Cognitive Neuroscientists Use Sound Training

Cognitive Neuroscientists Use Sound Training To Help Dyslexic Children Read
May 1, 2008 — Cognitive neuroscientists monitoring brain activity with fMRI found that children with dyslexia are often unable to process the fast-changing sounds used in spoken language. Sound training dedicated to teaching children to better process these sounds improves their ability to manipulate words and their phonetic components, which translates into better reading.


Dyslexia can be a frustrating condition, making it difficult for children to read. Many think it is a visual issue, but a new study using a computer game reveals the problem may not only be with sight, but also sound.

Jake Lo Giudice is dyslexic and some words can be tough to identify. "I felt like I was different," Jake recalls. I felt like I was outside of the group." Jake's mother Karen uses clay models to help her son visualize non-sight words. "It's because they are picture thinkers and those words do not have a picture," Karen explained. But researchers believe the problem could also be with how the brain "hears" sounds. "We believe that these children -- from being toddlers or even earlier as infants -- have problems with processing these changes in sounds," Nadine Gaab, Ph.D., an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Children's Hospital in Boston, Mass., told Ivanhoe.

Cognitive neuroscientists believe dyslexic children's brains have problems interpreting fast-changing syllables like "ba" and "da" because their brains are wired differently. This makes reading more of a challenge. Dr. Gaab is using "sound training" through computer exercises to monitor how dyslexics process fast and slow-changing sounds. While children play the game, Dr. Gaab monitors their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). But after eight weeks of intensive training, a dyslexic child's fMRI image shows more activity. "The brain is very plastic and so the brain learns and reconnected and built a new network," Dr. Gaab explained.

That possible reconnection could hold the key to helping dyslexics read. Researchers hope as children are diagnosed with dyslexia earlier, they can start sound training sooner and possibly reduce the severity of their condition.

LANGUAGE PROCESSING IS THE KEY: It is worth noting that dyslexia is not clinically identified by seeing letters backward or out of order. When dyslexics hear speech, they are not necessarily able to hear the sound accurately. Recent research showed that the brains of children with dyslexia are not able to process fast-changing sounds. Based on data obtained via fMRI, the findings suggest new ways to treat dyslexia and may help doctors to diagnose the disability earlier in life, before reading begins. This causes problems later when kids attempt to sound out words while reading.

THE EXPERIMENT: Researchers agree that dyslexics have problems manipulating words and sounds – that the primary problem is processing the sounds that make up words. Using a computer program that plays fast-changing and slow-changing sounds, Dr. Gaab used fMRI to monitor how children's brains respond to the sounds. Children with dyslexia use the same brain areas to process both fast and slow changing sounds, as opposed to other readers, who use a certain array of 11 areas more extensively when processing fast-changing sounds.

WHAT IS fMRI? Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) uses radio waves and a strong magnetic field rather than X-rays to take clear and detailed pictures of internal organs and tissues. fMRI uses this technology to identify regions of the brain where blood vessels are expanding, chemical changes are taking place, or extra oxygen is being delivered. These are indications that a particular part of the brain is processing information and giving commands to the body. As a patient performs a particular task, the metabolism will increase in the brain area responsible for that task, changing the signal in the image. Analyzing the images to understand how responses are similar or different for different tasks allows scientists to better understand the patient as an individual, and also to learn more about the human brain in general.

Effect Of Gamma Waves On Cognitive And Language Skills In Children

Effect Of Gamma Waves On Cognitive And Language Skills In Children
ScienceDaily (Oct. 21, 2008) — New studies conducted by April Benasich, professor of neuroscience at Rutgers University in Newark, and her colleagues reveal that gamma wave activity in the brains of children provide a window into their cognitive development, and could open the way for more effective intervention for those likely to experience language problems.

“Research into the adult brain has shown that gamma activity is the ‘glue’ that binds together perceptions, thoughts and memories,” notes Benasich. “Little research, however, has been conducted into the development of gamma activity in the infant brain and its possible connection to cognitive and language skills.”

