Learning while you sleep may work after all

Cosmos magazine describes an interesting study that appears in Science, but John Rudoy, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, in Chicago, USA.

… Half of the sound cues were then played to the participants once they had reached the ‘deep sleep’ stage of their nap, as determined by electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings.

When tested post-nap, it was found that participants were able to place the sound-cued objects more accurately than those not played during their nap. However, in the control experiment, in which participants were played the additional sounds without any sleep, there was no marked improvement. … – cosmos

The article goes on to say that the practical application of this is yet to be determined. I wonder if I can use this to improve my pitch recall. If I study during the day, then play a tape loop all night that plays a note and then tells me what that note is, would I be able to wake up and have absolute pitch awareness?

Seems worth a try.

 

Patient trapped in a 23-year ‘coma’ was conscious all along

A man thought by doctors to be in a vegetative state for 23 years was actually conscious the whole time, it was revealed last night. Student Rom Houben was misdiagnosed after a car crash left him totally paralysed.

He had no way of letting experts, family or friends know he could hear every word they said.

‘I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,’ said Mr Houben, now 46.

Doctors used a range of coma tests, recognised worldwide, before reluctantly concluding that his consciousness was ‘extinct’.

But three years ago, new hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.

Mr Houben describes the moment as ‘my second birth’.

Therapy has since allowed him to tap out messages on a computer screen.

Mr Houben said: ‘All that time I just literally dreamed of a better life. Frustration is too small a word to describe what I felt.’

His case has only just been revealed in a scientific paper released by the man who ’saved’ him, top neurological expert Dr Steven Laureys.

‘Medical advances caught up with him,’ said Dr Laureys, who believes there may be many similar cases of false comas around the world.

The disclosure will also renew the right-to-die debate over whether people in comas are truly unconscious.

Mr Houben, a former martial arts enthusiast, was paralysed in 1983. Doctors in Zolder, Belgium, used the internationally accepted Glasgow Coma Scale to assess his eye, verbal and motor responses. But each time he was graded incorrectly. Only a re-evaluation of his case at the University of Liege discovered that he had lost control of his body but was still fully aware of what was happening.

He is never likely to leave hospital, but as well as his computer he now has a special device above his bed which lets him read books while lying down. Mr Houben said: ‘I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me – it was my second birth. ‘I want to read, talk with my friends via the computer and enjoy my life now that people know I am not dead.’ Dr Laureys’s new study claims that patients classed as in a vegetative state are often misdiagnosed.

‘Anyone who bears the stamp of “unconscious” just one time hardly ever gets rid of it again,’ he said. The doctor, who leads the Coma Science Group and Department of Neurology at Liege University Hospital, found Mr Houben’s brain was still working by using state-of-the-art imaging.

He plans to use the case to highlight what he considers may be similar examples around the world. Dr Laureys said: ‘In Germany alone each year some 100,000 people suffer from severe traumatic brain injury. ‘About 20,000 are followed by a coma of three weeks or longer. Some of them die, others regain health.

‘But an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people a year remain trapped in an intermediate stage – they go on living without ever coming back again.’ …

via Patient trapped in a 23-year ‘coma’ was conscious all along | Mail Online.

Always be grateful for what you have.

Full recovery now possible for an ‘untreatable’ mental illness

Patients coping with the chaos and misery of Borderline Personality Disorder now have reason for strong confidence in making major life changes through a new treatment, Schema Therapy. For the first time, three major outcome studies have shown that many patients with Borderline Personality Disorder can achieve full recovery across the complete range of symptoms. In one study Schema Therapy was shown to be more than twice as effective in bringing about full recovery as a widely-practiced traditional treatment (Transference Focused Psychotherapy). Schema Therapy was also found to be more cost-effective and to have a much lower dropout rate. In a second study group schema therapy led to even stronger outcomes than those in the previous investigation over a briefer period with a 0% drop out rate and a recovery rate of 94% over an 8 month period. A third study, now in press, shows that individual Schema Therapy can be successfully implemented in regular mental health care settings with no loss of effectiveness.

While other specialized treatments for BPD have demonstrated empirical support, all but Schema Therapy have serious limitations in their impact on patients' functioning and quality of life and only Schema Therapy has demonstrated cost effectiveness. Schema Therapy is also associated with higher levels of patient and therapist satisfaction with the treatment.

