Aphantasia and hyperphantasia: exploring imagery vividness extremes.

The vividness of imagery varies between individuals. However, the existence of people in whom conscious, wakeful imagery is markedly reduced, or absent entirely, was neglected by psychology until the recent coinage of 'aphantasia' to describe this phenomenon. 'Hyperphantasia' denotes the converse - imagery whose vividness rivals perceptual experience.

Anomalies in the review process and interpretation of the evidence in the NICE guideline for chronic fatigue syndrome and myalgic encephalomyelitis.

Chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) is a disabling long-term condition of unknown cause. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published a guideline in 2021 that highlighted the seriousness of the condition, but also recommended that graded exercise therapy (GET) should not be used and cognitive-behavioural therapy should only be used to manage symptoms and reduce distress, not to aid recovery. This U-turn in recommendations from the previous 2007 guideline is controversial.

Selective immune suppression using interleukin-6 receptor inhibitors for management of immune-related adverse events.

Background: Management of immune-related adverse events (irAEs) is important as they cause treatment interruption or discontinuation, more often seen with combination immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy. Here, we retrospectively evaluated the safety and effectiveness of anti-interleukin-6 receptor (anti-IL-6R) as therapy for irAEs.

Methods: We performed a retrospective multicenter study evaluating patients diagnosed with de novo irAEs or flare of pre-existing autoimmune disease following ICI and were treated with anti-IL-6R.

The representational hierarchy in human and artificial visual systems in the presence of object-scene regularities.

Human vision is still largely unexplained. Computer vision made impressive progress on this front, but it is still unclear to which extent artificial neural networks approximate human object vision at the behavioral and neural levels. Here, we investigated whether machine object vision mimics the representational hierarchy of human object vision with an experimental design that allows testing within-domain representations for animals and scenes, as well as across-domain representations reflecting their real-world contextual regularities such as animal-scene pairs that often co-occur in the visual environment.

Spatial transformation in mental rotation tasks in aphantasia.

Aphantasia refers to the inability to summon images to one's own mind's eye, resulting in selective deficits of voluntary object imagery. In the present study, we investigated whether M. X.

Aphantasia, dysikonesia, anauralia: call for a single term for the lack of mental imagery-Commentary on Dance et al. (2021) and Hinwar and Lambert (2021).

Recently, the term 'aphantasia' has become current in scientific and public discourse to denote the absence of mental imagery. However, new terms for aphantasia or its subgroups have recently been proposed, e.g.

Clinical outcomes in transient epileptic amnesia: A 10-year follow-up cohort study of 47 cases.

Objective: Transient epileptic amnesia (TEA) is a form of adult-onset epilepsy where presenting features are well described, but little is known regarding prognosis. This study aimed to elucidate the long-term prognosis of TEA regarding seizure control, memory, medical comorbidities, and life expectancy.

Methods: Up-to-date clinical information was collected for 47 people diagnosed with TEA who had joined the The Impairment of Memory in Epilepsy (TIME) study 10 years earlier.

Training for object recognition with increasing spatial frequency: A comparison of deep learning with human vision.

The ontogenetic development of human vision and the real-time neural processing of visual input exhibit a striking similarity-a sensitivity toward spatial frequencies that progresses in a coarse-to-fine manner. During early human development, sensitivity for higher spatial frequencies increases with age. In adulthood, when humans receive new visual input, low spatial frequencies are typically processed first before subsequent processing of higher spatial frequencies.

Behavioral and Neural Signatures of Visual Imagery Vividness Extremes: Aphantasia versus Hyperphantasia.

Although Galton recognized in the 1880s that some individuals lack visual imagery, this phenomenon was mostly neglected over the following century. We recently coined the terms "aphantasia" and "hyperphantasia" to describe visual imagery vividness extremes, unlocking a sustained surge of public interest. Aphantasia is associated with subjective impairment of face recognition and autobiographical memory.

Untangling the Animacy Organization of Occipitotemporal Cortex.

Some of the most impressive functional specializations in the human brain are found in the occipitotemporal cortex (OTC), where several areas exhibit selectivity for a small number of visual categories, such as faces and bodies, and spatially cluster based on stimulus animacy. Previous studies suggest this animacy organization reflects the representation of an intuitive taxonomic hierarchy, distinct from the presence of face- and body-selective areas in OTC. Using human functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated the independent contribution of these two factors-the face-body division and taxonomic hierarchy-in accounting for the animacy organization of OTC and whether they might also be reflected in the architecture of several deep neural networks that have not been explicitly trained to differentiate taxonomic relations.

