Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
My name is Joseph Cubas.
I'm the director of institutional advancement here at ASB.
It is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Adam Gazzaley.
Dr. Gazzaley obtained an MD and PhD in neuroscience
at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City,
completed clinical residency in neurology at the University of Pennsylvania
and postdoctoral training in cognitive neuroscience at UC Berkeley.
He is the founding director of the neuroscience imaging center
at UC San Francisco
and associate professor in neurology, physiology and psychiatry
and principal investigator of a cognitive neuroscience laboratory.
His research has significantly expanded our understanding
of alterations in the aging brain that lead to cognitive decline.
His most recent studies explore
how we may enhance our cognitive abilities and/or prevent them from declining
in various neuropsychiatric conditions
via engagement with custom-designed video games.
Dr. Gazzaley has authored over 70 scientific articles
and delivered over 250 presentations
around the world.
Recently, he wrote and hosted
the nationally televised, PBS-sponsored special
"The Distracted Mind with Dr. Adam Gazzaley."
Awards and honors for his research
include the Pfizer/AFAR Innovations in Aging Award,
the Ellison Foundation New Scholar Award in Aging
and the Harold Brenner Pepinsky Early Career Award
in neurobehavioral science.
Tonight,
Dr. Gazzaley will present novel insights on a mutlimodal educational approach
directed at the fundamental information processing systems
of the brain.
His talk will include a discussion
of the potential use of action video game mechanics,
neurofeedback and direct-brain stimulation
to drive neuroplasticity during the learning process.
Please join me in welcoming Dr. Gazzaley.
(Applause)
Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here.
I want to start by considering
how education might benefit from coming to the time period
that we can now use the breakthroughs in neuroscience
and inspirations
to guide the educational process itself.
We know that the brain, in all its wondrous complexity,
is essentially
an information processing system
whose primary function is to receive information
and guide our interactions with the environment.
However, education is a multifaceted endeavor.
That we know.
I propose that enhancing the core cognitive operations
that guide cognition in its most fundamental form
should be a core part of our education system.
Let's first pause and consider
what education and cognition really have in common.
We know that the neural processes used to organize information
are the fundamentals of cognition.
And this can be broken down into several demands:
the selection of information is attention;
interpretation of information,
or perception;
retaining and retrieving information
as memory;
reasoning based on information is decision making;
and actions, based on information in the form of our motor responses
and speech output, which is part of our language.
These are all the essence and the fundamentals
of how cognition is constructed
and how it emerges from these properties of our brain.
If we're going to consider that cognitive enhancement
should be a core aspect of our education system,
I think we'll benefit from taking a step back
and looking at the larger landscape that comprises cognitive enhancement
so we can make decisions about anything on this list
that might play a role in the educational system.
This would be an example of how education and cognitive enhancement
might work together,
and that is the amplification,
or extension,
of core abilities of the mind
via augmentation of information processing systems.
So let's take a look at the landscape
that currently exists to enhance cognition.
Education itself exists when it's doing a strong job at improving these abilities.
But also things like meditation, cognitive training, enriched environments,
these ways of interacting with our environments in very targeted ways
have been shown to improve cognition.
There's another way, action video games -
I'll tell you some data about that -
that has also been shown to have strong impacts on cognitive abilities.
We have also developed drugs -
sometimes for the purpose
and sometimes as a side-effect that was not planned -
that have been shown to increase cognition:
Ritalin, Adderall, Modafinil, Aricept.
These medications have largely been developed
with neuropsychiatric conditions in mind.
For instance, Alzheimer's disease and ADHD.
However, we should be aware that many of these drugs,
for example, Adderall,
are used frequently on college campuses to improve cognition
or at least to try to.
So we should be aware that medications may have a role in this.
The other recent finding,
and one that is becoming more and more frequent in the literature,
is that things that we do to help our body also help our brains.
So physical exercise and nutrition have been shown, through very nice work,
to also be cognitive enhancers.
