brain exercise Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Improving Vision with At-Home Brain Exercises

The AHA! Team — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 08:17:33 +0000

John Jeffay via Israel21c – RevitalVision offers a unique intervention for people with eyesight challenges, treating the brain where images are processed. Doctors told Amit Azulay again and again that she’d never be able to drive because of medical conditions affecting her eyesight. She proved them wrong — using a unique piece of software developed by a startup in Israel that has been clinically proven to improve vision. Despite suffering nystagmus (involuntary eye movements) and albinism, her eyesight became good enough to apply for a license (see her delighted response to the news here). Amit, aged 25, is one of many patients who say the online training exercises have literally changed their lives. RevitalVision offers a unique intervention for people with eyesight challenges. It doesn’t treat the eye. It treats the brain. The eye is the hardware, providing the best optical signal it can. But in many cases, the brain struggles to process that signal. That could be because of medical conditions including diabetes, glaucoma or AMD (age-related macular degeneration). It could be a cataract patient whose hardware has been upgraded (cloudy lenses replaced with clear ones) but whose software (the brain) hasn’t caught up. Or somebody who’s had laser surgery but now has blurry vision resulting from reduced contrast sensitivity and still has to wear glasses. Or somebody with “lazy eye” (amblyopia) whose brain sidelines signals from the eye that doesn’t work as well as the other. Or somebody who’s borderline for wearing glasses and would prefer not to. RevitalVision addresses all these problems, and more, with a structured program that trains the brain to better make sense of the blurry signals it receives. Screams of joy RevitalVision’s program typically involves three half-hour, at-home computer sessions per week for two or three months. Patients are trained via a dedicated app. The result, says Yair Yahav, the company’s CEO, is a measurable improvement in vision of 20% to 25%, equivalent to an extra two or more lines on a standard eye chart or, in many cases, the difference between a driving license and no license. “Some patients come to our premises in Modi’in [central Israel], where we have a team of optometrists,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “About once a week I hear screams of joy from a patient in another room who now has good enough vision to qualify for a driving license. We have people who are literally crying. “They’ve been told their whole life that there’s no way, forget it, you’ll never be able to drive. “Then they come to us and if they’re missing just one or two lines [on the eye chart], that’s the average, we tell them they have an 85% to 90% chance of success.” One patient testimonial is from a woman who couldn’t read the label on her medicine, or see well enough to sign a check. She now can. Another, a graduate student with congenital nystagmus, always had to sit at the front of the class to read the board. Now she can sit anywhere. “It’s really lifechanging for many, many people,” says Yahav. Image processing He explains the science behind what they do. “The quality of the image we see depends both on image capturing and image processing,” he says. “We don’t treat the lens of the eye; we treat the brain by enhancing its ability to process visual information, which results in significant vision improvement.” The brain training is based on a “Gabor patch,” which looks like a grid of blurry black and white stripes on a gray background. It was invented by Dennis Gabor, who was born in Hungary, fled the Holocaust, invented holography, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1971. His seemingly simple image perfectly matches the shape of the receptive fields of neurons, or nerve cells, in the part of the brain that processes visual information. Repeatedly stimulating those neurons improves their performance, just like physical exercise at the gym builds muscle, says Yahav. Shoring up weaknesses RevitalVision uses an algorithm to understand exactly where the weaknesses lie for each patient. In a typical on-screen exercise, the patient sees three images pop up, two of a Gabor patch and one of a blank. They have to click, using their computer’s mouse, to indicate which is which. The exercises get harder and harder, with the Gabor patch appearing less clear or further toward the edge of the patient’s field of vision. All the time, the algorithm is assessing responses and adjusting the images it displays accordingly. “Our software maps the patient’s cortical deficits, neurons that do not respond well. Then the algorithm tailors specific stimulation to match those deficits,” says Yahav. “Once the patient is consistently answering correctly, the software knows that’s the exact threshold, the maximum vision of the patient in this exercise, and moves on to the next one. “We are training the neurons to be more responsive and restoring the basic mechanism of visual processing in the brain,” he says. FDA approved Yahav says RevitalVision has “the only regulated product approved by the FDA with clinical claims to improve vision for a variety of eye diseases and impairments.” Some products approved to treat amblyopia, he says, are not for those over the age of nine. RevitalVision builds on pre-Internet technology developed in Israel, which it acquired from another company. This technology was launched commercially two years ago as a web-based product available by direct purchase or through an eyecare specialist. So far, the company’s product has treated 15,000 patients. “We’ve raised $7 million so far and we’re raising another $6 million. Now we are scaling up,” says Yahav. The company received a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority during its product development stage, and is conducting trials at Shamir Medical Center associated with Tel Aviv University. It currently employs six people in Israel, six in India and one in the UK. The potential market is so huge that the biggest challenge right now is to spread the word, says Yahav. For more information, click here. To read the original article click here.

