Lifeboat Foundation

Conclusions: Most studies demonstrated the use of VR to be effective for supporting the treatment of anxiety or depression in a range of settings and recommended its potential as a tool for use in a clinical environment. Even though standalone headsets are much easier to work with and more suitable for home use, the shift from tethered VR headsets to standalone headsets in the mental health environment was not observed. All studies that looked at the use of CBT either in vivo or in a virtual environment found it to be effective in supporting the treatment of anxiety or depression.

Keywords: CBT; anxiety; depression; mental health; virtual reality.

©Nilufar Baghaei, Vibhav Chitale, Andrej Hlasnik, Lehan Stemmet, Hai-Ning Liang, Richard Porter. Originally published in JMIR Mental Health (https://mental.jmir.org), 23.09.2021.

Like this video about how Viva Vita addresses loneliness and depression in the elderly using VR. Subscribe here: https://freeth.ink/youtube-subscribe-depressionintheelderly.

Watch the next video in our series on virtual reality therapy: https://youtu.be/IZE41KejIBw.

Continue reading “VR Trips Help Treat Depression in the Elderly” »

The Conversation Weekly podcast is taking a short break in August. In the meantime, we’re bringing you extended versions of some of our favourite interviews from the past few months.

This week, how researchers discovered a biological switch that could turn on and off neuroplasticity in the brain – the ability of neurons to change their structure. We speak to Sarah Ackerman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Neuroscience and Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Oregon, about what she and her team have found and why it matters.

Continue reading “The biological switch that could turn neuroplasticity on and off in the brain” »

How does the research conducted by Lige Leng at the Institute of Neuroscience of Xiamen University in China (I link it to you here)? It all starts with the study of the “inflamed brain”: many diseases of old age are associated with low-level chronic inflammation in the brain, organs, joints and circulatory system. A phenomenon sometimes called “inflammaging”.

You know it: over time all of our body’s repair systems deteriorate, our DNA and proteins accumulate damage, metabolism stumbles and cells stop doing their job. That’s life, beauty.

We’re all on our way to the exit, but research on worms, flies, mice and monkeys show that going at this speed isn’t inevitable. Diet and lifestyle changes (and, perhaps, upcoming anti-aging drugs) can curb decay and give us many more years of life, especially healthy life.

Continue reading “Discovered an aging ‘brake pedal’?” »

Aude Oliva is a prominent Cognitive and Computer Scientist directing the MIT Computational Perception and Cognition group at CSAIL while also leading the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and co-leading the MIT AI Hardware Program. With research spanning computational neuroscience, cognition, and computer vision, she pioneers the integration of human perception and machine recognition. Her contributions extend across academia, industry, and research, making her a distinguished figure at MIT.

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Continue reading “Building Tools To Learn Human Brain Processes” »

New research finds that the memories useful for future generalizations are held in the brain separately from those recording unusual events.

Neuron devices prospects for recognition and interfaces.

Shared with Dropbox.

A biological pathway through which myelin, the protective coating on nerve fibers, can be repaired and regenerated has been discovered in a new study. The ramifications of this finding could be far-reaching for those with neurological diseases affecting myelin, many of which are currently untreatable.

If the axons that shoot out from the cell bodies of neurons are like electrical wires, you can think of the myelin sheath as the insulating plastic outer coating. In the brain, these sheathed nerve fibers make up most of the tissue known as white matter, but axons throughout the body are also coated in myelin.

The myelin sheath’s main functions are to protect the axon, to ensure electrical nerve impulses can travel quickly down it, and to maintain the strength of these impulses as they travel over what can be very long distances.

Researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have found how stem cells’ surrounding environment controls them to differentiate into functional cells, a breakthrough critical for using stem cells to treat various human diseases in the future.

Stem cells play a crucial role in supporting normal development and maintaining tissue homeostasis in adults. Their unique ability to replicate and differentiate into specialized cells holds great promise in treating diseases like Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and type I diabetes by replacing damaged or diseased cells with healthy ones.

Despite their potential therapeutic benefits, one of the major challenges for cell therapies lies in efficiently differentiating stem cells into functional cells to replace damaged cells in degenerative tissue. This task is particularly difficult due to the limited understanding of the underlying molecular mechanism by which the tissues around stem cells, known as the stem cell niche, guide stem cell progeny to differentiate into proper functional cell types.