New Neurofeedback For ADHD Book Released (With Exclusive Discount Code)
Archives
All entries, chronologically...
Patients with diabetes who also suffer from depression are more likely to develop a serious complication known as diabetic retinopathy, a disease that damages the eye’s retina, a five-year study finds. Diabetic retinopathy occurs when diabetes is not properly managed and is now the leading cause of blindness in patients between 25 and 74 years old, according to the study appearing online in the journal General Hospital Psychiatry.
Gestalt psychology contends that the human brain organizes what the eyes see based on traits such as similarity, common background, and proximity. But a new illusion that took second place in the 2011 Best Illusion of the Year Contest — a competition held annually by the Neural Correlate Society — illustrates that our brains can also organize what we see based on changes in contrast. Included in this report is a video demonstration of “The Grouping By Contrast Illusion” as well as several additional videos of previous illusions from this author, including the “Royal Face-Go-Round” and “The Exchange of Features, Textures, Faces.”
Fear of the unknown is one of the greatest issues facing patients with glaucoma – the second leading cause of blindness worldwide after cataracts – according to research in the April issue of the Journal of Advanced Nursing. People also worry about how the eye disease, which can be hereditary, will affect other members of their family.
Dr. Olivier Collignon of the University of Montreal’s Saint-Justine Hospital Research Centre compared the brain activity of people who can see and people who were born blind, and discovered that the part of the brain that normally works with our eyes to process vision and space perception can actually rewire itself to process sound information instead. The research was undertaken in collaboration with Dr. Franco Lepore of the Centre for Research in Neuropsychology and Cognition and was published late yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
When a person experiences impairment or declining health, caregiving typically falls to a family member, most often a spouse. This increased burden can cause burnout, stress, and illness in the caregiver. The health care system focuses first on the patient and provides little support for the caregiver. Check the end of this report for a link to download the full-text, original journal article.
A new paper from MIT neuroscientists, in collaboration with Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, offers evidence that it is easier to rewire the brain early in life. The researchers found that a small part of the brain’s visual cortex that processes motion became reorganized only in the brains of subjects who had been born blind, not those who became blind later in life. The results are described in the Oct. 14 issue of the journal Current Biology.
Gene therapy for a severe inherited blindness, which produced dramatic improvements last year in 12 children and young adults who received the treatment in a clinical trial, has cleared another hurdle. The same research team that conducted the human trial now reports that a study in animals has shown that a second injection of genes [...]
