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A state-of-the-art medical scanner will help scientists unveil the secrets of how the brain processes languages. The magneto-encephalography machine, which was unveiled yesterday at the inauguration of New York University Abu Dhabi's Neuroscience of Language Laboratory, will be able to analyse language processes in the brain faster and more efficiently than current neuroscience technology.

Study examined the medical records of 648 Alzheimer's patients in Hyderabad and found that bilinguals developed dementia four to five years later than monolinguals. 

Truth is stranger than fiction. A tenth century Anglo-Saxon eye salve not only cures sties but eradicated 90% of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, otherwise known as MRSA. The recipe, translated from Anglo-Saxon, is from Bald's Leechbook, a leatherbound Old English manuscript kept in the British Library. The Leechbook is widely thought of as one of the earliest known medical textbooks and contains Anglo-Saxon medical advice and recipes for medicines, salves and treatments. Another reason why it pays to know obscure languages.

Schizophrenia is a devastating brain disorder, and current treatments may not do enough to address the personal suffering, family burden, and cost to society linked to the illness. But a landmark new study finds that a treatment combining talk therapy and low-dose medication is more effective than traditional medication-only treatment. The actual study can be found at this link: http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2015.15050632.

In an article in Brain, researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and elsewhere report which brain regions must be intact in stroke survivors with aphasia if they are to perform well in a speech entrainment session, successfully following along with another speaker.

Fascinating look at the subcultural language of hospitals! The article provides several examples of "argot," the formal name for slang or jargon. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines "argot" as "an often more or less secret vocabulary and idiom peculiar to a particular group" [1]. According to its stated definition, argot permits those in the know to 1. share complex pieces of information without bystanders understanding what they are saying. 2. create or reinforce a bond between users. 3. give some emotional distance between the speaker and the event and its impact on patients and family members. 4. permits those in the know to express regret or even revulsion at having to deal with unpleasant situations. "Code brown," which refers to a conspicuous episode of fecal incontinence, is an example frequently used in the hospital setting.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine launched the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) in 1984 to help computers understand biomedical meaning as well as retrieve and integrate information from various electronic sources such as patient records and biomedical literature. From the set up of parameters for vocabulary sources, to the release of the UMLS "Metathesaurus," this article takes a look at how a vocabulary database tackled the most significant barrier to the application of computers in medicine, the lack of standard language in medicine.

Brain-imaging studies have shown that music activates many diverse parts of the brain, including an overlap in where the brain processes music and language. Brains of people exposed to even casual musical training have an enhanced ability to generate the brain wave patterns associated with specific sounds, be they musical or spoken, said study leader Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois. Musicians have subconsciously trained their brains to better recognize selective sound patterns, even as background noise goes up. In contrast, people with certain developmental disorders, such as dyslexia, have a harder time hearing sounds amid the din. Musical experience could therefore be a key therapy for children with dyslexia and similar language-related disorders. Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug has found that stroke patients who have lost the ability to speak can be trained to say hundreds of phrases by singing them first. Schlaug demonstrated the results of intensive musical therapy on patients with lesions on the left sides of their brains, those areas most associated with language. Before the therapy, these stroke patients responded to questions with largely incoherent sounds and phrases. But after just a few minutes with therapists, who asked them to sing phrases and tap their hands to the rhythm, the patients could sing "Happy Birthday," recite their addresses, and communicate if they were thirsty. "The underdeveloped systems on the right side of the brain that respond to music became enhanced and changed structures," Schlaug said at the press briefing.

Some adults learn a second language better than others, and their secret may involve the rhythms of activity in their brains. New findings by scientists at the University of Washington demonstrate that a five-minute measurement of resting-state brain activity predicted how quickly adults learned a second language.

Researchers from Univ. of Washington did an experiment and found certain brain wave patterns can influence and make learning a second language easier/quicker.

This month, the journal Pediatrics published a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity in 3-to 5-year-old children as they listened to age-appropriate stories. The researchers found differences in brain activation according to how much the children had been read to at home. Children whose parents reported more reading at home and more books in the home showed significantly greater activation of brain areas in a region of the left hemisphere called the parietal-temporal-occipital association cortex. This brain area is "a watershed region, all about multisensory integration, integrating sound and then visual stimulation," said the lead author, Dr. John S. Hutton, a clinical research fellow at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. This region of the brain is known to be very active when older children read to themselves, but Dr. Hutton notes that it also lights up when younger children are hearing stories. What was especially novel was that children who were exposed to more books and home reading showed significantly more activity in the areas of the brain that process visual association, even though the child was in the scanner just listening to a story and could not see any pictures. "When kids are hearing stories, they're imagining in their mind's eye when they hear the story," said Dr. Hutton. "For example, 'The frog jumped over the log.' I've seen a frog before, I've seen a log before, what does that look like?" The different levels of brain activation, he said, suggest that children who have more practice in developing those visual images, as they look at picture books and listen to stories, may develop skills that will help them make images and stories out of words later on. "It helps them understand what things look like, and may help them transition to books without pictures," he said. "It will help them later be better readers because they've developed that part of the brain

Doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, are treating stroke patients who have little or no spontaneous speech by associating melodies with words and phrases. "Music, and music-making, is really a very special form of a tool or an intervention that can be used to treat neurological disorders, said Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, associate professor of neurology at Beth Israel and Harvard University.

