HEARING VOICES IS A SIGN OF A WELL-TUNED BRAIN

If you start to hear voices, don't worry.  That's the sound of a well-organized brain say researchers from Durham, England.  Many folks will hear voices at night as they lie their head down to go to bed.  While others hear voices throughout the day, but these episodes are sporadic and fleeting.  It is not a sign of a mental illness.  In fact, "it’s a clue that a person’s brain is simply well-tuned to many sounds."

DURHAM, England — Hearing voices may not be a sign of mental illness as much as it’s a clue that a person’s brain is simply well-tuned to many sounds. A new study finds that healthy people who hear voices have differently-wired brains that find speech patterns in other sounds.

Researchers from Durham University studied brain-response differences between two groups of people — those who have experienced hearing voices (auditory verbal hallucinations) and those who have never mistaken other sounds for speech. Participants in the study included 17 people with typical responses to sounds and 12 people who have experienced hearing voices, but do not have any mental health problems.

Can hearing voices be a good thing? A new study finds that people who are not mentally ill, but often hear speech in sounds may actually have a special skill that comes from having a differently-wired brain than the rest of us.

Participants underwent an MRI brain scan while listening to hidden speech sounds, known as sine-wave speech. Sine-wave speech to the untrained ear would sound something like birdsong or alien-type noises. Typically, people are able to make out these sounds only after they have been clued in to listen for them or taught to decode the hidden speech sounds. After people are trained, though, they can detect simple sentences within the sounds, such as “The clown had a funny face.”

Researchers found that less than half of those with typical listening skills noticed the hidden speech while 75 percent of the voice-hearers picked it up.

“It suggests that the brains of people who hear voices are particularly tuned to meaning in sounds,” says lead author Dr. Ben Alderson-Day in a university release.

Researchers were surprised that the voice-hearers had such strong neural responses to the sounds with hidden speech. Even before being told to listen for hidden speech, voice-hearers reported hearing the voices in the sounds. They found speech-like sounds faster and more easily than those who have never experienced the phenomenon of hearing voices.

“We did not tell the participants that the ambiguous sounds could contain speech before they were scanned, or ask them to try to understand the sounds. Nonetheless, these participants showed distinct neural responses to sounds containing disguised speech, as compared to sounds that were meaningless,” adds co-author Dr. Cesar Lima.

The authors believe this shows that the brains of voice-hearers are more perceptive to the hidden meanings in sounds. The areas of the brain that control attention were quickly activated in the brains of voice-hearers when they were exposed to hidden speech compared to when they were listening to vague sounds.

“These findings are a demonstration of what we can learn from people who hear voices that are not distressing or problematic,” says Alderson-Day.

Between 5 and 15 percent of the population has occasionally had the experience of hearing voices. Although not everyone who hears voices has a mental health problem, it is commonly associated with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Researchers hope their findings could someday help scientists and clinicians find better ways to help those who are troubled by the voices they hear.

Be sure to protect your brain nonetheless.

PATIENTS DYING IN CORRIDORS OF BRITAIN'S SOCIALIZED HEALTH SYSTEM

h/t Robert Wenzel @ EconomicPolicyJournal

By George Pickering

“Patients dying in hospital corridors.” So went the headline which appeared on the BBC’s website last week, detailing the newest outrages which have emerged from Britain’s crisis-beset healthcare system. This most recent revelation came as a result of an open letter sent to the prime minister by 68 senior doctors, offering details of the inhuman conditions which have become common in the National Health Service’s hospitals.

The letter, which collected statistics from NHS hospitals in England and Wales, found that in December alone over 300,000 patients were

made to wait in emergency rooms for more than four hours before being seen, with thousands more suffering long waits in ambulances before even being allowed into the emergency room. The letter further noted that it had become “routine” for patients to be left on gurneys in corridors for as long as 12 hours before being offered proper beds, with many of them eventually being put into makeshift wards hastily constructed in side-rooms. In addition to this, it was revealed that around 120 patients per day are being attended to in corridors and waiting rooms, with many being made to undergo humiliating treatments in the public areas of hospitals, and some even dying prematurely as a result. One patient reported that, having gone to the emergency room with a gynecological problem which had left her in severe pain and bleeding, a lack of treatment rooms led hospital staff to examine her in a busy corridor, in full view of other patients.

While it’s tempting to believe that these extreme cases must be a rare occurrence, the fact is that such horror stories have become increasingly the norm for a socialised healthcare system that seems to be in a permanent state of crisis. Indeed, as the NHS entered the first week of 2018, over 97% of its trusts in England were reporting levels of overcrowding so severe as to be “unsafe.”

Almost as predictable as the regular emergence of new stories of this kind is the equally unwavering refusal of British commentators to consider that the state-run monopoly structure of the system itself might be to blame. Many, including the prime minister herself, have pointed to the spike in seasonal illnesses such as the flu at this time of year, to distract from the more fundamental flaws of the system. However, officials from Public Health England recently went so far as to openly dismiss this as a major cause of the current healthcare crisis, clarifying that current levels of hospital admissions due to the flu are “certainly not unprecedented.” The aging of the population, and local councils’ failure to provide more non-hospital care have also been blamed.

By far the most commonly suggested remedy, however, is simply to inject more taxpayers’ money into this failing system. Indeed, the belief that Britain’s perpetual healthcare crisis is solely the result of funding cuts by miserly Conservative politicians is so widespread that it is almost never challenged, least of all by the trusted experts within the system itself, many of whom stand to benefit from increased funding.

