Dyslexia: A Neurological Disorder

Up to one in five Americans have dyslexia, making it challenging for them to get through a best seller — or even a menu.

If they weren't diagnosed in school, many may incorrectly assume they're simply slow readers — "or even stupid," says Sally Shaywitz, M.D., codirector of the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity.

Dyslexia is neurological: Disruptions in key brain circuits affect the ability to retrieve or correctly order the basic sounds of language, explains Dr. Shaywitz.

Telltale clues — beyond reading in a way that feels plodding and deliberate — include exceptionally poor spelling and knowing a word but being unable to utter it correctly.

Although the process is time- consuming, you can overcome dyslexia. It requires relearning the basics of reading, all the way back to learning how to sound out words.

Group classes for adults typically meet at libraries, adult education centers, or offices of nonprofit literacy organizations several times a week for a year or longer.

You can also have private lessons with a tutor. Two reading programs that Dr. Shaywitz recommends: the Wilson Reading System (wilsonlanguage.com) and Language (voyagerlearning.com/language).

Developmental Dyslexia - The Lancet

Dyslexia is a neuro-developmental disorder that is characterised by slow and inaccurate word recognition.

Dyslexia has been reported in every culture studied, and mounting evidence draws attention to cross-linguistic similarity in its neurobiological and neurocognitive bases.

Much progress has been made across research specialties spanning the behavioural, neuropsychological, neurobiological, and causal levels of analysis in the past 5 years.

From a neuropsychological perspective, the phonological theory remains the most compelling, although phonological problems also interact with other cognitive risk factors.

Work confirms that, neurobiologically, dyslexia is characterised by dysfunction of the normal left hemisphere language network and also implicates abnormal white matter development.

Studies accounting for reading experience demonstrate that many recorded neural differences show causes rather than effects of dyslexia. Six predisposing candidate genes have been identified, and evidence shows gene by environment interaction.

A Profile of Paula Tallal Co-Director, Center for Molecular and Behavioural Neuroscience

A Profile of Paula Tallal, Co-Director, Center for Molecular and Behavioural Neuroscience & Professor II. Her Faculty is the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience

Correcting Language Problems Through Neuroplasticity

Similar to a traveler who unknowingly sets out on the wrong route and needs to be redirected, the brain's plasticity can be utilized to guide the development of neural networks to correct language learning problems.

That key finding and insights into the brain's auditory processing system by Paula Tallal, Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of Neuroscience, has helped to bring positive change to hundreds of thousands of children worldwide who struggle with language.

With her co-researchers, Tallal helped to devise a revolutionary technique and software program - Fast ForWord - to assist children with establishing and strengthening the neural networks for language development.

For more than 30 years, Tallal, co-director of the Rutgers Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, has been studying the connections between auditory processing, attention, memory and language learning.

What her research has shown is that timing is critically important for learning language and speech. The central problem for many children who struggle with language, including those with dyslexia, is that their brains have difficulty perceiving rapidly successive acoustic changes, such as the difference between "da" and "ba."

Tallal and her co-researchers hypothesized that the brain's neuroplasticity could be used to rewire neural networks to increase that processing speed or to "fire and wire" as she describes it. 

Neuroplasticity refers to the fact that the brain, rather than being molded and set, is able to reorganize itself in response to new situations or changes in the environment.

In 1996, she and co-researcher Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus, University of California, San Francisco, founded Scientific Leaning Corporation to bring their research out of the lab to help children who struggle with language.

The result was Fast ForWord, a computer-based program that corrects auditory processing problems by pushing the brain to handle auditory information at faster and faster speeds. The software, with an 80 percent success rate, has been used by children in more than 40 countries.

In her research, Tallal found that many children who struggle with language have a listening "window" that is slower than 1/4 second long.

Yet to differentiate fast-changing sounds, the brain needs to be able to perceive differences at the millisecond range to learn the smaller sounds inside of words, the phonemes.

If auditory information could be slowed down, Tallal theorized, it should become easier for children with processing delays to learn those differences.

