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 32,579 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Brain diseases and their treatment may help or hurt creativity in ways that shape quality of life. Increased creative drive is associated with bipolar disorder, depression, psychosis, temporal lobe epilepsy, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson disease treatments, and autism. Creativity depends on goal-driven approach motivation from midbrain dopaminergic systems. Fear-driven avoidance motivation is of less aid to creativity. When serotonin and norepinephrine lower motivation and flexible behaviour, they can inhibit creativity. Hemispheric lateralization and frontotemporal connections must interact to create new ideas and conceptual schemes. The right brain and temporal lobe contribute skill in novelty detection, while the left brain and frontal lobe foster approach motivation and more easily generate new patterns of action from the novel perceptions. Genes and phenotypes that increase plasticity and creativity in tolerant environments with relaxed selection pressure may confer risk in rigorous environments. Few papers substantively address this important but fraught topic. Antidepressants (ADs) that inhibit fear-driven motivation, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, sometimes inhibit goal-oriented motivation as well. ADs that boost goal-directed motivation, such as bupropion, may remediate this effect. Benzodiazepines and alcohol may be counterproductive. Although dopaminergic agonists sometimes stimulate creativity, their doing so may inappropriately disinhibit behaviour. Dopamine antagonists may suppress creative motivation; lithium and anticonvulsant mood stabilizers may do so less. Physical exercise and REM sleep may help creativity. Art therapy and psychotherapy are not well studied. Preserving creative motivation can help creativity and other aspects of well-being in all patients, not just artists or researchers.
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PMID:Brain illness and creativity: mechanisms and treatment risks. 2144 19

Adaptive Resonance Theory, or ART, is a cognitive and neural theory of how the brain autonomously learns to categorize, recognize, and predict objects and events in a changing world. This article reviews classical and recent developments of ART, and provides a synthesis of concepts, principles, mechanisms, architectures, and the interdisciplinary data bases that they have helped to explain and predict. The review illustrates that ART is currently the most highly developed cognitive and neural theory available, with the broadest explanatory and predictive range. Central to ART's predictive power is its ability to carry out fast, incremental, and stable unsupervised and supervised learning in response to a changing world. ART specifies mechanistic links between processes of consciousness, learning, expectation, attention, resonance, and synchrony during both unsupervised and supervised learning. ART provides functional and mechanistic explanations of such diverse topics as laminar cortical circuitry; invariant object and scenic gist learning and recognition; prototype, surface, and boundary attention; gamma and beta oscillations; learning of entorhinal grid cells and hippocampal place cells; computation of homologous spatial and temporal mechanisms in the entorhinal-hippocampal system; vigilance breakdowns during autism and medial temporal amnesia; cognitive-emotional interactions that focus attention on valued objects in an adaptively timed way; item-order-rank working memories and learned list chunks for the planning and control of sequences of linguistic, spatial, and motor information; conscious speech percepts that are influenced by future context; auditory streaming in noise during source segregation; and speaker normalization. Brain regions that are functionally described include visual and auditory neocortex; specific and nonspecific thalamic nuclei; inferotemporal, parietal, prefrontal, entorhinal, hippocampal, parahippocampal, perirhinal, and motor cortices; frontal eye fields; supplementary eye fields; amygdala; basal ganglia: cerebellum; and superior colliculus. Due to the complementary organization of the brain, ART does not describe many spatial and motor behaviors whose matching and learning laws differ from those of ART. ART algorithms for engineering and technology are listed, as are comparisons with other types of models.
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PMID:Adaptive Resonance Theory: how a brain learns to consciously attend, learn, and recognize a changing world. 2314 42

