Features

By Josie Clarkson

With much of the UK just emerging from its second coronavirus ‘lockdown’ into new tiers, the amount of social contact we are able to have is still limited. Among the worst affected are people living in the country’s care homes, 70% of whom have dementia. A recent report in The Lancet identified 12 risk factors for dementia and named social contact as an important defence against a decline in cognitive function as we get older.

Engaging in frequent social contact helps to increase and maintain ‘cognitive reserve’ – a measure of a person’s resilience to decline in thinking skills.

The Lancet report states that engaging in frequent social contact helps to increase and maintain ‘cognitive reserve’ – a measure of a person’s resilience to decline in thinking skills. This is because socialising stimulates the brain by challenging it to process lots of information simultaneously.

Conversely, research has shown that social isolation results in an increased rate of deterioration of symptoms among people with dementia. According to the Office for National Statistics, during the first lockdown in April there was an 80% increase in deaths due to dementia, even aside from COVID-19. It is therefore more vital than ever to keep in touch with people with dementia. Doing so will help to alleviate isolation and may slow the progression of the dementia itself.

The introduction of social distancing has restricted much of our social contact to virtual platforms – especially for people with dementia, many of whom fall into a vulnerable category.

The introduction of social distancing has restricted much of our social contact to virtual platforms – especially for people with dementia, many of whom fall into a vulnerable category. This transition online has benefits and drawbacks, and opinion is mixed as to whether digital forms of communication are an adequate substitute for face-to-face contact. On one hand, many people with dementia may struggle to access and use this technology, or to detect the usual non-verbal cues many rely on in communicating with others. On the other hand, virtual platforms open up a huge range of support services that may not be available locally – including, for example, resources in other languages.

With an estimated 850,000 people living with dementia in the UK – and at least 50 million worldwide – efforts to find new treatments and preventive strategies have never been more urgent. There is currently no ‘cure’ for dementia – an often-misunderstood term that describes a group of symptoms associated with and caused by conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s or vascular disease (to name just a few). The field is well known for its failed drug trials.

One organisation working to make much-needed breakthroughs in dementia is Dementias Platform UK (DPUK). Based in Oxford University’s Department of Psychiatry, DPUK was set up to accelerate progress in dementia research.

When we eventually deal with COVID-19, dementia will still be here in its many forms – and we’ve seen during this pandemic how deeply people with dementia and those who care for them have been affected.

Professor John Gallacher is Director of DPUK and Professor of Cognitive Health at Oxford. He says: ‘Dementia is certainly one of the biggest public health challenges facing us globally in the 21^st century. When we eventually deal with COVID-19, dementia will still be here in its many forms – and we’ve seen during this pandemic how deeply people with dementia and those who care for them have been affected.

‘But I’m optimistic about the future of dementia research. I believe that within the next five to ten years we will have disease-modifying treatments that will improve people’s lives. I’m more cautious about using the term “cure” – but treatments to delay the onset or slow the progression of dementia, yes.’

DPUK’s work focuses on better understanding the complexities of dementia in humans. There are three main strands to this work:

• a Data Portal giving researchers access to huge amounts of population health information – critical in helping identify the earliest signs and determinants of disease;
• a package of experimental medicine studies aiming to shed light on the root causes of dementia, such as what triggers inflammation in the brain;
• a ‘trials delivery framework’ that will help match public volunteers to the right dementia trials and studies, ensuring we can quickly understand what works (and what doesn’t).

 I believe that within the next five to ten years we will have disease-modifying treatments that will improve people’s lives.

Professor Gallacher says: ‘One of DPUK’s most important contributions to dementia research is the vast quantity of data it makes available to researchers so we can explore the varied causes of dementia and get a much more complete picture of why some people degenerate faster than others.

‘History shows us that individual specialties working independently will not bring the solution. We have lots of weapons in the fight against dementia: genetic information, brain imaging, stem cell technology, survey data and more. By bringing it all together and working collaboratively we will maximise our chances of success.’

DPUK has recently been awarded £7.5 million in renewed funding from the UK’s Medical Research Council.

