We all know that in a crowded or noisy setting, we can hear what someone is saying to us better if we can see their face. To some extent we all lip-read in that we can associate mouth movements with words as an aid to understanding speech.

But UC Riverside psychology Professor, Lawrence D. Rosenblum, and graduate students, Rachel M. Miller and Kauyumari Sanchez, have done research that indicates that studying someone’s face while they are speaking - even without sound - will help us hear them later.

The study involved 60 undergraduate students who were asked to lip-read sentences from a silent video of a speaker’s face. The students had no former experience lip-reading.

Students then listened to an audio of speakers against a lot of background noise. Half listened to a tape with the speaker they had just viewed and the other half listened to a tape of a new speaker. They were asked to identify as many words as possible from the sentences. The students who heard sentences from the speaker they had just spent an hour watching and trying to lip-read, were better able to identify more words from the noisy audio.

These findings suggest that when we watch a person speak, we become familiar with characteristics of their speaking style which also are present in the sound of their speech. This allows talker familiarity to be transferred from lip reading to listening, thereby making a talker easier to hear. These results have implications for individuals with hearing impairments as well as for brain lesion patients, Rosenblum said.

“Lip-Read Me Now, Hear Me Better Later: Crossmodal Transfer of Talker Familiarity Effects” - UC Riverside

People who exercise are known to do better on memory tests. Now researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have discovered why those who exercise have better memory retention.

Researchers used an MRI technique developed at Columbia to study the brains of people who had just exercised. They were able to identify the growth of new neurons in the dentate gyrus, a region of the brain within the hippocampus.

Exercise targets the dentate gyrus, which underlies normal age-related memory decline that begins around age 30 for most adults. The dentate gyrus is the one area of the brain where new neurons are generated, and exercise improves this process.

“Our next step is to identify the exercise regimen that is most beneficial to improve cognition and reduce normal memory loss, so that physicians may be able to prescribe specific types of exercise to improve memory,” said Scott A. Small, M.D., associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center and the study’s lead author.

Columbia Study - New Reason to Hit The Gym: Fighting Memory Loss

A certain amount of stress and worry is inevitable in everyone’s life. Coping with stresses and maintaining a healthy outlook leads to emotional stability. When stress and worry lead to excessive negative thinking, it’s called neuroticism. How you deal with stress and worry and whether or not you allow your negative thinking to take over and increase can have an effect on your health.

In a study that followed 1600 men over 12 years, it was found that those whose neuroticism increased with age were much more likely to become more stressed and their risk of dying from cancer and heart disease increased.

However, the study also showed that even if you are naturally fretful, learning to relax and control negative thinking can reverse this risk and give you a survival rate similar to that of an emotionally stable individual.

Study links propensity toward worry to early death

For some people with disturbed and disrupted sleep patterns who have also suffered a mild traumatic brain injury, the trouble could be a circadian rhythm sleep disorder and not insomnia. According to the Academy of Neurology, sleep disorders can be caused by mild head injuries.

Researchers studied 42 individuals who reported insomnia following a mild traumatic brain injury. After undergoing scans, sleep studies and measurements of temperature and saliva melatonin, the study found that 36% of these patients had a circadian rhythm sleep disorder (CRSD).

Patients coming to sleep clinics due to insomnia have a CRSD rate of only 7 to 10 percent. The findings of the study indicate that misdiagnosis of CRSDs could lead to it being labeled as insomnia and the prescription of sleep medications which do nothing to normalize sleep-wake cycles. Additionally, circadian rhythm sleep disorders may be accompanied by other associated psychological and cognition problems.

The study is published in the April 3 issue of Neurology

The Academy of Neurology