Speeding up brain networks might boost IQ

Back in 2009 a team of dutch scientists were analyzing the brain. They found that for all the denseness of the


brain doesn't really matter. It does just not as much as they originally thought. Its really about the efficiency of the wired brain. They found that the most intelligent people have the fastest connections not the most

Thus suggests that you may be able to increase your brain performance or boost your intelligence  via drugs. It also suggests that by speeding up ANN's (Artificial Neural Networks) may boost the intelligence of the system

In 2011 There were some studies done by Air Force researchers. They found that they could cut training time in half for air force pilots by delivering a mild electrical current (two milliamperes of direct current for 30 minutes).You can read the full article here

There are already a number of consumer products being created to try and take advantage of this discovery and its starting to hit the mainstream. Wired did an article on it "Inside the Strange New World of DIY Brain Stimulation". As well self described biohackers like Tim Ferriss and Dave Asprey are touting the positive effects it has had on them.

Foc.us has released several product geared for gamers. And Fisher Wallace has release a slightly different product to help people treat insomnia

You can check out foc.us here

So I decided to buy one a year ago and test it on myself. I got a cheaper tDCS ApeX Type A from Amazon. It worked great just like I expected. Being a connoisseur of nootropics(aka smart drugs) I usually run a battery of tests on myself to see if they are actually doing anything like the dual and back test. I did notice some improvement in working memory. I am still using it once a week to this day. I do believe I am gaining a benefit from it.

New energy source for future medical implants: brain glucose

The Matrix was right: humans will act as batteries

-CAPTION TO THE RIGHT: Brain power: harvesting power from the cerebrospinal fluid within the subarachnoid space. Inset at right: a micrograph of a prototype, showing the metal layers of the anode (central electrode) and cathode contact (outer ring) patterned on a silicon wafer. (Credit: Karolinska Institutet/Stanford University))--

MIT engineers have developed a fuel cell that runs on glucose for powering highly efficient brain implants of the future that can help paralyzed patients move their arms and legs again — batteries included.

The fuel cell strips electrons from glucose molecules to create a small electric current.

The researchers, led by Rahul Sarpeshkar, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, fabricated the fuel cell on a silicon chip, allowing it to be integrated with other circuits that would be needed for a brain implant.

In the 1970s, scientists showed they could power a pacemaker with a glucose fuel cell, but the idea was abandoned in favor of lithium-ion batteries, which could provide significantly more power per unit area than glucose fuel cells.

These glucose fuel cells also used enzymes that proved to be impractical for long-term implantation in the body, since they eventually ceased to function efficiently.

How to generate hundreds of microwatts from sugar
[+]silicon_wafer_glucose

A silicon wafer with glucose fuel cells of varying sizes; the largest is 64 by 64 mm. (credit: Sarpeshkar Lab)

The new fuel cell is fabricated from silicon, using the same technology used to make semiconductor electronic chips, with no biological components.

A platinum catalyst strips electrons from glucose, mimicking the activity of cellular enzymes that break down glucose to generate ATP, the cell’s energy currency. (Platinum has a proven record of long-term biocompatibility within the body.)

So far, the fuel cell can generate up to hundreds of microwatts — enough to power an ultra-low-power and clinically useful neural implant.

Benjamin Rapoport, a former graduate student in the Sarpeshkar lab and the first author on the new MIT study, calculated that in theory, the glucose fuel cell could get all the sugar it needs from the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that bathes the brain and protects it from banging into the skull.

There are very few cells in the CSF, so it’s highly unlikely that an implant located there would provoke an immune response, the researchers say.
[+]glucose_fuel_cell

Structure of the glucose fuel cell and the oxygen and glucose concentration gradients crucially associated with its cathode and anode half-cell reactions (credit: Benjamin I. Rapoport, Jakub T. Kedzierski, Rahul Sarpeshkar/PLoS One)

There is also significant glucose in the CSF, which does not generally get used by the body. Since only a small fraction of the available power is utilized by the glucose fuel cell, the impact on the brain’s function would likely be small.

