— Leave a Comment

Mind-Body Therapy May Improve Pelvic Pain

Mind-Body Therapy May Improve Pelvic Pain

A new study suggests that a mind-body therapy called Mensendieck somatocognitive therapy may reduce long-term (chronic) pelvic pain in women. The effects lasted several months after the treatment ended.

Mensendieck therapy emphasizes body awareness. During treatment, patients learn how to correct their movements, breathing patterns and posture. This therapy is commonly used in Europe, especially Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands.

Last year, Norwegian researchers found that Mensendieck therapy reduced pain and restored normal movement in 40 women with chronic pelvic pain with no known cause. The researchers reported their findings after a one-year follow up in the latest issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

In the study, the participants were randomly assigned to receive either standard care alone or standard care plus 10 weeks of Mensendieck therapy.

At the beginning and end of the study, the authors measured the motor function (including movement, posture, gait and respiration), pain and psychological stress and well being. All of the women in the Mensendieck therapy group experienced significant improvements in all areas compared to the control group.

One year later, the authors found that the women in the therapy group experienced additional improvements in their symptoms. During the one-year period, their pain scores improved by 64 percent, and they experienced significant improvements in psychological distress. In contrast, pain scores in the control group did not change appreciably.

Although these early results are promising, additional studies are needed before a firm conclusion can be reached.Natural Standard

General Blog Neuroscience & Psychology
— Leave a Comment

Scientists extract images directly from brain

Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. Further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

read more | digg story

General Blog Neuroscience & Psychology
— Leave a Comment

Memories may be stored on your DNA

Remember your first kiss? Experiments in mice suggest that patterns of chemical “caps” on our DNA may be responsible for preserving such memories.To remember a particular event, a specific sequence of neurons must fire at just the right time. For this to happen, neurons must be connected in a certain way by chemical junctions called synapses.

read more | digg story

General Blog Neuroscience & Psychology
— Leave a Comment

Radical Evolution: The Future of Human-Machine Intelligence

Ray Kurzweil sees a radical evolution of the human species in the next 40 years. The merger of man and machine, coupled with the sudden explosion in machine intelligence and rapid innovation in gene research and nanotechnology, will result in a world with no distinction between the biological and the mechanical or physical and virtual reality.

read more | digg story

General Blog Neuroscience & Psychology
— 2 Comments

Deep Brain Stimulation for Depression

Deep Brain Stimulation for Depression

Deep brain stimulation, an experimental and invasive treatment that involves stimulating the brain with electrical signals, may help treat otherwise difficult to cure depression, a new study reports.

Depression is an illness that involves the body, mood and thoughts. Imbalances in three brain chemicals, serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine, are linked to depression. Unlike normal emotional experiences of sadness, loss or passing mood states, depressive disorders are persistent and can significantly interfere with an individual's thoughts, behavior, mood, activity and physical health.

Depressive disorders affect approximately 18.8 million American adults or about 9.5 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older in a given year. Among all medical illnesses, major depression is the leading cause of disability in the United States and many other developed countries. Without treatment, symptoms can last for weeks, months or years. Appropriate treatment, however, can help most people who suffer from depression.

Researchers from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, explained that an early report in six patients suggested that deep brain stimulation of the subcallosal cingulate gyrus (part of the brain) may provide benefit in treatment-resistant depression.

In the study, 20 patients with treatment-resistant depression underwent serial assessments before and after the deep brain stimulation. The researchers analyzed the percentage of patients who achieved a response or remission after surgery. They also examined changes in brain metabolism associated with deep brain stimulation.

The researchers observed both early and progressive benefits with deep brain stimulation. For example, one month after surgery, 35 percent of the patients met criteria for response with 10 percent of patients in remission. Furthermore, six months after surgery, 60 percent of patients were responded to therapy and 35 percent met the criteria for remission. These benefits were largely maintained at 12 months.

Deep brain stimulation therapy was associated with specific changes in the metabolic activity localized to cortical and limbic circuits implicated in the pathogenesis of depression. The number of serious adverse effects was small with no patient experiencing permanent deficits.

