[UACCESS-L] a bit ot:Fw: [The vOICe] Scientists Enhance Ability to Feel

["David Poehlman" <poehlman1@comcast.net>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Meijer" <Peter.B.L.Meijer@philips.com>
To: <seeingwithsound@topica.com>
Sent: Friday, July 04, 2003 4:02 AM
Subject: [The vOICe] Scientists Enhance Ability to Feel


Hi All,

For your information. The subject line is the title
of an article in today's Washington Post, as appended.
It fits in well with what I replied to Joe last month,
saying

> Also, no one knows what would happen once medication
> is found that could temporarily increase plasticity
> via nerve growth factors or whatever.

So now one knows a little more...

Best wishes,

Peter Meijer


Seeing with Sound - The vOICe
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winvoice.htm


Scientists Enhance Ability to Feel.

Method Might Restore Sensory Function in Elderly,
Improve It in Young.

By Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer.
Friday, July 4, 2003; Page A07.

Giving new meaning to "sensitivity training," scientists
have developed a simple way to greatly enhance the human
body's ability to feel subtle sensations.

The enhanced sensitivity, achieved with a tiny
stimulating device and a single dose of a drug, has
reversed fingertip numbness in older people, many of whom
have trouble performing everyday tasks such as buttoning
shirts or turning switches on and off. Researchers said
they suspect it could also help blind people read
Braille. And applying the technique to the feet might
prevent falls in diabetics who have lost sensation in
their toes, which are crucial for balance.

The ability to boost sensory sensitivity, scientists
said, could even allow people with normal function to
achieve bionic supersensitivity - for work or
recreational purposes - enhancing the senses of taste or
smell or adding to the tactile pleasure of a romantic
caress.

"This indicates that the sensitivity we typically see in
normal subjects is not a physical limit," said Hubert R.
Dinse, the neuroscientist who led the work at the Ruhr-
University Bochum in Germany.

The new work, described in today's issue of the journal
Science, is the latest in a series of advances that have
demonstrated an unexpected capacity to reverse sensory
declines in the elderly and enhance those functions in
younger people.

Studies have shown that repeated exposure to subtle
signals - such as barely perceptible changes in musical
tones - can improve sensitivity to those signals, a form
of sensory enhancement that has been documented in
musicians. Research has shown that these enhanced
abilities are the result of the brain gradually
reconfiguring itself to devote larger portions to the
task at hand. In taxi drivers, for instance, the brain's
hippocampus - which maintains mental maps and a sense of
place in the world - grows larger.

Until now, however, scientists did not know how the body
translated musical practice, taxi driving or other
sensory experiences into anatomical changes in the brain.
The new study shows for the first time that the process
involves a biochemical pathway already known to play a
key role in learning and memory. When scientists gave
subjects a drug that "revs up" this pathway, it vastly
increased the amount of brain reorganization - or
"remodeling" - that occurred during sensory stimulation,
and significantly added to the improvement in function.

Geriatricians in particular want to understand and tinker
with these biochemical pathways, because the gradual loss
of sensory function in old age takes a huge toll on
quality of life.

"The incremental loss of vision, hearing, smell and touch
tips the balance eventually," said Daniel Perry,
executive director of the nonprofit Alliance for Aging
Research. "If you begin to lose these sensory abilities,
you've really lost the environmental cues that keep you
safe and allow you to operate independently. The end of
that road is a nursing home."

In the new experiments, volunteers placed the tip of one
index finger on a portable electrical device that
delivered a subtle stimulus - similar to the feel of one
fingertip gently touching another - about once a second
for three hours. As expected, brain scans showed an
increase in the amount of gray matter "paying attention"
to that finger, and volunteers showed improved "tactile
acuity," measured by the ability to discriminate between
two tiny and very closely spaced bumps on a surface.
But that effect was as much as doubled when the subjects
were also given a single dose of amphetamine, a drug that
energizes a class of brain cells in the NMDA pathway
involved in learning and memory. Those who got the drug
without the sensory training did not improve at all,
indicating that the drug by itself does not enhance
tactile sensitivity.

"We were able to change the tactile acuity of 80-year-old
subjects to a performance of a 50-year-old," Dinse said -
a 50 percent to 100 percent improvement.

Because of its potential for abuse, amphetamine is not
going to be the key to restoring sensory losses in the
aged. But the studies are likely to offer a better
picture of how the drug bolsters sensory training, Dinse
said, and should point the way to safer and simpler
chemicals with the same effect.

The higher sensitivity lasted a day or two. But it would
not be hard to deliver the fingertip stimulus regularly,
Dinse and others said - perhaps with a battery-operated
glove that could be worn at night. Some researchers are
already developing a similar device to help people who
have lost sensitivity in their toes.

Harvard physician Lewis A. Lipsitz and his colleague
James J. Collins, a professor of biomedical engineering,
have been applying vibrations to the feet of diabetics,
who gradually lose sensation because of nerve damage.
They have witnessed sizable improvements in those
patients' ability to detect sensations in their feet.

"Now we're building vibratory insoles that can be put in
a shoe," said Lipsitz, research director at Hebrew
Rehabilitation Center for Aged in Boston. "Anything that
can enhance information about where the body is in space
can help stabilize posture and overcome obstacles and
hopefully prevent falls."

Dinse's discovery of a pharmacological pathway linked to
sensory enhancement could revolutionize efforts to
sharpen the senses, agreed University of Toronto
neuroscientist Christo Pantev - who has done pioneering
work on the effects of musical training on the brain -
and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, director of the center for
brain and cognition at the University of California, San
Diego. The field of brain remodeling was already
exciting, Ramachandran said, but the new study "is even
more exciting, because it's starting to show what the
biochemical mechanisms are."

Others suggested that, in time, the spectrum of human
sensation could grow in almost unimaginable ways as
biomedical engineers develop drugs or devices for people
who are healthy but want to have a richer sensory
experience.

Source URL:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7101-2003Jul3.html?nav=hptoc_h

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