Implantable medical devices

“It will be a few more years into the future before you see people with spinal-cord injuries receive such implantable systems in the context of standard medical care, but those are the sorts of devices you could envision powering from a glucose-based fuel cell,” says Rapoport.

Karim Oweiss, an associate professor of electrical engineering, computer science and neuroscience at Michigan State University, says the work is a good step toward developing implantable medical devices that don’t require external power sources.

“It’s a proof of concept that they can generate enough power to meet the requirements,” says Oweiss, adding that the next step will be to demonstrate that it can work in a living animal.

A team of researchers at Brown University, Massachusetts General Hospital and other institutions recently demonstrated that paralyzed patients could use a brain-machine interface to move a robotic arm; those implants have to be plugged into a wall outlet.

Ultra-low-power bioelectronics

Sarpeshkar’s group is a leader in the field of ultra-low-power electronics, having pioneered such designs for cochlear implants and brain implants. “The glucose fuel cell, when combined with such ultra-low-power electronics, can enable brain implants or other implants to be completely self-powered,” says Sarpeshkar, author of the book Ultra Low Power Bioelectronics.

The book discusses how the combination of ultra-low-power and energy-harvesting design can enable self-powered devices for medical, bio-inspired and portable applications.

Sarpeshkar’s group has worked on all aspects of implantable brain-machine interfaces and neural prosthetics, including recording from nerves, stimulating nerves, decoding nerve signals and communicating wirelessly with implants.

One such neural prosthetic is designed to record electrical activity from hundreds of neurons in the brain’s motor cortex, which is responsible for controlling movement. That data is amplified and converted into a digital signal so that computers — or in the Sarpeshkar team’s work, brain-implanted microchips — can analyze it and determine which patterns of brain activity produce movement.

The fabrication of the glucose fuel cell was done in collaboration with Jakub Kedzierski at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. “This collaboration with Lincoln Lab helped make a long-term goal of mine — to create glucose-powered bioelectronics — a reality,” Sarpeshkar says.

Although he has begun working on bringing ultra-low-power and medical technology to market, he cautions that glucose-powered implantable medical devices are still many years away.

Ref.: Benjamin I. Rapoport, Jakub T. Kedzierski, Rahul Sarpeshkar, A Glucose Fuel Cell for Implantable Brain-Machine Interfaces, PLoS ONE, 2012, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0038436 (open access)

The Walk Again Project

Over the past decade, neuroscientists at the Duke University Center for Neuroengineering (DUCN) have developed the field of brain-machine interface (BMI) into one of the most exciting—and promising—areas of basic and applied research in modern neuroscience. By creating a way to link living brain tissue to a variety of artificial tools, BMIs have made it possible for non-human primates to use the electrical activity produced by hundreds of neurons, located in multiple regions of their brains, to directly control the movements of a variety of robotic devices, including prosthetic arms and legs.

As a result, BMI research raises the hope that in the not-too-distant future, patients suffering from a variety of neurological disorders that lead to devastating levels of paralysis may be able to recover their mobility by harnessing their own brain impulses to directly control sophisticated neuroprostheses.
The Walk Again Project, an international consortium of leading research centers around the world represents a new paradigm for scientific collaboration among the world’s academic institutions, bringing together a global network of scientific and technological experts, distributed among all the continents, to achieve a key humanitarian goal.

The project’s central goal is to develop and implement the first BMI capable of restoring full mobility to patients suffering from a severe degree of paralysis. This lofty goal will be achieved by building a neuroprosthetic device that uses a BMI as its core, allowing the patients to capture and use their own voluntary brain activity to control the movements of a full-body prosthetic device. This “wearable robot,” also known as an “exoskeleton,” will be designed to sustain and carry the patient’s body according to his or her mental will.

In addition to proposing to develop new technologies that aim at improving the quality of life of millions of people worldwide, the Walk Again Project also innovates by creating a complete new paradigm for global scientific collaboration among leading academic institutions worldwide. According to this model, a worldwide network of leading scientific and technological experts, distributed among all the continents, come together to participate in a major, non-profit effort to make a fellow human being walk again, based on their collective expertise. These world renowned scholars will contribute key intellectual assets as well as provide a base for continued fundraising capitalization of the project, setting clear goals to establish fundamental advances toward restoring full mobility for patients in need.

