By JANE E. BRODY The eyes may be windows to the soul, but the retina is the brain’s window to the world. When the retina is injured, vision is seriously threatened and may be lost entirely if the problem is not quickly addressed. The retina is a layer of tissue at the back of the eye that collects light relayed through the lens. Special photoreceptor cells in the retina convert light into nerve impulses, which are transmitted to the brain. At the retina’s center is an especially critical area called the macula, which enables you to see anything directly in front of you, like words on a page, a person’s face, the road ahead or the image on a screen. When blood flow through the retina is blocked or when the retina pulls away from the wall of the eye, getting the problem properly diagnosed can be an emergency. Modern treatments can do wonders if they are begun before the damage is irreversible. But a delay in getting to a retinal specialist can diminish the ability of even the best therapy to preserve or restore normal vision. As with all living tissue, the retina is highly dependent on a constant supply of oxygen-carrying blood. Should anything disrupt that, vision is at risk. Two retinal mishaps, retinal-vein occlusion and retinal detachment, can occur at any age, but both are more common among older people. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16008 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By RITCHIE S. KING As plain-tailed wrens dart through Chusquea bamboo in the Andes, they can be heard singing a kind of song that no other bird is known to sing: a cooperative duet. New research shows that male-female pairs take turns producing notes, at a combined rate of three to six per second, to create what sounds like a single bird’s song. Each member of the duo reacts to what the other one does, adjusting the timing and pitch as needed to maintain the melody the two are trying to play together. The duet is like humans dancing, said Eric Fortune, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University and an author of the study, which appeared in the journal Science. The cues between the birds are “continuous and subtle,” and brain scans show that each bird learns the entire duet — as a pair of ballroom dancers learns choreography — instead of only memorizing its individual part. In the world of plain-tailed wrens, it appears that females always lead, singing a simple backbone melody that the males fill in with something more variable, like a guitar solo. The research team suspects that a female engages in cooperative singing to put a male’s chirping prowess to the test and thereby determine his suitability as a mate. While alone, a female wren practices her section of a duet at full volume. But males make more mistakes during cooperative singing, so they tweet much more timidly when they rehearse their part. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16007 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By SAM ROBERTS Election Day is seldom associated with raging hormones. But three professors from Israel, where all politics is vocal, suggest that the very act of voting generates stress levels that could affect the outcome. In an experiment conducted in a small Israeli town during the fiercely contested 2009 national election, the researchers took saliva samples from people who were about to vote. They found higher levels of glucocorticoid hormones, including cortisol, which are secreted by the adrenal glands and are associated with stress. Not only that, but people who planned to vote for the underdog tended to exhibit even more stress — affirming a study from the United States that found Obama voters’ cortisol levels remained steadier than those of McCain voters as the 2008 election results rolled in. “This is the first study to explore the psychological well-being of actual voters through an endocrinal measure at the ballot,” the professors — Israel Waismel-Manor of the University of Haifa and Gal Ifergane and Hagit Cohen of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev — write in a recent edition of the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology. They conducted their experiment in Omer, a small town 70 miles south of Tel Aviv, and hope to replicate it in the United States a year from now, when Americans choose a president. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 16006 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By DENISE GRADY An operation that doctors hoped would prevent strokes in people with poor circulation to the brain does not work, researchers are reporting. A $20 million study, paid for by the government, was cut short when it became apparent that the surgery was not helping patients who had complete blockages in one of their two carotid arteries, which run up either side of the neck and feed 80 percent of the brain. The surgery was a bypass that connected a scalp artery to a deeper vessel to improve blood flow to the brain. The new study, published on Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is the second in recent months to find that a costly treatment, one that doctors had high hopes for, did not prevent strokes. In September, researchers reported that stents being used to prop open blocked arteries deep in the brain were actually causing strokes. That study was also cut short. Both the stents and the bypass operation seemed to make sense medically, and doctors thought they should work. Their failure highlights the peril of assuming that an apparent improvement on a lab test or X-ray, like better blood flow or a wider artery, will translate into something that actually helps patients, warned an editorial that accompanied the new findings. Only rigorous studies can tell for sure. The editorial writer, Dr. Joseph P. Broderick, chairman of neurology at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, also cautioned that other stroke treatments were being used without sufficient study, particularly devices to remove clots. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 16005 - Posted: 11.09.2011