Benasich and her research team are the first to look at “resting” gamma power in the frontal cortex, the “thinking” part of the brain, in children 16, 24 and 36 months old. In an article published online and in an upcoming issue of Behavioral Brain Research, Benasich offers significant new insight into the likely role gamma activity plays in supporting emerging cognitive and language abilities during the first 36 months of life.

Gamma waves are fast, high-frequency, rhythmic brain responses that have been shown to spike when higher cognitive processes are engaged. Research in adults and animals suggests that lower levels of gamma power might hinder the brain’s ability to efficiently package information into coherent images, thoughts and memories. However, until now little has been known about the developmental course of gamma power in children.

Analyzing the children’s EEGs (electroencephalograms), Benasich and her research team found that those with higher language and cognitive abilities had correspondingly higher gamma power than those with poorer language and cognitive scores. Similarly, children with better attention and inhibitory control, the ability to moderate or refrain from behavior when instructed, also had higher gamma power. There were no differences in gamma power based on gender or socio-economic status.

The measurements were obtained by placing a soft bonnet with 62 sensors on the heads of the children as they sat on a parent’s lap and quietly played. In separate tests, children were evaluated for their emerging language and cognitive skills. The researchers looked both at children from families with normal language development and those at higher risk for problems because they were born into families with a history of language disorders. As suspected, the group of children with a family history of language impairments showed lower levels of gamma activity.

“We believe that maturation of the brain mechanisms that support gamma activity and those critical for mounting normal language and cognitive development may be occurring simultaneously,” says Benasich. “We seem to have identified a window, during a period of sustained and dramatic linguistic and cognitive growth, that can help us to better determine where a child is developmentally.”

Such an understanding could provide for earlier and more effective intervention. For example, if a child is found to have lower than average resting gamma, intervention and learning methods could be instituted as a preventative measure. Such early intervention possibly also could result in increasing gamma power in the frontal cortex.

In her other related research, Benasich has discovered that how well infants distinguish differences in successive rapidly occurring tone sequences is a good predictor of future language problems and that it can be determined as early as three months whether a baby will struggle with language development. These latest findings appear to show that the emergence of strong gamma activity is critical for linguistic and cognitive development and that children at risk for language impairments may lag in this process.

“Having strong bursts of gamma appears to assist the brain in making the neural connections needed for effective language development,” says Benasich. “By measuring gamma activity in the frontal cortex, which is the last brain area to mature and is used to make decisions and solve problems, we may be able to tell how well the brain is developing in general.”

Being able to determine a child’s level of development could allow for more effective treatment at a critical point in time when the brain is laying the foundations for cognition and language and establishing efficient connections for future learning. From 16 to 36 months, there is a dramatic explosion of linguistic and cognitive growth; children rush headlong into language, rapidly developing their skills, increasing from a vocabulary of 100 words to 1,000 words, learning that words stand for objects, and that words not only are associated with a specific object but categories, such as “dog” representing not just a single animal but all dogs.

“During this intense learning period, they are little scientists in their environment putting things together and figuring things out,” says Benasich. “Lower levels of gamma power in the resting brain may provide a ‘red flag’ indicating that a child will experience language or attentional problems. Knowing that may allow us to provide effective intervention during this critical learning period.”

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See also:
Mind & Brain
Intelligence
Child Development
Language Acquisition
Behavior
Neuroscience
Psychology
Reference
Mirror neuron
Social cognition
Functional neuroimaging
Electroencephalography

Adapted from materials provided by Rutgers University.

Music moves brain to pay attention

This 20-second clip of a subject's [MRI] illustrates how cognitive activity increases in anticipation of the transition points between movements.

Music moves brain to pay attention, Stanford study finds
By Mitzi Baker

STANFORD, Calif.

Using brain images of people listening to short symphonies by an obscure 18th-century composer, a research team from the Stanford University School of Medicine has gained valuable insight into how the brain sorts out the chaotic world around it.

The research team showed that music engages the areas of the brain involved with paying attention, making predictions and updating the event in memory. Peak brain activity occurred during a short period of silence between musical movements—when seemingly nothing was happening.