Neurofeedback -
there's an interesting line of research that shows
that if we can be made aware of our own brain signals
and we can guide our training regiment, using it as a feedback routine,
and this has been shown to also improve cognitive abilities.
Neuromodulation -
neuromodulation is the direct stimulation of the brain,
either with a magnetic field in transcranial magnetic stimulation
or with a direct electrical current
that's known as transcranial direct current stimulation.
This is done at the level of the scalp to change activity within the brain.
Another approach is brain-computer interfaces,
which is usually done for more extreme conditions
and medical conditions,
and this is where an actual electrode is placed inside the brain to stimulate it
to improve cognitive abilities and other types of neural functioning.
And, perhaps, the most extreme is actually genetic modifications.
So I'm not going to propose
that all these should be part of our educational system,
but we should be aware of the landscape that exists.
I'm now going to tell you about some research in our lab
that combines three of these -
action video games, neurofeedback and neuromodulation -
in an approach that I call "closing the loop."
So I'm going to take you through some of this right now.
But first we want to pause and talk about video games.
So, as we know, video games are one of the most powerful forms of media.
And why is that?
Well, they're interactive - that's probably number one.
But they also turn out to be reasonably fun,
which is another part of what makes them so ubiquitous
in their uptake around the world.
So we're seeing an increase in video games being played
by both genders and across all ages.
I want to tell you about one specific type of video game.
Video games is a large field,
but what I want to talk about are action video games
and the last decade of research that's made some very surprising findings.
So work largely done by Daphne Bavelier and her colleagues over the last 10 years
has shown that action video games
can actually have the impact of improving attentional and perceptual abilities.
This includes resistance of distraction, an increase in the capacity of attention
and even a visual ability known as contrast sensitivity.
This has been first shown in young adults that played a lot of video games
compared to those that did not.
You can see these rather startling differences
when you look at laboratory tests of attention and distraction resistance.
But in probably more powerful studies, comparisons have been made
on training young adults that did not have video-game experience.
And this was either done with a first-person shooter game,
which is sort of the characteristic of an action video game,
or Tetris.
What they found in this study,
with even just a short period of training - ten hours of games play -
it's the group that played Medal of Honor, in this study,
that showed these improvements in these same abilities
that those young adults that played these for extensive periods of time
compared to the control group, which was Tetris.
So we know that there's some aspect of these games -
presumably the high interference involvement,
the need to distribute attention,
the high reward and emotional aspects that drive the dopamine system -
that really lead to these to have a strong impact on cognition.
Some interesting data that's come out more frequently
that shows that the brains of young adults that are heavy video game players
versus those that are not
show some very distinct differences when you record brain activity
while they're doing a high-demand cognitive task.
So we see that action video gamers process distracting information less,
meaning that they suppress that information that's irrelevant,
and they engage less brain areas, as you can see in this image here,
when they're doing more demanding tasks,
indicating that they're more efficient at how they use their brain
when something is very challenging.
I want to now tell you about some work that we're doing in our laboratory,
where we're interested in designing customized games
to target neural processes and information processing resources
and see if we can improve cognitive abilities
after our participants in our research study
spent some time engaging in these tasks.
So this game that I'm going to show now was developed in our lab five years ago.
What you can see here is a car is being driven by a participant.
It's winding. There are hills.
It's very hard to do this.
And then they're making decisions about these signs.
They're only responding to the green circles -
this is a perceptual discrimination task -
and they're ignoring other signs like this green pentagon,
which is actually very hard to ignore.
So what we have are participants in this study
that are engaging in two streams of information processing
with two tasks that have independent goals.
And this would fall into the class of test known as "multitasking."
And what we've recently found in a group of older adults
that trained on this type of video game,
that we can improve their ability to multitask
but also their ability to sustain attention on different tasks
as well as their working memory.
So we have many other experiments in our laboratory ongoing
to look at how these games could have strong impact -
not just on older adults but on children as well.
I now want to take a look at -
So one thing that we're doing
is we're trying to develop video games that can leave the laboratory
and be more accessible.