The first of these large scale studies was reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry, published by the American Medical Association, the second published in the Journal of Behavioral Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry and the third will soon be appearing in Behavior Research and Therapy. Schema Therapy is an integrative approach that expands on the principles of cognitive-behavioral therapy.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, Borderline Personality Disorder is found in about 1 to 2.5 percent of the general population although a recent large-scale epidemiological study reported a much higher estimate of 5.9%. This latter study indicates that BPD is potentially five to six times as prevalent as either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Patients with the disorder live life on the edge: they’re typically impulsive, unstable, exquisitely sensitive to rejection, have regular outbursts of anger, and live daily with extreme emotional pain. They often self-mutilate and make repeated suicide attempts. Identity problems, low stress tolerance, and fears of abandonment also make the disorder difficult for patients and for those who live with them. Many with BPD either cannot work or do not function at levels that could be expected in light of their intellectual capacities. As a result, the disorder carries high medical and societal costs, accounting for more than one in every five inpatient psychiatric admissions. …

Schema Therapy is an integrative approach, founded on the principles of cognitive-behavioral therapy, then expanded to include techniques and concepts from other psychotherapies. Schema therapists help patients to change their entrenched, self-defeating life patterns – or schemas — using cognitive, behavioral, and emotion-focused techniques. The treatment focuses on the relationship with the therapist, daily life outside of therapy, and the traumatic childhood experiences that are common in this disorder. Dr. Young believes that Schema Therapy’s greater effectiveness arises in part from its use of “limited reparenting,” which is not part of other approaches to BPD.

Both Schema Therapy and Transference Focused Psychotherapy focus on deeper personality change, in comparison to other recent treatments that have been limited to the reduction of specific behavioral symptoms of the disorder, such as self-mutilation. According to Dr. Young: “Other treatments for BPD, such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy, have also led to more effective coping skills and a significant reduction in self-harm. With Schema Therapy patients are, in addition, breaking free of lives of pain, self-hatred, and emptiness, making deeper personality changes, and significantly improving the quality of their lives.”

Even the most intensive version of Schema Therapy mentioned in the first study was found to be cost effective. An economic analysis conducted by the authors of the study indicated that, for each year Schema Therapy patients were in the study, Dutch society benefited from a net gain of 4,500 Euros per patient (the equivalent of about 5,700 US dollars), despite the cost-intensive treatment. The savings over the course of several years after the completion of treatment could actually prove to be higher. The newest innovation, group schema therapy, is likely to be even more cost effective.

Schema therapists and researchers are hoping that these repeated validations of the effectiveness of Schema Therapy for patients with Borderline Personality Disorder — that for so many years has been considered intractable—will lead to more research studies and will encourage more clinicians to learn Schema Therapy. They also hope that this study will convince healthcare insurers to reimburse the costs of effective longer-term psychotherapy for this painful and costly illness. … More information can be found at www.schematherapy.com…

via Full recovery now possible for an ‘untreatable’ mental illness.

Meditation ‘eases heart disease’

Heart disease patients who practise Transcendental Meditation have reduced death rates, US researchers have said.

At a meeting of the American Heart Association they said they randomly assigned 201 African Americans to meditate or to make lifestyle changes.

After nine years, the meditation group had a 47% reduction in deaths, heart attacks and strokes.

The research was carried out by the Medical College in Wisconsin with the Maharishi University in Iowa.

It was funded by a £2.3m grant from the National Institutes of Health and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

‘Significant benefits’

The African American men and women had an average age of 59 years and narrowing of the arteries in their hearts.

The meditation group practised for 20 minutes twice a day.

The lifestyle change group received education classes in traditional risk factors, including dietary modification and exercise.

As well as the reductions in death, heart attacks and strokes in the meditating group, there was a clinically significant drop (5mm Hg) in blood pressure.

And a significant reduction in psychological stress in some participants….

via BBC NEWS | Health | Meditation ‘eases heart disease’.

Scientists prove that Hypnosis has a real brain effect

Hypnosis has a “very real” effect that can be picked up on brain scans, say Hull University researchers.

An imaging study of hypnotised participants showed decreased activity in the parts of the brain linked with daydreaming or letting the mind wander.

The same brain patterns were absent in people who had the tests but who were not susceptible to being hypnotised.

One psychologist said the study backed the theory that hypnosis “primes” the brain to be open to suggestion.

Hypnosis is increasingly being used to help people stop smoking or lose weight and advisers recently recommended its use on the NHS to treat irritable bowel syndrome.

It is not the first time researchers have tried to use imaging studies to monitor brain activity in people under hypnosis.

But the Hull team said these had been done while people had been asked to carry out tasks, so it was not clear whether the changes in the brain were due to the act of doing the task or an effect of hypnosis.