Beyond understanding the process of listening to music, their work has far-reaching implications for how human brains sort out events in general. Their findings are published in the Aug. 2 issue of Neuron.

The researchers caught glimpses of the brain in action using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which gives a dynamic image showing which parts of the brain are working during a given activity. The goal of the study was to look at how the brain sorts out events, but the research also revealed that musical techniques used by composers 200 years ago help the brain organize incoming information.

“I’m not sure if the baroque composers would have thought of it in this way, but certainly from a modern neuroscience perspective, our study shows that this is a moment when individual brains respond in a tightly synchronized manner,” Menon said.

The team used music to help study the brain’s attempt to make sense of the continual flow of information the real world generates, a process called event segmentation. The brain partitions information into meaningful chunks by extracting information about beginnings, endings and the boundaries between events.

“These transitions between musical movements offer an ideal setting to study the dynamically changing landscape of activity in the brain during this segmentation process,” said Devarajan Sridharan, a neurosciences graduate student trained in Indian percussion and first author of the article.

No previous study, to the researchers’ knowledge, has directly addressed the question of event segmentation in the act of hearing and, specifically, in music. To explore this area, the team chose pieces of music that contained several movements, which are self-contained sections that break a single work into segments.

They chose eight symphonies by the English late-baroque period composer William Boyce (1711-79), because his music has a familiar style but is not widely recognized, and it contains several well-defined transitions between relatively short movements.

The study focused on movement transitions—when the music slows down, is punctuated by a brief silence and begins the next movement. These transitions span a few seconds and are obvious to even a non-musician—an aspect critical to their study, which was limited to participants with no formal music training.

The researchers attempted to mimic the everyday activity of listening to music, while their subjects were lying prone inside the large, noisy chamber of an MRI machine. Ten men and eight women entered the MRI scanner with noise-reducing headphones, with instructions to simply listen passively to the music.

In the analysis of the participants’ brain scans, the researchers focused on a 10-second window before and after the transition between movements. They identified two distinct neural networks involved in processing the movement transition, located in two separate areas of the brain.

They found what they called a “striking” difference between activity levels in the right and left sides of the brain during the entire transition, with the right side significantly more active.

In this foundational study, the researchers conclude that dynamic changes seen in the fMRI scans reflect the brain’s evolving responses to different phases of a symphony. An event change—the movement transition signaled by the termination of one movement, a brief pause, followed by the initiation of a new movement—activates the first network, called the ventral fronto-temporal network. Then a second network, the dorsal fronto-parietal network, turns the spotlight of attention to the change and, upon the next event beginning, updates working memory.

“The study suggests one possible adaptive evolutionary purpose of music,” said Jonathan Berger, PhD, associate professor of music and a musician who is another co-author of the study. Music engages the brain over a period of time, he said, and the process of listening to music could be a way that the brain sharpens its ability to anticipate events and sustain attention.

According to the researchers, their findings expand on previous functional brain imaging studies of anticipation, which is at the heart of the musical experience. Even non-musicians are actively engaged, at least subconsciously, in tracking the ongoing development of a musical piece, and forming predictions about what will come next. Typically in music, when something will come next is known, because of the music’s underlying pulse or rhythm, but what will occur next is less known, they said.

Having a mismatch between what listeners expect to hear vs. what they actually hear—for example, if an unrelated chord follows an ongoing harmony—triggers similar ventral regions of the brain. Once activated, that region partitions the deviant chord as a different segment with distinct boundaries.

The results of the study “may put us closer to solving the cocktail party problem—how it is that we are able to follow one conversation in a crowded room of many conversations,” said one of the co-authors, Daniel Levitin, PhD, a music psychologist from McGill University who has written a popular book called This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.

Chris Chafe, PhD, the Duca Family Professor of Music at Stanford, also contributed to this work. This research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the National Science Foundation, the Ben and A. Jess Shenson Fund, the National Institutes of Health and a Stanford graduate fellowship. The fMRI analysis was performed at the Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory.

