Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Tuesday, 25 May 2010
Dementia: Sing me the news, and I'll remember it
SINGING to elderly people with dementia helps them form new memories, one of the first skills they tend to lose.
Music is known to aid memory, especially recalling autobiographical information. For example, people with Alzheimer's disease are better at remembering events from their own past when music is playing in the background. It was less clear whether tunes could also help them learn.
Brandon Ally at Boston University and his team were inspired by the report of a man with Alzheimer's who could recall current events if his daughter sang the news to him to the tune of familiar pop songs. They decided to try it out for themselves.
They gave 13 people with Alzheimer's and 14 healthy seniors the lyrics from 40 unfamiliar children's songs to read, half accompanied by the actual song and half by the spoken words. All the participants saw the lyrics again without audio and mixed in with lyrics from a further 40 unknown songs. Those with Alzheimer's were able to recognise 40 per cent of the original lyrics that had been accompanied by song but only 28 per cent of those read to them. The healthy seniors recognised 80 per cent of lyrics, regardless of whether they had been sung or spoken (Neuropsychologia, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.04.033).
Very few things enhance new learning in people with dementia, says Ally. "It's really cool that hearing the lyrics sung did." He suggests that teaching patients new medication regimes via a song in the early stages of dementia might enable them to live independently for a bit longer.
We don't yet know why singing should help, but Ally says that music engages areas of the brain, including subcortical regions, that are typically spared until later on in dementia. Music may also improve attention, he adds.
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Art & Science Combine To Help
Tue May 25 12:14:02 BST 2010 by Adam
http://mememoryman.wordpress.com/I particularly like the idea of the musical world having a beneificial impact that's measurarable in the scientific world.
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The evolution of emotion: Charles Darwin's little-known psychology experiment
Charles Darwin is famous for his prolific writing about biology. In addition to publishing his theory of evolution, Darwin wrote books about coral reefs, earthworms and carnivorous plants. But the eminent naturalist made important contributions to more than just the life sciences. It turns out Darwin was also an early experimental psychologist.
Darwin conducted one of the first studies on how people recognize emotion in faces, according to new archival research by Peter Snyder, a neuroscientist at Brown University. Snyder's findings rely on biographical documents never before published; they now appear in the May issue of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences.
While looking through Darwin's letters at the University of Cambridge in England, Snyder noticed multiple references to a small experiment on emotion that Darwin had performed in his house. With the help of librarians, Snyder uncovered the relevant documents—research notes and tables filled with the illegible scrawl of Darwin's elderly hands and the neater writing of his wife Emma. Although Darwin's fascination with emotional expression is well documented, no one had pieced together the details of his home experiment. Now, a fuller narrative emerges.
"Darwin applied an experimental method that at the time was pretty rare in Victorian England," Snyder said. "He pushed boundaries in all sorts of biological sciences, but what isn't as well known are his contributions to psychology."
In 1872, Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, in which he argued that all humans, and even other animals, show emotion through remarkably similar behaviors. For Darwin, emotion had an evolutionary history that could be traced across cultures and species—an unpopular view at the time. Today, many psychologists agree that certain emotions are universal to all humans, regardless of culture: anger, fear, surprise, disgust, happiness and sadness.
In writing Expression, Darwin corresponded with numerous researchers, including French physician Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne, who believed that human faces expressed at least 60 discrete emotions, each of which depended on its own dedicated group of facial muscles. In contrast, Darwin thought the facial muscles worked together to create a core set of just a few emotions.
Duchenne studied emotion by applying electrical current to the faces of his subjects, sending their muscles into a state of continual contraction. By stimulating the right combination of facial muscles, Duchenne mimicked genuine emotional expression. He produced more than 60 photographic plates of his subjects demonstrating what he believed were distinct emotions.
But Darwin disagreed. "I started to look at the actual folio of photographic slides that Darwin had received from Duchenne," Snyder said. "And Darwin wrote these faint notes on it saying, 'I don't believe this. This isn't true.'"
Darwin hypothesized that only some of Duchenne's slides represented universal human emotions. To test this idea, he arranged a single-blind study at his home in Kent County, England. Darwin chose 11 of Duchenne's slides, placed them in a random order and presented them one at a time to over 20 of his guests without any hints or leading questions. He then asked his friends to guess which emotion each slide represented and tabulated their answers. That kind of experimental control would be considered minimal today, but it was progressive for Darwin's time, Snyder pointed out.
According to the handwritten notes and data tables Snyder found, Darwin's guests agreed almost unanimously about certain emotions—like happiness, sadness, fear and surprise—but strongly disagreed about what other more ambiguous slides showed. For Darwin, only photographic slides that earned overwhelming agreement depicted one of the true universal human emotions. The others were just Duchenne's failed simulations.
Darwin used the results of his 19th-century experiment to inform his own understanding of emotion and his writing of Expression. But his pioneering methods remain relevant to psychologists today. Snyder and his co-authors write that Darwin's little-known experiment is a forerunner of modern psychology experiments on people who cannot properly recognize emotion in faces.
"Today, we use almost the same technique, and even stimuli, to evaluate emotional recognition in a variety of psychiatric diseases, like autism and schizophrenia," Snyder said. "Darwin's method and approach are not locked in time."
Images of Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne stimulating a subject and Duchenne’s photographic slides courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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Monday, 24 May 2010
Is Time an Illusion?
From the June 2010 Scientific American Magazine | 26 comments
Is Time an Illusion? ( Preview )
The concepts of time and change may emerge from a universe that, at root, is utterly static
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