YOGA, COGNITIVE FUNCTIONS AND DEMENTIA

Yoga therapy can be used to treat those suffering from dementia, since there are no other effective means to counter this disease properly.

This point was highlighted during a support group meeting on Saturday at Sandhya Kirana, an old-age home, to help family members of persons with dementia. The meeting was organized by Alzheimer's and Related Disorders Society of India.

Hari Prasad from Nimhans spoke on how yoga can be used as a therapy, and he gave a presentation on using this method properly. "Currently, there is no single approved treatment method for dementia. I suggest yoga may work," he said.
He highlighted two forms of yoga for dementia patients. One is the preventive method, which addresses risk factors, reduces depression, hypertension and memory impairment. The other is curative, which prevents progression of the disease, improves quality of life and cognition in mild and moderate stages. Depending on the patient and the person's background, the yoga method can be moderated. "Yoga has an overall benefit through various methods like asanas, pranayama, kriya, mudras and meditation. It helps strengthen muscles, improves respiration, etc. It leads to a tranquilized state of mind," he explained. Caretakers of dementia patients were also asked to do yoga. This is because they may get irritated and depressed while taking care of unresponsive patients.

"Yoga is open for all ages," he added.

Source: BANGALORE, Karnataka / The Times of India / April 12, 2009

MANAGEMENT IMPAIRMENT OF OTHER'S KNOWLEDGE: AUTISM and ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

I have posted this recent article given its deep connection with my thesis project. As people with Alzheimer's Disease, Children with Autism are not able to manage knowledge about their interlocutors. The current article deals with how those with autism have not the ability to gauge other's emotions and that meddle in communicative interaction.

A team from the University of Durham studied 13 adults with autism and found the patients had difficulty identifying emotions such as anger or happiness when shown short animated video clips. Researcher suggest in Neuropsychologia this may contribute to problems with social interaction, characteristic of autism.

"The way people move their bodies tells us a lot about their feelings or intentions, and we use this information on a daily basis to communicate with each other"

Anthony Atkinson
Lead Author

"We use others' body movements and postures, as well as people's faces and voices, to gauge their feelings," said Anthony Atkinson, who led the research. "People with autism are less able to use these cues to make accurate judgements about how others are feeling. "We now need to look further to see how exactly this happens and how this may combine with potential difficulties in attention."

It is thought as many as half a million people in the UK have a form of autism, a lifelong developmental disability which can severely affect how a person makes sense of the world around them.

Source: Neurpsychologia

YOGA AND PSYCHOLOGY Language, Memory and Mysticism by Harold G. Coward

In part one of the book, Coward establishes the centrality of language to yoga. Here his thesis is bold and clear - that language has inherent within itself the power to convey knowledge both of a sensuous and a super sensuous kind, and to realize release. In the second part he discusses Freud, Jung and some transpersonal psychologists' perspectives on yogic issues like dualism and the possibility of an almost immaterial, ego-less knowing, the eradication of desires and of the unconscious, and free will.

The most relevant for our research issue is that Coward establishes in detail the centrality of trustworthy linguistic communications: the importance of testimony. According to Coward, there are divisions of Indian schools depending on the "degree of revealing power allowed to words" (p12). Verbal communication (agama) is one of three sources of valid knowledge (pramana) in Indian thought, (along with perception (pratyaksa) and inference (anumana)). Verbal communication functions when a trusted observer (apta), transfers his or her knowledge to us and is valid "if it is not deceptive, confused or barren in knowledge" (p. 12). The apta has to be "skilled and compassionate in the passing on of knowledge" (p.12), and not prone to any twisting of the knowledge for fame or fortune. Of course, the verbal communication may still fail if the mind of the hearer is too 'covered with karmic impurity' or too distracted to pay attention.

Yoga is thus a set of techniques for permitting the committed yogin to become one with Isvara (Isvara is defined as pure sattva (transparent consciousness) by a special kind of self or purusa that is beginninglessly untouched by the taints of karmas), a mystical fusion that entails losing one's impure personal ego. Language is central to this mystical experience since in it sound and meaning become one. "It is Isvara who is expressed by the word AUM: the sound of the word evokes its meaning" (p17). The relation between word and meaning here is not by convention" the relationship between Isvara and the word AUM is fixed like a lamp and its light" (Vyasa cited in p. 17).