Researchers have found a possible link between heavy use of methamphetamines and schizophrenia. Increased risk of the mental illness was discovered in meth users in a study of California hospital records for patients admitted between 1990 and 2000 with a diagnosis of drug dependence or abuse. Scientists at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health compared the drug users to a control group of patients with appendicitis and no drug use. A drug addict prepares a combination of heroin and crystal meth. Scientists at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health say people hospitalized for meth who didn't have a diagnosis of psychotic symptoms had about a 1.5- to threefold risk of being later diagnosed with schizophrenia.A drug addict prepares a combination of heroin and crystal meth. Scientists at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health say people hospitalized for meth who didn't have a diagnosis of psychotic symptoms had about a 1.5- to threefold risk of being later diagnosed with schizophrenia. Guillermo Arias/Associated Press The hospital records were studied for readmissions for up to 10 years after the initial admission. Co-author Russell Callaghan says people hospitalized for meth who didn't have a diagnosis of psychotic symptoms at the start of the study period had about a 1.5- to threefold risk of being later diagnosed with schizophrenia, compared with groups of patients who used cocaine, alcohol or opioid drugs. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16004 - Posted: 11.09.2011

by Jennifer Barone Language seems to set humans apart from other animals, but scientists cannot just hand monkeys and birds an interspecies SAT to determine which linguistic abilities are singularly those of Homo sapiens and which we share with other animals. In August neuroscientists Kentaro Abe and Dai Watanabe of Kyoto University announced that they had devised the next-best thing, a systematic test of birds’ grammatical prowess. The results suggest that Bengalese finches have strict rules of syntax: The order of their chirps matters. “It’s the first experiment to show that any animal has perceived the especially complex patterns that supposedly make human language unique,” says Timothy Gentner, who studies animal cognition and communication at the University of California, San Diego, and was not involved in the study. Finches cry out whenever they hear a new tune, so Abe and Watanabe started by having individual birds listen to an unfamiliar finch’s song. At first the listeners called out in reply, but after 200 playbacks, their responses died down. Then the researchers created three remixes by changing the order of the song’s component syllables. The birds reacted indifferently to two of the revised tunes; apparently the gist of the message remained the same. But one remix elicited a burst of calls, as if the birds had detected something wrong. Abe and Watanabe concluded that the birds were reacting like grumpy middle-school English teachers to a violation of their rules of syntax. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing C

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 16003 - Posted: 11.09.2011

BRAIN not needed: the muscles controlling the slit-like pupil of a cat's eye do not require nerve signals to drive their movement. A light-sensitive pigment in the iris can do the job instead. Mammals were thought to rely on signalling between the eye and brain to resize the pupil and control the amount of light reaching the retina, but King-Wai Yau and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, discovered that eyeballs isolated from animals that are active at night or at dusk and dawn - including cats, dogs and hamsters - continued to respond to light. They traced the effect to melanopsin, a light-sensitive pigment in the iris muscle. Eye tissue from mice lacking the gene for this pigment was unable to respond to light in the same way (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10567). The pigment is already known to play a similar role in birds, fish and amphibians. Stuart Peirson at the University of Oxford, who was not involved with the study, thinks it might provide dark-loving mammals with an additional pupil-shrinking tool that helps them avoid being dazzled if suddenly exposed to light. The findings also hint at clinical uses of melanopsin in humans. Some forms of blindness result from the loss of light-sensitive rod and cone cells from the retina. Peirson says it might be possible to use melanopsin to make other cells in the retina light-sensitive instead. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16002 - Posted: 11.09.2011

