(NaturalNews) Northwestern University scientists have pulled together a review of research into what music -- specifically, learning to play music -- does to humans. The result shows music training does far more than allow us to entertain ourselves and others by playing an instrument or singing. Instead, it actually changes our brains.The paper, just published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, is a compilation of research findings from scientists all over the world who used all kinds of research methods. The bottom line to all these studies: musical training has a profound impact on other skills including speech and language, memory and attention, and even the ability to convey emotions vocally. So what is it that musical training does? According to the Northwestern scientists, the findings ...MedWorm Message: Register for MedMatcha, MedWorm's medical advertising network, and receive $5 free advertising.

In 2007, the New Zealand Ministry of Education formally recognized the condition of dyslexia for the first time and has subsequently developed a working definition of the condition. The aim of this article is to draw on contemporary theory and research on ... (Source: SafetyLit: All (Unduplicated))

For a long, long time I've been arguing that differences in the way people learn, see and think are a good thing despite the fact that the mainstream would have those who don't process information in a traditional and linear way diagnosed with any number of "defects." Mine was dyslexia. But there is an interesting shift going on.Until now, information has typically been delivered as text - black letters on white paper. Letter-by-letter, line-by-line, paragraph-by-paragraph, page-by-page. No color, no movement, no sound, no design, no patterns, nothing. Then came the Internet and suddenly, everything changed. Reading became much livelier an experience and traditional learning went out the window along with linear thinking. Now, we have the option to watch videos and read articles. We link o...

Abstract: Cyclic alternating pattern (CAP) has now been studied in different age groups of normal infants and children, and it is clear that it shows dramatic changes with age. In this review we first focus on the important age-related changes of CAP from birth to peripubertal age and, subsequently, we describe the numerous studies on CAP in developmental clinical conditions such as pediatric sleep disordered breathing, disorders of arousal (sleep walking and sleep terror), pediatric narcolepsy, learning disabilities with mental retardation (fragile-X syndrome, Down syndrome, autistic spectrum disorder, Prader-Willi syndrome) or without (dyslexia, Asperger syndrome, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder). CAP rate is almost always decreased in these conditions with the exception of the ...

Authors: Ciaghi M, Pancheri E, Miceli G We studied the reading performance of 340 consecutive, Italian-speaking aphasics in order to evaluate the clinical features of deep dyslexia, the functional impairments underlying semantic paralexias, and their neuranatomical correlates. Semantic paralexias were observed in 9/340 subjects (2.4%). Our data and a review of the literature show that most deep dyslexics suffer from superficial and deep vascular damage in the territory of the left middle cerebral artery, and that they are relatively young, well-educated individuals, in the chronic stage of their disease. In these subjects, perisylvian damage might be mainly responsible for damage to sublexical grapheme-phoneme Conversion (GPC) procedures, and extrasylvian damage for lexical-semantic im...MedWorm Message: Register for MedMatcha, MedWorm's medical advertising network, and receive $5 free advertising.

Authors: Coltheart M, Saunders SJ, Tree JJ Rogers, Lambon Ralph, Hodges, and Patterson (2004) studied two-alternative forced-choice visual lexical decision performance in patients with semantic dementia. With item pairs where the target word was more "typical" (i.e., higher in bigram and trigram frequency) than the foil (all foils were pseudohomophones), lexical decision performance was good and was unaffected by word frequency. With item pairs where the target word was less "typical" (i.e., lower in bigram and trigram frequency) than the foil, lexical decision performance was worse and was affected by word frequency, being particularly inaccurate when the word targets were low in frequency. We show (using as materials all the monosyllabic items used by Rogers and colleagues) that the ...

This study investigated the role of speech perception accuracy and speed in fluent word decoding of reading disabled (RD) children. A same-different phoneme discrimination task with natural speech tested the perception of single consonants and consonant clusters by young but persistent RD children. RD children were slower than chronological age (CA) controls in recognizing identical sounds, suggesting less distinct phonemic categories. In addition, after controlling for phonetic similarity Tallal's (Brain Lang 9:182-198, 1980) fast transitions account of RD children's speech perception problems was contrasted with Studdert-Kennedy's (Read Writ Interdiscip J 15:5-14, 2002) similarity explanation. Results showed no specific RD deficit in perceiving fast transitions. Both phonetic similarity ...

Adventurer Charley Boorman on growing up with dyslexia (Source: BBC News | Health | UK Edition)

For those who are blind, dyslexic or have diseases like multiple sclerosis and have difficulty turning book pages, reading the latest best seller just got easier. (Source: Multiple Sclerosis Trust)

This study examined the pattern of results on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV; French version) for 60 French children with dyslexia, from 8 to 16 years of age. Although use of WISC-III failed to clearly identify typical profiles and cognitive deficits in dyslexia, WISC-IV offers an opportunity to reach these objectives with new indexes and subtests. The mean performance analysis showed a Working Memory Index (WMI) at a limit level, significantly lower compared to the three other indexes. The WMI was the lowest index for 68% of the population studied and was significantly weaker for children with phonological dyslexia compared to children with surface dyslexia. WISC-IV evidenced preserved language and reasoning abilities in contrast to limited verbal working memory eff...

