Training Faulty Brains To Work Better
August 19th 2009 05:31
Signature Tune
New treatments may help schizophrenics.
From: Newsweek
Whenever I speak to educators and interested laypeople about neuroplasticity—the ability of the adult brain to change in function and structure—one of the questions I often get is whether neuroplasticity can be tapped to treat truly devastating brain diseases such as Alzheimer's or schizophrenia. After all, neuroplasticity has been used to treat stroke, depression, dyslexia, and other diseases or injuries of the brain. The jury is still out on Alzheimer's (though since this disease involves massive neuronal death, my bet is that the answer will, sadly, be no). But to my surprise, the answer to schizophrenia might just be yes.
In schizophrenia, which affects about 1.1 percent of American adults, patients suffer from visual and auditory hallucinations, delusions, an absence of emotion, and cognitive deficits. All told, that seemed to be just too much for an approach based on neuroplasticity, which involves retraining the brain, to handle.
But it turns out that at least some of the symptoms of schizophrenia can be lifted with brain training. In a study published in the July issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, scientists led by Melissa Fisher of the University of California, San Francisco, describe what they call "neuroplasticity-based auditory training" to improve memory in people with schizophrenia. Basically, what they did was assign 55 patients with schizophrenia to receive a cognitive-training program developed by Posit Science or to play a computer game that required just as much time and concentration. The Posit program, similar to one the company developed to improve memory in the elderly, emphasizes basic auditory and speech perception; participants used it one hour a day, five days a week, for 10 weeks. The better they got, the harder the program got: it automatically adjusts the level of difficulty to keep the patients' performance at a constant level so they stay engaged.
Fisher and her colleagues found that the brain-trained group showed noticeably bigger improvements in cognition and verbal working memory than the game-playing control group. A better memory would give people with schizophrenia a better chance of doing the little tasks of daily life—remembering what and when to eat, how to dress, how to behave in public—that make them more likely to hold a job and live independently.
The emphasis on auditory training reflects the belief of UCSF's Michael Merzenich, a pioneer in neuroplasticity and cofounder of Posit, that this is the portal to improved memory and, possibly, cognition. The idea is that if you hear more clearly, then your brain makes fewer errors in encoding the information contained in speech. As Michael Green of UCLA put it in an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry the Posit Science approach "is unusual in that it rests heavily on neuroplasticity models ... that emphasize the consequences of a poor signal-to-noise ratio" in hearing, "which leads to errors and poor performance as they are fed forward for cognitive … operations."
It's hard to argue with even preliminary success, odd as it seems that merely hearing better could bring about such improvements in memory (and not just memory for heard words; it improves memory for seen words as well). "This emphasis on perceptual processes is a critical insight of the Posit Science approach and a clear distinction from other cognitive-training programs," says Green. The significance of the new study, he says, is that "it addresses cognitive training at a more basic neurobiological level than any previous strategy. We can hope that the dramatic effects they have reported will prove to be replicable and durable and that they will extend to meaningful effects for patients' lives."
Link to the article for those interested in its source and what else they have to say
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