• Question: How do you think that your research can help human kind and why did you choose that topic?

    Asked by anon-188663 to Warren, Shanti, Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 8 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Warren Mansell

      Warren Mansell answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      My research is based on a theory http://www.pctweb.org that applies to all realms of human kind – mental health, education, law, digital technology use, sports performance, for example. Most of my own research is on mental health and I think that it should benefit human kind mainly because of how it suggests helping people with mental health problems much more efficiently, on their own terms, rather than ‘experts’ diagnosing ‘disorders’ and applying ‘treatments’.

    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      Hi thanks for your great question. All of us work in different areas of psychology and all of them will have their own important ways of contributing to human kind. I look at sleep and memory, in particular how sleep changes memories to make them more useful for you in future (this is known as memory consolidation). There is a very close link between sleep and mental health, and certain conditions or diseases are often accompanied by sleep disturbances. If we understand the link between sleep and these conditions it can form part of therapies or interventions that might help people. There is recent evidence showing that the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease (a horrible neurodegenerative disease marked by severe memory loss) may, in part, be associated with a feedback loop of poor sleep and neurodegeneration (brain decline). It is a complex disease with many things that contribute to it, but it looks like the worse sleep gets, the worse the condition gets, and in turn the worse this makes sleep. This is just one example of why sleep is important, and how it can influence the mind and health. Other horrible conditions, such as depression and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are also often marked by sleep disturbances and we are still exploring the often complex interaction between sleep and these conditions.

    • Photo: Nadine Mirza

      Nadine Mirza answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      The research I’m trying to do is to make it easier for people from different backgrounds, like languages and culture, to get an accurate diagnosis of dementia and to be able to access the help they need for it. Right now, the system doesn’t work for everyone. A lot of the tests can’t pick up everyone with dementia because of differences in their background and then they won’t get help. And even when they get referred to hospitals and clinics sometimes those places don’t work so well with different people.
      So in the case of human kind, it means no matter who you are or where you come from, you can all get equal access to the best kind of help.
      I got into this topic because I’d always wanted to work with ethnic minorities because I am one myself (British South Asian!). And then I ended up sticking to dementia because it’s become a big thing that the country is focused on, with lots of places wanting dementia researcher’s and because the dementia itself is really interesting, exploring both the mind and the brain which carries it. I also saw so many people with dementia, some in my own family, and it became important to me to work on it.

    • Photo: Paul Matusz

      Paul Matusz answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      Hi,

      Thanks for this important question. I am hoping that my work will help equalising learning opportunities to mostly healthy but disadvantaged children in normal schooling, as well as bringing back visual skills, including abilities to read and do basic and more complex maths to children who have problems with vision (like “lazy eye”) or those with dyslexia or even people with problems with moving.

      Scientifically, I have always been interested in understanding how what we know about how people pay attention and learn new information in the world differs between traditional research (that typically uses just visual or just auditory etc. objects) and how information is typically presented in the real world – across multiple senses at once (“multisensory information”). That’s the more “theoretical” side of my research. Where I thought this type of scientific knowledge could matter is altering the lives of children with different types of disadvantage. From my experience, both with researchers, but also with specialists who care about these functions in the real world – head teachers, teachers and educators, as well as doctors treating different disorders of the brain from the eyes through dyslexia to problems with moving – do recognise the fact that the existing research may be limited in what it can tell us about “real world” attention and memory. That’s why I decided to pursue the research I’m currently doing.

      The line of my research that I think will most likely have the most direct effect on people’s lives and “the world” is a project where we test if virtual reality games can be a potential new treatment for kids with “lazy eye”. Currently the existing treatment – like patching the dominating eye, up to 6h per day! – are very slow (years) and patients really dislike it. And they are not this effective. So if we can help these treatments by those involving fun games, that’d be amazing!
      You can learn more about this project on my group’s website – https://groupforrealworldneuroscience.wordpress.com/understanding-the-role-of-attention-in-visual-rehabilitation-amblyopia-as-a-model-gambly/

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