Health

Music Therapy Helps Brain Damaged Patients

- Adam Clare

Music therapy can help people who have severe brain damage regain control of their brain and heal faster. This is really nifty!

But how does music find a pathway inside a damaged brain that regular speech can’t negotiate? According to Morrow, it has to do with the parts of the brain where music comes from. And that there are so many of them.

“Music centres are all over the brain,” says Morrow. “I might be able to retrieve lyrics from the right side, from the middle, from the back of the brain. There are so many components to music that I can tap into … to reach words again and to reformulate them in the brain.”

In terms of human evolution, speech is a relatively recent addition to our compartmentalized brains. Some believe music may precede it. There’s no doubt that toddlers babble and vocalize long before they speak.

“It used to be thought that music was a superfluous thing, and no one understood why it developed from an evolutionary standpoint,” says Michael De Georgia, director of the Centre for Music and Medicine at Case Western Reserve University’s Medical Centre in Cleveland.

“In the last 10 years, we’ve just started to understand how broad and diffuse the effect of music is on all parts of the brain,” he added. “We are just starting to understand how powerful music can be.”

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New Way to Examine Consciousness in Comatose Patients

- Adam Clare

There are a lot of ethical issues about what to do with a person in a vegetative state in a hospital, and sometimes pulling the plug (so to speak) isn’t the best course of action. Thanks to some smart researchers we can now tell which patients are still thinking and which patients have no activity in their brain.

“You spend a week with one of these patients and at no point does it seem at all they know what you are saying when you are talking to them. Then you do this experiment and find it’s the exact opposite — they do know what’s going on,” said Damian Cruse, a postdoctoral neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada who helped conduct the research. “That’s quite a profound feeling.”

The results and similar findings could also provide crucial insights into human consciousness — one of the most perplexing scientific puzzles — and lead to ways to better provide diagnoses and possibly rehabilitate brain-injury patients, the researchers said.

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Have the Fat Gene? Move!

- Adam Clare

The developed world is getting fatter and there’s everything you can do about it as an individual: be more active. As obvious as it sounds, being more physically active dramatically reduces your girth. The best part of some new research points out that even if you have a gene that predisposes you to obesity a little bit of physical activity can go a long way.

The obesity susceptibility gene is found in three-quarters of Europeans and North Americans. It is associated with a 20 per cent to 30 per cent increased risk of obesity.

“People who carry the gene but who are physically active have a reduced risk compared to people who carry the gene but are inactive,” Cambridge University medical researcher Ruth Loos said.

The findings highlight the importance of physical activity particularly in those genetically predisposed to be obese, Loos and her co-authors said in the journal PLoS Medicine.

“Physical activity gives them the opportunity to lose weight. So it goes against the often held view that if it’s in your genes, it’s out of your control,” Ross said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

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It’s Possible to Increase Your IQ

- Adam Clare

Yes, we’ve seen that you can increase your IQ before but isn’t it always a nice reminder that it’s possible? I think so!

Yet another study has been released that has demonstrable ways that anybody can increase their IQ. I think it’s also worth noting that IQ has a measurement is not the best way for people to compare their true smarts.

The take-home points from this research? This study is relevant because they discovered:

1. Fluid intelligence is trainable.

2. The training and subsequent gains are dose-dependent—meaning, the more you train, the more you gain.

3. Anyone can increase their cognitive ability, no matter what your starting point is.

4. The effect can be gained by training on tasks that don’t resemble the test questions.

Read more at Scientific American.

Malaria Vaccines Cuts Risk in Half

- Adam Clare

Malaria causes a lot of deaths every year and now researchers have made a giant leap forward by producing a vaccine that cuts the risk of the disease in half!

Malaria deaths have come down from more than a million to an estimated 780,000 a year, according to the latest report from the Roll Back Malaria partnership of the World Health Organisation. Three countries were certified malaria-free in the past four years, and nine more are preparing to move towards elimination – but that is out of 108 where the disease is endemic.

Since bed nets are not always effective, and not always used as they should be – there have been reports of some employed as fishing nets – and drugs can become ineffective, a vaccine could massively improve children’s chances.

While researchers started work on a potential Aids vaccine with extraordinary and, as it turned out, misplaced optimism, many in the scientific community thought a malaria vaccine was a non-starter. Nobody had ever made a vaccine against a parasite-borne disease.

Via the Guardian.

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