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Bates attempted to replicate Helmholtz’s original experiments, using a retinoscope on fish, rabbits, cats, and dogs, and found that focusing problems occurred not only because the lens shape changed but also because the shape of the entire eyeball changed, caused by the six external muscles that surround the eyes, which were previously thought to move the eyes only to track objects.
Nearsighted people often have tense sore eyes, sensations that they tend to suppress but that they can notice if they close their eyes and pay close attention to how they feel.
receptors are stimulated to fire off a second “snapshot” of the image. Even when we think we are staring fixedly at an object, our eyes are making microsaccades, sending multiple versions of the images to refresh the brain.
Bates developed alternative theories about how eye problems, such as nearsightedness, farsightedness, and crossed eyes, develop: he believed they are often caused by the habitual ways people use their eyes.
been part of the oral tradition, were the following: First, Namgyal Rinpoche told him to “meditate on the color blue-black for a few hours a day. It
Second, Namgyal Rinpoche told him to “move the eyes up, down, left, and right, and around in circles, as well as on diagonals.” Third, he said he must “blink frequently.” And fourth, he said, “Sun your eyes. Sit at a forty-five-degree angle to the sun, in morning or later afternoon when the sun is lower in the sky, eyes closed, to let the warmth and light penetrate through all the eye tissues, like taking a warm bath for the eyes, ten to twenty minutes a day.”
Today people increasingly spend most of the day at computers and smartphones, reading hurriedly, looking only short distances ahead. Fast
First, palming, by turning on the parasympathetic nervous system, allows the nervous system to settle, relax,
Second, neuromodulation occurs as the imbalance between excitation and inhibition is being adjusted.
Third, once a modulated state has been reached, a series of increasingly fine differentiations can be made. The
Finally, once the differentiation has been learned, the effect of these new changes on the whole nervous system is observed,
“The Feldenkrais lesson seemed to disarm my defenses. The constant and surprising shifts of attention throughout the lesson, and the explicit search to notice differences, kept me interested, alert, and engaged in the process. I
blind or had serious vision problems, he thought of all such waiting rooms
But why stimulate the tongue? Because the tongue, the team has discovered, is a royal road to activating the entire human brain. The tongue is one of the most sensitive organs in the body. “When the carnivores started to move on the surface of the earth,” Yuri points out, “the first points of contact with the earth were the tongue and the tip of the nose. Both are designed for exploring the environment—for
By Yuri’s analysis, there are 15,000 to 50,000 nerve fibers on the tip of the tongue, which create a huge information highway. The
In vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), an electrode is coiled around the left vagus nerve (a cranial nerve near the carotid artery in the neck), which sends stimulation to the brain stem’s nucleus tractus solitarius, one of the areas targeted by the device. At times VNS works for depression, but it requires surgery to implant a pacemaker into the chest to fire electrical stimulation. Another kind, deep brain stimulation (DBS), has been used on patients with Parkinson’s disease or depression, to target the circuits involved directly, with some success. But with DBS, a surgeon must implant electrodes
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Dr. Kurz’s
Yuri explained to them that their brains had quieted their noisy firing and had started forming new neuroplastic connections but had not completely healed yet.
Yuri’s hypothesis is that the PoNS device works in so many different kinds of illness because it activates the neuronal network’s general mechanisms of homeostatic regulation.
The device, he believes, sends extra electrical spikes—signals—into the interneuron system, creating spikes in interneurons that are unable to produce spikes by themselves due to disease. This allows a network that has lost the ability to regulate the balance between excitation and inhibition to be restored.
The vagus nerve, which supplies and regulates the gastrointestinal tract and digestion, is in the brain stem; its stimulation turns on the parasympathetic system and calms a person down. The brain stem also houses the reticular activating system (RAS), which regulates our level of arousal, influences our sleep-wake cycle, and can power up the rest of the brain (see Chapter 3 for details). Stimulation of the vagus and the RAS, Yuri believes, is the reason most patients who use the device have found they sleep better at night and are more awake during the day.
In an injured brain, Yuri believes, the spike flow in the sensory-motor loops that go from the body to the brain and back is unbalanced, desynchronized, disrupted, or too low. Instead of getting, say, a burst of a hundred spikes in 100 milliseconds in order to move, a muscle will get only ten spikes in that time, so it can’t contract properly, because its contraction becomes slow and weak. Before
According to Yuri, if some harm comes to one part of a functional system required for a movement—say, a person has a stroke in the motor cortex—the effects will not be confined to the motor cortex. Because the motor cortex is connected, or networked, with many other brain areas, the whole functional network that underlies the movement will be affected,
With the PoNS, one can divide the intervention into the stages of healing I have proposed. The neurostimulation leads to improved homeostasis, or neuromodulation, which balances the network. The neuromodulation quickly decreases the patients’ supersensitivities and appears to reset the brain stem’s reticular activating system that regulates arousal level, restoring a normal sleep cycle. This leads to neurorelaxation, allowing the circuits to rest and restore their energy. Ongoing neurostimulation, combined with the patients’ restored energy, allows them to turn on dormant circuits by engaging
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Norman Mailer, the abrasive novelist, wrote in Advertisements for Myself, “Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.”
