Examining the association between depersonalisation traits and the bodily self in waking and dreaming.

Depersonalisation (DP) is characterized by fundamental alterations to the sense of self that include feelings of detachment and estrangement from one's body. We conducted an online study in healthy participants (n = 514) with DP traits to investigate and quantify the subjective experience of body and self during waking and dreaming, as the vast majority of previous studies focussed on waking experience only. Investigating dreams in people experiencing DP symptoms may help us understand whether the dream state is a 'spared space' where people can temporarily 'retrieve' their sense of self and sense of bodily presence.

Reduced pain and improved daily activities for individuals with hand osteoarthritis using a silicone wrist hand orthosis.

Background: Symptoms of hand osteoarthritis (OA), such as pain, reduced grip strength, loss of range of motion (ROM) and joint stiffness, can lead to impaired hand function and difficulty with daily activities. Rehabilitative interventions with orthoses are commonly in the treatment of hand OA to reduce pain, improve hand strength and ROM, provide support for improved function and help with joint stability.

Purpose: The objectives of this perception-based study were to evaluate the effect of a silicone wrist hand orthoses (SWHO) on pain and daily functioning.

EFFECTS OF A SEMI-RIGID KNEE BRACE ON MOBILITY AND PAIN IN PEOPLE WITH KNEE OSTEOARTHRITIS.

Objective: Osteoarthritis is one of the most common chronic conditions leading to disability among older people (age 60+ years). Knee osteoarthritis has a significant impact on daily functioning. Pain, stiffness, reduced strength, changes in posture, and reduced knee stability may result in reduced mobility.

Beyond traditional sleep scoring: Massive feature extraction and data-driven clustering of sleep time series.

The widely used guidelines for sleep staging were developed for the visual inspection of electrophysiological recordings by the human eye. As such, these rules reflect a limited range of features in these data and are therefore restricted in accurately capturing the physiological changes associated with sleep. Here we present a novel analysis framework that extensively characterizes sleep dynamics using over 7700 time-series features from the hctsa software.

Adaptive evolution of flight in butterflies.

The diversity of flying animals suggests that countless combinations of flight morphologies and behaviors have evolved with specific lifestyles, thereby exploiting diverse aerodynamic mechanisms. How morphology, flight behavior, and aerodynamic properties together diversify with contrasting ecology remains to be elucidated. We studied the adaptive codivergence in wing shape, flight behavior, and aerodynamic efficiency among butterflies living in different forest strata by combining high-speed videography in the field with morphometric analyses and aerodynamic modeling.

PATIENT-REPORTED OUTCOMES FOR USE OF SILVERSPLINTS IN OSTEOARTHRITIS OF THE HAND.

Pain, stiffness and joint deformity can result in significantly reduced hand function in people with osteoarthritis. Characteristic finger deformities in osteoarthritis are swan neck deformity and boutonnière deformity. Several studies have reported that an orthosis decreases pain and increases function during daily activities for patients with arthritis.

Predicting lapses of attention with sleep-like slow waves.

Attentional lapses occur commonly and are associated with mind wandering, where focus is turned to thoughts unrelated to ongoing tasks and environmental demands, or mind blanking, where the stream of consciousness itself comes to a halt. To understand the neural mechanisms underlying attentional lapses, we studied the behaviour, subjective experience and neural activity of healthy participants performing a task. Random interruptions prompted participants to indicate their mental states as task-focused, mind-wandering or mind-blanking.

How deep is the rift between conscious states in sleep and wakefulness? Spontaneous experience over the sleep-wake cycle.

Whether we are awake or asleep is believed to mark a sharp divide between the types of conscious states we undergo in either behavioural state. Consciousness in sleep is often equated with dreaming and thought to be characteristically different from waking consciousness. Conversely, recent research shows that we spend a substantial amount of our waking lives mind wandering, or lost in spontaneous thoughts.

More than a Metric: How Training Load is Used in Elite Sport for Athlete Management.