Walk again Project Homepage

New TRANSHUMAN documentary - Do you want to live forever?

TRANSHUMAN is a short documentary film by director Titus Nachbauer. It is about radical life extension and future technology that might change the human condition.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brain-Machine-Interfacing/185448968175960?sk=wall

Boosting neuron growth may lead to drugs that improve cognition and mood

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have developed a new way to stimulate neurogenesis (neuron production) in the adult mouse brain, demonstrating that neurons acquired in the brain’s hippo campus during adulthood improve certain cognitive functions.

The researchers boosted the number of neurons in the hippo campus, an area of the brain involved in memory and mood, and tested the mice in both learning and mood-related tasks, looking for changes in behavior.
They found specific effects on learning tasks that involve a process called pattern separation, which is the ability to distinguish between similar places, events, and experiences. Pattern separation is important for learning, since it helps determine whether something is familiar or novel.

Pattern separation may also be important for anxiety disorders, including post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and panic disorder. People with PTSD, say the researchers, have a more generalized fear response, so that when they are placed in a situation that reminds them of even one aspect of their trauma, they frequently have a full fear response.

The researchers say that the genetic strategy used to stimulate neurogenesis in their experiments can be mimicked

Identifying brain networks for specific mental states

Researchers at Stanford University have determined from brain-imaging data whether

experimental subjects are recalling events of the day, singing silently to themselves, performing mental arithmetic, or merely relaxing.

In the study, subjects engaged in these mental activities at their own natural pace, rather than in a controlled, precisely timed fashion as is typically required in experiments involving fMRI. The team used uninterrupted scan periods ranging from 30 seconds to 10 minutes in length.

The team assembled images from each separate scan. Instead of comparing “on-task” images with “off-task” images to see which regions were active during a distinct brain state compared with when the brain wasn’t in that state, the researchers focused on which collections, or networks, of brain regions were active in concert with one another throughout a given state

The researchers found that distinct mental states can be distinguished based on unique patterns of activity in coordinated networks — brain regions that are synchronously communicating with one another.

The team is using this network approach to develop diagnostic tests for Alzheimer’s disease and other brain disorders in which network function is disrupted.

M. D. Greicius, et al., Decoding Subject-Driven Cognitive States with Whole-Brain Connectivity Patterns, Cerebral Cortex, 2011; DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhr099 (in press)

If the Drug NZT was real would you take it?

In the 2011 Movie "Limitless" the main character played by Bradley Cooper stumbles onto a drug called NZT that unlocks the potential of the human mind and in concept allows you to use 100% of it.

After taking NZT he becomes stronger, able to learn languages in a day, conquer wall street and makes his life the potential of his life virtually wait for it.........  LIMITLESS.

Obviously there are side effects of taking  the drug that are serious such as blackouts, loss of chunks time, fits of rage and if he stops taking it death.

I found myself thinking that it might be worth the risk especially if you are down and out for the count in life. If you have nothing left to lose "why not?"

I decided to do some digging around to find some non-drug solutions without the side effects and I wrote a post on it
http://transhumanmovement.blogspot.com/2011/04/movie-limitless-not-that-far-from.html

What I also wondered was how many people would actually take the drug as well knowing full-well the side effects.

If this topic interests you stay tuned as I will be writing a post soon about drug related solutions

Boosting neuron growth may lead to drugs that improve cognition and mood

Mice with more adult-born neurons (right) display increased exploratory behavior and decreased anxiety-like behavior in the open field test following a voluntary exercise regimen. (Credit:A Sahay et al./Nature)

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have developed a new way to stimulate neurogenesis (neuron production) in the adult mouse brain, demonstrating that neurons acquired in the brain’s hippocampus during adulthood improve certain cognitive functions.