This article provides the adolescent medicine physician with a review of seminal psychiatric research published in 2011 and 2012 and its clinical relevance for day-to-day practice. The present review focuses on conditions commonly encountered by adolescent medicine physicians such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, bipolar disorder, tic disorders, and major depression. Additionally, there is a section that outlines specific clinical situations for which psychiatric consultation must be obtained, as well as helpful resources and suggestions to mitigate the unavailability of appointments in a mental health office.
Adolesc Med State Art Rev 2013 Apr
PMID:What is new in adolescent psychiatry? Literature review and clinical implications. 2370 17

This is a commentary on a Cochrane review, published in this issue of EBCH, first published as: Reichow B, Steiner AM, Volkmar F. Social skills groups for people aged 6 to 21 with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2012, Issue 7. Art. No.: CD008511. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD008511.pub2. Further information for this Cochrane review is available in this issue of EBCH in the accompanying Summary article.
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PMID:Commentary on 'Social skills groups for people aged 6 to 21 with autism spectrum disorders (ASD)'. 2387 85

This article provides an overview of neural models of synaptic learning and memory whose expression in adaptive behavior depends critically on the circuits and systems in which the synapses are embedded. It reviews Adaptive Resonance Theory, or ART, models that use excitatory matching and match-based learning to achieve fast category learning and whose learned memories are dynamically stabilized by top-down expectations, attentional focusing, and memory search. ART clarifies mechanistic relationships between consciousness, learning, expectation, attention, resonance, and synchrony. ART models are embedded in ARTSCAN architectures that unify processes of invariant object category learning, recognition, spatial and object attention, predictive remapping, and eye movement search, and that clarify how conscious object vision and recognition may fail during perceptual crowding and parietal neglect. The generality of learned categories depends upon a vigilance process that is regulated by acetylcholine via the nucleus basalis. Vigilance can get stuck at too high or too low values, thereby causing learning problems in autism and medial temporal amnesia. Similar synaptic learning laws support qualitatively different behaviors: Invariant object category learning in the inferotemporal cortex; learning of grid cells and place cells in the entorhinal and hippocampal cortices during spatial navigation; and learning of time cells in the entorhinal-hippocampal system during adaptively timed conditioning, including trace conditioning. Spatial and temporal processes through the medial and lateral entorhinal-hippocampal system seem to be carried out with homologous circuit designs. Variations of a shared laminar neocortical circuit design have modeled 3D vision, speech perception, and cognitive working memory and learning. A complementary kind of inhibitory matching and mismatch learning controls movement. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled SI: Brain and Memory.
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PMID:From brain synapses to systems for learning and memory: Object recognition, spatial navigation, timed conditioning, and movement control. 2544 36

Whether art therapy can be an effective rehabilitative treatment for people with brain or mental diseases (e.g., dementia, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, autism, schizophrenia) is a long-standing and highly debated issue. On the one hand, several observational studies and anecdotal evidence enthusiastically support the effectiveness of arts-based therapy. On the other hand, few rigorous clinical investigations have been performed, and there is too little empirical evidence to allow a full assessment of the risks and benefits of this intervention. Nevertheless, there is a progressively increasing demand for the development of appropriate complementary therapies to improve the personal and social lives of patients with neurodegenerative diseases. This is because conventional medical treatments are aimed at alleviating symptoms but cannot arrest or reverse the degenerative process. Thus, as disease progresses and adverse effects emerge, patients' quality of life dramatically decreases; when this occurs patients seek different forms of intervention. Art therapy is a potentially appealing treatment because of its more holistic approach to healthcare. However, as with any medicine, its effects must be tested by using standard, rigorous scientific approaches. This report describes the current state of research into art therapy and outlines many key factors that future research should consider, all of which are directly or indirectly related to the neural mechanism underlying behavioral changes: brain plasticity. Artistic performance could promote some form of brain plasticity that, to some extent, might compensate for the brain damage caused by the disease.
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PMID:Is art therapy a reliable tool for rehabilitating people suffering from brain/mental diseases? 2584 86

