The current issue of the IEEE Spectrum, house organ for electrical engineers, revisits the state of the power grid one year after the blackout of August 14, 2003. This topic is of interest to us on many levels, and the present newsletter iterates the one I wrote last year on this topic.

First of all, the issue of grid stability has been getting the attention of system theorists working with nonlinear dynamical models. In simulations of ever greater complexity, it is found that cascading failures in which little blackouts become big ones seem to be a fact of life. But this instability is already evident when we have only three systems to coordinate as opposed to thousands. Sufficient complexity to make predictions nearly impossible in practice is already there at the level of three interacting systems. So we are into modeling complexity, in other words into chaos theory. (more…)

The pace of change is increasing in our field, rather than leveling off. How exciting, except of course for those who are connected with the Efficacy Document, who got left behind in the last century.

Now Chuck Davis is challenging us to change our thinking once again. What excited me about the Magnetic Stimulation capability in the previous ROSHI is that it involves the use of an EEG tracking capability. This allows us to stimulate the brain whenever a certain threshold in EEG amplitude is exceeded, irrespective of the frequency at which this occurs. This represents a kind of limit to which the standard inhibit strategy can be taken. It is like Reuters having a search routine that always finds its way automatically to what should be generating headlines at a particular moment. (more…)

I was invited to give a talk and workshop at the Innovations in Education Conference in Salt Lake City last week, and that gave me an opportunity to hear about other ways to break the barriers to learning. The moving force behind this conference is Ed Fila and Mike Phillips. Dr. Ed Fila was drawn to this field because of his own learning disabled daughter, the odd duck among a bunch of very successful children, whereas Mike Phillips had spent his first career in the juvenile justice system. One of his last official duties before his retirement was to check up on a cohort of kids to see what happened to them over the five years since they were released from custody in the juvenile justice system. Some 200 of these kids had cost the State close to $20 Million in continuing services, more than $100K apiece, for >20K per year. This is just the tangible public cost, and does not include the impact on other lives and on the private economy. Two-thirds of the kids were in prison by the end of the survey period—a resounding history of failure of the juvenile justice program. Less than 40% of the males, and less than 10% of the females had achieved high school graduation. What if such failed lives could be intercepted early on and set on a different course?

So Ed Fila and Mike Phillips have been gathering the best of available educational and remedial technologies for insertion into the Utah educational system. I have had the opportunity to present at each of their conferences over the years. I am told that my talk was always voted the best of the conference, but neurofeedback has never made the cut of being included in their proposed program. This is quite possibly because of the dearth of a documented track record of positive outcome for a within-school application. But it may also just be too difficult to get neurofeedback through the legislature at this point. The organization received $1M in funding from the legislature, but the disbursement has been held up by the current governor. (more…)

Our latest issue of the Neuroscientist, in its regular survey of the field of neuroscience, comments on an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the effect of stimulant medication on subsequent learning capacity. It was found that “[p]rior treatment with amphetamine or cocaine interfered with the ability of experience in a complex environment to increase dendritic arborization and spine density.” [Ref. 1] Yet it had been established previously that stimulant medication all by itself is capable of increasing dendritic branching and spine density.

It appears that we have to ask more subtle questions than simply whether stimulants provoke neural growth. It may be that if the growth is not shaped or mediated by learning experience then the growth is not much good to us. It may be more like kudzu in Louisiana. Even more ominously, randomly promoted growth may preempt the more useful neural growth on which learning depends. It could even account for the “neuropsychological deficits seen in amphetamine and cocaine addicts.” In sum, then, it may not be good news to discover that stimulant medication promotes neural growth. If not, then we are back to the model that the salutary benefit of stimulants relates to the immediate state change, not to any lingering induced physiological change. (more…)