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Second Opinion in Second Life

Virtual Hallucinations in Second Life

Avatars are all the rage these days, with the James Cameron movie breaking all box-office records. But before this movie made avatars famous, there was Second Life, the virtual online world where you can create your own avatar, and live vicariously through your virtual self. Your avatar can visit bars, go on dates, or buy clothes. But more and more people are using this online world to seek health and medical advice from health professionals. Freelance science journalist Alison Motluk takes us on a tour of this strange alternate reality.

Among the virtual places we visit are the Serenity Forest Treehouse, where one branch of Alcoholics Anonymous meets; the Path of Support, where you can find signs advertising various health support groups; and the Virtual Hallucinations Sim, where you can experience the hellish reality of what goes on in a schizophrenic's brain.

• Dr. Jennifer Keelan is an assistant professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. She wonders if people visiting Second Life might benefit from the "Proteus Effect" - whether activities in the virtual world translate into improved health behaviour in the real world. But she also worries that the anonymity of Second Life might also be emotionally harmful to some.
• Dr. Douglas Danforth teaches reproductive medicine at Ohio State University in Columbus. He uses Second Life as a teaching tool for his medical students. He finds that they are less shy about asking embarrassing questions when they are anonymous.
• Dr. Peter Yellowlees is a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California, Davis. He was the creator of the Virtual Hallucinations site, and says it helps people understand what a schizophrenic is experiencing. He also sees potential to use the technology for children with autism or obesity.

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Related Links

Dr. Keelan's project at the Centre for Innovation in Complex Care
Dr. Keelan's web page
Dr. Danforth's web page
Dr. Yellowlees' web page
Accessing Virtual Hallucinations in Second Life
Virtual Hallucinations on YouTube
Alcoholics Anonymous on Second Life

Clockless Caribou

Nathan Denette/Canadian Press

Over the last decade, we've learned a lot about our internal timepiece - the circadian clock. Many plants and animals have internal clocks, anchored in our genes, that program us in a twenty-four hour rhythm and govern our sleep cycles, our eating, our metabolism, and even our immune systems. Disrupt the clock - say, by switching time zones on a jet - and you feel disoriented, sleep badly and even become sick more easily. That's why Professor Andrew Loudon, of the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Manchester, was so surprised to discover that caribou have gone off the clock. In response to the wildly variable day length of their northern habitat, they seem to have disabled their internal clock and found a way to compensate for the services it normally provides.

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Related Links

Paper in Current Biology
News release from the University of Manchester
CBC News
Prof. Loudon's web page
Wired Science blog

Train the Brain

Brain waves of imagined movements before (top) and after (bottom) ten minutes of training the brain, courtesy University of Washington.

Just as a bodybuilder gets larger than normal muscles by lifting weights, the brain can also generate larger than normal activity by interacting with a computer. Dr. Kai Miller, a physicist and doctoral student in neurobiology and medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, experimented by attaching electrodes directly to the surface of 8 subjects' brains. The brain waves of imagined movements were recorded and compared to those of actual movements, such as sticking out a tongue or clenching a fist. The imagined movement brain waves were much weaker at first, but after ten minutes of 'training the brain', they became much stronger than the signals from the actual movements. The finding holds promise for rehabilitating patients after stroke or other neurological damage. It also suggests that a human brain could quickly become adept at manipulating an external device such as a computer interface or a prosthetic limb.

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Related Links

Paper in PNAS
News release from University of Washington
Dr. Miller's web page

Dining on Dwarves

Globular cluster, courtesy NASA

Dwarf galaxies are not exactly tiny. They contain millions of stars. And yet, new evidence suggests that our Milky Way galaxy has been gobbling dwarf galaxies like popcorn for much of its history. Dr. Terry Bridges, an astronomer from Queen's University in Kingston, has been studying globular clusters - large balls of many stars - in the halo of our galaxy. The stars in these clusters look a little strange, like they're not from around here. Their age and composition suggest that many of these huge clusters of stars are, in fact, the remnants of as many as six dwarf galaxies that have been swallowed up by the Milky Way.

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Related Links

Paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
News from Queen's University

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