PIEUVRE.CA WEEKLY WRAP-UP 25/8/09

As it has already been mentioned, one of our main focuses as a website is to inform you, the readers, of the various talents in today's society.  We've done features and occasionally interviews with people that have inspired us or otherwise.  The amount of information available to us is unfathomable and we hope to give you a tour of what surrounds us - whether it is in the darkest of alleyways or the busiest highways (although we prefer the alleyways).  

As much as we love giving you information about those that have affected us, in one way or another, there's something we love even more: collaborations. There's nothing more rewarding than to work with people who you respect, and luckily for us, we've found just that.  Thanks to networking and a little bit of luck we've recently managed to secure a collaboration with a Montreal-based website called Pieuvre.  We couldn't be more happy.

One of the interesting things about Pieuvre is that, unlike other news websites, it attempts to free itself of journalistic barriers. Pieuvre informs its readers of newsworthy topics  - whether cultural, political, environmental, the list goes on.  Although other like-minded websites simply give hard facts and common topics, Pieuvre manages to offer their own vision of events while still developing a clean journalistic style.  

For SHARP OBJEX, there is no definite journalistic style, but there is that vision that we hope to encapsulate. We hope to give you our recollections of artistic talents across the globe and, with the help of Pieuvre, we hope to give you their recollections of other news-worthy topics.  While our content differs, unless it involves cultural news, we share a common ground: inspiration.  

With that said, we plan on giving you weekly updates on the events covered in Pieuvre.  At the same time, some of our articles will be re-published onto their website.  We hope you enjoy.

Visit Pieuvre at: http://www.pieuvre.ca/

Pieuvre.ca Weekly Wrap-up 25/8/09

Audio hallucinations are dictated by the brain

More than two schizophrenics out of three hear voices in their head. Some believe that those voices talk directly to them “in their head”, others seem to perceive an external speech. According to a team of French scientists, those hallucinations could be explained by some subtle differences in the patients brain’s anatomy. These conclusions have been published online in the August 7^th edition of Schizophrenia Bulletin.

Verbal auditory hallucinations are some of the most frequent symptoms of schizophrenia: those phenomenoms are believed to be present in up to 70% of the people affected by the disease, which affect 1% of the population, according to World Health Organization’s data. A century ago, the two psychiatrists behind the concept of schizophrenia, Emil Kraepelin and Eugen Bleuler, distinguished two great classes of auditory hallucinations, depending on if they were perceived to be coming from the interior or exterior of the head.

Recent studies have confirmed this distinction, and identified three independant dimensions for those hallucinations: the complexity of the language, attribution errors and spatial localization of the voices. If the first two had already been documented, the spatial localization remained to be seen.

A team formed by Arnaud Cachia (Inserm-CEA research unit from Orsay) was able to accomplish that feat with the use of magnetic resonance imagery (MRI).  The team included psychiatrists from Assistance publique – Hôpitaux de Paris.

For their study, the scientists recruited 45 patients (29 men and 16 women, all right-handed) who were diagnosed with schizophrenia and who had persistent auditory hallucinations for at least one year on a daily basis for the last semester, even with medication. Twenty people with no psychiatric symptoms were verified and included to make some comparisons.

The 27 schizophrenic patients with auditory hallucinations have been subdivided in two groups: those whose hallucinations were perceived has an interior voice (15 patients) and those whose were an exterior voice (12 patients). The MRI revealed differences in a region implied in the spatial localization of the sounds, situated in the temporo-parietal cortex of the right hemisphere.

Derivations

The anomaly has been precised with the help of detailed 3D images analysis techniques developped at NeuroSpin, the imagery platform at Saint-Aubin-Saclay (Essonne). It concerns the junction between two cerebral cortices furrows: the upper temporal furrow and the angular furrow. In comparison with what is observed in a healthy subject, the junction is moved towards the front of the brain for the patients hearing external voices. For those hearing internal voices, the junction is located at the back of the brain. The furrows on the brain appear during fetal life, especially during the third semester of pregnancy. The junction’s position anomaly, which controls the localization of the auditory hallucination, could come from derivations during the brain’s functional organization development. But the study doesn’t say anything about the origin of the hallucination itself.

With Le Monde