JENIUS

Jenius adalah istilah untuk menyebut seseorang dengan kapasitas mental di atas rata-rata di bidang intelektual, terutama yang ditunjukkan dalam hasil kerja yang kreatif dan orisinal. Seorang yang jenius selalu menunjukkan individualitas dan imajinasi yang kuat, tidak hanya cerdas, tapi juga unik dan inovatif. Kata ini juga digunakan untuk orang yang memiliki kepandaian di banyak bidang, seperti Goethe atau Da Vinci.Sementara Einstein, jenius dalam fisika, tapi tidak dalam bidang lain seperti seni dan literatur.
Seseorang dapat menyandang predikat jenius apabila memiliki IQ (Intellegence Quotient) di atas 140.
Walaupun istilah jenius terkadang digunakan untuk menunjukkan kepemilikan bakat istimewa dalam bidang apapun, tapi dalam kebanyakan kasus, istilah ini diterapkan dengan salah dan seharusnya secara khusus ditunjukkan kemampuan alami yang istimewa dalam bidang seni, literatur, musik, atau matematika.

Teenage Brain: A Work in Progress (articles)

Development Flow and Emotions
From NIMH

New imaging studies are revealing—for the first time—patterns of brain development that extend into the teenage years. Although scientists don't know yet what accounts for the observed changes, they may parallel a pruning process that occurs early in life that appears to follow the principle of "use-it-or-lose-it:" neural connections, or synapses, that get exercised are retained, while those that don't are lost. At least, this is what studies of animals' developing visual systems suggest. While it's known that both genes and environment play major roles in shaping early brain development, science still has much to learn about the relative influence of experience versus genes on the later maturation of the brain. Animal studies support a role for experience in late development, but no animal species undergoes anything comparable to humans' protracted childhood and adolescence. Nor is it yet clear whether experience actually creates new neurons and synapses, or merely establishes transitory functional changes. Nonetheless, it's tempting to interpret the new findings as empowering teens to protect and nurture their brain as a work in progress.

The newfound appreciation of the dynamic nature of the teen brain is emerging from MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) studies that scan a child's brain every two years, as he or she grows up. Individual brains differ enough that only broad generalizations can be made from comparisons of different individuals at different ages. But following the same brains as they mature allows scientists a much finer-grained view into developmental changes. In the first such longitudinal study of 145 children and adolescents, reported in l999, NIMH's Dr. Judith Rapoport and colleagues were surprised to discover a second wave of overproduction of gray matter, the thinking part of the brain—neurons and their branch-like extensions—just prior to puberty. Possibly related to the influence of surging sex hormones, this thickening peaks at around age 11 in girls, 12 in boys, after which the gray matter actually thins some.

Prior to this study, research had shown that the brain overproduced gray matter for a brief period in early development—in the womb and for about the first 18 months of life—and then underwent just one bout of pruning. Researchers are now confronted with structural changes that occur much later in adolescence. The teen's gray matter waxes and wanes in different functional brain areas at different times in development. For example, the gray matter growth spurt just prior to puberty predominates in the frontal lobe, the seat of "executive functions"—planning, impulse control and reasoning. In teens affected by a rare, childhood onset form of schizophrenia that impairs these functions, the MRI scans revealed four times as much gray matter loss in the frontal lobe as normally occurs. Unlike gray matter, the brain's white matter—wire-like fibers that establish neurons' long-distance connections between brain regions—thickens progressively from birth in humans. A layer of insulation called myelin progressively envelops these nerve fibers, making them more efficient, just like insulation on electric wires improves their conductivity.

Advancements in MRI image analysis are providing new insights into how the brain develops. UCLA's Dr. Arthur Toga and colleagues turned the NIMH team's MRI scan data into 4-D time-lapse animations of children's brains morphing as they grow up—the 4th dimension being rate-of-change. Researchers report a wave of white matter growth that begins at the front of the brain in early childhood, moves rearward, and then subsides after puberty. Striking growth spurts can be seen from ages 6 to 13 in areas connecting brain regions specialized for language and understanding spatial relations, the temporal and parietal lobes. This growth drops off sharply after age 12, coinciding with the end of a critical period for learning languages.

While this work suggests a wave of brain white matter development that flows from front to back, animal, functional brain imaging and postmortem studies have suggested that gray matter maturation flows in the opposite direction, with the frontal lobes not fully maturing until young adulthood. To confirm this in living humans, the UCLA researchers compared MRI scans of young adults, 23-30, with those of teens, 12-16. They looked for signs of myelin, which would imply more mature, efficient connections, within gray matter. As expected, areas of the frontal lobe showed the largest differences between young adults and teens. This increased myelination in the adult frontal cortex likely relates to the maturation of cognitive processing and other "executive" functions. Parietal and temporal areas mediating spatial, sensory, auditory and language functions appeared largely mature in the teen brain. The observed late maturation of the frontal lobe conspicuously coincides with the typical age-of-onset of schizophrenia—late teens, early twenties—which, as noted earlier, is characterized by impaired "executive" functioning.