by Jessica Hamzelou How well can you control your thoughts? Mind-control training could improve symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Deep brain stimulation, which involves implanting electrodes in the brain, helps to alleviate problems with movement experienced by people with Parkinson's disease. "If putting in an electrode works, we thought training brains to self-regulate might work as well," says David Linden at Cardiff University, UK. To find out, Linden's team asked 10 people with Parkinson's to think about moving while having their brains scanned by fMRI for 45 minutes. Five were given real-time neurofeedback showing how well they activated a brain region that controls movement. Each participant was then told to practice such thoughts at home. Two months later, movement problems including rigidity and tremor had improved by 37 per cent in the group that received feedback compared with no change in the rest. "Sending signals to brain areas normally deprived of input could be reshaping neural networks," says Linden. Roger Barker, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, points out that the treatment would not work for everyone with Parkinson's disease. "If the person has a bad tremor then it would be difficult to get an image, while others don't like being inside the scanners," he says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 16001 - Posted: 11.09.2011

by Michael Marshall Gliding over a bed of reeds in south-west France, a male western marsh harrier circles his nest. Scanning the surrounding area, he spots a second male on a nest just 400 metres away from his own. Ordinarily this would be the start of a fight. Male marsh harriers are territorial, and don't like another male to set up home within 700 metres of the nest. Yet the new neighbour merits nothing more than a long look. That's because the interloper is a cross-dresser. Ever since he reached sexual maturity, his feathers have been coloured like a female's. Marsh harriers are one of only two bird species – and the only bird of prey – where some of the males mimic females. Male marsh harriers are mostly grey, with yellow eyes, while females are brown with white heads and shoulders, and brown eyes. Females are also about 30 per cent bigger than males. Not all males obey the gender rules, though. Up to 40 per cent of them have mainly brown feathers with no greys at all, though they do still have the yellow eyes that mark them as male, and are no bigger than expected for their gender. These female-like males acquire their unusual colour in their second year, and keep it for the rest of their lives. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16000 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By Christian Torres, Army Spec. David Hunt made it through a year of deployment in central Iraq largely unscathed. But two years after returning to the United States, he faces medical retirement from the military. As Hunt, 37, describes it, there’s “really not any place” for him in the Army because of chronic migraine, the condition that has plagued him ever since an off-duty auto accident in 2006. He has fought the symptoms — nausea, vomiting and sensitivity to light — through deployments to the Arizona-Mexico border as well as Iraq. He recalls one particularly bad migraine hitting while he was alone and on guard in Arizona, and he vomited while seeking shelter from the harsh sun. “I did everything I could to just sit up and keep watch,” he said. Hunt isn’t alone in his struggle. Over the past decade, migraine and headache have become a significant problem for U.S. armed forces. A 2008 Defense Department report said diagnoses of migraine increased across all branches of the military between 2001 and 2007. Another, more recent study found that, among nearly 1,000 soldiers evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan because of some form of headache between 2004 and 2009, two-thirds did not return to duty. “Headaches represent a significant cause of unit attrition in personnel deployed in military operations,” the study concluded. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Stress
Link ID: 15999 - Posted: 11.09.2011

By PAMELA PAUL THE indiscriminate worries and ruminations that churn through the mind of Cheryl Downs McCoy are matters most working mothers have rifled through at some point: “I need to call that guy about fixing the car. I think I’ve run out my daughter’s favorite snack. Should I change the batteries in the smoke alarm?” These are entirely acceptable matters to ponder. But not at 3 in the morning. Yet that is when Ms. McCoy, a 45-year-old museum exhibit writer in Oakland, Calif., lies awake, debating and categorizing the details of working motherhood. “Most of the time I get stuck mulling over the logistics of how everything’s going to get done — my brain really digs down the minutiae,” said Ms. McCoy, who has consulted a sleep therapist and has tried every prescription and over-the-counter soporific, from Ambien to low-dose anti-depressants, to assuage her maternal unrest. For some women, the drug of choice is Lunesta; for others, melatonin. Ms. McCoy knows a mother of two who takes Xanax a few times a week, “but she worries about addiction so some nights she just doesn’t sleep at all rather than take it,” she said. “I think she saw the irony in not sleeping because she was anxious about taking an anti-anxiety medicine in order to sleep.” Mother’s little helper of the new millennium may in fact be the sleeping pill — a prescription not likely to inspire a jaunty pop song anytime soon. Nearly 3 in 10 American women fess up to using some kind of sleep aid at least a few nights a week, according to “Women and Sleep,” a 2007 study by the National Sleep Foundation, a nonprofit research group. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15997 - Posted: 11.07.2011