Dedication to my Mother

"Because You Loved Me"

For all those times you stood by me
For all the truth that you made me see
For all the joy you brought to my life
For all the wrong that you made right
For every dream you made come true
For all the love I found in you
I'll be forever thankful
You're the one who held me up
Never let me fall
You're the one who saw me through through it all

You were my strength when I was weak
You were my voice when I couldn't speak
You were my eyes when I couldn't see
You saw the best there was in me
Lifted me up when I couldn't reach
You gave me faith 'cause you believed
I'm everything I am
Because you loved me

You gave me wings and made me fly
You touched my hand I could touch the sky
I lost my faith, you gave it back to me
You said no star was out of reach
You stood by me and I stood tall
I had your love I had it all
I'm grateful for each day you gave me
Maybe I don't know that much
But I know this much is true
I was blessed because I was loved by you

You were my strength when I was weak
You were my voice when I couldn't speak
You were my eyes when I couldn't see
You saw the best there was in me
Lifted me up when I couldn't reach
You gave me faith 'cause you believed
I'm everything I am
Because you loved me

You were always there for me
The tender wind that carried me
A light in the dark shining your love into my life
You've been my inspiration
Through the lies you were the truth
My world is a better place because of you

You were my strength when I was weak
You were my voice when I couldn't speak
You were my eyes when I couldn't see
You saw the best there was in me
Lifted me up when I couldn't reach
You gave me faith 'cause you believed
I'm everything I am
Because you loved me

You were my strength when I was weak
You were my voice when I couldn't speak
You were my eyes when I couldn't see
You saw the best there was in me
Lifted me up when I couldn't reach
You gave me faith 'cause you believed
I'm everything I am
Because you loved me

I'm everything I am
Because you loved me

by Celine Dion

13th February 2008

Quality vs Quantity

After the consultation with my neurosurgeon, alone, immediately I rang the Father of our two children and told him the new's of the recent MRI's, I then sent a text to friend in the UK and rang a friend.

Quality of life? or Quantity of life?

I choose Quality.

Meningioma Facts

A meningioma is a tumour of the meninges:The meningesThe skull protects the brain. Inside the skull, and covering the brain, are 3 thin sheets of body tissue. These are called the meninges and also help to protect the brain. This is the name given to the protective lining of the brain and spinal cord. It can occur in any part of the brain or spinal cord but the commonest sites are at the surface of the brain, either over the top or at the skull base.

About 1 in 4 primary brain tumours in adults (25%) is a meningioma. They are more common in older people and in women. These are tumours growing in the tissues covering the brain. They are most often found in the forebrain or hindbrain. They are usually benign (not cancerous).Some meningiomas are 'atypical'. This means that they behave more aggressively than normally expected for meningiomas. They can grow into surrounding brain tissue and may come back after they have been removed.Meningioma symptoms vary a lot, depending on where in the brain they are growing.Meningiomas are almost always benign and do not spread. Malignant (cancerous) meningiomas are extremely rare. It is also possible, but very rare, to have more than one meningioma. Multiple meningiomas are also extremely rare and present special problems.

How often do meningiomas occur?Because this is a rare condition, meningiomas generally do not occur often, they affect around 1 per 38,000 people. Their incidence increases with age, and they are most commonly found in middle-aged or elderly people, but they also affect younger people & teens.

The majority of meningiomas (over 90%) are benign, but occasionally they recur or re-grow after apparently complete surgical resection. Atypical and malignant meningiomas are more likely to recur.

What causes meningiomas? Like most brain tumours the cause of meningioma is unknown. In some people there may be an underlying genetic abnormality such as a mutation in a specific gene. Recent research has also shown a possible link between meningioma and hormone levels. Meningiomas frequently possess progesterone receptors and, less commonly, oestrogen receptors, which may explain their higher incidence in women.