That instead of mistaking "cat" for "tat," for example, they could learn to hear the discrete changes and if that information then could be presented at increasingly faster rates, their brains could be remodeled to make learning language easier and permanent.

That is just what Fast ForWord and the team's related learning tools accomplish. As shown by fMRI studies, the brains of children who have used the program develop the same firing patterns as children who do not struggle with language.

Her current research is focused on the neural and genetic bases of language development, and early detection methods for language learning difficulties.

In research that followed a set of babies across several years, she and her team found that identifying how fast the brain can organize simple incoming auditory information at very young ages is the best predictor of successful language development.

Such findings could open the way for earlier correction methods to spare children the struggles so many experience because of processing delays.

Synesthesia: Laughter on the Canvas

Laughter is an uncontrollable emotion that brings joy. It's not, however, something you'd normally see depicted graphically in a painting.

Sonja Landis, 35, is a Carlsbad artist who brings laughter to life with the stroke of a paintbrush and some help from sound engineers.

Sonja Landis started The Painted Laugh about three years ago, when she heard her son laugh and saw colourful sound waves swirling around him.

She has a documented but not widely understood condition called Synesthesia. It's a neurological condition where two senses involuntarily cross. Her type allows her to see sound in the air.

When Landis first painted the sound waves of laughter, she did it for herself and hung a piece above her mantel.

Once people saw the painting, everyone wanted one. It eventually evolved into a business and she has been distributing them all over the country ever since, and plans on selling internationally.

After the paintings became popular, she decided to add actual sound. This way, parents and grandparents could hear their children's laughter whenever they wanted.

A button is placed behind the canvas of her paintings. Push it and it plays a recording of your child's laugh.

"There is a universal truth to laughter that doesn't need an explanation between cultures and between languages," Landis says. "And that's what I love about this the most."

Landis has partnered with Crayola, and has experimented with laughter therapy for children's hospitals.

Click here to watch a YouTube video made by The Painted laugh 

Sonja Landis also has a project running that is trying to create or develop a Painted Laugh APP for Smartphones and iPad devices.

The video below outlines her thinking on this.

Motor Neurone Disease: New Insight about how it works

When we imagine how research results can change society or help us make new bounds in medical science we think of proving a hypothesis or cracking a code, but sometimes research that refutes a theory can be just as beneficial, as scientists can eliminate a hypothesis from the mix and save years of wasted-time investigating dead ends and a team of German researchers has just done exactly that.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the team refute a widely accepted hypothesis about a causative step in neuro-degenerative conditions.

These results deal specifically with animal models of human amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Motor Neurone Disease, but the findings also have implications for other neuro-degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or Huntington's disease.

One of the ways neuro-degenerative diseases manifest themselves is in the loss of axons - essentially, the transmission lines for electrical signals in individual nerve cells - and synapses, the key sites for communication between them.

In the past, such damage has been attributed to deficits in the bi-directional transport of organelles, such as the intracellular power plants called mitochondria, along the axons of nerve cells.

The team, from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen (LMU), put these previously-held assumptions to the test in one of the most thorough tests carried out to date.

They used novel imaging techniques, with high resolution in both space and time, to observe changes in both axon morphology and organelle transport in several different animal models of ALS.

Their results show that transport deficits and axon degeneration can develop independently of each other, throwing into question the theory that one is a direct cause of the other.

They observed axonal organelle transport in living tissue in real time, and in a way that enabled them to track the movement of individual mitochondria, using a novel imaging approach that involves transgenic labelling.

They were also able to observe transport of another kind of organelle, endosome-derived vesicles. Several different animal models of ALS were investigated, all of which are based on human mutations associated with the disease.

One of the study authors, Professor Thomas Misgeld from the Institute of Neuroscience at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen, comments on their findings: 'We do think these insights have implications for other studies of ALS, or even studies of other neuro-degenerative diseases.

What our experiments really say is that it is not easy to develop faithful models of neuro-degenerative diseases.

So it might be worth spending more effort to get better animal models, as this is the only way forward for mechanistic studies, while always checking them against human pathology or human-derived cellular models.

