NeuroCognitive Lab, Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Agra, India
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What being silent can do to your brain?
How come being silent for some time can help you boost your performance on a simple brain game? What is the science behind it? And how can I use that to boost my grades up?
We were asking these questions at our Cognitive Science lab for the past whole year and we finally got the answer!
We designed a simple experiment that involved our friends and university students (no guinea pigs!) to help us understand how and why does this practice affects the brain. We asked them to play a simple cognitive game called Stroop task to start off, which they pretty much enjoyed. You can play the game too, there are simple rules: Watch the video below, and try to read aloud the colour of words appearing on the screen.
Well played!
Now to boost your performance on the 'incongruent' words (e.g., YELLOW), let's help you out. Sit with your eyes closed for next five minutes, put your screen to sleep too (to avoid distraction from screen brightness), open your mind to all the thoughts coming in and going out, let them flow like water, and it's really easy to do!
You can take help of this timer alarm video which will beep at the end of five minutes, just hit start here and dive into the silent state.
Well, it's the time!
If you done that right, you should be feeling internally exuberant right now. Let's take a test if it worked on you, go back to the first Stroop video and play that game again, let's see if it helps you reading the incongruent words faster.
If it worked out for you, congratulations, something like this just happened in your brain:
In this study, we found out that at certain important time events after you have watched the word written on the screen, your brain starts to process it to 'prepare' an answer for it. And this processing occurred very differently after being in the meditative state for just five minutes. Before this intervention, the parietal lobe of the brain appears to be 'densely active' as indicated by yellow colour in the image above which depicts high electrical activity in the brain. Whereas after intervention of five minutes silence state, the same region of the brain appears to use less activity and yet brings increase in the accuracy to answer the incongruent words.
The results are interesting, so is the significance of silence, focus and being open to experiences in our lives!
We are publishing our results soon on this study, to get updates, stay connected with us on LinkedIn.
Professor C.M. Markan, a Physicist by degree and Cognitive Scientist by heart. Sir has been actively pursuing the field of cognitive science for more than ten years. His academic journey can be traced in this link which describes his work in the field of physics and cognitive science:. Sir has been an integral part of the University for last thirty years, having received his graduate degree from the same University, he is giving it back to the institute by establishing world-class cognitive science research here. More details about Sir can be found on the university website . Sir overseeing our preparations for a visit of German Professors to our lab. Sir sharing our work with our visitors who were fascinated by our work. Group picture with Prof. Wolfgang from University of Kiel, Germany
We are excited to share the variety of tools and devices we have got in our lab, it's a little showoff but we anyway like it! So first we get to see all the EEGs we have got in the lab. Let's start with the supreme of all - The 64-Channel ActiChamp Wet EEG worn by our favourite lab mate. Next, we have OpenBCI Ultracortex "Mark IV". We still don't understand the reason why it's written like that, but for more info on that, check out their website (https://openbci.com). It's a pretty cool device when it comes to naming the components of this EEG, it's got channels named CytonDaisy, isn't it cool? We enjoyed working with the device on a few projects studying attention components in the brain. The next one and the last one on the list is Dreem 2 coming from https://dreem.com. And yes, that relates to 'Dream' because this one is a dry polysomnography device, at least this is what the website says. We tried to do some sleep research with it but ...
Publications that have come out from the lab have been invaluable for the field of cognitive science. We have compiled a list of some of the publications available online for reference of our readers: Exploring a Quantum Hebbian Model of Feature Map Formation P Gupta, CM Markan, International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence Identifying Neural Correlates in Stroop Task S Jain, CM Markan, S Ahuja, M Tripathi, Advances in Systems Engineering, 21-29 Brain interfaced remote laboratory–a novel BCI application for inclusive education CM Markan, S Gupta, G Kumar, P Gupta, S Mittal, IEEE Int. Conf. Comput. Intell. Virtual Environ. Measurement Syst. Appl Neuromorphic adaptable ocular dominance maps P Gupta, M Bansal, CM Markan, International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, 49-56 Calibration of off-the-shelf low-cost wearable EEG headset for application in field studies M Jain, CM Markan , arXiv preprint arX...
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