By Jacqueline Pumphrey

Researchers led by a team at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging at the University of Oxford have developed a new framework that binds together the way the brain forms maps of space to the way the brain understands relationships of any kind – general mental maps. The new framework, published in Cell, resolves a decades-old debate on how the same part of the brain, the hippocampus, seems to be important for two seemingly very different functions – how to move around in space and how to remember relational structures like a family tree. The researchers say that they are just two sides of the same coin.

For example, when you watch a romantic comedy, there is always a common structure: 1) character setup, 2) they meet, 3) romance starts, 4) obstacle #1, 5) uncertain journey, 6) obstacle #2, 7) all goes wrong, 8) happy resolution. This structure is the same, irrespective of the exact storyline and characters.

In a similar way, whenever you go into a new house, you know that the house is likely to be set up according to some standard rules: it has rooms that connect with each other, the bedrooms are likely upstairs and the kitchen likely downstairs.

Both houses (relationships in space) and understanding films (relationships in episodes) can be understood in the same way – working out a relational web. This relational web is very useful: knowing a web for houses means you can walk into any house and have a good guess where you might find a bathroom; and knowing a web for romantic comedies means you can turn on the TV and if they’re kissing in the rain it means the film is about to end.

Using this framework of learning relational webs, the researchers built the ‘Tolman-Eichenbaum Machine’ (TEM). This is a deep neural network model named after Edward Tolman and Howard Eichenbaum, two researchers whose ideas influenced this work. Without ever telling it the underlying web, TEM was able to learn the web and use it to its advantage. For example, by seeing several different families, it could learn what a family was i.e. the family tree relation web. When learning about space, the TEM’s neurons behaved exactly numerous neurons that have been recorded in animals over the last few decades (in two areas of the brain associated with memory – the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex) including grid and place cells that allow us to keep track of our position in space.

TEM also makes novel predictions about how neurons behave. Previously it had been thought that place cells are randomly allocated for each new situation. This work, however, says that although the allocations may look random, there is in fact a hidden preserved structure – the relational web of space. This is exactly what they subsequently found when analysing recordings of grid and place cells.

TEM in visual. Image by Gil Costa

Lead researcher, Dr James Whittington, said: ‘There has been lots of confusion over how the hippocampus can do so many apparently unrelated things. This work shows that those apparently unrelated things are actually the same things but seen from different angles. Thinking in this way opened up the possibility to build a mechanistic model to really understand how this part of the brain works.’

A new campaign to make the case for languages has been launched by Oxford Humanities. 

Languages are a core part of teaching and research across Oxford University. Our researchers look at languages from many different angles. They teach and study modern and medieval languages, as well as ancient languages like Latin, Greek and Egyptian.

They explore the link between culture and identity in languages like Celtic, and help to keep endangered languages alive in Indonesia. They study how languages developed over millennia, and what that means about our past.

They investigate the evidence for language learning: from their impact on creativity to their benefits for children’s cognitive development. They are at the forefront of understanding the role of language in computer programming, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Introducing ‘Talking Languages’

Talking Languages is a new campaign from Oxford Humanities that seeks to tell all of these stories and more. It is hosted on a new Medium site.

Taken together, these stories aim to arm readers with the evidence for why languages are so important. The intended audience is wide and includes schoolchildren and their parents, teachers and heads, employers, and policymakers. The campaign provides an emphatic answer to questions like "why should the UK stay in the Erasmus scheme?” or “is knowing languages useful for my employment prospects?"

The first stories to be published reflect the depth of Oxford’s engagement with languages across its Humanities faculties. They include:

The race to save the Enggano language

We meet Professor Mary Dalrymple (Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics) and hear about her project to save the endangered language of Enggano, which is spoken on an island off the coast of Indonesia. Only 1,500 speakers remain, but Professor Dalrymple’s team is working with the local community to ensure it is learned by the next generation, and preserved for future generations. She and her team say that their project “will allow the data to be preserved for future research and, for the Enggano community and its descendants, as a record of possibly the last generation of fluent Enggano speakers.”

