Gray Matters

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THE ATTENTION ISSUE #2

ATTENTION

PERCEPTION

MEMORY

48-69

THE MAP: Use this to find your way around.

26-47

4-25THE PROCESS BY WHICH SENSORY INFORMATION IS ENCODED, STORED, + RETRIEVED.

THE PROCESS OF CONCENTRATING ON ONE ASPECT OF THE ENVIRONMENT WHILE IGNORING OTHERS.

THE PROCESS OF UNDERSTANDING THE ENVIRONMENT THROUGH ORGANIZING/INTERPRETING SENSORY INFORMATION.

LEVEL UP! Good news for gamers! Turns

out playing video games is

actually better for you than

you’d think.

THE BRAIN DOES THAT? Taking a placebo doesn’t just

make you feel better. Some-

thing actually happens in the

brain! Should we be excited?

BEAUTIFUL BRAINS Moody. Impulsive. Maddening.

Why do teenagers act the way

they do? These traits may be

their key to success as adults.

THINK AGAIN. In a trivial sense, everything

rewires your brain; in a more

meaningful sense, almost

nothing does.

SMARTER NOT HARDER Good students don’t just study

hard, they study smart. This

study identifies habits of

successful college students.

LIVING THE GAME. Fans in love, players at work.

Here’s why players play the

game but the fans are the

ones who really live it.

LECTURES SUCK. We’ve all said it. It turns out

that we might have been right.

Even good lecturers could

teach more by lecturing less.

YOU MUST BE JOKING.Some people are so unskilled

they don’t realize it. Which

means if you think you’re

funny, you’re probably not.

DON’T FORGET (TO REMEMBER)New studies show that vast

memory capacities lie latent

in many of us.

CAN YOU MAKE YOUR- SELF SMARTER? The new game that’s revived

the notion that people can

work their way to a higher I.Q.

LONDON CABBIES +GROWING BRAINSThis bizarre survey shows the

changing brain structure in

London cab drivers.

THE 2 EXTREMES OF HUMAN MEMORY She might have the best

memory in the world. He could

very well have the worst.

48-69

FEATURE: MENTAL ATHLETESHow I trained my brain and became a world class athlete.

FEATURE: THE SCIENCE OF WINNINGHow the MIT Blackjack team hijacked Las Vegas.

FEATURE: SUPERWOMENWomen who can see more color than you and me.

3

7

THE 2 EXTREMES OF HUMAN MEMORY She might have the best memory. He could very well have the worst.

21

LONDON CABBIES +GROWING BRAINSThis bizarre survey shows the changing brain structure in London cab drivers.

FRAGMENTS_ OF THE MIND _

For this exercise, you’LL utiLiZe your ABiLity to reMeMBer + recALL FActs/to soLVe the riDDLes AND oBtAiN the PAsscoDe.

eAch “riDDLe” DescriBes A VisuAL eLeMeNt thAt cAN Be FouND soMewhere throughout these PAges. iF you thiNK you KNow the ANswer, see iF you cAN FiND it it iN the MAgAZiNe!

oNce you’Ve DeciPhereD ALL 5 riDDLes + oBtAiNeD the coDe, you MAy eNter your guess oNLiNe At grAyMAtters.coM to see iF you’re eLigiBLe to wiN!

Two hearts that don’t belong

One three and a four

A blur of color + light

A compass pointing in many directions

The gift of words

PG ___

PG ___

PG ___

PG ___

PG ___

17

WAR IS DAMAGING:A rampage in Afghanistan calls attention to a potentially lethal combo of PTSD and traumatic brain injury.

25

CAN YOU MAKE YOURSELF SMARTER? The new game that’s revived the notion that people can work their way to a higher I.Q.

FEATURE: MENTAL ATHLETESHow I trained my brain and became a world class athlete.

5

There is a 32-year-old

woman, employed as an

administrative assistant from

California. She’s known in the

medical literature only as “AJ”

who remembers almost every

day of her life since age 11.

There is an 21-year-old man,

a young lab technician called

“EP,” who remembers only his

most recent thought. She might

have the best memory in the

world. He has the worst.

“My memory flows

like a movie—nonstop and

uncontrollable,” says AJ. She

remembers that at 12:34 p.m.

on Sunday, August 3, 1986, a

young man she had a crush on

called her on the telephone.

