Continuing with the theme of this mornings posts, a study, authored by Lee Ritterband, PhD, of the University of Virginia has shown that a cognitive behavioral intervention for insomnia delivered via the Internet can significantly improve insomnia in adults.
The study focused on 44 participants (mostly female) with an average age of 45 years. The participants were randomly selected to either the cognitive behavioral intervention for insomnia via the Internet or a wait list control. Measures of sleep, mood, cost, and cognitive functioning were collected at pre- and post-treatment, while additional measures of sleep were collected throughout treatment. [continue reading…]
New research published in the  Journal of the American Medical Association, suggest that dementia could be slowed significantly by treatments that reset the body’s natural clock.
The Dutch team used brighter daytime lighting – with or without the drug melatonin – to improve patients’ sleep, mood and cut aggressive behaviour.
Link to BBC article
A new computer programme for cerebral stimulations improves intellectual performance among older people. A pilot study from the University of Basel presenting evidence to this effect is being presented at the European Neurology Congress in Nice. It also shows how large the capacity of the brain to reorganize itself still is in the elderly.
A new computer based training programme can slow the loss of cognitive ability. The results of a pilot study to this effect are being presented by Dr. Iris Katharina Penner, associate professor at the institute for general psychology and methodology at the Psychology Faculty of the University of Basel (Switzerland), at the European Neurological Society Congress in Nice. [continue reading…]
Contrary to what one might imagine, the way in which each of us interacts with the world is not a simple matter of seeing (or touching, or smelling) and then reacting. Even the best baseball hitter eyeing a fastball does not swing at what he sees. The neurons and neural connections that make up our sensory systems are far too slow for this to work. “Everything we sense is a little bit in the past,” says Richard A. Andersen of the California Institute of Technology, who has now uncovered the trick the brain uses to get around this puzzling problem.
Work by Andersen, the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience at Caltech, and his colleagues Grant Mulliken of MIT and Sam Musallam of McGill University, offers the first neural evidence that voluntary limb movements are guided by our brain’s prediction of what will happen an instant into the future. “The brain is generating its own version of the world, a ‘forward model,’ which allows you to know where you actually are in real time. It takes the delays out of the system,” Andersen says. [continue reading…]