The language of lockdown

We hear about the words most commonly used by staff and students at Oxford in written reflections about the first lockdown earlier this year. Dr Stuart Lee (English) and his team carried out linguistic analysis on this archive, which will be invaluable for future historians studying the current pandemic. “If we only had photos of lockdown experiences, like you have on Instagram, we would not have a record of how people were thinking and feeling at the time,” he says.

Dr Liz Frood in Egypt (photograph by Jane Wynyard)

Can classical languages boost children’s cognitive development?

A project led by Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson (Classics) is on the verge of providing hard evidence for the benefits of teaching Latin and Ancient Greek to primary schoolchildren. The findings, which will be published soon, will feed into the policy networks developing the national curriculum. “Classics education is vastly understudied: we needed to rectify the gap in the evidence base,” says Dr Holmes-Henderson.

Towards a National Language Strategy

Professor Neil Kenny (Modern and Medieval Languages) outlines his campaign with the British Academy to arrest the decline in language learning in schools, and why language learning is more important than ever for Britain’s prospects after Brexit. “We want this to be a strategy that stands the test of time and survives even if it does not attract continuous financial support from governments,” he says.

Why employers want linguists

Nan Gibson, Chief Human Resources Officer at Lidl GB, gives an insight into why employers value language skills so highly. “It is a massive advantage to have language skills, and in order to progress to the most senior levels at Lidl GB you are required to understand German,” she tells us.

In the coming week, several new stories will be released each week. These will include:

• Oxford’s Egyptologists explaining insights into life in ancient Greece that only come from studying the language.
• A Modern Languages professor unpicks the link between multilingualism and creativity.
• A theologian assessing how the use of language by political leaders can affect our behaviour, beliefs and morality.
• Representatives of the British Council and the British Academy unpicking their experiences of campaigning for languages in the national policy arena.

You can follow the campaign on Medium, on Twitter, on the Humanities website, and here on the Arts Blog. We also want to hear from our readers. When were you first exposed to another language? What do languages mean to you? What role should universities like Oxford play in promoting them? Let us know on Twitter or Medium.

We hope you will join us on this journey in the coming weeks.

Talking Languages is Oxford Humanities' first communications campaign

This month Senior Associate of Oxford’s Pembroke College, Leslie Scott, was honoured by her wildly popular invention Jenga being inducted in the US’s National Toy Hall of Fame. Sold in 117 countries across the world and loved by all ages, as a family- and pub-favourite, Jenga is now officially a classic.

Science Blog caught up with Leslie Scott, to find out how the game evolved and why its simple concept keeps people coming back for more.

How did Jenga come into being?

As a game, it evolved amongst my family when we were living in Ghana in the mid-70s. I moved to Oxford a few years later and had a set of these blocks and started to play it as a game. They weren't exactly like the Jenga blocks are now but the principle of the game was there.

I played a lot with friends here in Oxford. But it took a long time for the penny to drop that this didn't exist already as a game. People and children have obviously been piling up blocks of wood for years, but actually to turn that into a game, it just didn't exist.

So in 1982, I decided I was going to take this game to market.  But that's when the issues started. I knew nothing about the toy industry and nothing about retail business. But I was just so convinced this was going to work.

What are the secrets to Jenga’s success?

Not many people realise this but each one of the blocks in the game are slightly randomly different from each other. And that's absolutely deliberate. Because without that, the game just really doesn't work. If they're all identical it just sits there. So that sort of randomness was a factor of the original, handmade wooden blocks.

I had to figure out how to mass market some of these flaws. Then there was the question of how many actual blocks there should be, plus their size. The original ones were slightly longer than Jenga blocks are now. That meant you couldn't assemble them three by three and make a stable tower to start with - there were gaps between each.

But I figured out that if you made them just slightly shorter you can square it up. So you can start with a fairly stable tower. The decision to go for 54 blocks was trial and error. You start with 18 rows and it just worked - I don't think there was anything more scientific.

How did you scale up production to maintain randomness?

I spoke to a carpenter I knew and asked him how would you do this. He came up with a very clever suggestion, which was to send the planks of wood through a sanding template that was not in itself 100% even. So these planks of wood would go through that template, and then be chopped up into the pieces.