The researchers boosted the number of neurons in the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in memory and mood, and tested the mice in both learning and mood-related tasks, looking for changes in behavior.
They found specific effects on learning tasks that involve a process called pattern separation, which is the ability to distinguish between similar places, events, and experiences. Pattern separation is important for learning, since it helps determine whether something is familiar or novel.

Pattern separation may also be important for anxiety disorders, including post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and panic disorder. People with PTSD, say the researchers, have a more generalized fear response, so that when they are placed in a situation that reminds them of even one aspect of their trauma, they frequently have a full fear response.

The researchers say that the genetic strategy used to stimulate neurogenesis in their experiments can be mimicked pharmacologically, potentially leading to the development of new drugs to reverse pattern separation deficits and improve cognition and mood.

Ref.: René Hen et al., Increasing adult hippocampal neurogenesis is sufficient to improve pattern separation, April 3 online edition, Nature

Punk rock skeleton demos mind control system

Who says punk is dead? In the video above, a skeleton with a mohawk is helping to visualise how a new neural implant device reads brain signals and interprets them to control a prosthetic arm. The yellow spikes radiating from the skeleton's head represent the firing of motor neurons in the brain. Each neuron is tuned to recognise a different direction in space, so as the arm moves, the spikes change to reflect the changing direction. By adding together the output of all the neurons, the direction of the arm's movement - represented by the blue arrow - can be predicted.
Mind control devices are quite the rage these days, with systems designed to control everything from iPad apps, to prosthetic limbs, to cars. This system, developed by Daniel Moran of Washington University in St. Louis uses a grid of disc-shaped electrodes, inserted between the brain and the skull, to read electrical activity in the brain. It's more precise than electrodes placed outside of the skull, and less invasive than probes inserted into the brain itself.
With further refinements, the system could give amputees better control over prosthetic limbs without overly invasive surgical implants.

Original article from New Scientists magazine

Magnetic Brain Stimulation Improves Skill Learning, Study Finds

ScienceDaily (July 7, 2009) — The use of magnetic pulses to stimulate the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) region of the brain results in an improved ability to learn a skilled motor task. Researchers show that skilled movements can be stored as memories in the PMd and that magnetic stimulation of this area can facilitate this learning process.

Lara Boyd and Meghan Linsdell, from the University of British Columbia, studied the effect of transcranial magnetic stimulation of the PMd on the ability of 30 volunteers to track a target on a computer screen using a joystick. During the task, the target would move randomly, then enter a programmed pattern and finally return to moving randomly. The participants were not aware of the repeated section, believing that movements were random throughout.

The volunteers received four days of training, during which they were either given excitatory stimulation, inhibitory stimulation or sham stimulation immediately before practicing the motor task. The volunteers were not aware which group they were in. On the fifth day, they were tested to see how well they had learned the task. By comparing the improvements between the random and repeated sections of the task, the researchers were able to separate the general improvement due to practice from the learned motor memory of the repeated section.

Those participants who had received the excitatory stimulation were significantly better than the other groups at tracking the target during the repeated section of the test. They showed no significant difference in improvement during the random sections. The researchers conclude, "Our data support the hypothesis that the PMd is important for continuous motor learning, specifically via off-line consolidation of learned motor behaviors".

Journal reference:

1. Lara A Boyd and Meghan A Linsdell. Excitatory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation to left dorsal premotor cortex enhances motor consolidation of new skills. BMC Neuroscience, (in press) [link]

Adapted from materials provided by BioMed Central, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

A step toward better brain implants using conducting polymer nanotubes

This illustration depicts neurons firing (green structures in the foreground) and communicating with nanotubes in the background. Credit: Illustration courtesy of Mohammad Reza Abidian

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Brain implants that can more clearly record signals from surrounding neurons in rats have been created at the University of Michigan. The findings could eventually lead to more effective treatment of neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease and paralysis.

Neural electrodes must work for time periods ranging from hours to years. When the electrodes are implanted, the brain first reacts to the acute injury with an inflammatory response. Then the brain settles into a wound-healing, or chronic, response.

It's during this secondary response that brain tissue starts to encapsulate the electrode, cutting it off from communication with surrounding neurons.

