Frustration and Hijacking the Amygdala

Sensory Integration Therapy

Sensory Integration Therapy

Sensory Integration Therapy

Sensory Integration Therapy

Sensory Integration Therapy

Sensory Integration Therapy

Sensory Integration Therapy

This is another therapy for healing trauma that I learned about from reading The Body Keeps Score.

Bessel van der Kolk

From yee Wiki:

Sensory integration therapy is based on A. Jean Ayres' theory of Sensory Integration. Ayres' Sensory Integration (ASI) is a theory that describes:

How the neurological process of processing and integrating sensory information from the body and the environment contribute to emotional regulation, learning, behavior, and participation in daily life.

Empirically derived disorders of sensory integration and an intervention approach. “Sensory integration theory is used to explain why individuals behave in particular ways, plan intervention to ameliorate particular difficulties, and predict how behavior will change as a result of intervention."

Sensory integration theory originated from the work of A. Jean Ayres, PhD, OTR, an occupational therapist and psychologist, whose clinical insights and original research revolutionized occupational therapy practice with children. 

Dr. Ayres wrote "Sensory Integration is the organization of sensations for use. Our senses give us information about the physical conditions of our body and the environment around us...The brain must organize all of our sensations if a person is to move and learn and behave in a productive manner."

 Sensory Integration Therapy

Sensory Integration Therapy

Sensory Integration Therapy

Sensory Integration Therapy

Sensory Integration Therapy

In the News: Lack Of Deep Sleep May Set The Stage For Alzheimer's

Jeffrey Iliff (right) and Bill Rooney, brain scientists at Oregon Health & Science University, look over an MRI. The school has an especially sensitive MRI unit that should be able to detect precisely when during sleep the brain is being cleansed of toxins.

There's growing evidence that a lack of sleep can leave the brain vulnerable to Alzheimer's disease.

"Changes in sleep habits may actually be setting the stage" for dementia, says Jeffrey Iliff, a brain scientist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.

The brain appears to clear out toxins linked to Alzheimer's during sleep, Iliff explains. And, at least among research animals that don't get enough solid shut-eye, those toxins can build up and damage the brain.

Iliff and other scientists at OHSU are about to launch a study of people that should clarify the link between sleep problems and Alzheimer's disease in humans.

It has been clear for decades that there is some sort of link. Sleep disorders are very common among people with Alzheimer's disease.

For a long time, researchers thought this was simply because the disease was "taking out the centers of the brain that are responsible for regulating sleep," Iliff says. But two recent discoveries have suggested the relationship may be more complicated.

The first finding emerged in 2009, when researchers at Washington University in St. Louis showed that the sticky amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer's develop more quickly in the brains of sleep-deprived mice.

Then, in 2013, Iliff was a member of a team that discovered how a lack of sleep could be speeding the development of those Alzheimer's plaques: A remarkable cleansing process takes place in the brain during deep sleep, at least in animals.

What happens, Iliff says, is "the fluid that's normally on the outside of the brain, cerebrospinal fluid — it's a clean, clear fluid — it actually begins to recirculate back into and through the brain along the outsides of blood vessels."

This process, via what's known as the glymphatic system, allows the brain to clear out toxins, including the toxins that form Alzheimer's plaques, Iliff says.

Scientists watch dye flow through the brain of a sleeping mouse.Nedergaard Lab, University of Rochester Medical Center.

"That suggests at least one possible way that disruption in sleep may predispose toward Alzheimer's disease," he says.

To know for sure, though, researchers will have to study this cleansing process in people, which won't be easy.

Iliff studied the glymphatic system in living mice by looking through a window created in the skull. The system also involved a powerful laser and state-of-the-art microscope.

With people, "we have to find a way to see the same sort of function, but in a way that is going to be reasonably noninvasive and safe," he says.

The solution may involve one of the world's most powerful magnetic resonance imaging machines, which sits in a basement at OHSU. The MRI unit is so sensitive, it should be able to detect changes that indicate precisely when the glymphatic system gets switched on in a person's brain, says Bill Rooney, who directs the university's Advanced Imaging Research Center.

When humans enter deep sleep, and toxin removal begins, there should be a particular change in the signal coming from certain salt molecules. That would indicate that fluid has begun moving freely through the brain.

In young, healthy brains, the signal should be "robust," Rooney says, indicating that the toxin removal system is working well. In the brains of older people, and those who are likely to develop Alzheimer's, the signal should be weaker.

Rooney and Iliff have received funding from the Paul G. Allen Foundation to test their approach. They hope to begin scanning the brains of participants within a year.

One challenge, though, will be finding people able to fall asleep in the cramped and noisy tunnel of the magnetic resonance machine.

"It's a tricky thing because it's a small space," Rooney says. "But we'll make people as comfortable as possible, and we'll just follow them as they go through these natural stages of sleep."

If Rooney and Iliff are right, the experiment will greatly strengthen the argument that a lack of sleep can lead to Alzheimer's disease. It might also provide a way to identify people whose health is at risk because they aren't getting enough deep sleep, and it could pave the way to new treatments.

"It could be anything from having people exercise more regularly, or new drugs," Rooney says. "A lot of the sleep aids don't particularly focus on driving people to deep sleep stages."

Human Brain Can Process Image Seen For Just 13 Milliseconds, Study Shows

By Tanya Lewis

The human brain can achieve the remarkable feat of processing an image seen for just 13 milliseconds, scientists have found. This lightning speed obliterates the previous record speed of 100 milliseconds reported by previous studies.

In the study, scientists showed people a series of images flashed for 13 to 80 milliseconds. Viewers successfully identified things like a "picnic" or "smiling couple" even after the briefest of glimpses.

"The fact that you can do that at these high speeds indicates to us that what vision does is find concepts," study leader Mary Potter, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., said in a statement. "That's what the brain is doing all day long — trying to understand what we're looking at." 

The eyes shift their gaze three times per second, so the ability to process images speedily may help the eyes find their next target, Potter said.

When a person looks at something, the retina sends that information to the brain, which processes shape, color and orientation. Potter and her team aimed to increase gradually the speed at which people could identify images until they were no more accurate than they would have been if they had guessed the image. The viewers had never seen the images before.

Previous studies suggested the brain takes at least 50 milliseconds to send visual information from the retina to the "top" of the brain's visual processing chain and back again in loops that confirm what the eye saw, so the researchers expected people would get worse at seeing images shown for less than 50 milliseconds.

But Potter's team found that although people's performance declined on average as the time was reduced, they still performed better than chance when identifying images flashed for as little as 13 milliseconds, the speed limit of the computer monitor they used.

The findings, detailed online Jan. 16 in the journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, show that people were processing the images much more quickly than scientists believed was possible. One reason may be that the study participants became faster with practice, and also received feedback on their performance, Potter said.

The findings support those from a study of macaque monkeys in 2001 that found the animals respond to specific kinds of images — such as faces — flashed for just 14 milliseconds.

These studies demonstrate that the information only needs to flow in one direction, from the retina to the visual brain areas, in order to identify concepts, without needing feedback from other brain areas.

This ability could give the brain the time it needs to decide where to point the eyes, which can take only 100 to 140 milliseconds. (It might also explain why some people report a "sixth sense," when they unconsciously pick up on visual cues in a scene.)

In addition, even though viewers saw the images for only 13 milliseconds, part of their brain may have continued to process them, because sometimes, participants weren't asked about the image until after they saw a sequence of images.

Next, the researchers want to see how long the brain can hold visual information glimpsed for such a short time, and which brain regions are active when a person correctly identifies what they saw.

Deconstructing the Brain Layer by Layer: Scientific American