Associations between epilepsy and musical or poetic composition have received little attention. We reviewed the literature on links between poetic and musical skills and epilepsy, limiting this to the Western canon. While several composers were said to have had epilepsy, John Hughes concluded that none of the major classical composers thought to have had epilepsy actually had it. The only composer with epilepsy that we could find was the contemporary composer, Hikari Oe, who has autism and developed epilepsy at age 15years. In his childhood years, his mother found that he had an ability to identify bird sound and keys of songs and began teaching him piano. Hikari is able to compose in his head when his seizures are not severe, but when his seizures worsen, his creativity is lost. Music critics have commented on the simplicity of his musical composition and its monotonous sound. Our failure to find evidence of musical composers with epilepsy finds parallels with poetry where there are virtually no established poets with epilepsy. Those with seizures include Lord George Byron in the setting of terminal illness, Algernon Swinburne who had alcohol-related seizures, Charles Lloyd who had seizures and psychosis, Edward Lear who had childhood onset seizures, and Vachel Lindsay. The possibility that Emily Dickinson had epilepsy is also discussed. It has not been possible to identify great talents with epilepsy who excel in poetic or musical composition. There are few published poets with epilepsy and no great composers. Why is this? Similarities between music and poetry include meter, tone, stress, rhythm, and form, and much poetry is sung with music. It is likely that great musical and poetic compositions demand a greater degree of concentration and memory than is possible in epilepsy, resulting in problems retaining a musical and mathematical structure over time. The lack of association between recognizable neuropsychiatric disorders and these skills is a gateway to understanding facets of the relationship between the brain and creativity. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled "Epilepsy, Art, and Creativity".
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PMID:Musical and poetic creativity and epilepsy. 2689 16

Art has the ability to entertain and educate about many vital aspects of the human experience. Recently, innovative endeavors are providing greater accessibility to theatrical productions for people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), prompting ethical questions about how accommodations to provide access to art and culture should be made, and for whom. This article uses an attributional model of stigma to explain potential differences in knowledge, attitudes, and behavior toward people with mental illness. This social cognitive model also provides clues about how to spur social change through translational education, familiarization, and advocacy to permit greater access to art for people with disabilities.
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PMID:Autism, Art, and Accessibility to Theater. 2800 50

Adaptive Resonance Theory, or ART, is a neural model that explains how normal and abnormal brains may learn to categorize and recognize objects and events in a changing world, and how these learned categories may be remembered for a long time. This article uses ART to propose and unify the explanation of diverse data about normal and abnormal modulation of learning and memory by acetylcholine (ACh). In ART, vigilance control determines whether learned categories will be general and abstract, or specific and concrete. ART models how vigilance may be regulated by ACh release in layer 5 neocortical cells by influencing after-hyperpolarization (AHP) currents. This phasic ACh release is mediated by cells in the nucleus basalis (NB) of Meynert that are activated by unexpected events. The article additionally discusses data about ACh-mediated tonic control of vigilance. ART proposes that there are often dynamic breakdowns of tonic control in mental disorders such as autism, where vigilance remains high, and medial temporal amnesia, where vigilance remains low. Tonic control also occurs during sleep-wake cycles. Properties of Up and Down states during slow wave sleep arise in ACh-modulated laminar cortical ART circuits that carry out processes in awake individuals of contrast normalization, attentional modulation, decision-making, activity-dependent habituation, and mismatch-mediated reset. These slow wave sleep circuits interact with circuits that control circadian rhythms and memory consolidation. Tonic control properties also clarify how Alzheimer's disease symptoms follow from a massive structural degeneration that includes undermining vigilance control by ACh in cortical layers 3 and 5. Sleep disruptions before and during Alzheimer's disease, and how they contribute to a vicious cycle of plaque formation in layers 3 and 5, are also clarified from this perspective.
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PMID:Acetylcholine Neuromodulation in Normal and Abnormal Learning and Memory: Vigilance Control in Waking, Sleep, Autism, Amnesia and Alzheimer's Disease. 2916 63