Thinking more clearly in certain cerebral functions would be immensely helpful in walks of life, especially when tasked to remember a multitude of organic chemistry reactions. I know many of you can relate. When students are given ample amounts of material before an exam, students will go home and continuously practice until the information is encoded into their memory. While this method has been tried and true for years, it still does not do students any good in the midst of anxiety shown on test day. In many occasions I have experienced this and have forgotten the most rudimentary of concepts. In order to retrieve this lost information, I closed my eyes, contemplated, and the concept came right back to me.
As a college student, this novel concept truly intrigued me when I was first presented this information by Dr. Carola Salvi. There she presented her review of John Kounios and Mark Beeman's series of experiments concerning "The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight." More specifically, their research in Figure 1. showed during electroencephalography (EEG) that "occipital alpha band oscillations reflect the inhibition of visual inputs," (Kounios & Beeman 2018). Thus meaning that in order to better recall or retrieve information about a subject, participants perform better while there is little to no stimulus presented within their visual field. In my previous neuroscience courses, I've always learned about the correlation between pupil size and memory. According to a 2017 study performed by Foroughi, Sibley, and Coyne, larger pupils have been associated with increased mental activity and an increased strength of connectivity in between brain regions. The larger an individual's pupils were, the more stimulus was required in order to encode this new information, and the the stronger the connection was. In this study, as time progressed and individuals were able to complete tasks more fluently, their corresponding pupil sizes decreased. Almost as if the brain had developed some sort of muscle memory and less visual stimuli was required to be able to complete the task.
 |
| Figure 1. Results of EEG measuring oscillation in the Right Temporal Lobe |
After learning about the correlation between pupil size and mental activity, I thought about the effect of pupil size on recall when visual stimulus is inhibited. It would be interesting to measure the relative speed of insight based on pupil sizes of individuals when tasked with a mental activity. Would increased pupil size lead to an elevated recall or insight moments when an individuals eyes are closed? Quite the dichotomy the brain shows here.
This is an interesting position that has been postulated by these sources of research. According to this information, it would be beneficial to start opening your eyes extremely wide in order to encode information better. After doing that, then you could close your eyes in order to recall or have an insight of a mental task that was just presented before you. Experiments such as these help to guide future experiments in order for humans to better understand how humans encode and retrieve information. As a college student, research such as this should be held at a high priority in order to most effectively learn information presented to me.
References:
Foroughi, C. K., Sibley, C., & Coyne, J. T. (2017, October). Pupil size as a measure of within-task learning. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28593652
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28593652
Kounios, Joun, and Mark Beeman. "The Aha! Moment: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight."
Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 18, no.4, Aug. 2009, pp. 79-80
Kounios, Joun, and Mark Beeman. "The Aha! Moment: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight."
Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 18, no.4, Aug. 2009, pp. 79-80
No comments:
Post a Comment