She remembers exactly what

happened on Murphy Brown

on December 12, 1988. And she

remembers that on March

28, 1992, she had lunch with

her father at the Beverly Hills

Hotel. She remembers world

events and trips to the grocery

store, the weather and her

emotions. Virtually every day

is there. But she’s not very

much easily stumped. She

sees everything in almost

complete detail. She

remembers world events

and trips to the grocery

store, the weather and her

emotions. Virtually every

day is there. But she’s

not very much easily

stumped. Everything

she sees is essentially in

complete detail.

There have been a small

handful of people over the

years that are known for their

It was the best and the worst of memory...

7

Stock-still + sweating

profusely, it all began on the

19th floor of a building near

Union Square in Manhattan. I

was there to write an article

about what I imagined would

be the Super Bowl of savants.

The scene I actually

stumbled upon, however, was

something less than a clash of

titans: a bunch of guys (and a

few women), varying widely

in age + personal grooming

habits, poring over pages of

random numbers and long

lists of words. They referred

to themselves as mental

athletes, or M.A.’s for short.

The best among them could

memorize the first and last

names of a dozen strangers in

just a few minutes, thousands

of random digits in under an

hour. To impress those with a

more human time, I asked Ed

Cooke, the competitor from

England — he was 24 at the

time and attending the U.S.

event to train that summer’s

World Memory Championships

— when he first realized he

was a savant. “Oh, I’m not a

savant,” he said.

“Photographic memory?”

He chuckled again.

“Photographic memory is a

detestable myth. Doesn’t exist.

In fact, my memory is quite

average. All of us here have

average memories.”

This is the unlikely story of how I ended up in the

finals of the U.S.A. Memory Championship...

43

SMARTER, NOT HARDER. Good students don’t just study hard, they study smart. This study identifies the habits of successful college students.

29

LEVEL UP! Good news gamers! Turns out playing video games are good for multi-tasking.

47

LECTURES SUCK.We’ve all said it. It turns out that we might have been right. Even good lecturers could teach more by lecturing less.

39

WAR IS DAMAGING: A rampage in Afghanistan calls attention to a poten-tially lethal combo of PTSD and traumatic brain injury.

1. In which hand is the Statue

of Liberty’s torch?

A. Left

B. Right

5. Which way does a “no

smoking” sign’s slash run?

A. Towards bottom right

B. Towards bottom left

2. What 2 letters don’t appear

on the telephone dial?

A. Q, U

B. Q, Z

C. X, Z

D. Y, Z

6. On Which side of a women’s

blouse are the buttons on?

A. Left

B. Right

3. On the American flag - is

the top stripe red or white?

A. Red

B. White

7. How many hot dog buns are

in a standard package?

A. 6

B. 8

C. 10

D. 12

4. What is the lowest number

on the FM dial?

A. 86

B. 87

C. 88

D. 89

8. On which side of a venetian

blind is the cord that adjusts

the opening between slats?

A. Left

B. Right

27

Videogamers show eXTraordiNarY mulTi-TaskiNg abiliTies + PerForm well aT Focus ceNTered Tasks.

LEVEL UP+++

Hey parents, the next

time you fret that your child is

wasting too much time playing

video games, consider new

research suggesting that

gaming may have real world

benefits for his/her brain.

Ms. Daphne Bavelier is a

professor of brain + cognitive

sciences at the University of

Rochester. She studies young

people playing action video

games. Having now finished

conducting more than twenty

studies on the topic, Bavelier

says, “It turns out that action

video games are actually far

from mindless.”

Her studies show that

video gamers show improved

skills in vision, attention and

certain aspects of cognition.

BY PEACH G.

Why opting not to shower for a week to play Call of

Duty might actually be better for your brain.

And guess what? These skills

are not just gaming skills, but

real-world skills. They perform

better than non-gamers on

certain tests of attention,

speed, accuracy, vision and

multitasking, says Bavelier.

Vision, for example,

improved in gamers. More

specifically, the kind of vision

called “contrast sensitivity,”

that is, the ability to see subtle

shades of gray.

A recent test subject in

cognitive scientist Daphne

Bavelier’s study tries to follow

the direction of moving dots

on a computer screen.

“And this is a skill that

comes in very handy if you’re

driving in fog,” Bavelier says.

Seeing the car ahead of you is

29

determined by your con-

trast sensitivity.” These skilled

gamers also are able to see

smaller type size than most

non-gamers on vision tests.

But Bavelier wanted to

know which came first: Is

the better vision caused by

playing action video games,

or is better vision a skill that

gamers bring to the table?