Another series of MRI studies is shedding light on how teens may process emotions differently than adults. Using functional MRI (fMRI), a team led by Dr. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd at Harvard's McLean Hospital scanned subjects' brain activity while they identified emotions on pictures of faces displayed on a computer screen. Young teens, who characteristically perform poorly on the task, activated the amygdala, a brain center that mediates fear and other "gut" reactions, more than the frontal lobe. As teens grow older, their brain activity during this task tends to shift to the frontal lobe, leading to more reasoned perceptions and improved performance. Similarly, the researchers saw a shift in activation from the temporal lobe to the frontal lobe during a language skills task, as teens got older. These functional changes paralleled structural changes in temporal lobe white matter.

While these studies have shown remarkable changes that occur in the brain during the teen years, they also demonstrate what every parent can confirm: the teenage brain is a very complicated and dynamic arena, one that is not easily understood

‘Midbrain activation’ for sport

A one-day workshop for kids on ‘Midbrain Activation’, a whole new concept to Sri Lanka, though quite popular in both East and South-East Asia was conducted at the Olympic House last Thursday by a well-known Malaysian expert, David Ting. Parents, educators, sports coaches and trainers had a rare opportunity to take advantage of a training session in this new field, during this one-day workshop.
‘Midbrain Activation’ is a novel method of training a child to gather information on both academic and sports fields. It is said to be a new-found technique of optimising the function of the middle brain or the ‘bridge’ between the left and right brain.
It is believed that by activating this bridge, one can retrieve information from both the left and the right brain leading to a more efficient absorption of information and stabilising of important individual characteristics like creativity, self-confidence and the ability to concentrate.
‘Midbrain Activation’ allows the brain to function as a whole, rather than utilising only one part of the brain, either left or right. The individuals who are middle-brain-oriented are expected to have strong influence from both the hemispheres of the brain to be logical - by being influenced by the left, while being intuitive - with the influence of the right. This is regarded as the basic principle behind ‘Midbrain Activation.’ The ideal candidates for this method are considered to be children between the ages of 5 to 15.
It brings out and strengthens characteristics such as creativity, memory, application skills, self-confidence and ability to concentrate. Research has shown that humans normally use less, than one per cent of their mind’s vast abilities. However, through the use of various mental training techniques, one can tap into this enormous ‘sleeping giant’ residing inside all of us. Experts say that transformation must always occur at the inner level before any results will ever appear at the outer level; and this is essential to ensure that the benefits remain permanent. This is where the revolutionary technique of ‘Midbrain Activation’ comes in.
By Samiddha Rathnayake

Been There, Done That: Brain Mechanism Predicts Ability To Generalize

ScienceDaily (Oct. 23, 2008) — A new study reveals how the brain can connect discrete but overlapping experiences to provide a rich integrated history that extends far beyond individually experienced events and may help to direct future choices. The research, published by Cell Press in the October 23rd issue of the journal Neuron, also explains why some people are good at generalizing from past experience, while others are not.
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Decisions are often guided by drawing on past experiences, perhaps by generalizing across discrete events that overlap in content. However, how such experiences are integrated into a unified representation is not clear, and fundamental questions remain regarding potential underlying brain mechanisms. It is likely that such mechanisms involve the hippocampus, a brain structure closely linked with learning and memory. The midbrain may also play a role, as its projections modulate activity in the hippocampus, and activity in both regions has been shown to facilitate encoding of individual episodes.
Dr. Daphna Shohamy from the Department of Psychology at Columbia University was interested in examining how past experiences might be integrated within the brain to create generalizations that guide future decisions. "We hypothesized that generalization stems from integrative encoding that occurs while experiencing events that partially overlap with previously encoded events and that such integrative encoding depends on both the hippocampus and midbrain dopamine regions. Further, we anticipated that greater hippocampal-midbrain engagement during integrative encoding enables rapid behavioral generalization in the future," offers Dr. Shohamy.
Dr. Shohamy and her collaborator, Dr. Anthony Wagner from the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study participants engaged in an associative learning and generalization task. They found that activity in the hippocampus and midbrain during learning predicted generalization and observed a cooperative interaction between the hippocampus and the midbrain during integrative encoding.
"By forming a thread that connects otherwise separate experiences, integrative encoding permits organisms to generalize across multiple past experience to guide choices in the present," explains Dr. Shohamy. "In people who generalize successfully, the brain is constantly building links across separate events, creating an integrated memory of life's episodes. For others, although the brain may accurately remember each past event, this integration does not occur, so that when confronted with a new situation, they are unable to flexibly apply what they learned in the past."
The researchers include Daphna Shohamy, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Columbia University, New York, NY; and Anthony D. Wagner, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.