Training load monitoring is a core aspect of modern-day sport science practice. Collecting, cleaning, analysing, interpreting, and disseminating load data is usually undertaken with a view to improve player performance and/or manage injury risk. To target these outcomes, practitioners attempt to optimise load at different stages throughout the training process, like adjusting individual sessions, planning day-to-day, periodising the season, and managing athletes with a long-term view.

"To Tech or Not to Tech?" A Critical Decision-Making Framework for Implementing Technology in Sport.

The current technological age has created exponential growth in the availability of technology and data in every industry, including sport. It is tempting to get caught up in the excitement of purchasing and implementing technology, but technology has a potential dark side that warrants consideration. Before investing in technology, it is imperative to consider the potential roadblocks, including its limitations and the contextual challenges that compromise implementation in a specific environment.

Silence in Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation: An Evidence Synthesis Based on Expert Texts.

Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation are said to aim for "contentless" experiences, where mental content such as thoughts, perceptions, and mental images is absent. Silence is understood to be a central feature of those experiences. The main source of information about the experiences is texts by experts from within the three traditions.

Modulating dream experience: Noninvasive brain stimulation over the sensorimotor cortex reduces dream movement.

Recently, cortical correlates of specific dream contents have been reported, such as the activation of the sensorimotor cortex during dreamed hand clenching. Yet, despite a close resemblance of such activation patterns to those seen during the corresponding wakeful behaviour, the causal mechanisms underlying specific dream contents remain largely elusive. Here, we aimed to investigate the causal role of the sensorimotor cortex in generating movement and bodily sensations during REM sleep dreaming.

Are Elite Soccer Teams' Preseason Training Sessions Associated With Fewer In-Season Injuries? A 15-Year Analysis From the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Elite Club Injury Study.

Background: Preseason training develops players' physical capacities and prepares them for the demands of the competitive season. In rugby, Australian football, and American football, preseason training may protect elite players against in-season injury. However, no study has evaluated this relationship at the team level in elite soccer.

Does the Mind Wander When the Brain Takes a Break? Local Sleep in Wakefulness, Attentional Lapses and Mind-Wandering.

Sleep has been classically described as an all-or-nothing global phenomenon. However, recent research strongly suggests that this view requires tempering. Invasive and non-invasive recordings in animals and humans show that neural activity typically associated with sleep can locally occur during wakefulness.

Close encounters of the US kind: illness and injury among US athletes at the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympic Games.

Aim: To describe injury and illness incidence during the 2018 Winter Olympic Games (WOG) by Team USA.

Methods: A descriptive observational study. We used registered Team USA Olympic athletes' electronic medical records to review preparticipation health histories and medical encounters immediately prior to and throughout the 2018 WOG.

Can a microdynamic approach to sleep-onset imagery solve the overabundance problem of dreaming? Commentary on Tore Nielsen's "Microdream neurophenomenology".

Nielsen proposes that a microdynamic approach to experiences occurring in the earliest stages of sleep onset, which he calls microdreams, can shed light on the process of dream imagery formation. I discuss microdreams in the context of simulation views, in which dreaming is defined as the immersive experience of a virtual world centered on a virtual self. I also evaluate his proposal to expand the dimensions included in the oneiragogic spectrum by kinesis.

Business Intelligence: How Sport Scientists Can Support Organization Decision Making in Professional Sport.

The application of scientific principles to inform practice has become increasingly common in professional sports, with increasing numbers of sport scientists operating in this area. The authors believe that in addition to domain-specific expertise, effective sport scientists working in professional sport should be able to develop systematic analysis frameworks to enhance performance in their organization. Although statistical analysis is critical to this process, it depends on proper data collection, integration, and storage.

Getting the most out of intensive longitudinal data: a methodological review of workload-injury studies.

Objectives: To systematically identify and qualitatively review the statistical approaches used in prospective cohort studies of team sports that reported intensive longitudinal data (ILD) (>20 observations per athlete) and examined the relationship between athletic workloads and injuries. Since longitudinal research can be improved by aligning the (1) theoretical model, (2) temporal design and (3) statistical approach, we reviewed the statistical approaches used in these studies to evaluate how closely they aligned these three components.

Design: Methodological review.