Perhaps, Bavelier wondered,

gamers already have sharp

vision, and are thus good at

action games and vision tests.

To test this out, Bavelier

recruited non-gamers and

trained them for a few weeks

to play action video games.

“At the end of their training,”

Bavelier says, “they’re told,

go back home, and no more

gaming. They’re not allowed

to play any games.”

Then they came back into

the lab every few months to

have their vision re-checked.

LASER FOCUS

Bavelier found that their

vision remained improved,

even without further practice

on action video games. “We

looked at the effect of playing

action games on this visual

skill of contrast sensitivity,

and we’ve seen effects that

can last up to almost two

whole years.”

Gamers, Bavelier has

also found, have much better

attention than non-gamers

— they stay focused. She

issued video-gamers tests

to measure attention. She

found that gamers get much

less distracted by what came

before and by events in their

immediate surroundings.

They are able to detect,

for example, new information

coming at them faster. As a

result, they are more efficient.

And Bavelier also says that

gamers can switch from task

to task much quicker than

non-gamers, making them

much better multitaskers.

BODY MOVING GAMES

Gaming may improve

children’s cognitive skills, but

it’s not without drawbacks:

There’s a lot of evidence

showing correlation between

gaming and childhood obesity.

New devices — like Nintendo

Wii, PlayStation Move or

Kinect for Xbox 360 — might

help game lovers get off the

couch, but do games used

with these systems show the

same potential to improve a

child’s aptitude for tests and

other challenges?

Not really, says Daphne

Bavelier, a brain/cognitive

sciences researcher at the

University of Rochester.

“Those games typically don’t

have the same effect [on the

brain],” she says.

At the same time, she

said some studies have found

that exercise itself can have a

great impact on the cognitive

skills of older adults, but she

says that we don’t know yet

whether the same is true.

“We see that typically in

people that don’t play action

games, their reaction time [on

multi-tasking tests] increased

by 200 milliseconds, which is

something like 30 percent,”

Bavelier says. “But in gamers,

it increased only by 10.”

CLOSING THE GENDER GAP

Brain researcher Jay

Pratt, has studied the dif-

ferences between men and

women in their ability to men-

tally manipulate 3D objects.

This skill is referred to as

spatial cognition, and it’s an

essential mental skill for math

and engineering. According to

Pratt, women test significantly

worse on tests of spatial

cognition.

Pratt found that when

women who had had little

gaming experience were

trained on action video

games, the gender difference

nearly disappeared.

After 10 hours of training,

Pratt brought the women back

to the lab and gave them the

spatial cognition test again

+ they found that the women

improved substantially, and

almost caught up to the men’s

scores,” he says.

Pratt also seperately

investigated a different area

of spatial cognition called “the

useful field of view,” which

is essentially how much of

the visual field a person can

perceive at any given moment.

(Or as Pratt describes it in his

research, “How wide can you

cast your net of attention?”)

Typically, there exist

baseline differences between

men and women on this test,

with men usually performing

significantly better. But Pratt

found that training on action

video games helped women

to significantly improve on

this test of visual attention.

Pratt says playing these video

games changes your ability

to learn, to find and integrate

new information.

“Video-gamers are keen

enough to pick up very subtle,

statistical irregularities in

their environments and then

use them to their advantage,”

Pratt says. “ These same

irregularities in environments

are the things that help us

VISUAL REACTION TIMESPATIAL THINkING

ENHANCED COORDINATION

FOCUS & ATTENTION

72% of AmericAn households plAy computer And/or video gAmes.

31

I try to control my breath

as I stroll through the Logan

International Airport. Terminal

C is buzzing and chaotic, an

over-air-conditioned hive of

college students escaping

Boston for a long weekend.

I am dressed like everyone

else: baggy jeans, baseball

hat, scuffed sneakers. But

in my mind, I have as much

chance of blending in as a

radioactive circus clown.

There’s more than enough

money hidden under my

clothes to buy a two-bedroom

condo. To top it all off, there’s

about $100,000 worth of yellow

plastic casino chips jammed

into the backpack slung over

my right shoulder. By now,

my anxiety is at an all time

high as I reach the security

checkpoint. I want to turn and

run, but the security guard is

staring at me, and I have no

choice: I show him my ticket.

America West, flight 69, from

Boston to Vegas. It’s the

Friday night Express.

He gestures with his

head, and I drop my backpack

onto the conveyor belt. I know

the chips will show up on the

X-ray machine, but even if

the guard makes me open the

backpack, he won’t realize

how much money the yellow

hunks of plastic represent.