Authors: Lemonnier E The term "dyspraxia" was coined by Julian de Ajuriaguerra and Mira Stambak in 1964. This clinical term was treated very differently according to which explanatory model was adopted. Nowadays, it is used to refer to developmental coordination disorder in view of its neuro-developmental origin. In any case, the actual clinical situations vary and are often complex. In our opinion, it is first necessary to examine the differential diagnosis: apraxia in children caused by lesions, dysgraphia, simply delayed motor development, non-verbal learning disability syndrome, hemispheric specialisation deficits, pervasive developmental disorders (autisms, Asperger syndrome, atypical autism and other pervasive developmental disorders), mixed specific developmental disorders, mult...MedWorm Message: Register for MedMatcha, MedWorm's medical advertising network, and receive $5 free advertising.

Abstract: Forty per cent of a child’s waking life is spent in school and one of the most intrusive impacts on the success or otherwise of this experience is that of reading difficulties. Developmental dyslexia has a high genetic contribution affecting 50% of children with dyslexic parents. The paediatrician may be consulted for a child with dyslexia to advocate, interpret predisposing factors in the child’s developmental and medical history and offer scientific interpretation of the vast range of theories and interventions proposed for dyslexia. The purpose of this article is to orientate the paediatrician to what they need to know, so that they can maximize their contribution in the care of children with developmental dyslexia within a multidisciplinary team. It will cover the epidemi...

This article examines these recent findings. A second article to appear in Advances will focus on clinical aspects of the disorder. (Source: Advances in Psychiatric Treatment)

DIG Coaching Practices presents Attention Talk Radio and "The Disorganized Mind" by Nancy Ratey: Insights on the Book and How a Person with Dyslexia and ADHD Goes about Writing a Book. (Source: Disabled World)

Future Neurology , July 2010, Vol. 5, No. 4, Pages 597-617. (Source: Future Neurology)

Paul Satz, a UCLA professor emeritus of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences and the founder of the neuropsychology program at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, died June 20, in Lihue, Hawaii, after a long battle with cancer. He was 77.   One of the founders of the discipline of neuropsychology, Satz was widely recognized for his groundbreaking research on brain–behavior relations. During his tenure at UCLA (1981–2002), he established the UCLA Neuropsychology Program and helped turn it into one of the world's largest and most successful training programs for clinical neuropsychologists.   The author of more than 300 publications, Satz's scientific contributions to the understanding of normal and abnormal...MedWorm Message: Register for MedMatcha, MedWorm's medical advertising network, and receive $5 free advertising.

Conclusion Besides reading-induced myoclonic jerks of the jaw, a second variant of reading epilepsy exists with clearly partial seizures manifested by visual symptoms and a- or dyslexia. These seizures originate from the occipito-temporal region of the dominant hemisphere, corresponding to the posterior part of the neural network that underlies the function of reading. (Source: Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry)

Authors: Wong SW, Ho CS Clarifying whether automatization deficits constitute the primary causes or symptoms of developmental dyslexia, we focused on three critical issues of the dyslexic automatization deficit, namely universality, domain specificity, and severity. Thirty Chinese dyslexic children (mean age 10 years and 5 months), 30 chronological-age-, and 30 reading-level-matched children were tested in 4 areas of automaticity: motor, visual search, Stroop facilitation effects, and automatic word recognition. The results showed that the dyslexic children performed significantly worse than the CA-controls but not the RL-controls in all the tasks except for Stroop congruent-color words, on which they performed worse than children in both control groups. The deficits reflect a lag in r...

Authors: Nalavany BA, Carawan LW, Rennick RA Concept mapping (a mixed qualitative-quantitative methodology) was used to describe and understand the psychosocial experiences of adults with confirmed and self-identified dyslexia. Using innovative processes of art and photography, Phase 1 of the study included 15 adults who participated in focus groups and in-depth interviews and were asked to elucidate their experiences with dyslexia. On index cards, 75 statements and experiences with dyslexia were recorded. The second phase of the study included 39 participants who sorted these statements into self-defined categories and rated each statement to reflect their personal experiences to produce a visual representation, or concept map, of their experience. The final concept map generated nine...

This small-scale study compared 10 to 13-year-old dyslexic children's use of text message abbreviations with that of reading age- and chronological age-matched controls. There were no significant differences in the proportion of textisms used between the dyslexic children and the two control groups, although a preference for non-phonetic text abbreviations was observed in the dyslexic group. Unlike the controls, there was little evidence of an association between phonological awareness and textism use in children with dyslexia. These results are discussed in relation to strategy use by dyslexic children when decoding text. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. (Source: Dyslexia)