In the meantime, it is probably prudent to work with several of the available models in parallel. Moreover, in more general biological terms, our results also speak to the relationship between axonal transport disruptions and degeneration - which might not be as tight as we assumed. Here we have a lot more to understand.'

The iPSoALS project brings together researchers from France, Germany, Israel and Sweden with the aim of better understanding ALS disease mechanisms.

For more information, please visit: Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM)

50 Facts about Dyslexia

What is Dyslexia?

• Dyslexia is a learning disability that includes difficulty in the use and processing of linguistic and symbolic codes, alphabetic letters representing speech sounds or numeric representing numbers or quantities.
• The first description of dyslexia appeared in 1896 by Dr. W. Pringle Morgan in Sussex, England, this is what he wrote: “Percy F.,... aged 14,... has always been a bright and intelligent boy, quick at games, and in no way inferior to others of his age. His great difficulty has been—and is now—his inability to learn to read.”
• The word dyslexia is derived from the Greek word ‘dys’ (meaning poor or inadequate) plus ‘lexis’ (words or language). Implying only an inadequacy in language tasks.
• Dyslexia is not the result of neurological damage, but the product of neurological development.
• Dyslexia varies from mild to severe.
• Dyslexia does not reflect an overall defect in language, but, rather, a localized weakness within the phonologic module of the brain. This module is the functional part of the brain where the sounds of language are put together to form words and where words are broken down into sounds.
• Dyslexia is a unique mindset that is often gifted and productive but learns differently than other minds.

Prevalence of Dyslexia

• Dyslexia affects nearly 10% of the population.
• Dyslexia is by far the most common learning disability.
• According to NIH research, of those who are placed in special education for a learning disability, around 80% of those have dyslexia.
• A study at Yale found that the numbers of girls and boys who have dyslexia are about the same.
• Dyslexia commonly runs in families.
• Children don't outgrow dyslexia.
• Some of the most brilliant minds of our time have been known to have dyslexia: Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and John Lennon, to mention only a few.
• There are people with dyslexia in many types of highly respected careers such as: Tom Cruise, Danny Glover, Cher, Magic Johnson, Carl Lewis, Bruce Jenner, and General George Patton.
• “Given the high prevalence of reading difficulties, it is more likely for your child to have a reading problem than almost any other physical problem for which he is being checked.” - Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz, M.D.

Dyslexic Gifts

• Dyslexics often enjoy and excel at solving puzzles.
• Dyslexics have excellent comprehension of the stories read or told them.
• Most dyslexics often have a better sense of spatial relationships and better use of their right brain.
• Dyslexics have excellent thinking skills in the areas of conceptualization, reason, imagination, and abstraction.
• Dyslexics have a strong ability to see concepts with a "big picture" perspective.
• Dyslexics are adept to excellence in areas not dependent on reading.
• Dyslexics typically have a large spoken vocabulary for their age.
• Dyslexics tend to be more curious, creative, and intuitive than average.
• Dyslexics’ special mode of thought easily produces the gift of mastery.
• Dyslexia is not related to low intelligence.

Symptoms of Dyslexia

• Dyslexia can affect spoken language, written language and language comprehension.
• Dyslexics have trouble breaking down unfamiliar words into letter-sound segments. As a result, reading is slow and filled with errors.
• Dyslexics require extra time and effort to process language information.
• Dyslexics often need to be taught to look at words linearly, left-to-right.
• Dyslexics have difficulty in learning (and remembering) the names of letters.
• Dyslexics often fail to understand that words come apart; for example, that "batboy" can be pulled apart into "bat" and "boy" and, later on, that the word "bat" can be broken down still further and sounded out as 'b' 'aaa' 't'
• Dyslexics often have a difficult time learning to associate letters with sounds, such as being unable to connect the letter b with the /b/ sound.
• Dyslexics will sometimes make reading errors that show no connection to the sounds of the letters; for example, the word "big" is read as "goat."
• Dyslexics often struggle to read small "sight" words such as "that," "an," "in."
• Dyslexics often substitute words with the same meaning for words in the text they can't pronounce, such as "car" for "automobile."
• Dyslexics often omit parts of words when reading.
• Dyslexics often have difficulty remembering dates, names, telephone numbers, and random lists.
• Dyslexics often have an extreme difficulty learning a foreign language.