The $100 bills are another

matter. This is an airport; they

can drag me to a windowless

How the M.I.T. Blackjack Team HACKED Las Vegas:

33

in the DEA, FBI, and IRS. It

will be up to me to prove that

I’m not a drug dealer. But,

to the customs agents, $100

bills smell like cocaine. In

reality, I’m a writer, with six

pulpy thrillers under my belt,

but today I’m on the scent of

a real life story even more

high-octane than any of my

fictional jaunts. I’m going to

ferry money for Kevin Lewis,

one of the best card counters

alive. He’s taking me back to

his glory days when he ran a

card team that hit Vegas for

a few millions.

The guard doesn’t seem

to be bothered by the bulges

under my clothes. He waves

me through the metal detector,

and I stumble toward gate. My

heart rate has almost returned

to normal when I spot Lewis

standing near the back of the

line of college kids waiting

to board flight 69. He doesn’t

look up, waiting until I am right

next to him to show me the

edges of a mischievous grin.

“Pretty intense,” he says.

I nod. His voice is full

of bravado, a stark contrast

to his appearance. Dressed in

a gray sweatshirt and khaki

shorts, Lewis looks like the

stereotypical college student.

His features are ethnic, but

beyond that, indeterminate.

He could be Asian, Latino,

even Italian or Russian. He is

a carbon copy of thousands

of other kids who call Boston

home. “There’s got to be

an easier way to carry your

stake,” I finally say, adjusting

the bricks of $100 bills that are

sliding down my legs.

“Sure,” Lewis responds.

“We went through a gadget

phase. You know, James

Bond kind of stuff. But hollow

crutches are a lot harder

to explain to the FBI than

Velcro.”He isn’t joking.

WHO IS LEWIS?The truth is, Kevin Lewis

isn’t actually his real name.

This amiable kid lived a double

life for more than four years.

In Boston, he was a straight-A

engineering major at MIT. In

Las Vegas, he was something

more akin to a rock star. He

partied with Michael Jordan

+ Howard Stern. He dated

a cheerleader from the L.A.

Rams and got drunk with

Playboy centerfolds. He was

chased off a riverboat in

Louisiana and narrowly

avoided being thrown into a

Bahamian jail. He was audited

by the IRS, tailed by private

investigators, and had his

picture faxed around.

Along the way, he

amassed a small fortune,

which he keeps in neat stacks

of Benjamins in a closet by his

bed. It’s rumored he’s made

somewhere between a million

and $5 million.

For six years in the 1990s,

Lewis was a principal member

of the MIT Blackjack Team,

an infamous clique of hyper

geniuses and anarchistic whiz

kids who devised a method

of card counting that took

the gaming world completely

by surprise. Funded, in part,

by shadowy investors and

trained in mock casinos

set up in classrooms, dingy

apartments, and underground

warehouses across Boston,

Lewis + his gang used their

smarts to give themselves an

incredible advantage at the

only truly beatable game in

the pit. Picture this: a baby

faced card counting team

armed with extremely

impressive math skills.

This here was a

novelty that

turned the game of blackjack

into an arbitrage opportunity.

Their system was so insanely

successful, it took nearly

two years before the casinos

began to catch on ultimately

engaging in a cat-and-mouse

war with the well-trained MIT.

To the casinos, there’s no

difference between legal card

counters like Lewis, who use

their brains to beat the game,

and the brash, increasingly

high tech cheaters who steal

tens of millions of dollars

from the resorts every year.

In response, the casinos have

developed a sophisticated

means of identifying, tracking,

and eliminating their enemies:

i.e., anyone who doesn’t

consistently lose.

THE TEAM

“It started the summer

after my junior year,” Lewis

recalls. “I had these two

friends who were always off

disappearing long weekends.

Both had dropped out of MIT,

and neither one seemed to

be interested in getting

a job. And yet they

always seemed

to have tons

of money.

51

THE BRAIN DOES WHAT?! Taking a placebo doesn’t just make you think you feel better, it produces a chemical response!

55

IT REWIRES YOUR BRAIN? THINK AGAIN. In the trivial sense, everything rewires your brain; in a more meaningful sense, nothing does.

59

FEATURE: SUPERWOMENWomen who can see more color than you and me.

65

LIVING THE GAME. Fans in love, players at work. Here’s why players play the game but the fans are the ones who really live it.

