Haven’t done a Randomness in awhile.  This one is courtesy of Syeda in the Beeman lab:

Facebook Friend Count Linked to Brain Density

(mashable.com reporting from Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences)

The write-up even nicely opens with the correlation/causation problem — do brain differences cause more friends or do more friends cause brain differences?  The areas of gray matter density correlating with number of friends are a collection of temporal lobe regions, mostly non-MTL.  Intriguing but not trivial to make sense of.  I headed to google scholar to see if there was any other work in this area and found a study on Facebook use in TBI patients (http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/02699052.2011.613086).  Interestingly, they also approach Facebook/social networking as a positive thing and with these patients find what we’d expect: some barriers to use related to level of impairment and prior familiarity.

I’m not claiming this video is accurate, because the author is apparently a Professor of Funk.

In either case, it’s interesting and speaks to pseudo-effects.

Saw this linked via a gaming site:
SkillCraft.ca: A SC2 Expertise Study

It’s a study being run by Mark Blair at Simon Frasier Univ using Starcraft2 as a domain for looking at the development of expertise.

Nice idea. I wonder what the approach is.

Apparently there’s a new research study out suggesting that people don’t remember things as well if they know they can look the information up later on Google. This set off a spate of media reports on the predictable theme that technology is bad for our brains, e.g.: http://techland.time.com/2011/07/15/is-google-really-wrecking-our-memory/.

I got an email from a reporter, Rachelle Dragani from ECT News Network, this morning and got a chance to chip in on the other side:
http://www.ectnews.com/story/72879.html

My point was that since we don’t remember everything, choosing to put more effort into remembering things we can’t look up online is pretty adaptive actually. I also threw in a reference to the Flynn effect and my opinion that Google is making us smarter by giving us more access to more information. But those didn’t make it into the short report.

Apparently I mis-remembered; the study was done by Newsweek, not a fancy academic research institution.

http://www.newsweek.com/content/newsweek/2011/06/19/the-real-minimum-wage.html

Not only is this mad science, but the head researchers are from schools in Southern California (USC) and Winston-Salem (Wake Forest)!

A cortical neural prosthesis for restoring and enhancing memory

http://iopscience.iop.org/1741-2552/8/4/046017

I haven’t posted an expertise in gaming video in awhile, but a link to this appeared on twitter earlier today.  I’m unfamiliar with the game, but it appears to be a 7button + wheel (8 operator) rhythm game.  The 7 keys are arranged white/black above/below as a piano would be.  I think this is a player called Dolce who may be the best player in the world at this game.  I’m not entirely sure he’s human. I guess I just keep underestimating the upper bound of possible sequence learning…

Youtube link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gaN4AoXtC0&feature=related