Dyslexia Research Findings

• Despite popular belief, dyslexics do not see letters backwards. They often have difficulty naming and writing letters, and in fact, writing letters backwards is something that many kids do when they’re first learning to write, whether they have dyslexia or not.
• Many individuals with dyslexia have proven to see things three dimensionally, which can effect how they look at words.
• Often dyslexics are thought to be reading backwards because of what is called the "Recency Effect." In which they pronounce the word using the most recent sound first, like "tap" for "pat."
• Research has shown strong correlations between dyslexia symptoms and deficits in short-term memory and executive functioning.
• Dr. Glenda Thorne stated, "Dyslexia is not a deficit in the visual processing system; however, it is a language processing problem. The hallmark characteristic of dyslexia is a breakdown in what is called phoneme awareness."
• Yale researchers have shown when people with dyslexia try to read the front part of the brain is over-stimulated while crucial portions in the center and back are under-stimulated.

Solutions for Dyslexia

• Research has proven that explicit, systematic phonics can actually help 'rewire' the brain and help dyslexic students learn to read.
• The use of the Orton-Gillingham approach can significantly compensate for the language learning and processing problems that arise from dyslexia.
• Dyslexics score significantly higher on test when they are given additional time and given the test orally.
• Dyslexics do best when directions are two steps or fewer. They often get confused and frustrated with a long list of “to dos” or directions.
• The more important, consistent, frequent, multi-sensory, and emotionally reinforcing information is presented, the easier and more enduring language learning becomes for dyslexics.

Read more at Reading Horizons

Podcast on Dyslexia and Autism - The Life Scientific, Uta Frith

Listen to The Life Scientific by Uta Frith

Professor Uta Frith came from a grey post war Germany to Britain in the swinging sixties, when research into conditions such as autism and dyslexia was in its infancy.

At the time many people thought there was no such thing as dyslexia and that autism was a result of cold distant parenting, but Professor Frith was convinced that the explanation for these enigmatic conditions lay in the brain and she set out to prove this through a series of elegant experiments.

Together with her students (Prof) Francesca Happe and (Prof) Simon Baron Cohen she developed the idea that people with autism find it hard to understand the intentions of others, known as theory of mind.

Neuro-imaging experiments carried out with her husband Professor Chris Frith, meant she was able to show that there is a region in the brain which is linked to dyslexia.

Uta Frith talks about her pioneering work that has changed how we view these brain disorders with Jim Al Khalili.

Selling you the Brain Balance Programme

Hearing that your child is dyslexic, is on the autism spectrum, or has ADHD can be very hard for a parent. After that diagnosis, parents want to be in control and feel that decisions must be made, but the choices are often confusing.

What’s best for the child: a drug, a special school program, therapy, all of the above? It is reported that these diagnoses are becoming more common, some studies indicate that autism spectrum disorders now affect 1 out of 64 children in the US. In the midst of this how do parents find effective treatment for their children?

Dr. Mark Smith claims to be the only active board-certified chiropractic neurologist in central Virginia. He is now opening a Brain Balance Achievement Center Richmond (http://www.brainbalancecenters.com) this month. He claims that this method helps parents and children who are working to overcome these learning and neurologigal behavioural difficulties.

The revolutionary Brain Balance Achievement Center approach offers an integrated and comprehensive non-drug, whole-child approach that includes academic performance, social abilities, cognitive function, sensory/motor skills, visual/spatial organisation skills, and nutritional diets.

Their overall goal is commendable and simple: to help kids literally change the connections in their brains, working on the basis that there is something wrong with the existing connections.

Dr. Smith says “I’ve worked with children in the Autistic Spectrum for the past 20 years, and it has become my passion to help these families heal."