The new brain implants developed at U-M are coated with nanotubes made of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT), a biocompatible and electrically conductive polymer that has been shown to record neural signals better than conventional metal electrodes.

U-M researchers found that PEDOT nanotubes enhanced high-quality unit activity (signal-to-noise ratio >4) about 30 percent more than the uncoated sites. They also found that based on in vivo impedance data, PEDOT nanotubes might be used as a novel method for biosensing to indicate the transition between acute and chronic responses in brain tissue.

The results are featured in the cover article of the Oct. 5 issue of the journal Advanced Materials. The paper is titled, "Interfacing Conducting Polymer Nanotubes with the Central Nervous System: Chronic Neural Recording using Poly(3-4-ethylenedioxythiophene) Nanotubes."

"Microelectrodes implanted in the brain are increasingly being used to treat neurological disorders," said Mohammad Reza Abidian, a post-doctoral researcher working with Professor Daryl Kipke in the Neural Engineering Laboratory at the U-M Department of Biomedical Engineering.

"Moreover, these electrodes enable neuroprosthetic devices, which hold the promise to return functionality to individuals with spinal cord injuries and neurodegenerative diseases. However, robust and reliable chronic application of neural electrodes remains a challenge."

In the experiment, the researchers implanted two neural microelectrodes in the brains of three rats. PEDOT nanotubes were fabricated on the surface of every other recording site by using a nanofiber templating method. Over the course of seven weeks, researchers monitored the electrical impedance of the recording sites and measured the quality of recording signals.

PEDOT nanotubes in the coating enable the electrodes to operate with less electrical resistance than current metal electrode sites, which means they can communicate more clearly with individual neurons.

"Conducting polymers are biocompatible and have both electronic and ionic conductivity," Abidian said. "Therefore, these materials are good candidates for biomedical applications such as neural interfaces, biosensors and drug delivery systems."

In the experiments, the Michigan researchers applied PEDOT nanotubes to microelectrodes provided by the U-M Center for Neural Communication Technology. The PEDOT nanotube coatings were developed in the laboratory of David C. Martin, now an adjunct professor of materials science and engineering, macromolecular science and engineering, and biomedical engineering. Martin is currently the Karl W. Böer Professor and Chair of the Materials Science and Engineering Department at the University of Delaware.

Martin is also co-founder and chief scientific officer for Biotectix, a U-M spinoff company located in Ann Arbor. The company is working to commercialize conducting polymer-based coatings for a variety of biomedical devices

In previous experiments, Abidian and his colleagues have shown that PEDOT nanotubes could carry with them drugs to prevent encapsulation.

"This study paves the way for smart recording electrodes that can deliver drugs to alleviate the immune response of encapsulation," Abidian said.

More information: Scientific article: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/122525755/PDFSTART

Source: University of Michigan

The Next Hacking Frontier: Your Brain?

Hackers who commandeer your computer are bad enough. Now scientists worry that someday, they’ll try to take over your brain.

-->In the past year, researchers have developed technology that makes it possible to use thoughts to operate a computer, maneuver a wheelchair or even use Twitter — all without lifting a finger. But as neural devices become more complicated — and go wireless — some scientists say the risks of “brain hacking” should be taken seriously.
“Neural devices are innovating at an extremely rapid rate and hold tremendous promise for the future,” said computer security expert Tadayoshi Kohno of the University of Washington. “But if we don’t start paying attention to security, we’re worried that we might find ourselves in five or 10 years saying we’ve made a big mistake.”
Hackers tap into personal computers all the time — but what would happen if they focused their nefarious energy on neural devices, such as the deep-brain stimulators currently used to treat Parkinson’s and depression, or electrode systems for controlling prosthetic limbs? According to Kohno and his colleagues, who published their concerns July 1 in Neurosurgical Focus, most current devices carry few security risks. But as neural engineering becomes more complex and more widespread, the potential for security breaches will mushroom.
For example, the next generation of implantable devices to control prosthetic limbs will likely include wireless controls that allow physicians to remotely adjust settings on the machine. If neural engineers don’t build in security features such as encryption and access control, an attacker could hijack the device and take over the robotic limb.
“It’s very hard to design complex systems that don’t have bugs,” Kohno said. “As these medical devices start to become more and more complicated, it gets easier and easier for people to overlook a bug that could become a very serious risk. It might border on science fiction today, but so did going to the moon 50 years ago.”