Yoga teaches freedom and release from the individual ego rather than the cultivation of ego-strength or uniqueness endorsed in the west, entails a loss of individual ego. Yoga entails the belief that the true nature of objects can be encountered when we have transcended all of the material apparatus of body, senses and to some extent individual mind. Yoga is not about control of the object, but of changing the subject. It has a very precise array of techniques and practices to achieve that, involving postures, breath-control, taming of the fluctuations of the mind as a result of wandering senses, and an exquisite attention to the role that habits of mind and perception play in distorting our grasp of reality so that we can counter these habits, and be open to what is. With meditative practice one becomes so subtly aware of the way that past traces, emotions and a kind of sloth or heaviness marks one's consciousness that one can root out those tendencies to an ever-increasing degree. Coward suggests that Yoga assumes that when 'egoity' (sic) is overcome there is no further duality between subject and object, only immediate intuition.

From my point of view, through all this knowledge we can try finding an alternative and complementary way to investigate what the "tipping point" is in which communication/interaction breaks off in people with Alzheimer and how cognitive functions (memory, attention) are involved and interact with language.

Click Book Reference: Yoga and Psychology Language, Memory, and Mysticism by Harold G. Coward SUNY Press, 2002

SEA MEMORY: CONTEXT REPRESENTATION IN ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

Sea Memory: Context Representation in AD

(thesis project presentation 14/07/2009)

Department Translation and Laguage Sciences

University Pompeu Fabra

I would like to share with you a presentation about my thesis project in order to get your interest, knowledge about the issue and your feedback.

I would like to thank everyone who collaborated on my proposal presentation, members of the committee (Dr. Rafael Blesa, Dr. Albert Costa and Dr. Montserrat González) and , of course, Dr. Teun A. van Dijk.

Thank you all for your support and encouragement!

Fátima

Click here to see the presentation

LANGUAGE "PREDICTS DEMENTIA RISK"

People with superior language skills early in life may be less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease decades later, research suggests.

A team from Johns Hopkins University studied the brains of 38 Catholic nuns after death.They found those with good language skills early in life were less likely to have memory problems - even if their brains showed signs of dementia damage.

The study appears online in the journal Neurology.

One possible implication of this study is that an intellectual ability test in the early 20s may predict the likelihood of remaining cognitively normal five or six decades later Rebecca Wood Alzheimer's Research Trust

Dementia is linked to the formation of protein plaques and nerve cell tangles in the brain. But scientists remain puzzled about why these signs of damage produce dementia symptoms in some people, but not others.

The researchers focused on nuns who were part of an ongoing clinical study. They divided the women into those with memory problems and signs of dementia damage in the brain, and those whose memory was unaffected regardless of whether or not they showed signs of dementia damage. And they also analysed essays that 14 of the women wrote as they entered the convent in their late teens or early 20s, assessing them for complexity of language and grammar. The study showed that language scores were 20% higher in women without memory problems than those with signs of a malfunctioning memory. The grammar score did not show any difference between the two groups.

Lead researcher Dr Juan Troncoso said: "Despite the small number of participants in this portion of the study, the finding is a fascinating one. "Our results show that an intellectual ability test in the early 20s may predict the likelihood of remaining cognitively normal five or six decades later, even in the presence of a large amount of Alzheimer's disease pathology."

Brain cell growth

The study also found that brain cells were largest in women who retained a normal memory despite showing signs of disease in their brains. The researchers said this suggested that a growth in brain cells might be part of the body's early response to the onset of dementia, and this might help to prevent memory impairment. Dr Troncoso said: "Perhaps mental abilities at age 20 are indicative of a brain that will be better able to cope with diseases later in life." Dr Susanne Sorensen, head of research at the Alzheimer's Society, said: "It is interesting that the nuns in the study with better language skills in their youth avoided memory problems in later life. "However, the research is in a very small, select group and it would be difficult to say at this stage if language skills could really predict dementia."

Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Research Trust, said: "One possible implication of this study is that an intellectual ability test in the early 20s may predict the likelihood of remaining cognitively normal five or six decades later. "However, prominent exceptions exist, including authors like Terry Pratchett and Iris Murdoch, who developed dementia despite their linguistic brilliance."

Source: BBC

THE ANATOMY OF MEANING

How do we understand what others are trying to say? The answer cannot be found in language alone. Words are linked to hand gestures and other visible phenomena to create unified ‘composite utterances’. In this book N. J. Enfield presents original case studies of speech-with-gesture based on fieldwork carried out with speakers of Lao (a language of Southeast Asia). He examines pointing gestures (including lip and finger-pointing) and illustrative gestures (examples include depicting fish traps and tracing kinship relations). His detailed analyses focus on the ‘semiotic unification’ problem, that is, how to make a single interpretation when multiple signs occur together. Enfield’s arguments have implications for all branches of science with a stake in meaning and its place in human social life. The book will appeal to all researchers interested in the study of meaning, including linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists.