He claims that; "People need to know that there are effective methods available to actually get to the underlying cause of these problems, that they are not doomed to just endure and ‘live with it’."

He also claims that; "We have seen tremendous improvement using these research based protocols and are thrilled with the results and excited to offer this program to the greater community.“

The Brain Balance Program was developed by Dr. Robert Melillo, based on his research on Hemispheric Integration Therapy (H.I.T.).

HIT claims to be a multi-modal approach to the treatment of ADHD, dyslexia, autism, Asperger’s, Tourette’s, learning disabilities, and other neurobehavioural disabilities found in children.

His research was the precursor to and foundation for the program, which was founded in 2003 to help children with neurobehavioural deficits improve their academic, social and behavioural functions.

We do not reccommend or condemn this research or subsequent 'treatment' and provide this article on it, purely for information. Caveat Emptor! Let the buyer beware!

Why Current In-the-Ear Hearing Aids Fail

Hearing aids have improved greatly over recent years, but they continue to be a surprisingly frustrating experience for new wearers.

Clearly, today’s hearing aids are tiny, nearly invisible in fact, and they amplify sound and are able to present a higher range of frequencies, but they have not yet completely solved the problem of amplifying the peripheral sounds we just don’t want, or don't need to hear.

For new wearers the crumpling of a paper bag on the other side of a room can sound like a jackhammer.

This is a huge challenge for technology because it is dependent on how the brain perceives sound and how we have learned to filter peripheral sound out of normal hearing. Andrew J. Oxenham is a psychologist and hearing expert at the University of Minnesota and an expert in psychoacoustics.

Oxenham explains: The ear works by analysing sound and breaking it into different frequencies and with many forms of hearing impairment it’s this frequency selectivity that is impaired.

What that means is that the ear doesn’t filter as well as it did before. So instead of having very sharp tuning to filter out different frequencies the filtering becomes much broader and there is no real way of compensating for that.

You can’t sharpen the filters or you can’t pre-process sound so it’s sharp. It’s like a broken TV set. You can process the signal going into the TV as much as you like but you still won’t get a clear picture of the output.

Recent hearing aids have made a lot of progress, like being able to present frequencies of up to 6000 Hz as opposed to limited frequencies up to about 4000 Hz, by using digital signal processing, and a lot more computing power on a lot smaller chip.

Another big leap forward has been made with directional hearing. They can focus the microphones toward the front and filter out a lot of the sound coming from the side and back. And although that is a fairly simple technique, it involves signal processing that wasn’t possible with earlier hearing aids.

Ambient or peripheral sound is horribly distracting for hearing aid wearers. A paper bag being crumpled across a room sounds screechingly loud.

This is common complaint of people who recently start wearing a hearing aid. Their hearing has deteriorated, often without them being completely aware of it, over a period of time.

When they are suddenly fitted with a hearing aid, they hear sounds they’ve got used to not hearing. The sounds are suddenly annoying and distracting. It’s a contrast effect.

It’s more to do with perception i.e the brain’s ability to analyse and prioritise different sounds.

It’s a complex interaction between the ear and the brain. The ear sends signals up to the brain; the brain does an awful lot of processing on top of that; then sends signals back down to the ear. These signals change the way the ear accepts input.

This is partly why hearing aids are not perfect because the hearing aid is not part of that natural feedback loop. There’s no way with current aids that the brain can interface with a hearing aid directly to change its characteristics.

Hearing Loops
To deal with background noise there are things called “hearing loops.”

These are systems that are set up within places like concert halls and churches that interface directly with the hearing aid. It’s like sending a radio signal to the hearing device.

The idea is that this hearing loop picks up the sound directly from the microphone in front of a speaker.

If you are in a conference and the speaker is talking into a microphone. Normally we hear the sound acoustically through the airwaves.

If you are wearing a regular hearing aid the microphone will pick up the sounds on the airwaves but that is together with all the background noise and reverberation in the room.

With a hearing loop it sends the signal directly from the microphone to the ear and bypasses all the acoustics in the building itself. So the ear is getting a much better, clearer and cleaner signal of what’s coming into the microphone.