I saw this topic at one of ms. stewarts posts and the topic really interests me as someone that is really interested in biology and believes in the science of medicine. possible research topic.

The New England Journal of Medicine has a first-person article about the consequences of the language of economics in the doctoring biz . From the article, "A decent medical-care system that helps all the people cannot be built without the language of equity and care. If this language is permitted to die and is completely replaced by the language of efficiency and cost control, all of us - including physicians - will lose something precious."

Schizophrenia is a very disabling psychiatric illness affecting about 2 to 3 million Americans. Contrary to popular perception, it has nothing to do with a "split personality." Schizophrenia is a chronic brain disorder involving "positive" and "negative" symptoms. Positive symptoms include hallucinations (hearing voices or seeing visions that aren't real), delusions (fixed false beliefs), and disorganized thinking or speech. A recent study in the Archives of General Psychiatry by Paul Grant, Aaron Beck, and their colleagues found that a modified version of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), a specific type of talk therapy, can produce clinically significant improvement in patients with schizophrenia. Importantly, significant improvement was seen in certain negative symptoms-apathy/avolition (lack of drive)-as well as in positive symptoms. These results are impressive, especially considering that the participants had been ill for an average of 18 years and suffered from severe symptoms. In this study, study participants were divided into two groups. One group received CBT in addition to "standard treatment," which included treatment with antipsychotic medications. The other group received standard treatment alone. CBT has been shown to be effective in a variety of psychiatric illnesses. It uses pragmatic techniques to help a person correct inaccurate or dysfunctional thoughts and emotions by promoting critical comparison of those thoughts with observable facts. For example, if a person believes that he/she is "doing absolutely nothing," one CBT technique would be to encourage the person to keep a detailed diary of daily activities. The therapist would later review this diary with the patient and facts would be compared to perceptions. Homework assignments would include strategies to increase productive activities. In the study mentioned above, the researchers focused CBT "on identifying and promoting concrete goals for improving quality of life and

An interview with Ellen Bialystok, a cognitive neuroscientist, about the advantages of being bilingual.

A cognitive neuroscientist, Ellen Bialystok has spent almost 40 years learning about how bilingualism sharpens the mind. Her good news: Among other benefits, the regular use of two languages appears to delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease symptoms. Dr. Bialystok, 62, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, was awarded a $100,000 Killam Prize last year for her contributions to social science.

"In our next studies , we looked at the medical records of 400 Alzheimer's patients. On average, the bilinguals showed Alzheimer's symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language. This didn't mean that the bilinguals didn't have Alzheimer's. It meant that as the disease took root in their brains, they were able to continue functioning at a higher level. They could cope with the disease for longer." No other website I have found has so comprehensively covered the various benefits of being bilingual. This is a concise interview that displays that bilingual people are not only better at multitasking but can also delay the onset of Alzheimer's by up to 5 years.

This article talks about: -swearing -what makes a word taboo -social norms -why "taboo" words still exist -to envoke feeling -part of the brain used while swearing -amygdala: processes emotion and memory -swearing and medical conditions -swearing and freedom of speech

This article explains different aspects of swearing. It talks about the idea of swearing itself and why swear words are considered swear words. It also explains why people swear and for what uses. It also explains how swearing affects the brain.

In a group of internationally adopted children with cleft lip and/or palate, speech at age five is impaired compared to a corresponding group of children born in Sweden, a study shows. The adopted children also need more extensive surgery, which may be due to their surgical interventions taking place later in life.

This article talks about how and if music helps a person study and memorization skills. People who have a musical background learned better with neutral music and tested better with pleasurable music. The opposite was true for people without music training.

Why does psychotherapy favorably compare to medication in treating depression? One reason may be rooted in the evolutionary origins of depression. Scholars suggest humans may become depressed to help us focus attention on a problem that might cause someone to fall out of step with family, friends, clan or the larger society-an outcast status that, especially in Paleolithic times, would have meant an all-but-certain tragic fate. Depression, by this account, came about as a mood state to make us think long and hard about behaviors that may have caused us to become despondent because some issue in our lives is socially problematic. Steven D. Hollon, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, explores the implications of helping a patient come to grips with the underlying causes of a depression-which is the goal of CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), and is also in line with an evolutionary explanation. The anodyne effects of an antidepressant, by contrast, may divert a patient from engaging in the reflective process for which depression evolved-a reason perhaps that psychotherapy appears to produce a more enduring effect than antidepressants. Hollon notes that depression has a purpose--it spurs rumination about complex social problems, and that CBT can expedite rumination and make it more effective. He states, "For most people, depression motivates them to think more deliberately about the causes of their problems and the solutions they can apply. In most instances in our ancestral past this worked well enough; most depressions remit spontaneously even in the absence of treatment. Cognitive therapy, at the least, hurries the process along and, at the most, helps unstick that subset of individuals who get stuck making negative ascriptions about themselves, typically about personal competence or lovability."