One Brain's journey

A new study, that will be published in the August edition of Applied Cognitive Psychology, conducted at the University of York in the U.K. shows that stimulant medication significantly increases visuo-spatial working memory but that Cogmed Working Memory Training leads to significant improvements in all four critical measures of working memory: verbal and visuo-spatial short-term and visuo-spatial working memory. In addition the training effects were still in place when the subjects were retested six months later.

The subjects were 25 children with ADHD. The study is the latest from the team of Joni Holmes Ph.D and Susan Gathercole Ph.D who have been performing independent research examining the impact of Cogmed training on subjects with ADHD and working memory problems.

A friend asked me for a phone number a day or two ago and I said I didn’t have it but I knew someone who did and gave him that phone number. He called the mutual friend who declared, “I gave that number to him last week.” The first friend called me back to tell me this and I suppose expected some measure of guild from me in that I had lost the number or, more likely, had written it down and forgotten where I had put it. He got no satisfaction on the guilt front. I learned that lesson not long after I was diagnosed with ADHD. Soon after I heard one of the top experts on ADHD in Canada talk about the difference in treating adults with ADHD and treating children. “The main difference,” he said, “is that with the adults you have to deal with the self-esteem issues that have built up over a lifetime and if you don’t do this, you never get anywhere with treatment. With the kids they haven’t had time to suffer all the knocks and disappointments that lead to low self-esteem.”

I have never forgotten this and although I can still do a number on myself over some mistake or misplaced object, I rarely let someone else get away with it. My reply to the mutual friend was simply, “Whether I got it from him before or not is irrelevant. What I said was that I don’t have it now.”

My close friends know that this sort of statement means the issue is closed, certainly as far as I’m concerned but the odd one, usually someone who doesn’t know me well will persist. It happened to me a few weeks ago. Someone whom I have known for a long time but not well asked me to ask another mutual friend to call him when I saw him next. I stated that I would not remember. He persisted, more-or-less along the referred guilt path with a statement like, “What do you mean you won’t remember?”

I replied, “I don’t know how I can make it any clearer. I wont remember.”

He still wasn’t buying it and said, “Okay I’ll call you and remind you.”

Now I had him and I knew as sure as I knew I wouldn’t remember the first message that he wouldn’t remember to call to remind me and sure enough he didn’t.

I don’t really get angry in these circumstances…unless pressed. At least I have stopped getting angry, for the most part, at myself. Oh it does happen occasionally but it passes quickly but not nearly as quickly as any referred guilt from someone else. I guess you could say this is my contribution to my own self esteem and when I am diligent about it, it works.

A new study conducted at the University of Buffalo shows that acute stress, the kind where the body produces the stress hormone, corticosterone in rats which were used as the test subjects and cortisol in humans, increases the transmission of the neurotransmitter glutamate thereby enhancing learning and memory. More specifically, according to the senior author of the study, professor of physiology and biophysics, Zhen Yan, “Stress hormones have both protective and damaging effects on the body. This paper and others we have in the pipeline explain why we need stress to perform better. but don’t want to be stressed out.”

The rats in the study were taught to run a maze and then half of them were made to swim for 20 minutes and then run the maze again. Those who had been dunked made less mistakes than those that had remained dry.

In addition, Yan noted that chronic stress suppresses the the transmission of glutamate in the prefrontal cortex of male rodents and has the opposite effect of acute stress resulting in more mistakes in the maze. Apparently, estrogen receptors in female rodents makes them more resilient to chronic stress than male rats. But you already knew this didn’t you.

Simultaneously with the Toronto Catholic District School Board axing the Arrowsmith Program, four other neuroplasticity programs are being considered for adoption by the non-sectarian Toronto District School Board. The four are Arrowsmith, Cogmed Working Memory Training, Fast ForWord and Wasdell SMaRts. Two of the programs, Cogmed and Fast ForWord are being used in Toronto schools now. Arrowsmith has been employed in the Catholic Board for the last ten years and had previously participated in a number of studies of effectiveness although none of these studies measured changes in the actual classroom.

Another study assessing Cogmed is scheduled to start this fall under the supervision of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children researcher Rosemary Tannock. This study in Ontario’s demonstration school will track 120 students who are severely learning disabled. According to Tannock, “The big question is not just whether Cogmed can improve working memory but will it really improve classroom performance.” A further study using Cogmed is set to begin with students at the University of Toronto.

That problems with working memory may have a role in schizophrenia has been touched on before in this blog and now a new study indicates what that role might be. Previously scientists thought that the one problem with the disorder could be with automation processing of ordinary tasks i.e. learning by repetition to do things on auto pilot. Dutch researcher Tamar Van Raalten studied the role of working memory in automation and established that it is not the automation process but the processing of new information that was the cause of problems.

Van Raalten, using an fMRI scanner, asked subjects to perform tasks in which they had to remember a series of letters, something that would be accompished in working memory, and discovered that the more the tasks were repeated, the lower the brain activity became in the areas of the brain associated with working memory. But this activity was not compensated for by other areas of the brain involved in long term memory. By automating the letter series the subjects were releasing working memory capacity allowing it to process new information. Van Raaltlen concluded that this restructuring of incoming information was another function of working memory, a process known as chunking. For example to remember 1232673445 you would clump numbers together as you might a phone number, 113 276 3445 . This allowed working memory to be freed up to process new information. Her initial conclusion, in observing schizophrenic patients performing the same tasks, was that their working memory was less efficient and automation did not proceed as well as with healthy subjects. Van Raalten went on to observe that schizophrenic patients process less information than healthy subjects. However, the testing revealed automation proceeded as well as with healthy subjects but subsequently, working memory was not released to deal with new tasks. Further testing revealed that the working memory in schizophrenic subjects struggled with the processing of information that continually changed, leading to the conclusion that Schizophrenics may have more of a tendency to adopt automatic strategies in circumstances that demand flexible behavior.