The authors concluded that deep brain stimulation provides significant improvement in patients with treatment-resistant depression. The stimulation likely acts by modulating brain networks whose dysfunction leads to depression. They observed that the procedure was well-tolerated and benefits were sustained for at least one year.

Natural Standard

General Blog Neuroscience & Psychology
— Leave a Comment

14 Research-Proven Ways To Boost Brain Power

14 Research-Proven Ways To Boost Brain Power

Until just a few years ago, doctors believed that the brain stopped making new neural connections – meaning that the memory began to get irreversibly worse – when the body stopped developing, usually in the early 20s. And doctors knew that, like any other part of the body, neurons weaken as people age. Loss of brain function due to neural breakdown was assumed to be a normal, unavoidable part of aging. It turns out they were wrong.

In the past few years, it has become clear that you can, in fact, make new neurons starting in your 20s and continuing well into old age. You can literally rewire the brain with new parts as the older parts wear out. How?

There are lots of things you can do right now to preserve, protect and enhance your gray matter.

1Physical exercise

A healthy body really does mean a healthy mind. In the last decade it became clear that regular exercise beneficially affects brain function. Exercise boosts brain power by stimulating formation of new brain cells (neurons), the process known as neurogenesis2. Also, exercise strengthens connections between those cells. Researchers have found the areas of the brain that are stimulated through exercise are associated with memory and learning1.

Physical exercise may even help prevent Alzheimer's disease. Several studies7–9 have confirmed that regular physical activity reduces the risk of cognitive decline and dementia in old age.

2Lifelong learning – your brain is a learning machine

For most of us, after we graduate from high school or college, our pursuit of new knowledge bottoms out over time. We may be masters at what we do, but we aren't learning new things. There is clear evidence10–11 that education and learning produce favourable changes in the brain. Researchers believe that intellectual activity play a neuroprotective role against dementia. Some studies suggest that having a low level of formal education and poor linguistic skills is a risk factor for cognitive decline in later life.

But if you continue to learn and challenge yourself, your brain continues to grow, literally. Recent research12 have demonstrated that learning over time enhances memory and the survival of new brain cells. An active brain produces new connections between nerve cells that allow cells to communicate with one another. This helps your brain store and retrieve information more easily, no matter what your age.

How can you challenge yourself? Scientists agree that anything that is new and expands your knowledge will be effective:

  • Learning to play a musical instrument
  • Switching careers or starting a new one
  • Starting a new hobby, such as crafts, painting, biking or bird-watching
  • Learning a foreign language. According to the latest study speaking more than one language may slow the aging process in the mind.
  • Staying informed about what's going on in the world
  • Learning to cook new dish

If you let your brain be idle, it's not going to be in the best health.

See full article at: http://www.emedexpert.com/tips/brain.shtml

General Blog Neuroscience & Psychology
— Leave a Comment

What is Consciousness

The Problem of Consciousness

Conventional explanations portray consciousness as an emergent property of classical computer-like activities in the brain's neural networks. The prevailing views among scientists in this camp are that 1) patterns of neural network activities correlate with mental states, 2) synchronous network oscillations in thalamus and cerebral cortex temporally bind information, and 3) consciousness emerges as a novel property of computational complexity among neurons.

However, these approaches appear to fall short in fully explaining certain enigmatic features of consciousness, such as:

  • The nature of subjective experience, or 'qualia'- our 'inner life' (Chalmers' "hard problem");
  • Binding of spatially distributed brain activities into unitary objects in vision, and a coherent sense of self, or 'oneness';
  • Transition from pre-conscious processes to consciousness itself;
  • Non-computability, or the notion that consciousness involves a factor which is neither random, nor algorithmic, and that consciousness cannot be simulated (Penrose, 1989, 1994, 1997);
  • Free will; and,
  • Subjective time flow.

Brain imaging technologies demonstrate anatomical location of activities which appear to correlate with consciousness, but which may not be directly responsible for consciousness.

 PET scan image of brain showing visual and auditory recognition (from S Petersen, Neuroimaging Laboratory, Washington University, St. Louis. Also see J.A. Hobson "Consciousness," Scientific American Library, 1999, p. 65).

Read full article : http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/presentations/whatisconsciousness.html

General Blog Neuroscience & Psychology