Category: Neuroscience

If you watch a baby’s eyes, they move quickly, processing and integrating information.

Time seems to pass faster with age because our eyes and brain get slower, a new theory suggests.

This makes older people feel time is passing quicker now than it was in their youth.

If you watch a baby’s eyes, they move quickly, processing and integrating information.

In contrast, adult’s eyes move more slowly and their brains are more complex.

Signals have further to travel through the brain and take longer, because the whole system is slowing down.

This gives older people the subjective experience that things are happening more quickly.

Imagine the difference between watching a movie in slow motion compared with fast forward.

An older person — who is effectively watching in fast forward —  sees fewer images in the same amount of time, leading to the perception that the film is passing more quickly.

A young person, who is watching in slow motion, has the perception that it is dragging on and on.

Professor Adrian Bejan, the study’s author, said:

“People are often amazed at how much they remember from days that seemed to last forever in their youth.

It’s not that their experiences were much deeper or more meaningful, it’s just that they were being processed in rapid fire.”

In youth, the mind receives many more images each day, Professor Bejan said:

“The human mind senses time changing when the perceived images change.

The present is different from the past because the mental viewing has changed, not because somebody’s clock rings.

Days seemed to last longer in your youth because the young mind receives more images during one day than the same mind in old age.”

The study was published in the journal European Review (Bejan, 2019).

After treatment, the two patients were able to understand language and communicate for the first time in years.

Neuroscientists have used ultrasound to jump-start two people’s brains from a minimally conscious state, a new study reports.

After treatment, the two patients were able to understand language and communicate for the first time inyears.

Ultrasound uses low-intensity focused sound-waves to excite neurons in the thalamus.

The thalamus is a kind of relay station or hub for the brain, routing information to the cerebral cortex and elsewhere.

When in a coma, activity in the thalamus is typically reduced.

In one case, a 56-year-old man was in a minimally conscious state after a stroke.

When in a minimally conscious state, people sleep and wake normally and only show the subtlest signs of consciousness.

Before treatment, the man was lying in bed unable to communicate for 14 months.

After treatment, which involved two sessions of ultrasound across one week, he started showing signs of being able to communicate.

He could grasp and drop a ball and nod and shake his head in response to simple questions.

The case builds on a 2016 report of a 15-year-old who recovered from a coma after ultrasound treatment.

Comas are deeper states than being minimally conscious.

Professor Martin Monti, study co-author, said:

“I consider this new result much more significant because these chronic patients were much less likely to recover spontaneously than the acute patient we treated in 2016 — and any recovery typically occurs slowly over several months and more typically years, not over days and weeks, as we show.

It’s very unlikely that our findings are simply due to spontaneous recovery.”

The other patient was a 50-year-old woman who had been in a minimally conscious state for 2.5 years after a heart attack.

Following treatment, though, she was able to communicate and recognise her family for the first time in years.

Professor Monti said:

“What is remarkable is that both exhibited meaningful responses within just a few days of the intervention.

This is what we hoped for, but it is stunning to see it with your own eyes.

Seeing two of our three patients who had been in a chronic condition improve very significantly within days of the treatment is an extremely promising result.”

Although the improvements of the patients are small, they are still significant.

The 56-year-old was able to recognise photos he was shown, which gave hope to his wife.

Professor Monti said:

“She said to us, ‘This is the first conversation I had with him since the accident.

For these patients, the smallest step can be very meaningful — for them and their families.

To them it means the world.”

Professor Monti hopes a smaller, reasonably-priced ultrasound device can be developed so it can be used in people’s homes.

The study was published in the journal Brain Stimulation (Cain et al., 2021).