FINAL BLOG ENTRY

Lookin’ for some hot stuff, baby, this evenin’! … Burn, baby burn! (forgive my mix of two classic songs together, haha). My favorite part of the class this semester was touch! More specifically, I found the part about premature babies literally growing faster/healthier if paid more attention to be incredible! It was amazing to me that not only do they need all the nutritional elements, but also the human interaction! I had no idea that touch could have more than just social impact… but a physical impact (maybe even life or death!).

The key behind touch stimulating growth is the production of growth-promoting hormones in the babies body. Healthcare providers have long known that babies who are touched a lot grow better, and now there is research to back up this observation. Touch stimulates growth-promoting hormones and increases the enzymes that make the cells of the vital organs more responsive to the growth-promoting effects of these hormones. For example, premature infants in a “grower nursery,” where they can gain needed weight, showed 47 percent more weight gain when they received extra touch. (1) The amazing thing is that it does not even have to be the child’s own mother touching it to stimulate its continued growth.

The babies’ need for touch can be especially high if it has been through a great deal of trauma or surgery to fix some problem in their young life. Much of the little one’s experience with touch has been painful (being held down to be stuck with a needle, or carried to where pain would be inflicted upon him/her), so it is important o reinforce the fact that not all touch, in fact most of it, is not filled with pain.

And one final study, done in the UK, has revealed statistical insight into the mother/child relationship. The study involved 2,500 UK parents, and it showed that 90 per cent of today’s mums believe they have more physical contact with their babies than their mothers did with them. 59 percent of the mums said that they managed to cuddle with their baby more than 20 times per day! Over half (53 per cent) said this was because they are more open about expressing their feelings, while 47 per cent said they have the luxury of more time to spend with their babies. Mums in the South East and Midlands were the cuddliest of all, with 23 per cent spending more than five hours a day in skin-to-skin contact with their new babies. Most of this contact took place during feeding (45 per cent), followed by bathtime (31 per cent) and then massage (11 per cent). (2).

That is a LOT of cuddling, and should make for some extremely happy and healthy babies! Thanks again for the great semester, and good luck with your own little one Prof. Boucher!

(1) Find out about ALL the amazing things touch can do for the young and old here: http://www.askdrsears.com/html/10/T110209.asp

(2) Learn more about the power of touch: http://www.babycentre.co.uk/advertorials/j&jpoweroftouch/

Feeling the Mo… Space Sickness

Since I have done a piece earlier on motion sickness, I figured I would follow it up with one on its colleague: space sickness.

Until space travel catches up to 2001-level technology, space sickness is likely to remain a problem — not to mention the fact that astronauts cannot complete their mission when they are using supped-up air sickness bags.  So, as you can see from this picture, NASA is willing to go to any lenghths, even seemingly silly ones like the picture above, to keep their astronauts healthy. The two astronaut trainees pictured are getting a one-way trip on the infamous “vomit comet.” The goggles work by simulating strobe-lighting effects, which have been proven to reduce motion sickness by freezing images on the retina. The idea is for astronauts to wear the goggles for the early part of their mission, until they get better acclimated to weightlessness. After the astronauts get used to them, though, they should be all clear to dance the night away in true space-strobe style. If you would like a pair of these shades for yourself, they will soon be available for purchase via a special travel manufacturer.

Colorblindness

I was curious this week about how one inherits colorblindness. Interestingly, far more men are colorblind (12-20% of the white male population!) than females are colorblind. If a male receives a color deficient gene in his one X chromosome, then he will be colorblind. For a female to have the same problem, however, her father must be colorblind and her mother must also be colorblind or be a carrier.

Here are all the possible patterns of colorblindness inheritance (click to enlarge):

Here are some visualizations of what the real world might look like for those that are colorblind (normal/protanope/deuteranope):

Believe it or not, though, there can actually be a “work-around” for one’s colorblindness. One can put in a contact lens that will somewhat shift the world’s colors to make color vision normal for those lacking. The lens basically covers the eye… but the lens has been treated with an extremely expensive laser-dye that can significantly brighten colors enough to fluorescent-ize them for your visual field.  Amazingly enough… This product is out there! Go to this website for more information!

The Eyes Have It!

I was wondering what adaptations fish must make to their visual system to 1) make them functional underwater in low-light situations and 2) How they can withstand the pressure of the deep.

Fluid pressure is critical to the maintenance of eye-firmness. The source of this pressure is osmosis, the single most important factor influencing the evolution of the vertebrate eye.

In humans (and other land species), the eye fluid comes from the ciliary body, a combination of glandular tissue and muscle inside the eye at the edge of the lens. Within the ciliary body, there are sites where inner-ocular fluid is actually produced and excreted, thus keeping the fluid pressure up inside the eye. The fluid is diffused into the blood or drained through a canal at the same rate it is produced, thus maintaining a constant ocular pressure.