The Anatomy of Meaning
Written by: Nicholas J. Enfield

WIDEN FRONTIERS

Alzheimer's disease (AD) has become the most common form of dementia in the world. Nowadays, it does not raise only a scientific, human and healthy challenge, but also a social and family one. AD is a progressive, degenerative disease that destroys vital brain cells. AD affects memory systems as well as cognitive and executive functions; that is, AD damages the ability to think, to remember, to speak and to make decisions. In addiction to affecting a person’s mental abilities, the disease can also lead to other problems such as emotional and behavioural changes, confusion and disorientation in time and space.

In the early stage of the disease, apart from memory systems, language becomes one of the affected cognitive functions. Until now, the greater part of linguistic research in AD accounts for semantic dificulties at a lexical level and their neural correlates (Imamura 1998; Venneria et al., 2008; Costa et al., 2008; Apostolova et al., 2008). These discoveries are relevant because they do not contribute only to the study of the conceptual organization of the information in the brain, but also of the anatomical ground of semantic degradation.

However, if we consider aging as a complex process, given its multi-directionality and the great internal and external variables that take part in the process, we should think about aging from a global and multidisciplinary perspective in order to comprehend the nature of aging. Also, we should keep in mind that scientists are neither exactly sure why cells fail in AD, nor have they yet identified any single cause. Because of this, one might expect that this disease has a multifactorial reason, with the greatest risk factor being increasing age. As aging, AD entails a complex process and it is not enough to think that language problems in AD are mainly characterised by a shrinking vocabulary and decreased word fluency; we must study, therefore, language within these processes from a wide perspective, beyond the lexical level.

To my knowledge, I consider Discourse Studies as the most suitable discipline for research in the communicative and linguistic dimensions in AD. It is the richest area in Neurolinguistics dealing with the complex interaction among language, cognition and brain. Thus, Discourse Studies could generate a multidisciplinary study framework around language research in AD. According to the literature, studies on the interplay between discourse processing and memory systems (Kintsch et al., 1999; Caspari, I., y Parkinson, Stanley R., 2000) as well as on discourse processes and its neural correlations have been published (Nieuwland, M. S. & van Berkum, Jos J. A. 2006; Troiani et al., 2006; Baggio et al., 2008; van Berkum et al., 2008; Martín-Loeches et al., 2008). Despite these studies, research into Alzheimer Discourse, in this particular field, hardly exists (Ash et al., 2006).

Previous research into Discourse Studies and Alzheimer’s Disease has focused, essentially, on discourse semantic level (Ulatowska, H. K. & Chapman, S. B. 1991; Vuorinen et al., 2000; Dijkstra et al., 2003; Ash et al., 2004; Ash et al., 2007). Additionally, there exist studies covering the pragmatic and sociolinguistics aspects of Alzheimer Discourse (Ramanathan 1995; Ramanathan 1997; Perkins et al., 1998; Keller, J., y Rech, T., 1998; Hamilton 1994; Hamilton 2008) as well as relatively new studies on research in artificial intelligenge (AI) for which the general motivation is to construct testable computational models that will enhance understanding of the effects of AD on communication and, specifically, to develop a computer program for training caregivers in use of assistive techniques for social conversation with persons in their care affected by AD (Green 2002; Green & Davis 2003; Green 2004).

All these different perspectives on Alzheimer Discourse research allow us to achieve an integral comprehension of how the real communication of persons living with AD is. In spite of these studies (among others), there are still not many researchers doing this kind of work; thus, more investigation in all dimensions of Alzheimer Discourse (such as pragmatic, semantic, sociolinguistic, neurologic, cognitive, technological (AI) and so on) is needed. I would like highlight the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries in order to obtain a complete understanding about discourse and Alzheimer. That is, Discourse Studies will permit us 1) to comprehend how language is used by patients with this disease in many contexts, both experimental and natural; 2) to find out how discourse processing is carried out at a neural level and how discourse interplays with memory systems and cognitive aspects as well.

All these reflections make up part of my PhD project, which has also a therapeutic motivation: setting up new more natural and contextualized therapies in order to stimulate communicative skills of people suffering of Alzheimer. Some of these therapies could be thought through Yoga practice, which could improve in a creative way their mental (cognitive) and body balance.