Some might question why anyone would want to hack into someone else’s brain, but the researchers say there’s a precedent for using computers to cause neurological harm. In November 2007 and March 2008, malicious programmers vandalized epilepsy support websites by putting up flashing animations, which caused seizures in some photo-sensitive patients.
“It happened on two separate occasions,” said computer science graduate student Tamara Denning, a co-author on the paper. “It’s evidence that people will be malicious and try to compromise peoples’ health using computers, especially if neural devices become more widespread.”
In some cases, patients might even want to hack into their own neural device. Unlike devices to control prosthetic limbs, which still use wires, many deep brain stimulators already rely on wireless signals. Hacking into these devices could enable patients to “self-prescribe” elevated moods or pain relief by increasing the activity of the brain’s reward centers.
Despite the risks, Kohno said, most new devices aren’t created with security in mind. Neural engineers carefully consider the safety and reliability of new equipment, and neuroethicists focus on whether a new device fits ethical guidelines. But until now, few groups have considered how neural devices might be hijacked to perform unintended actions. This is the first time an academic paper has addressed the topic of “neurosecurity,” a term the group coined to describe their field.

“The security and privacy issues somehow seem to slip by,” Kohno said. “I would not be surprised if most people working in this space have never thought about security.”
Kevin Otto, a bioengineer who studies brain-machine interfaces at Purdue Universty, said he was initially skeptical of the research. “When I first picked up the paper, I don’t know if I agreed that it was an issue. But the paper gives a very compelling argument that this is important, and that this is the time to have neural engineers collaborate with security developers.”
It’s never too early to start thinking about security issues, said neural engineer Justin Williams of the University of Wisconsin, who was not involved in the research. But he stressed that the kinds of devices available today are not susceptible to attack, and that fear of future risks shouldn’t impede progress in the field. “These kinds of security issues have to proceed in lockstep with the technology,” Williams said.
History provides plenty of examples of why it’s important to think about security before it becomes a problem, Kohno said. Perhaps the best example is the internet, which was originally conceived as a research project and didn’t take security into account.
“Because the internet was not originally designed with security in mind,” the researchers wrote, “it is incredibly challenging — if not impossible — to retrofit the existing internet infrastructure to meet all of today’s security goals.” Kohno and his colleagues hope to avoid such problems in the neural device world, by getting the community to discuss potential security problems before they become a reality.
“The first thing is to ask ourselves is, ‘Could there be a security and privacy problem?’” Kohno said. “Asking ‘Is there a problem?’ gets you 90 percent there, and that’s the most important thing.”

Originally posted in Wired magazine

Sending Genes into the Brain

The brain has long presented a special challenge to drug developers: tightly enclosed by the blood brain barrier, it remains locked to many therapies delivered orally or intravenously.
However, thanks to more-precise methods of targeting the brain, advances in brain imaging, and the growing popularity of implanted stimulators for treating neurological diseases, the brain is no longer off limits. This is highlighted by a number of new clinical trials involving Parkinson's patients, in which a therapeutic gene or another treatment is delivered directly to a specific part of the brain.

Read original article here-->

Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion

Wired, May 2009
Our brains don't see everything -- the world is too big, too full of stimuli. So the brain takes shortcuts, constructing a picture of reality with relatively simple algorithms for what things are supposed to look like.

Magicians capitalize on those rules.

Read original article here

Concentration Science: Ear Plugs to Lasers

Imagine that you have ditched 

your laptop and turned off your 

smartphone. You are beyond the 

reach of YouTube, Facebook, 

e-mail, text messages. You are 

in a Twitter-free zone, sitting 

in a taxicab with a copy of 

“Rapt,” a guide by Winifred 

Gallagher to the science of 

paying attention.