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How to Make Healthy Decisions Under High Pressure & Anxiety

AHA Publisher — Fri, 26 Nov 2021 08:00:00 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #334) and blog, I speak about the link between anxiety, stress, and decision-making. Often, when we are in an anxious state, we cannot seem to make a decision, or, if we do, we end up making a choice we regret. I know this has happened to me many times! What should we do when this happens? Is there a way out of this mental swamp? Thankfully, yes! To make healthy decisions, our brain needs optimal blood, oxygen and energy flow, especially in the front of the brain (the frontal lobe). When we are in toxic stress, this flow is constricted, which can impact how and what we choose to say or do in the moment, as well as our overall wellbeing. However, we can learn how to make our stress work for us instead of against us. The key point here is to see our anxiety as a signal telling us something is going on in our lives that needs to be addressed. Anxiety is not something we should suppress or ignore. It is designed to get our attention in a focused way, so we can deal with the disequilibrium we are experiencing in our life. If we ignore this signal, it can affect our wellbeing, putting us in a toxic stress state that can impact our ability to make decisions and increase our impulsivity. It can also impact our mental and physical health due to the mind-brain-body connection (known as psychoneurobiology). We need to learn how to tune into these signals and manage them before they take over our thinking. This includes nothing our unique red flags: how anxiety and stress show up in our life, how we feel emotionally and physically, and how we can manage these signals to make healthy decisions. Self-regulation is key! When we make a decision, we should try to get into the habit of observing ourselves. Why did we choose this? What impacted our choice? Why did we feel this way? How did this impact our ability to decide? One way I like to do this is by practicing pausing just before I make a decision. During this pause, I breathe in deeply for 3 counts, and breathe out for 7 counts, and do this a few times depending on how I feel and how important the choice I am about to make is. As I do this, I am better able to observe what I feel in the moment because I am getting my neurophysiology under control, which, in turn, helps me better understand my anxiety signals and stress state, bringing back balance into my brain so I can make a good decision. This really is a great way to calm down the mind when things are difficult! If, after doing this, you still feel you need more time and information (as often happens with really big decisions), this is totally okay! Just say you need more time to think about it (if possible)—never be ashamed of needing more time or asking for more space to think something through. If you feel a lack of confidence in the moment, remind yourself of all the times you made a good choice in the past. Give yourself a little pep talk: remember when you made a choice under pressure and managed to successfully overcome a challenge. If you still feel stuck, work on what I call the “possibilities mindset”. Think of all the possibilities in each situation. How will this choice play out? How did this play out in the past? What if you made a different choice? What if this happened? What have you learned? This is a great brain exercise and a reminder that life isn’t linear—we can never truly grasp all the threads that lead us to where we are, or where we will be. If you are not sure how to do this, use the 5-step mind management system I developed based on my clinical practice and research, called the Neurocycle (for more on this, check out my latest book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess and my app Neurocycle). First, gather awareness of the information you need and your past choices. What is the data telling you? What worked? What didn’t? Now, reconceptualize all “failures” as “I haven’t failed; I have learned x things that now I know don’t work, which is great to know!” Reflect on what these lessons are by asking, answering, and discussing them to find the information, emotions, and physical responses in your brain and body. Write down what you have been reflecting on, in as much detail as possible, to help organize your thinking. Then, recheck what you have written to add more insight and look for patterns. Now, practice looking at what you have written and use it to make good choices. During this time, watch how this carries over into your day-to-day life; observe and write how this mental exercise helps you, especially during tough times. To read the original article click here.

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