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Music therapy has long been used to help people recover from physical and emotional trauma, but now it may also be a breakthrough in assessing consciousness levels in children who have suffered significant brain injuries. Researchers at Anglia Ruskin University, The Children’s Trust, and Temple University have developed a new tool called MuSICCA (Music therapy Sensory Instrument for Cognition, Consciousness, and Awareness) to help doctors and caregivers determine the level of consciousness in children aged 2-18.

Currently, there is a lack of tools to assess consciousness in children, making it difficult for medical staff to provide proper care. As children grow and develop, their brains undergo significant changes that can make it even harder to determine their level of awareness. MuSICCA aims to change this by using specially selected music to stimulate the patient and encourage them to respond.

A qualified music therapist performs live music stimulation for the patient, manipulating different aspects of the music depending on how they respond. The music therapist observes the child’s behaviors and records these observations against a set of scales, which then produces a diagnosis of the level of consciousness.

In a recent study, researchers invited participants including music therapists, family members of children affected by brain injuries, and healthcare professionals to evaluate MuSICCA. The results were overwhelmingly positive, with 85% of participants strongly agreeing that MuSICCA is an assessment of consciousness and awareness, and 85% also strongly agreeing that it is suitable for use with children and young people.

The lead author of the study, Dr. Jonathan Pool, said: “Children with disorders of consciousness are often almost completely dependent on others to meet their needs. Their therapists, nurses, and caregivers must interpret very subtle behaviors to help them understand their needs. MuSICCA allows us to conduct a rigorous assessment of the patient’s response to various musical stimuli, giving us a picture of their level of consciousness and the strengths and weaknesses of their responses.”

The researchers believe that MuSICCA has the potential to revolutionize the way we assess consciousness in children with brain injuries, providing a more accurate and reliable method for doctors and caregivers to determine the best course of treatment.

The secret to aging successfully may not be what you think. Instead of focusing on physical exercise or mental stimulation alone, research suggests that cultivating curiosity can play a significant role in maintaining cognitive health and even preventing Alzheimer’s disease. An international team of psychologists has found that older adults who maintain a curious mindset and seek out new knowledge relevant to their interests may be able to offset or prevent dementia.

This finding challenges prior research that suggested curiosity decreases with age. The study, published in the journal PLOS One, was led by UCLA psychologist Alan Castel and involved a large sample of participants between the ages of 20 and 84. The researchers aimed to tease apart two types of curiosity: trait curiosity (a general level of inquisitiveness) and state curiosity (a momentary feeling of curiosity experienced when engaging with specific topics).

To assess these forms of curiosity, the researchers asked participants to complete an online questionnaire and guess answers to hard trivia questions. Analysis showed that while trait curiosity did decline across the adult lifespan, state curiosity increased sharply after middle age and continued upward well into old age.

The study’s lead author, Mary Whatley, notes that this finding may be related to selectivity theory, which suggests that as people get older, they become more selective about what they want to learn. This aligns with research on lifelong learning, where many older adults engage in activities like taking classes or picking up hobbies.

Castel’s own work on memory has shown that people tend to quickly forget information that doesn’t engage their curiosity. Anecdotally, many older adults report that staying curious is crucial for maintaining cognitive health and preventing dementia.

This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The findings suggest that cultivating curiosity can be a key factor in healthy aging and may even help prevent or offset Alzheimer’s disease.

The Feeling of Control: Uncovering the Secrets of Sense of Agency in Motor Learning

Have you ever tried to control a robot or a computer cursor with your body? If so, you might have experienced a feeling of agency – a sense that you are in charge of what’s happening. This sensation is crucial for tasks and well-being in everyday life, but its mechanisms are still not fully understood.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have shed new light on how we develop this sense of agency when learning new motor skills. They used a specialized glove to track changes in people’s feelings of control as they learned to map their hand movements onto a computer cursor.

Traditionally, the brain was thought to build an internal model of expected outcomes from actions, which would then be compared with actual sensory feedback to create a sense of agency. However, this “comparator model” doesn’t fully explain how we learn new skills, like playing a sport or relearning everyday activities after an injury.

The researchers found that when people first start learning a new motor skill, they rely on temporal synchronicity – the hand and cursor movements are in sync – to judge whether they’re in control. However, as they practice more, they develop a sense of agency when their hand movements align with the learned mapping.

In contrast, simply imitating gestures without actively discovering the underlying rules doesn’t lead to a strong sense of agency. This suggests that motor exploration is essential for building a structural representation of the skill and developing a sense of control.

These findings have important implications for the development of human-computer interfaces in new technology, as well as for rehabilitation and virtual reality applications. By understanding how we develop a sense of agency when learning new skills, researchers can design more effective training programs that enhance our feelings of control and confidence.

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