In the latest study, the team first tested how people responded to hypnosis and selected 10 individuals who were “highly suggestible” and seven people who did not really respond to the technique other than becoming more relaxed.

The participants were asked to do a task under hypnosis, such as listening to non-existent music, but unknown to them the brain activity was being monitored in the rest periods in between tasks, the team reported in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.

Default mode

In the “highly suggestible” group there was decreased activity in the part of the brain involved in daydreaming or letting the mind wander – also known as the “default mode” network.

One suggestion of how hypnosis works, supported by the results, is that shutting off this activity leaves the brain free to concentrate on other tasks.

Study leader Dr William McGeown, a lecturer in the department of psychology, said the results were unequivocal because they only occurred in the highly suggestible subjects.

“This shows that the changes were due to hypnosis and not just simple relaxation. “Our study shows hypnosis is real.”

via BBC NEWS | Health | Hypnosis has ‘real’ brain effect.

Bad Decisions May Be Contagious

Money Pit. Throwing good money after bad in decisions like real estate investments could be contagious.Like the flu, a person’s emotional state can be contagious. Watch someone cry, and you’ll likely feel sad; think about the elderly, and you’ll tend to walk slower. Now a study suggests that we can also catch someone else’s irrational thought processes.

Anyone who’s lost money on a fixer-upper may have succumbed to a classic economic fallacy known as “sunk costs.” You make a bad investment in a home that’s never going to sell for more than you put in to it, yet you want to justify your investment by continuing to throw money into renovations. One way to avoid this hole is to get advice from someone who has no self-interest in the project. But is the outsider still somehow susceptible to your mindset?

To find out, social psychologist Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues asked college students to take over decision-making for a person they had never met–and who they didn’t know was fictitious. The volunteers were split into two groups: one that felt some connection with the decision-maker and another that didn’t.

In one experiment, the volunteers watched the following scenario play out via text on a computer screen: the fictitious decision-maker tried to outbid another person for a prize of 356 points, which equaled $4.45 in real money. The decision-maker started out with 360 points, and every time the other bidder upped the ante by 40 points, the decision-maker followed suit. Volunteers were told that once the decision-maker bid over 356 points, he or she would begin to lose some of the $12 payment for participating in the study.

When the fictitious decision-maker neared this threshold, the volunteers were asked to take over bidding. Objectively, the volunteers should have realized that–like the person who makes a bad investment in a fixer-upper–the decision-maker would keep throwing good money after bad. But the volunteers who felt an identification with the fictitious player (i.e., those told by the researchers that they shared the same month of birth or year in school) made almost 60% more bids and were more likely to lose money than those who didn’t feel a connection. The team reports the findings of this experiment–and three similar experiments–in this month’s issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

via Bad Decisions May Be Contagious — Torrice 2009 (1110): 2 — ScienceNOW.

Dreams may have an important physiological function

Dreams have long been assumed to have psychological functions such as consolidating emotional memories and processing experiences or problems, but according to a Harvard psychiatrist and sleep researcher the real function may actually be physiological.

According to Dr J. Allan Hobson, the major function of the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep associated with dreams is physiological rather than psychological. During REM sleep the brain is activated and “warming its circuits” and is anticipating the sights, sounds and emotions of the waking state.

Dr Hobson said the idea explains a lot, and likened it to jogging. The body does not remember every step of a jog, but it knows it has exercised, and in the same way we do not remember many of our dreams, but our minds have been tuned for conscious awareness.

Hobson said dreams represent a parallel consciousness state that is running continuously, but which is normally suppressed while the person is awake. Dr Mark Mahowald, a neurologist from Hennepin County Medical Center, in Minneapolis, said most people studying dreams have started out with fixed ideas about the psychological functions of dreaming, and try to make dreaming fit these ideas, but the new study makes no such assumptions.

In evolutionary terms REM sleep seems to be relatively recent, and has been identified in humans, other warm-blooded animals, and birds. Earlier studies have suggested it appears early in life, in the third trimester in humans, and research has produced evidence the brain of the fetus may in a sense be “seeing” images long before its eyes are opened, so the REM state appears to help the brain build neural connections, especially in the visual areas.

This does not mean dreams have no psychological meaning, since they do at times reflect current problems, anxieties and hopes, but people can read almost anything into dreams. A recent study of more than one thousand people at Carnegie Mellon University in Harvard, showed that there were strong biases in how people interpreted dreams. So, for example, subjects attached more significance to negative dreams about people they disliked and to positive dreams about people they liked.