The book’s theme, which Ms. Gallagher chose after she learned she had an especially nasty form of cancer, is borrowed from the psychologist William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” You can lead a miserable life by obsessing on problems. You can drive yourself crazy trying to multitask and answer every e-mail message instantly.

Or you can recognize your brain’s finite capacity for processing information, accentuate the positive and achieve the satisfactions of what Ms. Gallagher calls the focused life. It can sound wonderfully appealing, except that as you sit in the cab reading about concentration science, and you realize that ... you’re not paying attention to a word on the page.

The taxi’s television, which can’t be turned off, is showing a commercial of a guy in a taxi working on a laptop — and as long as he’s jabbering about how his new wireless card has made him so productive during his cab ride, you can’t do anything productive during yours.

Why can’t you concentrate on anything except your desire to shut him up? And even if you flee the cab, is there any realistic refuge anymore from the Age of Distraction?

I put these questions to Ms. Gallagher and to one of the experts in her book, Robert Desimone, a neuroscientist at M.I.T. who has been doing experiments somewhat similar to my taxicab TV experience. He has been tracking the brain waves of macaque monkeys and humans as they stare at video screens looking for certain flashing patterns.

When something bright or novel flashes, it tends to automatically win the competition for the brain’s attention, but that involuntary bottom-up impulse can be voluntarily overridden through a top-down process that Dr. Desimone calls “biased competition.” He and colleagues have found that neurons in the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s planning center — start oscillating in unison and send signals directing the visual cortex to heed something else.

These oscillations, called gamma waves, are created by neurons’ firing on and off at the same time — a feat of neural coordination a bit like getting strangers in one section of a stadium to start clapping in unison, thereby sending a signal that induces people on the other side of the stadium to clap along. But these signals can have trouble getting through in a noisy environment.

“It takes a lot of your prefrontal brain power to force yourself not to process a strong input like a television commercial,” said Dr. Desimone, the director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at M.I.T. “If you’re trying to read a book at the same time, you may not have the resources left to focus on the words.”

Now that neuroscientists have identified the brain’s synchronizing mechanism, they’ve started work on therapies to strengthen attention. In the current issue of Nature, researchers from M.I.T., Penn and Stanford report that they directly induced gamma waves in mice by shining pulses of laser light through tiny optical fibers onto genetically engineered neurons. In the current issue of Neuron, Dr. Desimone and colleagues report progress in using this “optogenetic” technique in monkeys.

Ultimately, Dr. Desimone said, it may be possible to improve your attention by using pulses of light to directly synchronize your neurons, a form of direct therapy that could help people with schizophrenia and attention-deficit problems (and might have fewer side effects than drugs). If it could be done with low-wavelength light that penetrates the skull, you could simply put on (or take off) a tiny wirelessly controlled device that would be a bit like a hearing aid.

In the nearer future, neuroscientists might also help you focus by observing your brain activity and providing biofeedback as you practice strengthening your concentration. Researchers have already observed higher levels of synchrony in the brains of people who regularly meditate.

Ms. Gallagher advocates meditation to increase your focus, but she says there are also simpler ways to put the lessons of attention researchers to use. Once she learned how hard it was for the brain to avoid paying attention to sounds, particularly other people’s voices, she began carrying ear plugs with her. When you’re trapped in a noisy subway car or a taxi with a TV that won’t turn off, she says you have to build your own “stimulus shelter.”

She recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. At that point your prefrontal cortex probably needs a rest, and you can answer e-mail, return phone calls and sip caffeine (which does help attention) before focusing again. But until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption.

“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime.

“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”

During her cancer treatment several years ago, Ms. Gallagher said, she managed to remain relatively cheerful by keeping in mind James’s mantra as well as a line from Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.”

“When I woke up in the morning,” Ms. Gallagher said, “I’d ask myself: Do you want to lie here paying attention to the very good chance you’ll die and leave your children motherless, or do you want to get up and wash your face and pay attention to your work and your family and your friends? Hell or heaven — it’s your choice.”