69

MUST BE JOKING. Some people are just so unskilled they don’t realize it. Which means if you think you’re funny, it might mean you’re really not.

49

SUPERWOMENI can just hear all those

scrunchy-clad-pony-tailed

girls taunting me on the school

playground, if only they had

known about tetrachromacy in

females back then...

It has been long accepted

that human color vision is

based on having three cone

receptors (trichromat) red,

green and blue, but since the

early 90’s researches have

been searching for people

who have four (tetrachromat).

These people demonstrate a

heightened color sense + the

ability to see “rare subtleties of

color.” Unfortunately, for half

of the population, it seems that

in order to lay claim to such

super color vision you need

to have two X chromosomes.

So, if you’ve ever been in a

hopeless debate with a man

who easily pairs two colors as

exactly the same, and to you

they’re clearly not the same at

all, he may not be colorblind–

as you may infer during this

type of situation, but rather you

see the colors differently.

Men, don’t fear, for

we may be able to still call

ourselves tetrachromats, even

if we can’t say we have super

color vision. As it turns out hu-

mans are better described as

‘blocked tertrachromats’ rather

than trichromats, according to

one researcher’s paper.

By Hue Colls “Nah-na-na-nah-na! I can see more colors than you!”

A TETRACHROMAT IS A WOMAN WHO CAN SEE FOUR DISTINCT RANGES OF COLOR, INSTEAD OF THE THREE THAT MOST OF US LIVE WITH.

59

The Ishihara color test is a simple + accurate method for discovering various kinds and degrees of congenital color blindness. It was named after it’s designer, Dr. Shinobu Ishihara (1879-1963), a professor at the University of Tokyo, who first published his tests in 1917.

THE GENETICS

“In an odd twist of fate,

the same genetic glitch that

creates color-blind males may

create females with better-

than-usual color vision.” ‘A Life

More Colorful’ By Cynthia

“In humans, two cone cell

pigment genes are located on

the sex X chromosome, the

classical type 2 opsin genes

OPN1MW and OPN1MW2. It

has been suggested that as

women have two different X

chromosomes in their cells,

some of them could actually

be carrying some variant cone

cell pigments, which means

possibly being born as full

tetrachromats and having

four different simultaneously

functioning kinds of cone cells,

each type with a specific

pattern of responsiveness

to different wave lengths of

light in the range of the visible

spectrum. One particular study

suggested that 2–3% of the

world’s women might have the

kind of fourth cone that lies

between the standard red and

green cones which, in theory,

give significant increase in

color differentiation. Another

study suggests that as many as

50% of women and 8% of men

may have four photopigments.”

COLORBLINDNESS TEST

“Dr. Gabrielle Jordan of

Cambridge University tested

the color perception of 14

women who each had at least

one son with the right kind

of color-blindness. She set

up a test where the subjects

had to manipulate and blend

two wavelengths of colored

light to produce any hue they

liked. They then had to match

their own results a second

time. With normal color vision,

several different combina-

tions would match any given

hue, but with a tetrachromat

the possible combinations to

produce a visible match would

be much reduced.

Dr. Jordan reported that

two of the 14 women showed

exactly the results she would

have expected from a woman

with tetrachromacy. At least

one of the two women reports

having a different sense of

color from the people around

her, with both better color

matching and better color

memory. While not completely

conclusive, this initial study

has so far provided our best

candidates for natural human

tetrachromats.”

HOW MANY DO YOU SEE?

The accepted number of

hues an average human can

differentiate between is one

million. Based on that math, a

functioning tetrachromats with

‘super color vision’ could see

100 million colors.

Mrs M. - an English social

worker, and the first known

human “tetrachromat” - sees

rare subtleties of colour. Look-

ing at a rainbow, she can see

10 distinct colours. Most of us

only see five. She was the first

to be discovered as having this

ability, in 1993, and a study in

2004 found that two out of 80

subjects were tetrachromats.

But even if we find our tetra-

chromats, they may not all be

created equal. If the modified

color receptor is sensitive to

wavelengths very close to a

normal receptor, then the tet-

rachromat would merely have

slightly better color-vision. The

further apart the wavelength

Normal color vision should read the number 5. Red-green deficiencies should read the number 6. Those with total color blindness should not be able to read any numeral.

Both normal and all color vision deficiencies should read the number 12.



THERE HAVE BEEN NO kNOWN CASES OF TETRACHROMACY IN MALES DOCUMENTED THUS FAR.

61

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