Research on lucid dreams has suggested that only 20 percent of dreams are about people or places we know, and most images are unique to a single dream. Lucid dreaming is the ability to watch a dream as an observer without waking up, and Dr Hobson finds support in lucid dreaming for his argument for dreams as a kind of physiological brain exercise. A study co-authored by Hobson and published in the September issue of the journal Sleep reported that elements of both REM and waking were apparent in lucid dreaming, especially in the frontal areas that are quiet during normal dreams. According to Hobson, this suggests there are two systems, which can be running at the same time.

The potential applications of the research may be a deeper understanding of conditions such as schizophrenia, which is categorized by imaginings that may be related to abnormal activation of a dreaming state.

via Dreams may have an important physiological function.

Signature of consciousness captured in brain scans

A telltale signature of consciousness has been detected that takes us a step closer to disentangling the brain activity underlying conscious and unconscious brain processes.

It turns out that there is a similar pattern of neural activity each time we become conscious of the same picture, but not if we process information from the image unconsciously. These contrasting patterns of activity can now be detected via brain scans, and could one day help determine if patients with brain damage are conscious. They might even be used to probe consciousness in animals.

“It's very exciting work,” says neuroscientist Raphaël Gaillard of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the work. “The use of a reproducibility measure to disentangle conscious and non-conscious processes is genuinely new.” Gaillard has previously shown that coordinated activity across the entire brain is one of the signatures of consciousness .

Consistent signals

So far, efforts to find a brain signature of consciousness have focused on the intensity of neural activity, how long it lasts, and whether signals tend to be synchronised across different regions of the brain.

“We were looking for something other than the intensity and duration of the neural activity that characterises conscious neural processing,” says Aaron Schurger of Princeton University in New Jersey, who led the new work.

He and his colleagues hypothesised that when the brain is presented with the same sensory input – a picture, say – time after time, then conscious awareness of the picture should produce similar neural activity each time.

Conversely, if the sensory input did not enter conscious awareness, it should produce different brain activity each time because there would be other subconscious processes going on at the same time.

via Signature of consciousness captured in brain scans – life – 12 November 2009 – New Scientist.

Music Improves Brain Function

For most people music is an enjoyable, although momentary, form of entertainment. But for those who seriously practiced a musical instrument when they were young, perhaps when they played in a school orchestra or even a rock band, the musical experience can be something more. Recent research shows that a strong correlation exists between musical training for children and certain other mental abilities.

The research was discussed at a session at a recent gathering of acoustics experts in Austin, Texas.

Laurel Trainor, director of the Institute for Music and the Mind at McMaster University in West Hamilton, Ontario, and colleagues compared preschool children who had taken music lessons with those who did not. Those with some training showed larger brain responses on a number of sound recognition tests given to the children. Her research indicated that musical training appears to modify the brain’s auditory cortex.

Can larger claims be made for the influence on the brain of musical training? Does training change thinking or cognition in general?

Trainor again says yes. Even a year or two of music training leads to enhanced levels of memory and attention when measured by the same type of tests that monitor electrical and magnetic impulses in the brain.

“We therefore hypothesize that musical training (but not necessarily passive listening to music) affects attention and memory, which provides a mechanism whereby musical training might lead to better learning across a number of domains,” Trainor said.

Trainor suggested that the reason for this is that the motor and listening skills needed to play an instrument in concert with other people appears to heavily involve attention, memory and the ability to inhibit actions. Merely listening passively to music to Mozart — or any other composer — does not produce the same changes in attention and memory.

via Music Improves Brain Function | LiveScience.

Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats

Movie Review: I recommend seeing this movie.  It was funny, unexpected and did have a few connections to some strange things that really happened.

Here is an interesting report from TDG on the topic:

With the new public attention on the story, a number of the individuals involved have thrown some doubts on the veracity of Ronson’s account.

John Alexander has long disputed a number of the claims in The Men Who Stare at Goats, and in a recent article (“They Stared at Goats Because…“) states that even the title is incorrect, as the goat in question actually died after being struck using a martial arts move. Meanwhile, Stargate remote viewer Paul Smith, in an Amazon review of the book, says that while Goats is an entertaining read, it is not an accurate summation of the actual history – and at times, uses plenty of ‘artistic license’ in presenting material. And Jim Channon, whose ‘First Earth Battalion’ idea is central to much of Goats (and who has been very sporting and good-humoured about his treatment in the book), has a press release on his website which says that “Ronson’s tongue-in-cheek account is classified as a work of ‘non-fiction,’ but it is so loaded with speculation and inaccuracy, it sets the stage for much of the confusion.”