Two hearing aids better than One?
It’s only recently that people have routinely been fitted with two hearing aids. Often people only got one.

Directional hearing and the way we localise sound: To know where the sound is coming from the brain compares the signals coming into the two ears. So if it’s slightly louder on one side then the brain knows the sound is coming from that side.

More importantly it’s the time of arrival difference between the two ears. If you think about a sound coming from the right. The sound will reach your right ear a little bit before it reaches your left ear.

Although we are talking about millionths of seconds, your brain needs two ears to make a distinction. If you only have one you lose that ability to localise sound and tell which direction it is coming from.

It’s also an important part of filtering out sound and noise. The brain can determine if there is speech right in front and background noise in back of and to the side. The brain can use those differences in localisation to help to make the speech more intelligible.

So the biggest technical challenge is developing hearing aids that can focus on what we really need and want to listen to. This is the current problem.

The Solution
We are hoping through even more sophisticated signal processing schemes that we’ll be able to work on artificial source segregation; i.e. analysing the signal that is coming in and figuring out what is speech and what isn’t, and only presenting to the ear the wanted signal.

Distinguishing between speech and noise
The assumption is that what you really want to listen to is speech, and so there are certain acoustical aspects of speech that we can recognise and there are certain acoustical aspects of noise that are different from speech.

So, we need to establish a suitable algorithm to be able to distinguish between speech and noise that will help you towards filtering the unwanted signal.

A more complete solutiion could mean that brain-computer interface may be part of the hearing aid systems of the future. Where the hearing aid is tapping into brain responses to pick up the specific signal the person wants to pay attention to.

This is an ongoing process with incremental steps and we will continue to see improvements over the next 15 years.

The Turkey and the Crow - The Tension Between Expertise and Creativity

Although we train students toward expertise and mastery, a tension seems to exist between cognitive efficiency and automaticity representing expertise, and divergent problem solving and innovation.

Once we started looking for the turkey-crow split, the more we started seeing it everywhere.

Please share your thoughts, comments, and criticisms, and share this video with your friends if you find it helpful. Education would really be much better if it recognized how fundamentally different turkey- and crow-biased thinkers approach learning. It wouldn't hurt either for more teachers, parents, professionals, and really everybody else came to appreciate the remarkable talents of the crow.

Don’t leave learning to the young. Older brains can grow, too. - Oliver Sachs

I bring you an extract from a very interesting article from the neuro-physician and author, Oliver Sachs.

NEW Year’s resolutions often have to do with eating more healthfully, going to the gym more, giving up sweets, losing weight — all admirable goals aimed at improving one’s physical health. Most people, though, do not realise that they can strengthen their brains in a similar way.

While some areas of the brain are hard-wired from birth or early childhood, other areas — especially in the cerebral cortex, which is central to higher cognitive powers like language
and thought, as well as sensory and motor functions — can be, to a remarkable extent, rewired as we grow older.

In fact, the brain has an astonishing ability to rebound from damage — even from something as devastating as the loss of sight or hearing. As a physician who treats patients with neurological conditions, I see this happen all the time.

For example, one patient of mine who had been deafened by scarlet fever at the age of 9, was so adept at lip-reading that it was easy to forget she was deaf. Once, without thinking, I turned away from her as I was speaking. “I can no longer hear you,” she said sharply.

“You mean you can no longer see me,” I said.

“You may call it seeing,” she answered, “but I experience it as hearing.”

Lip-reading, seeing mouth movements, was immediately transformed for this patient into “hearing” the sounds of speech in her mind. Her brain was converting one mode of sensation into another.

In a similar way, blind people often find ways of “seeing.” Some areas of the brain, if not stimulated, will atrophy and die. (“Use it or lose it,” neurologists often say.) But the visual areas of the brain, even in someone born blind, do not entirely disappear; instead, they are redeployed for other senses. We have all heard of blind people with unusually acute hearing, but other senses may be heightened, too.

