Believing is Seeing: How Mindset Can Improve Vision

PhysOrg.com) -- How you see isn't just about how good your eyes are - it's also about your mindset, according to a study published in Psychological Science. For example, in one experiment, if someone was told that exercise would improve their vision, they saw better after doing an athletic activity - jumping jacks - than an unathletic activity with the same effect on heart rate - skipping.

The researchers, led by Ellen Langer at Harvard University, were interested in how the mind and body connect, particularly how mindset affects the body's performance. Langer has studied this kind of connection for decades. "Many of the things that we think we can't do are a function of our mindset rather than our abilities to do them," she says. In this case, she was interested in whether what we think affects how well we see.

People expect to see only the first few lines on traditional eye charts. Volunteers in an experiment who read a eye chart arranged in reverse order (the letters got progressively larger, with the giant "E" in the last row) saw a greater proportion of the smallest letters than when they viewed a traditional eye chart.

Another experiment took advantage of the belief that pilots have good eyesight. College students in the ROTC were brought into a flight simulator, given army fatigues to wear, and told to fly the simulator. They did simple flight maneuvers, then did an eyesight test by reading markings on the wings of planes ahead - actually lines from an eye chart. A control group of ROTC students was put in the same conditions, but they were told the simulator was broken, and that they should just pretend to fly the plane. The people who had performed like pilots, as opposed to those who just pretended, saw 40 percent better.

These findings suggest that visual acuity is influenced by mindset and might be improved by psychological means. Just being aware of this might help people improve their eyesight, says Langer - if they pay attention to when they can see well and when they can't, for example, or simply believe that they can see better when they aren't sitting in a dark room at the optometrist's office. These findings along with others from Langer's lab lead them to question how many of our limits are of our own making. The research is part of a larger inquiry into the psychology of possibility.

Provided by Association for Psychological Science

Source: http://newscri.be/link/1089861

Comparing China And India

 

I’ve been traveling around this week giving talks on my new Oxford University Press book, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, and one of the works I took along to divert me on planes and trains (I started it while flying to D.C. on Monday and finished it on an Amtrak ride to New Jersey on Wednesday) was an excellent new Princeton University Press publication by Berkeley economist Pranab Bardhan. As soon as I dipped into Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India, one thing that struck me was how much it had in common with the book I've been promoting--and not just because each is a general interest work by an academic that has been issued by a press linked to a prestigious university.


Here's a rundown of some similarities between the two works:

1) Each is short. (Mine clocks in at 164 pages; Bardhan's at 172.)

2) Each strives to dispel some common misconceptions about China, including the notion that it will inevitably democratize as its economy grows.

3) Each has only a small number of footnotes and tends to steer clear of specialized terminology.

4) Each stresses the dangers of making firm predictions about what is to come, yet ends with a forward-looking chapter. The last one in Bardhan's book is called “Looking to the Future: Through the Lens of Political Economy,” while the “The Future" is the title of the last one in mine.

All this could suggest that I would have trouble enjoying Bardhan’s book because of a sense that it was in direct competition with mine. This was not, however, the case. I was able to take pleasure in reading and learning from it without any niggling worry that people who buy it won’t be tempted to purchase China in the 21st Century. This is because, for all the similarities between the two books, there are a pair of crucial differences between them.

The first relates to topical focus. Bardhan is an economist, so not surprisingly he is primarily concerned with economic issues. Those are not the sole focus of my book, which explores topics ranging from Confucian thought to consumer culture, from generation gaps to the World Expo. Bardhan has valuable things to say about non-economic topics (politics, the environment, etc.), but his attention remains fixed throughout on the dynamics of development.

The second contrast between our books is even more important: his is equally concerned with two different countries, whereas I concentrate on just one (albeit with a variety of brief forays into comparison). Bardhan makes his interest in a pair of countries clear in his book’s title and subtitle: Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India. (One thing I like about that title is that it is refreshingly free of any allusion to a totemic animal. No cliched “dragon” vs. “elephant” word play for him.)

Bardhan writes with remarkable clarity about complex issues, such as the widely varying ways that corruption can affect the economy, and the positive as well as negative legacy of the Maoist era for China in terms of its recent trajectory. (For example, he stresses the importance of the upsurge of literacy during the pre-Reform era, which meant that a relatively well-educated pool of workers were ready to contribute to the country's take-off after Deng Xiaoping came to power.) He also shows some welcome stylistic flair, quoting poetry to good effect in one section (how often do economists do that?) and slipping a lovely bit of alliteration into the title of a chapter: “Infrastructure: The Dazzling Difference.”

