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Category: neuroscience – Page 570

Researchers uncover strange symptom that could be first sign of Alzheimer’s

New symptoms such as failing to identify more than one object at a time and a “space perception deficit” could be the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease, a new study has found.

Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), is a diagnosis for those who struggle with judging distances, distinguishing between moving and stationary objects and completing tasks like writing and it overwhelmingly predicts Alzheimer’s.

In the latest study from researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, some 94 per cent patients with PCA had Alzheimer’s pathology. Most patients with PCA have normal cognition early on, but by the time of their first diagnostic visit, an average 3.8 years after symptom onset, mild or moderate dementia was apparent with deficits identified in memory, executive function, behavior, and speech and language , according to the researchers’ findings.

The Frequencies of Cognition: Exploring How Our Brains Differentiate Sounds

A study shows our brains use basic sound rates and patterns to distinguish music from speech, offering insights to enhance therapies for speech impairments like aphasia.

Music and speech are among the most frequent types of sounds we hear. But how do we identify what we think are differences between the two?

An international team of researchers mapped out this process through a series of experiments—yielding insights that offer a potential means to optimize therapeutic programs that use music to regain the ability to speak in addressing aphasia. This language disorder afflicts more than 1 in 300 Americans each year, including Wendy Williams and Bruce Willis.

Suicide Risk Increased in Women With Premenstrual Disorders, Study Finds

Menstruation can often come with a degree of discomfort as the uterus prepares to shed. For some, the effects can be horrendous.

It’s estimated that some 5 to 8 percent of women experience moderate to severe symptoms that have a noticeably negative impact on their lives, mental health, and ability to function normally. These premenstrual disorders, or PMDs, affect millions of women globally, yet we know shockingly little about their long-term consequences.

Now, a new nationwide observational study in Sweden has shown that women with PMDs have an increased risk of suicide. In fact, they’re more than twice as likely to die by suicide as women without PMDs. It’s a sobering figure, one that strongly suggests more work needs to be done to understand PMDs, and help the people who suffer from them.

Thinking of Consciousness as Waves

First written: Dec 14, 2018, Last update: Jan 2, 2019.

How can we think about the relationship between the conscious and the physical? In this essay, I wish to propose a way of thinking about it that might be fruitful and surprisingly intuitive, namely to think of consciousness as waves.

The idea is quite simple: one kind of conscious experience corresponds to, or rather conforms to description in terms of, one kind of wave. And by combining different kinds of waves, we can obtain an experience with many different properties in one.

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