For example, Geerat Vermeij, a biologist at the University of California-Davis who has been blind since the age of 3, has identified many new species of mollusks based on tiny variations in the contours of their shells. He uses a sort of spatial or tactile giftedness that is beyond what any sighted person is likely to have.

The writer Ved Mehta, also blind since early childhood, navigates in large part by using “facial vision” — the ability to sense objects by the way they reflect sounds, or subtly shift the air currents that reach his face.
Ben Underwood, a remarkable boy who lost his sight at 3 and died at 16 in 2009, developed an effective, dolphin-like strategy of emitting regular clicks with his mouth and reading the resulting echoes from nearby objects. He was so skilled at this that he could ride a bike and play sports and even video games.

People like Ben Underwood and Ved Mehta, who had some early visual experience but then lost their sight, seem to instantly convert the information they receive from touch or sound into a visual image — “seeing” the dots, for instance, as they read Braille with a finger.
Researchers using functional brain imagery have confirmed that in such situations the blind person activates not only the parts of the cortex devoted to touch, but parts of the visual cortex as well.

One does not have to be blind or deaf to tap into the brain’s mysterious and extraordinary power to learn, adapt and grow. I have seen hundreds of patients with various deficits —
strokes, Parkinson’s and even dementia — learn to do things in new ways, whether consciously or unconsciously, to work around those deficits.

Music is an especially powerful shaping force, for listening to and especially playing it engages many different areas of the brain, all of which must work in tandem: from reading musical notation and coordinating fine muscle movements in the hands, to evaluating and expressing rhythm and pitch, to associating music with memories and emotion.

Whether it is by learning a new language, traveling to a new place, developing a passion for beekeeping or simply thinking about an old problem in a new way, all of us can find ways to stimulate our brains to grow, in the coming year and those to follow. Just as physical activity is essential to maintaining a healthy body, challenging one’s brain, keeping it active, engaged, flexible and playful, is not only fun. It is essential to cognitive fitness.

To read the full article go here Don’t leave learning to the young. Older brains can grow, too. - NYTimes.com

Neuroimaging helps to predict which dyslexics will learn to read

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have used sophisticated brain imaging to predict with 90 percent accuracy which teenagers with dyslexia would improve their reading skills over time.

Their work, the first to identify specific brain mechanisms involved in a person's ability to overcome reading difficulties, could lead to new interventions to help dyslexics better learn to read.

"This gives us hope that we can identify which children might get better over time," said Fumiko Hoeft, MD, PhD, an imaging expert and instructor at Stanford's Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research. "More study is needed before the technique is clinically useful, but this is a huge step forward."

Hoeft is first author of a paper, which will be published online Dec. 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The senior author is John Gabrieli, PhD, a former Stanford professor now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dyslexia, a brain-based learning disability that impairs a person's ability to read, affects 5 to 17 percent of U.S. children. Affected children's ability to improve their reading skills varies greatly, with about one-fifth able to benefit from interventions and develop adequate reading skills by adulthood. But up to this point, what happens in this brain to allow for this improvement remained unknown.

Past imaging studies have shown greater activation of specific brain regions in children and adults with dyslexia during reading-related tasks; one area in particular, the inferior frontal gyrus (which is part of the frontal lobe), is used more in dyslexics than in typical readers. As the researchers noted in their paper, some experts have hypothesized that greater involvement of this part of the brain during reading is related to long-term gains in reading for dyslexic children.

For this study, Hoeft and colleagues aimed to determine whether neuroimaging could predict reading improvement and how brain-based measures compared with conventional educational measures.

The other exciting implication, Hoeft said, involves therapy. The research shows that gains in reading for dyslexic children involve different neural mechanisms and pathways than those for typically developing children. By understanding this, researchers could develop interventions that focus on the appropriate regions of the brain and that are, in turn, more effective at improving a child's reading skills.

Hoeft said this work might also encourage the use of imaging to enhance the understanding (and potentially the treatment) of other disorders.

"In general terms, these findings suggest that brain imaging may play a valuable role in neuroprognosis, the use of brain measures to predict future reductions or exacerbations of symptoms in clinical disorders," she explained.