The next stage was introduced by a group of people in Yorkshire at a place called Camphill. It's a sheltered community for adults with learning disabilities and other special needs - it's a movement all around the world. In Yorkshire they have a farm, they've got a dairy, but they also have a woodworking shop.

They had already been making wooden toys, and a person that I knew at Oxfam suggested talking to them. I went up and saw them and asked if they would be interested in doing this for me? And they said, “Yes”, provided that if it became successful, I took it elsewhere to be manufactured because they didn't want to spend the rest of their lives just churning out hundreds and thousands of the wooden blocks!

They came up with this idea of tumble polishing them. When you very lightly tumble polish it puts a nice sheen on them. It smooths the edges, but it doesn't smooth them totally - it introduces another level of slight inconsistency, so it's really clever.

I haven't seen how Hasbro make them now in vast quantities, but I understand it's not that different. This randomness is still built into it. People love playing with wood. There's that tactile element to it, but it's also actually key to the functioning of the game.

What do you think is Jenga’s enduring appeal?

I think it appeals because you can play it with anybody - as long as you've got a certain amount of dexterity. It still seems to require skills, but they're not skills that take a lifetime to learn. And plus, it is never the same. There's nothing inevitable about who's going to win. When you start the game you could make exactly the same moves, but it's not going to end up in the same way because of the randomness.

It's thrilling when you're teetering at 30 layers already. And it's terrifying it when it comes back to you.

Also, I didn't deliberately intend it to be a cooperative game. But if you watch people playing, once the tower gets beyond a certain height, most people end up wanting it to get higher. They really want it to get high, so it becomes almost like a team effort, in a funny way. The excitement comes in trying to get it as high as possible. Nobody deliberately wants it to fall over. So on one hand it could be considered a very competitive game, on the other hand, there’s actually quite surprisingly cooperative play involved. It's thrilling when you're teetering at 30 layers already. And it's terrifying when it comes back to you.

Where did the name Jenga come from?

I grew up speaking Swahili and the word jenga is the imperative form of kujenga, the Swahili verb “to build.” When I first put it on the market, I called it ‘Jenga the perpetual challenge’. And the company that took it on - first of all Irwin in Canada, and then subsequently Hasbro worldwide - hated the word ‘perpetual’. They said Jenga doesn't mean anything and nobody in North America will understand what perpetual means either! So I had a bit of a battle with them and I ended up saying, “Okay, okay, okay, you don't have to call it perpetual.” Even though I actually really meant it – I’d thought about that hard. It is always a challenge. It's not the ultimate challenge, but it's always a challenge. But I have this feeling that by giving up on 'perpetual' I got away with keeping Jenga [laughs].

Do you feel that your childhood influenced the development of Jenga?

I think we should leave children to think and do things for themselves a great deal more than we do now.

When we were kids, the idea that every moment of the day was somehow timetabled wasn’t there. Even at school, there were large, large chunks of time where we literally went out and played, and we were not being supervised for every moment. And, personally, I think we've got the concept of education a wee bit wrong. I mean, I think we should leave children to think and do things for themselves a great deal more than we do now.

If you think about some of the toys that are now produced for children, there's an awful lot that have stories already built into them. I think it's interesting that the National Toy Hall of Fame (which has inducted 74 items), have quite a large number that don't have an inventor as such. There's things like the cardboard box, the stick, marbles. What they're trying to recognise are playthings that have actually contributed to genuine play, playful play.

I think the opportunity to be creative, or the environments in which you can become creative arise when somebody else hasn't told you how to think about something. I don't know how Jenga fits into that, but play is a subject that really interests me.

What is a play – what is a game?

We use terms like “Somebody's got to play the game” or we imply that incredibly serious things are games - like business is a game and life is a game. I think we need to be quite careful how we define what we mean by ‘play’ and make sure that if we are saying, “it's all a game” that at least we actually know what those rules are when we're playing this game. And we know when we're outside of that too.

The thing about a game is that you've agreed to take part in it, it is something voluntary. Secondly, you've got a set of rules that you've agreed that you understand, you're playing by that set of rules, you're playing within a confined space, a delineated area, you're playing for a certain amount of time. So there's a beginning and there's an end to it too. 