By ANDREW JACOBS BEIJING — Big Red Belly, his thick limbs nourished by a strict liver-tofu-ginger diet, should have been a contender. Instead, as his trainer watched in dismay, the young fighter nervously circled his more menacing adversary and then skittered to a corner of the ring, prompting jeers from a half-dozen spectators. “Worthless,” his patron, Chang Hongwei, a retired mechanical engineer, growled as he yanked Big Red Belly from the arena and unceremoniously ended his brief fighting career. “Next!” Countless members of the Gryllus bimaculatus clan, also known as field crickets, have faced off in the capital’s narrow alleys this fall in a uniquely Chinese blood sport whose provenance extends back more than 1,000 years. Nurtured by Tang Dynasty emperors and later popularized by commoners outside the palace gates, cricket fighting was banned as a bourgeois predilection during the decade-long Cultural Revolution, which ended in 1976. But like many once-suppressed traditions, among them Confucianism, mah-jongg and pigeon raising, cricket fighting is undergoing a revival here, spurred on by a younger generation — well, mostly young men — eager to embrace genuinely Chinese pastimes. Cricket-fighting associations have sprung up across the country, as have more than 20 Web sites devoted to the minutiae of raising critters whose daily needs can rival those of an Arabian steed. Last year, more than 400 million renminbi, or about $63 million, were spent on cricket sales and upkeep, according to the Ningyang Cricket Research Institute in Shandong Province. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 15996 - Posted: 11.08.2011

by Belle Dumé IT MAY sound like a strange brew, but green tea and red light could provide a novel treatment for Alzheimer's disease. Together, the two can destroy the rogue "plaques" that crowd the brains of people with the disease. The light makes it easier for the green-tea extract to get to work on the plaques. Andrei Sommer at the University of Ulm in Germany, and colleagues, have previously used red light with a wavelength of 670 nanometres to transport cancer drugs into cells. The laser light pushes water out of the cells and when the laser is switched off, the cells "suck in" water and any other molecules, including drugs, from their surroundings. Now, Sommer's team have found that the same technique can be used to destroy the beta-amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's. These plaques consist of abnormally folded peptides, and are thought to disrupt communication between nerve cells, leading to loss of memory and other symptoms. The team bathed brain cells containing beta-amyloid in epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) - a green-tea extract known to have beta-amyloid inhibiting properties - at the same time as stimulating the cells with red light. Beta-amyloid in the cells reduced by around 60 per cent. Shining the laser light alone onto cells reduced beta-amyloid by around 20 per cent (Photomedicine and Laser Surgery, DOI: 10.1089/pho.2011.3073). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15995 - Posted: 11.08.2011

A new film looks at the work of a Canadian doctor and author who travelled to the Amazon to learn about a psychotropic medicine that may help drug addicts to recover. Vancouver's Dr. Gabor Maté learned about ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic plant concoction used at a clinic in Peru. At the clinic, the cure rates for addicts is many times the average found in North America and Europe. CBC's The Nature of Things joined Maté in South America and traced his efforts to treat addicts in Vancouver with ayahuasca, which occupies a grey area of the law in Canada. Maté is determined to apply to what he's learned to his patients, but he knows it will be a challenge.Dr. Gabor Maté knows it will be a challenge to try ayahuasca with his patients.Dr. Gabor Maté knows it will be a challenge to try ayahuasca with his patients. The Nature of Things "Personally, I can see that it works and I can also see why it works, but proving it to colleagues that's another question entirely," Maté said in the documentary. Psychedelic researcher Dr. Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine, and his colleagues interviewed members of the Brazilian ayahuasca religion. They found several had histories of serious drug addiction and alcoholism that seemed to remit once they used the drug ceremonially twice a month. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15994 - Posted: 11.08.2011