However, the popular caricature of the NHS as suffering from chronic underfunding is simply a myth. In fact, even when adjusting for inflation, it is clear that government funding to the NHS has been increasing at an extraordinary rate since the turn of the millennium, much more quickly than during the early years which its supporters look back on so fondly.

Indeed, under the Conservative government of 2015–16, almost 30% of Britain’s public services budget was spent on its monopoly healthcare system, compared with around 11% in the NHS’s first decade.

One commonly heard soundbite from supporters of the current system is that the Conservatives have allowed healthcare spending to slump to historically low levels; all it would take to return the NHS to the levels of success it supposedly previously enjoyed would be to increase its funding back to the same level it previously enjoyed, or so they say.  However, to believe such a statement one would have to make two separate misinterpretations of the statistics, both so basic that they would strike shame into even the dullest high school math students: firstly, it is not the absolute amount of spending on the NHS which has fallen under the Conservative-led governments of 2010–18, but merely the rate at which spending is continuing to increase, even when adjusting for inflation. Second, the only reason that the rate of increase seems to have fallen is because of how disproportionately high it had been been under the infamously spendthrift Labour governments of 1997–2010.

Not only is the NHS not underfunded, but it suffers from dismally low efficiency in terms of healthcare bang per buck compared with similarly developed countries. This suggests that no matter how much its funding is increased, the current set-up is prone to chronically waste that money away.

To overcome these problems, reforms to the fundamental nature of the system itself are desperately needed, to increase the economic freedom of healthcare providers in the UK as well as the freedom of choice of consumers. In short, as long as British healthcare is organised as a taxpayer-funded state monopoly it will continue to fail, just as the other nationalised monopolies of the 1970s failed. To get to a point where the British public would even consider reforms of that kind, however, would require the breaking of a taboo that has defined the past 70 years of British politics.

George Pickering is the Almoayyad Fellow in Residence at the Mises Institute this summer, and is a student of economic history at the London School of Economics.

The above originally appeared at Mises.org.

CANADIAN WAIT TIME TO SEE A NEUROLOGIST: 4.5 YEARS

Canadian Health Care is "Free" But Rationed by Long Wait Times, e.g., a 4.5 YEAR estimated wait time to see a neurologist in Ontario! #Insanity pic.twitter.com/UHljzjvhNX

— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) January 21, 2018

STATE LICENSURE: "IF YOU CONTROL WHO PRACTICES THE PROFESSION, YOU CONTROL HOW IT'S PRACTICED"

h/t Steve Bartin

Wow!  At the 7:10 mark, Anahad O'Connor's NYT's September 12, 2016 article on how the sugar industry shifted the blame on bad health to fat.  They paid off researchers to downplay the link between sugar and heart disease.  According to Greg Glassman, owner of CrossFit, says that the ACSM, American College of Sports Medicine, has influential ties to Coca Cola who has influence on university studies and reports about the "not so bad" effects of sugar or transfer the culprit on heart disease to fat.  

"MRI REVEALED SURGEON HAD LEFT A SCALPEL IN [ARMY VETERAN'S] ABDOMEN 4 YEARS EARLIER"

I find this to be absolutely incredible.  What, the surgeon completes an exhaustive surgery, leaves a scalpel in someone's gut, turns and walks to wash up after telling his staff to "Okay, stitch him up"?  Is that how it went down?  

Some surgeries are necessary, no doubt.  But I wonder how many you could avoid if you maintained a broad spectrum of vital nutrient compounds, day after day, meal after meal?  I wonder.  Check out what happened to veteran, Glen Turner, and then check out the products at the bottom of this post.  Thanks for reading.

HARTFORD, Conn. - An Army veteran says an MRI revealed that a surgeon had left a scalpel in his abdomen four years earlier.

Glenford Turner, 61, of Bridgeport, went to the West Haven VA with abdominal pain last April when the surprising discovery was made, according to his lawyer. Turner required surgery to remove the scalpel, and last week filed suit against the Veterans Administration.

"Xrays revealed the presence of an abandoned scalpel inside Mr. Turner's body. Doctors confirmed that is was the scalpel knife used during Turner's radical prostatectomy - performed four years earlier at the West Haven VA," attorney Joel Faxon of New Haven said in a statement Monday announcing the lawsuit.

Administrators at the VA Connecticut Healthcare's West Haven campus could not be reached Monday, which was a federal holiday.

In the lawsuit, Turner says he underwent a robotic-assisted laparoscopic prostatectomy at the West Haven VA on Aug. 30, 2013. He returned to the VA hospital on March 29, 2017, for an MRI after complaining of dizziness and long-term abdominal pain, Faxon said.

"The imaging study was abruptly halted when Mr. Turner began to experience severe, worsened abdominal pain," and subsequent X-rays revealed the scalpel, Faxon said.

The instrument was removed in an operation in April 2017.

Faxon described the incident as "an incomprehensible level of incompetence." The suit seeks unspecified compensatory damages, and claims Turner suffered pain, additional surgery, hospitalization, prolonged rehabilitation, medical expenses and lost work time.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called the allegations "egregious" and said he's asking the VA for a detailed explanation of what happened.

Visit The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.) at www.courant.com

Stay healthy, my friends with these and this.