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March 1, 2010 |
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Today is the anniversary of David H. Hegarty’s birthday. I have loved his music, his compositions and arrangements, his friendship, and his brain for a great many years. Some of you have heard him play the organ / piano and have been thrilled, as well. As Christakis and Fowler wrote in their book Connected, “Our friends and family serve as conduits for us to be influenced by hundreds or even thousands of other people…As part of a social network, we transcend ourselves, for good or ill, and become a part of something much larger. We are connected . . .” Today you may want to be thankful for the people with whom you are connected be they acquaintances, colleagues, biological family, close friends, or family-of-choice members. I know I am deeply grateful—they make a positive difference in my life. Happy Birthday, Hegarty. May you enrich the world through music for decades to come!
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March 8, 2010 |
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Using a brain imaging method called magnetoencephalography MEG), researchers scanned the brains of 74 U.S. veterans with PTSD, and 250 civilians without the disorder. MEG machines are a fast, sensitive and accurate way to measure electric activity in the brain. Whereas CT scans and MRIs record brain signals every few seconds, MEGs can do it by the millisecond, catching biomarkers and brain activity that the other tests inevitably miss. By spotting specific brain biomarkers, they accurately diagnose PTSD sufferers with 90 percent accuracy.
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February 22, 2010 |
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Carnegie Mellon University scientists Timothy Keller and Marcel Just reported in the journal Neuron, brain imaging of children between the ages of 8 and 10 showed that the quality of white matter — the brain tissue that carries signals between areas of grey matter, where information is processed — improved substantially after the children received 100 hours of remedial training. After the training, imaging indicated that the capability of the white matter to transmit signals efficiently had increased, and testing showed the children could read better. That it is possible to rewire a brain's white matter has important implications for treating reading disabilities and other developmental disorders, including autism.
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February 15, 2010 |
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Blindness Causes Structural Brain Changes, Implying Brain Can Re-Organize Itself to Adapt. Reporting in the January issue of the journal NeuroImage (currently online), Natasha Leporé, a postgraduate researcher at UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, and colleagues found that visual regions of the brain were smaller in volume in blind individuals than in sighted ones. However, for non-visual areas, the trend was reversed in that the areas grew larger in the blind. This suggests that the brains of blind individuals are compensating for the reduced volume in areas normally devoted to vision, and shows the exceptional plasticity of the brain. In other words, it appears the brain will attempt to compensate for the fact that a person can no longer see, and this is particularly true for those who are blind since early infancy, a developmental period in which the brain is much more plastic and modifiable than it is in adulthood.
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