Megan Erickson The simplest description of a black hole is a region of space-time from which no light is reflected and nothing escapes. The simplest description of consciousness is a mind that absorbs many things and attends to a few of them. Neither of these concepts can be captured quantitatively. Together they suggest the appealing possibility that endlessness surrounds us and infinity is within. But our inability to grasp the immaterial means we’re stuck making inferences, free-associating, if we want any insight into the unknown. Which is why we talk obscurely and metaphorically about "pinning down" perception and “hunting for dark matter” (possibly a sort of primordial black hole). The existence of black holes was first hypothesized a decade after Einstein laid the theoretical groundwork for them in the theory of relativity, and the phrase "black hole" was not coined until 1968. Likewise, consciousness is still such an elusive concept that, in spite of the recent invention of functional imaging - which has allowed scientists to visualize the different areas of the brain - we may not understand it any better now than we ever have before. “We approach [consciousness] now perhaps differently than we have in the past with our new tools," says neuroscientist Joy Hirsch. "The questions [we ask] have become a little bit more sophisticated and we’ve become more sophisticated in how we ask the question," she adds - but we're still far from being able to explain how the regions of the brain interact to produce thought, dreams, and self-awareness. “In terms of understanding, the awareness that comes from binding remote activities of the brain together, still remains what philosophers call, ‘The hard problem.'"

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15993 - Posted: 11.08.2011

By Jonah Lehrer Email Author Inequality is inevitable; life is a bell curve. Such are the brute facts of biology, which can only evolve because some living things are better at reproducing than others. But not all inequality is created equal. In recent years, it’s become clear that many kinds of wealth disparity are perfectly acceptable — capitalism could not exist otherwise — while alternate forms make us unhappy and angry. The bad news is that American society seems to be developing the wrong kind of inequality. There is, for instance, this recent study published in Psychological Science, which found that, since the 1970s, the kind of inequality experienced by most Americans has undermined perceptions of fairness and trust, which in turn reduced self-reports of life satisfaction: Using the General Social Survey data from 1972 to 2008, we found that Americans were on average happier in the years with less income inequality than in the years with more income inequality. We further demonstrated that the inverse relation between income inequality and happiness was explained by perceived fairness and general trust. That is, Americans trusted others less and perceived others to be less fair in the years with more income inequality than in the years with less income inequality. Americans are happier when national wealth is distributed more evenly than when it is distributed unevenly. It’s now possible to glimpse the neural mechanisms underlying this inequality aversion, which appears to be a deeply rooted social instinct. Last year a team of scientists at Caltech published a fascinating paper in Nature. The study began with 40 subjects blindly picking ping-pong balls from a hat. Half of the balls were labeled “rich,” while the other half were labeled “poor.” The rich subjects were immediately given $50, while the poor got nothing. Life isn’t fair. Wired.com © 2010 Condé Nast Digital.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15992 - Posted: 11.05.2011

By Laura Sanders The contents of a person’s dream have been revealed by brain scan for the first time, scientists report in the Nov. 8 Current Biology. By monitoring the brain of a man who has unusual control over his dreaming, the accomplishment brings researchers closer to understanding how the brain spins its nightly yarns. “It’s really exciting that people have done this,” says sleep researcher Edward Pace-Schott at Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “And it also brings back lucid dreaming as a very powerful scientific tool.” Lucid dreaming is the rare ability to direct behaviors while in a deep sleep. By all objective measures, the person is dead to the world: Most muscles are paralyzed and the eyes are doing the quick jitters that characterize REM, the main dreaming phase of sleep. But at the same time, the lucid dreamer knows that he is dreaming and can control the scenes, says study coauthor Michael Czisch of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. “The world is open to do everything.” Czisch and his team set out to catch a lucid dreamer’s brain activity with an fMRI machine. Instead of creating complex fantasias of flying over the Alps, scaling buildings or slaying dragons, six experienced lucid dreamers were asked to squeeze their left hands and then their right hands repeatedly in a dream. “It’s a rather easy thing to do,” Czisch says. “If it’s a random dream, things would be much more complicated.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Sleep; Brain imaging
Link ID: 15991 - Posted: 11.05.2011