One thing that I was relieved to discover when I reached the end of the book was that, while I certainly gained new insights into many specific issues from reading it, nothing I came across in Awakening Giants caused me to wish I could go back and alter fundamentally anything about my own brief treatment of China-India comparisons in China in the 21st Century. This is hardly surprising, though, since one person I read to prepare to write that part of the book was Bardhan--a fact I acknowledge by listing one of his recent articles (that is available free online) in my book's “further readings” section.

There’s a final contrast between our two books worth noting. Only mine was written in a question-and-answer format, a hallmark of the “What Everyone Needs to Know” series of which it is part. And yet, when I got to the end of Awakening Giants, I definitely felt that most of the questions I had about the Chinese and Indian political economies (and I suspect these are ones that other Americans interested in Asia are likely to have as well) had been answered very effectively.

Jeff WasserstromBio
Professor of History, editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know

Source: http://newscri.be/link/1089853

AMD risk on the rise for Asians; retinal vein 'bypass' may help many CRVO patients

The May issue of Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, includes a surprising, first report on increasing rates of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) among Asians, and describes an innovative "bypass" laser surgery that may help many people with central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO) avoid serious vision loss.

Are Asians as Vulnerable to AMD as Caucasians?

A major review by Tien Yi Wong, MD, MPH, PhD, and Singapore Eye Research Institute colleagues concludes that Asians may be just as susceptible to age-related macular degeneration as Caucasians. Asians have long been considered a low risk group for AMD, which is a leading cause of vision loss in older Caucasians. Since the number of elderly people is increasing in Asia, Dr. Wong's study suggests that health systems there need to prepare for an onslaught of AMD.

Pooling results from nine standardized-diagnosis studies in five Asian populations (Japan, China, South Korea, India and Singapore), Dr. Wong's group confirmed prevalence of early-stage AMD as 6.8 percent and late-stage as 0.56 percent, comparable to Caucasians at 8.8 percent and 0.59 percent, respectively. All rates pertain to people aged 40 to 79 years. Also, among those with late AMD, the "wet" (neovascular) form appeared to be more prevalent in Asians than in whites. Asian men were more likely to develop late AMD than white men and much more likely than Asian women.

The researchers speculate that Asian men may be more susceptible to polypoidal choroidal vasculopathy (PCV), abnormal development of blood vessels in the deeper layers of the eye. Whether PCV is a sub-type of AMD or a separate disorder remains controversial; it is also unclear whether PCV responds well to medications that inhibit abnormal blood vessel growth (anti-vascular endothelial growth factor drugs such as Avastin and Lucentis) that help many wet AMD patients keep their vision.

"Future studies should evaluate whether there are 'Asian forms' of AMD and discern other racial/ethnic differences in Asian susceptibility," Dr. Wong said."Our meta-analysis could not adjust for important risk factors like smoking, common among many Asian men; nor did this study include all relevant Asian racial/ethnic groups," he added.

"Bypass" May Lead to Vision Gains for CRVO Patients

Central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO) affects one to four percent of Americans older than 40 and very often causes severe vision loss, including "legal blindness" (20/200 vision). While current treatments reduce CRVO symptoms such as macular edema-swelling of the center of the eye's light-sensitive retina-none address the underlying problem, the blocked retinal vein. Ian L. McAllister, MD, Lions Eye Institute, Australia, and his research team took direct aim at the problem, using lasers to create a "bypass" around the constricted retinal vein with the aim of restoring near-normal blood flow to the retina.

In three-quarters of the eyes treated the "bypass" was successful, and patients achieved significant vision gains by the 18 month follow-up. This study was also the first prospective, randomized trial to compare the bypass approach, called laser-induced chorioretinal venous anastomosis (L-CRA), with conventional treatment.

L-CRAs were successfully created in 76.4 percent of the 58 patients in whom the procedure was attempted. Overall, bypass-treated patients achieved significantly better visual acuity and were more likely to gain 20/40 vision (the legal standard for drivers in many countries) than were control group patients. Bypass patients were significantly less likely to have moderate or severe vision loss. While about 18 percent of L-CRA-treated patients developed a significant complication-abnormal blood vessel growth at the surgery site-the researchers report that due to close monitoring and effective management, negative consequences from this and other complications were minimal.

"The risk of complications from L-CRA should be weighed against the substantial vision loss faced by CRVO patients with standard treatments," Dr. McAllister said. "In future studies of L-CRA, optical coherence tomography (not widely available when our study began) would be another useful outcome measure for L-CRA effectiveness," he added.

Provided by American Academy of Ophthalmology

http://newscri.be/link/1089328

Related articles:

Macular Degeneration - New guide! Tips, treatments, resources, and questions to ask. - www.afb.org/seniorsite
Stop Macular Degeneration - Regain Lost Vision with Dr. Todd's Proven no-Surgery or Drugs Approach - www.BetterVision.com