So what you can see in this image here
is an iPad that shows a different version of the game
that was adopted to be more accessible using a mobile platform.
Another goal of ours is to see if we can maintain the fun and engagement,
including for children to be immersed in these games
without having the violence.
So increasing the amount of art and music and story
so that they are engaging and fun.
But one very important aspect that we develop in all of these games
is adaptivity.
And by that I mean that as the participant plays the game in real time,
the game becomes more difficult as performance improves.
What this does is it keeps the person engaged in the game
right on that perfect sweet spot,
where it's not too hard that they're frustrated,
it's not too easy that they're bored.
And this really challenges their abilities,
and, we think, maximally drives neuroplasticity in their brain
and improves their cognition.
So this is what I mean by closing the loop.
We have the brain on one side,
and when you make a decision, it guides your behavior,
and then this influences the game.
The game reacts adaptively in real time to challenge you,
which changes the environment,
and then cycles back to the brain to close the loop
and changes your brain.
So this is this two-way road
between how we interact with our environment
and an environment that's responsive to us -
how it can act to change our brain.
And this has been the large majority of the research we've done in this field.
One thing that we're interested in now is actually creating a neural loop.
And I'm going to show you what I mean by that.
It's meant to act in complement to that loop I've already described.
So how we do this
is we first have our participants in our laboratory play these video games
while we record brain activity in real time.
So this is an example
of someone playing a game with the high density EEG cap.
This records the electrical activity in the brain.
And we can see what are the neural markers
while someone is engaging in the game
that is related to their performance, their high level of performance.
One marker that I want to mention to you is known as "midline frontal theta."
It's a low-frequency oscillation that we can pick up with EEG
that we've shown now, in our laboratory,
is related to performance.
So when this measure is higher,
when one of those signs come up, you do better on the task.
And we could see that this measure decreases as you get older,
and that's also related to the change of performance.
We can also see that when we train a brain,
it's these very measures that seem to improve
along with their performance on the task.
So we have a marker in the brain that tells us the depth of engagement
that someone that's playing this game is investing into the task,
and it's related to their performance.
Another study in the lab
is to use direct current stimulation to the brain
to see if we could change plasticity.
So what you're looking at here
is transcranial direct current stimulation cap,
and what this is is an amazing phenomena
that there's now a wealth of data revealing,
that if you stimulate the brain through the scalp
with even the power of a 9-volt battery
and you have someone engaged in a task,
the rate of learning is faster.
So what we're interested in,
Can you use the dynamics of the video game, and the mechanics,
to feedback and stimulate the brain to encourage plasticity?
And so what you can see here
is the behavioral and environment loop that I already traced,
and that's something that we're already working very hard on.
But you can imagine that if neural data is being stimulated
and then applied into the software platform,
the game would change in response to what is going on in your brain.
So, example - if attention deviates,
the game can change its mechanics to pull you back in
and to really help you learn how to control your attention
in a goal-directed way.
On the other side of the loop,
a game could be used to stimulate the brain
to lead to stimulation in select areas,
also to improve plasticity and to increase learning
on this particular targeted mechanism.
Now, I'm not suggesting
that this type of approach might be used in the classroom,
although it might,
but this might be the type of approach, at least on the EEG side,
that could be used at home
to help improve, for example, attentional abilities
in someone that needs extra work.
The other side, the neural-stimulation side,
that might be more reserved for people that have brain disorders,
where you really need to encourage plasticity
so that they can play - you know, be on the same playing field
and to have the same type of impact from the educational system.
So this just gives you a little bit of an idea of where we can go.
I think the most important point
is to not think about all of these areas that impact cognitive enhancement
as silos,
but to think about how they could work together,
such as meditation, physical exercise, nutrition
in addition to the type of examples that I gave you today.
So it is, I think, really relevant for educators to realize
that this is a lot of the directions that neuroscience is taking
to understand, really,
how we can impact the basic mechanisms that underlie cognition to improve them
and lead to a big impact, hopefully, on the quality of our lives.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)