How do you feel about Jenga entering the National Toy Hall of Fame?

I am thrilled! And I’m honoured and delighted, too, that I am to be included in an upcoming Strong Museum exhibition of women who created  a toy or game that became a classic. It’s very exciting.

The National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong Musuem, was established in 1998 and recognizes toys that have inspired creative play and enjoyed popularity over a sustained period. Each year, the prestigious hall inducts new honorees and showcases both new and historic versions of classic toys beloved by generations. Final selections are made on the advice of historians, educators, and other individuals who exemplify learning, creativity, and discovery through their lives and careers. Toys are celebrated year-round in an exhibit at The Strong museum in Rochester, New York.

For more information about the hall, visit toyhalloffame.org.

It is a well-known fact that one of the things financial markets hate most is uncertainty. There are a lot of other things the market hates, but the ‘devil-they-know’, will almost always be preferable to the one they don’t know, even if the ‘fundamentals’ are not there.

This year, the markets have, by and large, underlined their love for certainty – surging on promises of government support from the US Fed and from Chancellor Rishi Sunak, propelling stock market prices higher, despite the ravages of the pandemic and the anticipated economic fall-out to come.

Whatever bad news emerged, as the virus swept the western world, there seemed no end to share price enthusiasm...towards the end of October, the reckoning finally seemed to have come

Whatever bad news emerged, as the virus swept the western world, there seemed no end to share price enthusiasm. Many observers were perplexed over how long this apparently counter-intuitive bull market could go on, considering the tax rises anticipated to follow. And, towards the end of October, the reckoning finally seemed to have come.

Share prices in London and New York tumbled to their lowest levels since March, when brokers took fright over COVID, before the regulators stepped in with reassurances. So, was this long-awaited end to market ‘madness’? In short, no.

According to the Associate Professor of Finance at Oxford’s Said Business School, Bige Kahraman, last month’s down-tick in share prices was a reflection of that market bête noir: uncertainty.

‘There was a lot of uncertainty prior to the US election,’ she said. ‘In the US, the market was uncertain about what was going to happen and that had an effect on prices.’

Traditionally, on entirely business grounds, the markets have preferred a Republican in the White House. It generally means low taxes and a benign business environment. But that old enemy ‘uncertainty’ trumps everything. And, since the election, the Dow Jones has risen consistently – even more since it became clear that President-elect Joe Biden is heading for Pennsylvania Avenue.

Traditionally, on entirely business grounds, the markets have preferred a Republican in the White House....But that old enemy ‘uncertainty’ trumps everything. And, since the election, the Dow Jones has risen consistently – even more since it became clear that President-elect Joe Biden is heading for Pennsylvania Avenue

Professor Kahraman said, ‘The markets are now back up to pre-COVID levels...the falls in October were just market uncertainty.’

But can this really go on for much longer? Will the reality of COVID economic havoc ever bite for the markets?

‘The indices do not represent the whole economy,’ explained Professor Kahraman. ‘Hard hit firms in the small and medium sectors are not represented in the markets...In fact, many of the really big firms which are represented have done very well recently.’

According to Professor Kahraman, big tech companies now account for some 30% of the equities markets and represent a safe haven for investors, who do not see any returns from interest-bearing accounts. Plus, many ‘tech’ firms have seen revenues going up during the pandemic, even if advertising revenue has gone down for the likes of Facebook and Google.

‘Amazon has worked really well,’ said Professor Kahraman. ‘Its business model is proving more successful than ever.’

The tech firms have emerged as the new ‘blue chip’ investments, ‘safer, whatever the fundamentals’, according to Professor Kahraman. ‘If investors want to put their money somewhere, these tech firms seem unlikely to go down that much.’

But, she said, ‘Prices are inflated right now. In a couple of years, there may be a return to real interest rates and that could have the effect of correcting the market.’

There is no sentimentality in the markets. Professor Kahraman said, ‘The falls were just election uncertainty. With a Democrat elected, the market is relieved, but not celebrating.’