Fatal insomnia: the elusive prion disease.

A previously well 54- year-old woman presented with a short history of diplopia, cognitive decline, hallucinations and hypersomnolence. The patient had progressive deterioration in short-term memory, ocular convergence spasm, tremor, myoclonus, gait apraxia, central fever, dream enactment and seizures. Results of investigations were normal including MRI brain, electroencephalogram, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF, including CSF prion protein markers) and brain biopsy.

Aphantasia: The science of visual imagery extremes.

Visual imagery allows us to revisit the appearance of things in their absence and to test out virtual combinations of sensory experience. Visual imagery has been linked to many cognitive processes, such as autobiographical and visual working memory. Imagery also plays symptomatic and mechanistic roles in neurologic and mental disorders and is utilized in treatment.

What is the relationship between Aphantasia, Synaesthesia and Autism?

For people with aphantasia, visual imagery is absent or markedly impaired. Here, we investigated the relationship between aphantasia and two other neurodevelopmental conditions also linked to imagery differences: synaesthesia, and autism. In Experiment 1a and 1b, we asked whether aphantasia and synaesthesia can co-occur, an important question given that synaesthesia is linked to strong imagery.

Electroconvulsive therapy related autobiographical amnesia: a review and case report.

While short-term cognitive impairment following electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is well described and acknowledged, the relationship between ECT and persistent memory impairment, particularly of autobiographical memory, has been controversial. We describe the case of a 70-year-old consultant neurophysiologist, AW, who developed prominent, selective autobiographical memory loss following two courses of ECT for treatment-resistant depression. His performance on standard measures of IQ, semantic and episodic memory, executive function and mood was normal, while he performed significantly below controls on measures of episodic autobiographical memory.

Phantasia-The psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes.

Visual imagery typically enables us to see absent items in the mind's eye. It plays a role in memory, day-dreaming and creativity. Since coining the terms aphantasia and hyperphantasia to describe the absence and abundance of visual imagery, we have been contacted by many thousands of people with extreme imagery abilities.

Medical student education in sleep and its disorders is still meagre 20 years on: A cross-sectional survey of UK undergraduate medical education.

Sleep is a pillar of health, alongside adequate nutrition and exercise. Problems with sleep are common and often treatable. Twenty years ago, UK medical school education on sleep disorders had a median teaching time of 15 min; we investigate whether education on sleep disorders has improved.

Orthogonal Representations of Object Shape and Category in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks and Human Visual Cortex.

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are gaining traction as the benchmark model of visual object recognition, with performance now surpassing humans. While CNNs can accurately assign one image to potentially thousands of categories, network performance could be the result of layers that are tuned to represent the visual shape of objects, rather than object category, since both are often confounded in natural images. Using two stimulus sets that explicitly dissociate shape from category, we correlate these two types of information with each layer of multiple CNNs.

Pathologic tearfulness after limbic encephalitis: A novel disorder and its neural basis.

Objective: We investigated the nature and neural foundations of pathologic tearfulness in a uniquely large cohort of patients who had presented with autoimmune limbic encephalitis (aLE).

Methods: We recruited 38 patients (26 men, 12 women; median age 63.06 years; interquartile range [IQR] 16.

A Longitudinal Study of Epileptic Seizures in Alzheimer's Disease.

The prevalence of epileptic seizures is increased in patients in the clinical stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD) when compared to age-matched cognitively normal populations. In previously reported work from the Presentation of Epileptic Seizures in Dementia (PrESIDe) study, we identified a clinical suspicion of epilepsy in between 12.75 and 28.

Robot Assistants for Perimetry: A Study of Patient Experience and Performance.

Purpose: People enjoy supervision during visual field assessment, although resource demands often make this difficult. We evaluated outcomes and subjective experience of methods of receiving feedback during perimetry, with specific goals to compare a humanoid robot to a computerized voice in participants with minimal prior perimetric experience. Human feedback and no feedback also were compared.

The prevalence and clinical features of epileptic seizures in a memory clinic population.

Purpose: To determine the prevalence and clinical features of epileptic seizures occurring in a memory clinic population.

Method: We recruited patients receiving a diagnosis of dementia or mild cognitive impairment (MCI) at a regional memory clinic. We interviewed patients and informants using a proforma designed to elicit symptoms suggestive of epilepsy.