Surprisingly, fish don’t even have ciliary bodies in there eyes, due to the fact that they are surrounded by fluid and thus don’t need to produce any more. To maintain water balance inside and outside the eye, freshwater fish absorb fluid into their eyes by osmosis directly through the cornea.  This allows them to keep osmotic pressure inside their eyes higher than that of the surrounding salt water, thus keeping the eyes firm.

As far as fish seeing in low-light conditions, water is a poor transmitter of light. Even in the clearest water the wavelengths (reds) are excluded beyond the first 10-15 meters. The only wavelengths of light that will make it even to relatively deep (much less the depths) part of the ocean are short wavelengths — light blue for example. Many fish have eyes which react to light of blue and green wavelengths thus concentrating their vision on the blue end of the light spectrum.

With depth, rods become more important than cones. Not surprisingly, nocturnal and deep-swimming fish have far more rods than cones in their eyes to enhance their night vision. Further to an extreme, sharks, rays and mantas have almost all rods and probably cannot see colour which may be the reason for their dull skins.

Learn more at this website!

Tracking how the Eye Assess Objects

I am going to talk about how the eye tracks objects today, as determined by a contact lens that can be inserted into the eye (combined with some topical numbing agent). The study that I looked at for this week was about a still picture shown to participants that were asked various questions about what they saw. Based upon the questions that were asked, eye movements were radically different on the same picture. Now, the obvious thought is that the movements are different because the questions could be asking the viewer to identify different things (are the walls blue, is the girl’s hair short/long). But instead, the questions asked entirely subjective questions such as: “Talk about what the family was doing prior to this snapshot” and “What is the overall wealth of this family?”

Observe the eye mapping that the study found in response [[CLICK ON IT TO SEE THE FULL IMAGE]]:

What this interesting study reveals is that the task that we are performing has a strong influence on the ways that our eyes move. We do not take regular assessments of our surroundings in a uniform way. Instead, our eyes will answer very subjective questions with different movements every time. Interestingly, our brains can process any array of movements to piece together the answer to the question.

Now look at eye movements when we read text [[CLICK ON IT TO SEE THE FULL IMAGE]]:

In summary, there are few more interesting things to me regarding understanding the eye that the strategic approach to examining objects that seems rather innate in all of us. Hard-wired into our brains are the ability to take any situation and be able to use our highly-advanced color-receptive eyes to break down the problem.

Your Blind Spot as a Key to Brain Function

Recent studies have been yielding interesting results in regard to what the “size” of your blind spot can indicate about your brain’s function (including trauma). Initial research interestingly indicates something chiropractors will be very happy to hear: spinal function plays a crtical role in the health of more than just the musculoskeletal system.

Every eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve enters the eye and where photoreceptors are absent. Our eye is able to fill in the gaps of information so that we normally do not notice. The brain can give us the illusion of an uninterrupted visual field, but it cannot change the size of the blind spot because the area where photoreceptors are absent is a fixed anatomical feature. Certain retinal diseases can lead to the destruction or malfunction of photo receptors which may cause an apparent enlargement of the anatomical blind spot or the appearance of additional blind spots at other locations. In the illustration above, the black spot to the right is a normal blind spot; the central black ring is a field defect (scotoma) caused by a disease.

So How Can Mapping Be Done?

The simple way to do at home is not all that different from the one we did in class. Draw a fixation point, stand about 1 foot away from the piece of paper, and draw the inner and outer edge of where your blind spot occurs for the other objects on the page. Something like…

When we go to the eye doctor, they are more regularly mapping our visual fields, including the blind spot, to follow patients with glaucoma and to diagnose other diseases. They rarely find that the blind spot is enlarged on one side, and when they do they can almost always find retinal disease to explain it.

Frederick R. Carrick, D.C., Ph.D. had done a great deal of research on this topic if you would like to research more.

Motion Sickness and Vision

Apparently, seeing is believing. I read an interesting study about individual’s aptness to ge tmotion sickness based upon whether they could see or not. It is a very common myth that motion sickness is nearly if not entirely dependent on your inner-ear fluid staying balanced (greatly aided by being able to see the horizon or be on firm ground).

Motion sickness is brought on by the difference between apparent perceived movement and actual movement. When an individual has their eyes open, they make certain mental judgments about how they think they are moving, and those are reinforced by the eye. The brain then balances out those data inputs with the inner-ear fluid (endolymph) to make sure that the fluid agrees a movement just occurred.  When the two start producing conflicting stories, the most common sickness is nausea and vomiting

What the study found, though, is that by reducing the confirmation input that your brain received about perceived movement, the less likely you are to produce dramatic discrepancies between what the endolymph is reporting and what your perceptive field is reporting (your perception of movement is dramatically reduced without your eyes).

Finally, solutions such as the anti sickness wristband: do very little from the standpoint of altering your body in any chemical way. What these bands do instead is work very much like a placebo. By making the wearer believe that the bands will offer some type of motion-sickness immunity, the wearer is much less apt to mentally psych themselves into a state of panic/vulnerability. Basically, it’s a simple way to trick the brain into a game of mind over matter.

You can read more about the study here.

