Welcome to the Brainlink PublicTV channel.
Brainlink is a public education project of the Center for Mental Health and Media, a division of the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA.
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Asperger's Syndrome Sufferers Can Thrive Despite Disorder
Asperger's Syndrome is a social learning disorder which affects a child's ability to interact and communicate with others, but the effects of the disorder are not all bad. While children with Asperger's may not be wired for social interaction, many do have above average intelligence and they often develop deep interests in narrow topics. Available video includes an edited package about a boy with Asperger's who is talented in computer animation.
Videos
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Video game violence and real life violence is not as clearly linked as once thought.
Brainlink examines why there is so much media and government attention to the disease.
A short video on the signs of and problems that come from living with Autism.
As a way to help people combat the symptoms of Parkinson 's disease, some treatment facilities in the U.S. are using dance therapy. A person with Parkinson 's can sometimes feel frozen in place, which is due to a dopamine shortage in the basal ganglia—a part of the brain that gives a sort of internal "go" signal, telling muscles to move. To fight this effect, these treatment centers seek to create an external "go" signal by playing music. When the music is played, patients are able to "lock on" to the beat and move along with the sound, which leads to improvements in coordination, balance and self-confidence
During the current economic crisis, many people who have lost money have also found themselves feeling physically sick to their stomachs - and this is no coincidence. There is a part of the brain, the insula, which triggers these sick feelings inside of us after we receive bad financial news. The insula contains specialized cells called 'spindle cells' which get very active when we've lost money--and expect to lose more. It's like the "gut reaction" our brains have to rotting garbage or furry spiders.
A study done a few years ago reported that about 800,000 children had gone missing in the U.S. during a single year, but there is much more to that statistic than meets the eye. Despite rising fears in parents across the country due to published numbers like these, as well as scary movies and TV shows on the subject, the incidents of child abduction by strangers in the U.S. are actually almost as rare as a person being struck by lightning.
There is a widespread belief that some vaccines can trigger autism, but this is actually untrue. Many people have come to believe in this connection between vaccines and autism though because of the way the human mind works. The brain has a natural tendency to search for and discover patterns, even when such patterns may not truly exist. Since the MMR vaccine is given around the same time that the first signs of autism usually appear, this has caused people to link the two, even though studies have proven such link to be nonexistent.
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