attention

I can't sleep and it's almost 4 AM. I have class at 8 AM, but for the last couple of days this has kind of been my schedule. It's getting increasingly harder for me to regulate my body now for some reason, as if by some wayward polarity I have gone from being a model student to a junior high dropout. I've missed lots of classes these last few weeks and just can't seem to get my shit together.

Apart from my bewildering current lack of self-confidence, I can't seem to shake this fascinating study out of my mind. It's not a new one, in fact it appeared in Nature over 10 years ago, but the implications are phenomenal. I wonder if you're familiar with the term hemineglect? It's a disease state in neurology that typically accompanies right-sided parietal damage that causes the individual to not pay attention to the contralateral hemifield. It's peculiar since vision systems work entirely well, they just don't attend to it for gosh knows why. If you ask them to draw a clock they will draw half a clock with half of the numbers, and if you ask them to put on their coat they only draw on one sleeve. I've heard stories of females putting on only half of their makeup and a guy who would only eat half of his meal.



So how do you get someone to pay attention to their neglected field? Rosetti et al. had the bright idea of using prism goggles - those fantastic spectacles that shift your vision an 'X' number of degrees to one side. Essentially if you think about it, if you wear glasses that shift your vision 10 degrees to the right and you're trying to throw darts at a dart board, you're going to miss until your brain processes that it should actually be 10 degrees more to the left. In the same manner, they would apply a prismatic shift to those with left prismatic neglect, so that when they removed their goggles after adaptation hypothetically they would have 10 extra degrees to the neglected side.



AND IT WORKED. Neuropsychological tests showed that they attended to more of the previously neglected field than before. Savings lasted up to four days!



I just can't get over how cool this is. Rehabilitation has been so exciting since the advent of neuroplasticity, and here is a mechanism by which we have the possibility to rehabilitate cognition. Absolutely fascinating!

Link to the full PDF: here.