The upside is that if we can restore homeostasis to noisy neural networks, we can slow symptom progression that we think of as mercilessly progressive.
tinnitus (ringing in the ears),
They think the device may help improve functioning for autistic spectrum disorders (where the cerebellum is often affected, and where balance and sensory integration problems are prominent),
it also turns off chronic inflammation, a newly discovered effect of electricity on the brain. Scientists have discovered a neuroinflammatory reflex that is housed in the vagus nerve (which the PoNS stimulates directly) and have recently used electrical stimulation of the vagus to cure rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune illness like MS, in a man for whom all medications had failed. The details of the neuroinflammatory reflex, and how it works to turn off an overactive immune system almost immediately, are discussed in detail in the endnotes.
MADAULE, I DISCOVERED, ACTUALLY lived on my street in Toronto, in an old Victorian house from the 1880s, hidden far back from the sidewalk, off an alley, behind a wooden fence, surrounded by a botanical garden the size of a small park. He had bought the property when it
Prematurity, even without oxygen deprivation, contributes to fewer connections between neurons because a rapid increase in the branching of fetal neurons normally occurs in the last third of pregnancy—the period when most premature babies are extruded from the womb.
I have described: in the first few days he required appropriate neurostimulation, which turned on the parts of his brain that neuromodulate arousal. He got the neurostimulation and began to sleep properly. This state of neurorelaxation allowed him to accumulate energy so that he was soon able to make huge leaps in language development and sensory discrimination, a sign of neurodifferentiation.
When Paul works with children who can’t speak or who have immature or delayed speech, he often finds that moving them on a swing while they are wearing the Electronic Ear stimulates their speech, showing
But what really happened was that as a new structure was added, the older ones adapted; the presence of a new structure modified the old, and old and new now work together holistically. Recent studies in animals and humans have demonstrated this phenomenon beautifully: they show that as the cortex evolved and increased in size, the subcortical structures grew massively and were modified.
Once again the lesson is that localization, while instructive, can be taken too far and often is. Our cortico-centric view has failed to take into sufficient account the contributions of the subcortical brain.
Paul doesn’t claim to perform such wonders with all autistic children. But he has found that most of the autistic patients who he thinks will benefit from listening therapy do improve significantly, though many will still have remnants of the condition.*
Sound therapy can correct attention problems by stimulating all the subcortical areas illustrated in the figure on page 338. All these subcortical areas in the figure are stimulated initially by sound therapy, especially when combined with movement.
The music in sound therapy turns on and enhances the connection between brain areas that process positive reward (which give us a feeling of pleasure when we accomplish something) and the insula, a cortical area of the brain that is involved in paying attention.
There is a direct link between the ear and the sensory pathways of the vagus nerve. Sound therapy, as Minson and Pointer explain, stimulates the sensory vagus, which supplies the ear canal and tympanic membrane.
Many children with eating problems, including some colicky babies, actually have sensory processing problems, which make them picky eaters.
Chanting, in many traditions, is known to energize the chanter. Tomatis himself chanted, to keep charged through the day. “There are sounds which are as good as two cups of coffee,” he said. He was so energetic that he slept only four hours a night.
For a chant to be effective, the chanter must produce high frequencies, which stimulate the cochlea, which has many receptors for these frequencies. When sung properly, Tibetan Buddhist chants of “om”—often perceived as deep and low—actually produce many high overtones, or harmonics, which is why they sound so rich.
It can take decades for a monk to perfect this sound, which is so filled with harmonics (higher sounds), it is actually a chord. A
REGORIAN CHANT DOES NOT ONLY energize; it is also effective in calming the spirit at the same time, which is why Paul often ends his clients’ listening sessions with it. The Gregorian music that he plays is modified to quickly alternate between emphasizing the higher and the lower frequencies, so it also has a training effect on the middle ear system; but the chant still covers the full spectrum of sound, which strengthens the calming, grounding effect.
Brain scan studies show that when the brain is stimulated by music, its neurons begin to fire in perfect synchrony with it, entraining with the music it hears.
“Mozart, more than any other composer, prepared the path, primed the nervous system, primed the brain—wired the brain—and gave it the rhythms, melodies, flow, and movement required for the acquisition of language.