Eye Damage

After our class lectures this week, I heard through a few friends of mine that someone I used to know had an eye ulcer that has left him blind in one eye, possibly permanently. Since we have been studying eyes and their function this past week, I wanted to inform myself as well as the class what an eye ulcer even is, and why it could potentially be blinding.

The most common type of ulcer that appears on the eye is called a corneal ulcer. The first major important distinction that ought to be made is whether it is infectious (more harmful) or sterile. That classification simply refers to whether the body is responding to the ulcer by accumulating cells and fluid near the inflammation or not. Infectious corneal ulcers are very dangerous as they are almost always accompanied by a break in the epithelium (the superficial layer of the cornea).  Blindness can result (along with extreme pain) in as little as 24-48 hours as the bacteria creates an infection that destroys the cells that are responsible for keeping the eye moist, clean, and functional.

Aggressive treatment for a corneal ulcer is critical to saving one’s vision. In the story of the person I knew, he waited for more than 5 days with a normal steroid pack (upon his student health center’s recommendation) prior to seeing an eye specialist.  Frequently, treatment for such an ulcer will require eye drops every 15 minutes for up to 4 or 5 hours for 15 days. The doctor will also liberally numb the eye with drops and then take a culture of the ulcer for further observation by scraping the eye. Ouch!!

Almost invariably, the cause of ulcers include some type of puncture or scraping of the eye (either by a contact lens or fingernail) that imbeds some bacteria in the eye. 99% of the time, the eye has no difficulty cleaning out the bacteria, but if it gets trapped under a contact lense or if the wound is severe enough, an ulcer can develop. Get treatment immediately!!

Here is a picture of what an eye ulcer can look like when dyed eye droplets are introduced into the eye for better treatment and monitoring:

Check, Check, Check… Testing 1, 2, 3

This week’s classes offered more “play-at-home” opportunities than any other week by far. Whether it was echolocation websites, earplug experiments, mosquito ring tones, or looking at “ba / da / ga” videos dozens of items (100’s after I had shown my friends), there was a lot to do when I got back from class. I am writing my blog this week on another one of those activities: a hearing test. Linked from a website that provides the mosquito ring tone, the hearing test website is to determine if the mosquito website is “suitable” for you! Not only that, but you get to test how well you can hear in a very easy format. It notes that anything ~17kHz and higher you will likely be unable to hear if you are in your twenties. Older? It starts declining. My results: Can’t hear 17.7kHz and above.

Also, as a quick aside, the mosquito ring tone, which I can hear, is outrageously annoying. It left my ears ringing afterwards… not from high volume, but from the pitch!

I also got a good laugh out of our discussion of mondegreens this week, as I have had a few since my childhood. As a small child, I always thought the the word “malfunction” was “now-function.” It was eternally perplexing when I heard adults describe a machine as “now-functioning” when it was actually broken ! Another that I had confused as a kid was the song “Takin’ Care of Business” always sounded like “Tape it to a biscuit!”I actually just now went back and listened to the song, and I can still see how I was confused by that (perhaps when I was hungry) . And finally, “Give me the beat, boys, and free my soul!” Always sounded like “Give me the Beach Boys and free my soul!”

Until next time!

My Ears Are Ringing!

– Saturday, Feb 16th, 2008 –

I will be writing today’s blog on a condition that both my father and I have with our hearing. In fact, millions of Americans (more men than women) suffer from the problem: Tinnitus.

Pretend that you have a noisy roommate that will never stop humming. Or a phone that rings 24 hours a day. Or imagine sitting next to a machine that is making a constant rumbling and dull roar. People who have tinnitus – and there are millions – hear ringing, roaring, buzzing or clicking sounds in their ears and have no way to eliminate it. The sound for some is an annoyance, but for others, it can truly be both physically and mentally disturbing. People with severe cases of tinnitus often find it difficult to hear, work, or even sleep. The good part? Tinnitus is rarely an indication of any further serious complications.

Tinnitus is not a disease itself, but a symptom associated with many forms of hearing loss and other health problems. According to the American Tinnitus Association, it is estimated that “more than 50 million Americans have experienced tinnitus – either short-term or long-term – at some point in their lives. About 12 million people have sought medical help for the condition, and for 1 to 2 million of them, the situation is bad enough to interfere with normal daily activities.”

The solution? Not incredibly encouraging. “Learn to live with it” is what the vast majority of  the “prescribed” treatment is. There are a few options that are pretty extreme and dramatic for those that truly hearing deafening noises in their ears (I do not, just a ringing noise similar to what one would have when getting out of a concert… all the time). One treatment available is putting an extremely small instrument into your ear that basically serves as a vacuum. You leave that instrument in for 1 YEAR! and the hope is that the hairs causing the ringing will be still (no longer vibrating,causing the ringing).The treatments get increasingly hocus-pocus as one moves down the list: pure oxygen therapy (a breathing technique to attempt to get oxygen to “damaged” parts of the body)… as well as some attempts to boost blood-flow to expand vessels in your ears.

For additional reading information, please visit: http://www.hbo-freiburg.de/en/tinnitus.html