at sites where nerves rewire to form new memory circuits.
Describing the brain as a big circuit board in which each new experience creates a new circuit, Hopkins neuroscience professor Richard Huganir, Ph.D. says that he and his team found that during emotional peaks, the hormone norepinephrine dramatically sensitizes synapses -- the site where nerve cells make an electro-chemical connection -- to enhance the sculpting of a memory into the big board.
Norepinephrine, more widely known as a "fight or flight" hormone, energizes the process by adding phosphate molecules to a nerve cell receptor called GluR1. The phosphates help guide the receptors to insert themselves adjacent to a synapse. "Now when the brain needs to form a memory, the nerves have plenty of available receptors to quickly adjust the strength of the connection and lock that memory into place," Huganir says.
Huganir and his team suspected that GluR1might be a target of norepinephrine since disruptions in this receptor cause spatial memory defects in mice. They tested the idea by either injecting healthy mice with adrenaline or exposing them to fox urine, both of which increase norepinephrine levels in brain. Analyzing brain slices of the mice, the researchers saw increased phosphates on the GluR1 receptors and an increased ability of these receptors to be recruited to synapses.
When the researchers put mice in a cage, gave a mild shock, took them out of that cage and put them back in it the next day, mice who had received adrenaline or fox urine tended to "freeze" in fear -- an indicator they associated the cage as the site of a shock -- more frequently, suggestive of enhanced memory.
However, in a similar experiment with mice genetically engineered to have a defective GluR1 receptor that phosphates cannot attach to, adrenaline injections had no effect on mouse memory, further evidence of the "priming" effect of the receptor in response to norepinephrine.
The researchers plan on continuing their work by going in the opposite direction and engineering another mouse strain that has a permanently phosphorylated or "primed" receptor. "We're curious to see how these mice will behave," Huganir says. "We suspect that they'll be pretty smart, but at the same time constantly anxious."
Reference: Hu et al.: "Emotion Enhances Learning via Norepinephrine Regulation of AMPA-Receptor Trafficking." Publishing in Cell 131, 160--173, October 5, 2007. DOI 10.1016/j.cell.2007.09.017
Authors on the paper are Hailan Hu, Eleonore Real, and Roberto Malinow of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; Joe LeDoux of New York University; and Kogo Takamiya, Myoung-Goo Kang, and Huganir of Johns Hopkins.
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellowship, NARSAD, and the Ale Davis and Maxine Harrison Foundation
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com

Genes May Hold The Keys To How Humans Learn

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071001172835.htm

Science Daily — New research is giving scientists fresh insights into how genetics are a prime factor in how we learn.
Michael Frank, an assistant professor of psychology and director of the Laboratory for Neural Computation and Cognition at The University of Arizona, headed a team whose results are reported in the Oct. 1 issue of Early Edition, an online site hosted by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Frank and his colleagues found links to learning behaviors in three separate genes associated with dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical in the brain that is often associated with pleasure, learning and other behaviors. Several neurological disorders, such as Parkinson's disease, are also linked to abnormal levels of dopamine.
Frank's study points to fundamental genetic differences between "positive" and "negative" learners.
"All three genes affect brain dopamine functioning, but in different ways, and in different parts of the brain" Frank said. "The genes predicted people's ability to learn from both the positive and negative outcomes of their decisions."
Two of the genes - DARPP-32 and DRD2 - predicted learning about the average, long-term probability of rewards and punishments, not unlike your personal preference for why, for example, you might choose steak over salmon.
"When making these kinds of choices, you do not explicitly recall each individual positive and negative outcome of all of your previous such choices. Instead, you often go with your 'gut,' which may involve a more implicit representation of the probability of rewarding outcomes based on past experience," Frank said.
The DARPP-32 and DRD2 genes control dopamine function in a region of the brain called the striatum, thought to be necessary for this kind of implicit reward learning. A third gene, COMT, did not predict long-term reward or punishment learning, but instead predicted a person's tendencies to change choice strategies after a single instance of negative feedback. Frank said this gene affects dopamine function in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the area associated with conscious processing and working memory. This would be akin to switching from steak to salmon upon remembering your last experience with overdone steak.
The overall research program was designed to test a computer model that simulates the key roles of dopamine in reinforcement learning in different parts of the brain, as motivated by a body of biological research.
"The reason we looked at these three individual genes in the first place, out of a huge number of possible genes, is that we have a computer model that examines how dopamine mediates these kinds of reinforcement processes in the striatum and prefrontal cortex," Frank said. "The model makes specific predictions on how subtle changes in different aspects of dopamine function can affect behavior, and one way to get at this question is to test individual genes."
Among the evidence incorporated in the model and motivating the genetic study is research showing that bursts of dopamine production follow in the wake of unexpected rewards. Conversely, dopamine production declines when rewards are expected but not received.
To test their hypothesis, the researchers collected DNA from 69 healthy individuals who were asked to perform a computerized learning program. The volunteers were asked to pick one of two Japanese characters that appeared on a screen and were "rewarded" for a "correct" response, and "punished" for an "incorrect" one.
Frank said more research is needed to confirm that genetic effects are accompanied by brain-related changes in behavior. But, he said, the research offers insights into the genetic basis for learning differences and insights into improving human cognition and learning, both normal and abnormal.
"Understanding how dopaminergic variations affects learning and decision-making processes may have substantial implications for patient populations, such as (those with) Parkinson's disease, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and schizophrenia," Frank said. "The genetics might also help us identify individuals who might gain from different types of learning environments in the classroom."
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by University of Arizona.

Fausto Intilla
www.oloscience.com