What are the symptoms?These can vary greatly, dependent on where the tumour is. Symptoms are caused by brain displacement or compression, not by invasion. However, these tumours can be so slow growing that they may go undetected for years. They can grow in and around cranial nerves that control function so that eyesight, taste, smell, sensation (numbness), swallowing or other movement may be affected. They may cause fits or muscle weakness. Sometimes sudden unexplained and/or recurrent severe headaches (which may be accompanied by nausea and/or vomiting) are the first symptom. Occasionally, an eye examination may reveal abnormalities, which lead on to further investigation and diagnosis.

Tests and investigationsIn order to plan the correct treatment doctors need to get as much information as possible about the type, position and size of the tumour. Initially, a neurological examination will take place to assess any effect the tumour has had on the nervous system.
A CT scan or MRI scan will then be done to find the exact position and size of the tumour. MRI scans are the most widely used diagnostic tests since they are very effective in identifying even small meningiomas. The MRI scan usually includes injection of a contrast (a short-acting dye) in order to determine the exact position and size of the tumour. Occasionally, an angiogram will be done, where dye is used to show up the blood vessels in the brain and their relationship with the meningioma.

To confirm the exact type of tumour, a biopsy or sample of cells is taken from the tumour and examined under a microscope, but this is typically done at the time of surgical removal.
The treatment of meningioma depends on a number of factors including your general health, the size and position of the tumour and the rate of progression of the symptoms.
SurgeryWhere possible, surgery is the first form of treatment for meningioma and in many cases the tumour can be removed completely. So far this has been the principal form of treatment for meningioma and it is still so in many circumstances. Surgical resection of meningiomas always has some risk, and growth or size of the meningioma or the progression of the symptoms should justify the risk.

For meningiomas located near the surface of the brain, surgery is often the best option. For meningiomas that are deep (cavernous sinus, medial sphenoid wing, parasellar, skull base and clivus), complete surgical removal may not be possible or it may involve too much risk to the cranial nerves or blood vessels. In addition, meningiomas sometimes recur, especially those that are atypical (on the borderline between benign and malignant). Radiation therapy may then be used to control their regrowth, whereas radiosurgery is increasingly used instead of surgery to control small meningiomas.

Radiation therapy – Conventional radiotherapy may be used after surgery if the meningioma cannot be totally removed, in order to destroy any remaining tumour cells. Radiotherapy and radiosurgery have become a promising alternative to surgery in the treatment of surgically inaccessible meningiomas.

In RT (stereotactic radiotherapy or radiosurgery) a highly focused radiation is given, which precisely targets the tumour with little impact on healthy brain tissue. Radiation is administered in multiple smaller treatments over a number of weeks (often 30 sessions given over six weeks). This allows the overall total dose to be higher than in standard radiation, because it allows normal brain tissue to recover better. It stops tumour growth in the vast majority of cases and in some people it may even cause the tumour to shrink. Each treatment is called a “fraction” therefore this type of therapy is sometimes called “fractionated” therapy. Fractionated stereotactic radiosurgery is often called FSR.

Radiosurgery can be given either with a gamma knife or a modified linear accelerator. Gamma knife radiosurgery is generally a single treatment planned and delivered all in one day, but fractionated radiotherapy using a linear accelerator has overtaken it, as it is safer for most tumours, (though not all). READ RADIOTHERAPY NOTES

Hormonal therapy and chemotherapy – These options have been tried in a small number of patients when meningiomas recurred despite treatment with surgery and/or radiotherapy. Hormonal therapy is based on the fact that many meningiomas contain receptors for hormones such as progesterone. Anti-progesterone drugs have been tried in a few clinical trials, but results thus far have been disappointing. The use of chemotherapy is limited by the fact that meningiomas are typically slow growing and therefore not very susceptible to chemo drugs. These modes of treatment are still not proven and are rarely used, especially when other proven treatment options are available.

Watch and WaitSmall, asymptomatic (few or no symptoms or signs) meningiomas can be carefully observed and followed with regular MRI scans. This can be an option where the tumour is slow growing, and it may be preferable, particularly in elderly patients, when there are no clinical signs (symptoms or impairments). A possible advantage is that better treatments and procedures may be available by the time treatment is needed.