The authors noted several caveats with their findings. The children were followed for two-and-a-half years; longer-term outcomes are unknown. The study also involved children in their teens; more study is needed to determine whether brain-based measures can predict reading progress in younger children.

Hoeft is now working on a study of pre-readers, being funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Journal Reference:

1. Fumiko Hoeft, Bruce D. Mccandliss, Jessica M. Black, Alexander Gantman, Nahal Zakerani, Charles Hulme, Heikki Lyytinen, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, Gary H. Glover, Allan L. Reiss, and John D. E. Gabrieli. Neural systems predicting long-term outcome in dyslexia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1008950108

New reactive eye test may detect learning disabilities, early Alzheimer's

New reactive eye test may detect learning disabilities, early Alzheimer's

Two-year-old Jakeson Bowlby has a bull's eye sticker on his forehead that helps a computer system track the movement of his eyes.

He sits in a high chair and watches a video, but instead of Toy Story or another favourite, researchers at Queen's University show him a high-definition video that is part of a new test to assess brain function in toddlers. It jumps quickly from one image to another -- kangaroos sitting under a tree, kids playing soccer, buses and cars zooming by.

How quickly children can zero in on the kangaroos and follow the ball or the vehicles is a measure of how well their brains are directing the movement of their eyes, says Queen's neuroscientist Doug Munoz. He has devoted nearly two decades to documenting how eye control is related to abnormal brain function, both in children and adults.

His work is part of a broad investigation involving labs around the world which, over the last two decades, has laid the groundwork for relatively simple tests that could soon be used to detect everything from learning disabilities to the early onset of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease.

Munoz's latest project is aimed at the high chair set, a way to screen youngsters for problems that may make it difficult for them to learn in school. He and his colleague, Laurent Itti at the University of Southern California, have preliminary evidence that shows their "free viewing" test can identify children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

Autism - Children with autism 'have problem with self-awareness'

It is well known that children suffering from Autism struggle in social situations. Scientists have produced evidence that self-awareness is a big problem for people with autism.

Sophisticated scans showed the brains of people with autism are less active when engaged in self-reflective thought. The findings provide a neurological insight into why people with autism tend to struggle in social situations.

The study, by the University of Cambridge, appears in the Oxford neurological journal Brain.

Navigating social interactions with others requires keeping track of the
relationship between oneself and others - Michael Lombardo, University of Cambridge,

Autism has long been considered a condition of extreme egocentrism.

But research has shown the problem is children with the condition have trouble thinking about, and making sense of, themselves.

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance scans (MRI) to measure brain activity in 66 male volunteers, half of whom had been diagnosed as being within the autistic spectrum.

The volunteers were asked to make judgements either about their own thoughts, opinions, preferences, or physical characteristics, or about someone else's, in this case the Queen.

By scanning the volunteers' brains as they responded to these questions, the researchers were able to visualise differences in brain activity between those with and without autism.

They were particularly interested in part of the brain called the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex (vMPFC) - known to be active when people think about themselves.

The researchers found this area of the brain was more active when typical volunteers were asked questions about themselves compared with when they were thinking about the Queen.

However, in autism this brain region responded equally, irrespective of whether they were thinking about themselves or the Queen.

Researcher Michael Lombardo said the study showed that the autistic brain struggled to to process information about the self.

He said: "Navigating social interactions with others requires keeping track of the relationship between oneself and others.

"In some social situations it is important to notice that 'I am similar to you', while in other situations it might be important to notice that 'I am different to you'.

"The atypical way the autistic brain treats self-relevant information as equivalent to information about others could derail a child's social development, particularly in understanding how they relate to the social world around them."

Dr. Gina Gómez de la Cuesta, of the National Autistic Society, described the study as "interesting". "We know many children with autism do want to interact with others and make friends but they have difficulty recognising or understanding other people's thoughts and feelings.

"This research has shown that children with autism may also have difficulty understanding their own thoughts and feelings and the brain mechanisms underlying this."