By Bruce Bower Talk is cheap, but scientific value lurks in all that gab. Words cascading out of countless flapping gums contain secrets about the evolution of language that a new breed of researchers plan to expose with statistical tools borrowed from genetics. For more than a century, traditional linguists have spent much of their time doing fieldwork — listening to native speakers to pick up on words with similar sounds, such as mother in English and madre in Spanish, and comparing how various tongues arrange subjects, verbs, objects and other grammatical elements into sentences. Such information has allowed investigators to group related languages into families and reconstruct ancestral forms of talk. But linguists generally agree that their methods can revive languages from no more than 10,000 years ago. Borrowing of words and grammar by speakers of neighboring languages, the researchers say, erases evolutionary signals from before that time. Now a small contingent of researchers, many of them evolutionary biologists who typically have nothing to do with linguistics, are looking at language from in front of their computers, using mathematical techniques imported from the study of DNA to wring scenarios of language evolution out of huge amounts of comparative speech data. These data analyzers assume that words and other language units change systematically as they are passed from one generation to the next, much the way genes do. Charles Darwin similarly argued in 1871 that languages, like biological species, have evolved into a series of related forms. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 15990 - Posted: 11.05.2011

By Rachel Ehrenberg One whiff of a plant known as the headache tree can spur intense, excruciating pain — and now scientists know why. An ingredient in the tree sets off a chain of events that eventually amps up blood flow to the brain’s outer membrane. Other headache triggers, such as chlorine, cigarette smoke and formaldehyde, interact with some of the same cellular machinery, suggesting they all work via the same pain-inducing mechanism. In the new study, an international group of researchers extracted the plant compound umbellulone from dried bay laurel leaves and then exposed various mouse and rat cells to the compound. Umbellulone tickles the same cellular detector that responds to painfully cold stimuli and the sinus-clearing scent of wasabi and mustard oil, the researchers report online October 27 in Brain. Stimulating this chemical detector ultimately triggers the release of a particular protein implicated in migraine headaches, the researchers found. This protein prompts blood vessels to swell, and scientists think this swelling puts pressure on the skull and nerves, causing pain. The new research is solid, says neuroscientist Peter Goadsby, director of the headache center at the University of California, San Francisco. Other irritants linked to headaches interact with the same chemical detector, and it may be a good target for therapy, Goadsby says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15989 - Posted: 11.05.2011

Caitlin Stier, Focus on the dot in the centre of this video as a pattern flashes around it. After about 30 seconds, a word appears on the screen. But take a look at the image again: chances are, you didn't see some of the letters. The illusion, created by Isamu Motoyoshi of the Tokyo Institute of Technology and his team, occurs due to a phenomenon called adaptation-induced blindness where prolonged exposure to a high-contrast dynamic pattern affects the brightness of an image viewed afterwards. In this new version of the illusion, the team was able to make the after-image completely invisible by gradually fading in the pattern. The image that appears in your peripheral vision is also of lower contrast. If the pattern was shown quickly at full contrast, your eyes would be able to detect it. In this animation, solid letters are used, but the illusion also works with patterns. A pulsing gradient, for example, can induce blindness when a static version is presented afterwards, as long as the pattern and colours are introduced gradually. You can experiment with other variations of adaptation-induced blindness by exploring Motoyoshi's online demonstrations. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15988 - Posted: 11.05.2011