Things that go bump on your head National Post, Canada - Concussion (mild traumatic brain injury) is a major topic in the sports medicinecommunity. Experts met in Zurich, Switzerland recently to debate the best ...
Amonte Hiller Named LM's Person of the Year Lacrosse Magazine Online, MD - 59 minutes ago The charitable organization is named for Jaclyn Murphy, a 13 year-old diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in 2004, a fixture on Northwestern's sidelines. ...
Body works out, brain zones out Chicago Tribune, United States - Nov 30, 2008 Diane Whaley, a sports psychologist at the University of Virginia, says there are two goals for exercise: to be enjoyable and effective. ...
Bernie Ecclestone: It's Time To Go! Bleacher Report, CA - Nov 30, 2008 Surely then, at 78 years of age, the last thing the brain can deal with is running a multi-billion-dollar estate?especially when the vast majority of this ...
Patriots dazzling, but few saw CharlotteObserver.com, NC - Nov 29, 2008 JEFF SINER ? jsiner@charlotteobserver.com Every team I have ever covered, regardless of the sport it played, has been criticized for being too conservative. ...
running is as therapeutic for father as it is for son Seattle Times, United States - This "soup of seizures," as Shawna calls them, have damaged his brain so severely that doctors told the parents Cody never would be able to learn, ...
Saturday?s Matchups: Welcome to Rivalry Week New York Times, United States - Nov 28, 2008 Now as for you USC fans out there, you need so much to go your way that I can barely wrap my brain around it. As far as the actual Oklahoma/Oklahoma State ...
Knicks have completely bungled Marbury situation FOXSports.com - Nov 30, 2008 Walsh also probably felt he could control the fragile situation to some degree with dreams of a buy-out burning in Marbury's brain. ...
Obama fumbles political football Kansas City Star, MO - Nov 22, 2008 Division IA college football has the greatest regular season in all team sports, and a playoff system would ruin that distinction. For decades, coaches and ...
Van Brocklin said sports writers' brains haven't been used. Anderson Independent Mail, SC - Nov 28, 2008 The Tigers have dominated the series 64-37-4, and even when the Gamecocks seem to have the better team they usually find a way to lose. ...
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Recent News and Articles on the Keywords: brain + track + may Related to the article below (Last Update: 8/5/2008)
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LegalView Brain Injury Site Reports Department of Veteran Affairs ... PR-CANADA.net (press release), Montenegro - Aug 4, 2008 Individuals who have been injured in a TBI accident may be advised to seek out experienced traumatic brain injury attorneys in order to receive the best ...
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Processing systems with intelligent article tracking - GA Maney, AC Bonora, M Parikh, MD Brain? - US Patent 4,974,166, 1990 - freepatentsonline.com ... Inventors: Maney, George A.; Bonora, Anthony C.; Parikh, Mihir; Brain, Michael D ...
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Brain May Be Hard-Wired to Track Team Sports
July 6, 2006 04:03:13 PM PST By E.J. Mundell HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, July 6 (HealthDay News) -- When soccer fans gather Sunday to watch France and Italy do battle in Berlin during the World Cup finals, new research suggests the enraptured audience will be better able to follow every artful pass and blistering shot on goal because of the brilliant, crisp colors each team will wear.
Fact is, without the help of color, the human brain can't pay attention to more than three moving objects at once, concluded a team of neurological researchers reporting in the July issue of Psychological Science.
Grouping even a vast number of objects or people together by color makes all the difference, the researchers said.
"That's a new finding -- that humans can attend to more than three items if those items form a single set," said study co-researcher Justin Halberda, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University. "The set itself can then function as an individual," he added.
According to Halberda, a variety of tests have proven over and over that humans of all ages, as well as other primates, can't keep their attention fixed on more than three items at once in a given visual field. "We've never seen a case where that wasn't true," he said.
So, that finding begged the question: How can humans follow and enjoy team sports, which often contain dozens of players running in various directions at once? Halberda and his colleagues suspected the answer lay in the fact that societies have historically clothed opposing teams -- even opposing soldiers -- in different colors.
"Color is processed very early [by the brain]," Halberda said, so it makes sense that it would function as a nearly immediate cue to who belongs to what.
In their study, the Hopkins scientists had undergraduate volunteers view a series of colored dots that flashed before their eyes on a computer screen for just a half-second -- too short a time for counting.
The dots were arranged randomly, but some shared a color -- say, red or green. The researchers would sometimes warn the volunteers ahead of time to "watch for the red dots," for example. But in other experiments, the volunteers were given no such warning and were simply told to pay attention to the screen.
The researchers then asked the participants to recall how many dots of a specific color they thought they had seen.
The result: Participants did well at estimating the number of dots when told in advance which colors they should pay attention to, demonstrating they could pay attention to large numbers of items based on color alone. In fact, participants were accurate in estimating the number of color-specific dots even when the total collection consisted of a wide spectrum of colors.
Participants did less well when they weren't told beforehand which color they should fix their attention on. They were still able to recall, with some accuracy, the number of dots of a certain color -- but only when the whole array was comprised of dots of three colors or less.
Translating these findings from the computer screen to the playing field isn't a great leap, Halberda said.
"If you consider something like the World Cup, you have this big green field, and you're not so much tracking the items as they move, in terms of color -- it's just seeing them all in the first place," Halberda said. "So, England's bright white jerseys jump out from the green background and that makes them easier to pay attention to."
But humans also have an upper limit when it comes to paying attention to sets, Halberda said, and it's the same as their tolerance for tracking individual objects -- three.
That could explain why, throughout history, people have stuck to games with just two opposing teams. "Our research suggests that if a game was devised with four teams playing simultaneously, it would just be too many for any spectator, coach or player to pay attention to," Halberda said.
He said his team is now trying to find out whether other qualities are as easily gathered into sets as is color. Already, orientation -- objects that stand up vertically rather than lie horizontally -- looks promising, he said. Other characteristics, such as shape or gender, take longer for the brain to process and may be less useful, Halberda said.
Color does seem to be especially useful, he said, not just in sports but for a host of everyday challenges, such as playing cards, scanning the TV guide, or arranging filing cabinets at the office.
The ability of the human mind to supersede the "three-object rule" and clump together many similarly colored items into sets could have evolutionary roots, Halberda added.
"Let's say you were a hunter-gatherer, and you wanted to compare which tree had the most oranges," he said. If primitive man could only pay attention to three oranges at a time, that task would have been enormously difficult.
"But we have this system, and now you can look up at a tree and simultaneously attend to all 70 oranges," Halberda said. "Then, you could say, 'Yeah, that's a good tree, I'll climb that one.' It's a radical increase in efficiency," he said.
(HealthDay News) -- Tetanus is contracted when bacteria enter the body through a deep open wound. Sometimes called lockjaw, it damages the nervous system and causes muscles spasms and jaw cramps.
Initial symptoms of tetanus usually include headache and minor muscle spasms, often in the jaw, the Directors of Health Promotion and Education say. As the infection progresses, severe muscle spasms of the arms, legs, neck and stomach may occur, as may seizures. Symptoms usually appear within two weeks, but it may be as long as a few months before you notice any signs.
Although tetanus often is fatal, people who do survive face months of therapy and the threat of complications like high blood pressure, difficulty breathing, pneumonia, irregular heartbeat and fracture.
The best way to prevent tetanus is to be regularly immunized. See your doctor quickly if you suffer a serious puncture wound and haven't recently been vaccinated.
