Mindfully Healing

Simple techniques taught to parents are the key to an effective new therapy for autism. Very early treatment of infants with the first signs of autism can substantially reduce the symptoms such that, by age 3, most have no developmental delays, a new study finds. ‘Infant Start’ is the name of the new behavioural therapy, mostly delivered by the children’s parents, developed by autism experts at the University of California – Davis and Duke University in North Carolina. The results of a pilot study of the therapy have just been

50% improvement in learning from this sleep technique. Sleeping in between study sessions could be the key to better recall, new research finds. The technique aids recall up to six months later, psychologists have found. Dr Stephanie Mazza, the study’s first author, said: “Our results suggest that interleaving sleep between practice sessions leads to a twofold advantage, reducing the time spent relearning and ensuring a much better long-term retention than practice alone. Previous research suggested that sleeping after learning is definitely a good strategy, but now we show that sleeping

Have you ever fallen foul of the grammar police? Introverts are more likely to judge a person negatively on the basis of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, a new study finds. People who are sensitive to grammatical errors are also more likely to be less agreeable by nature. Extroverted people, though, are more likely to ignore written errors. Professor Julie Boland, one of the study’s authors, said: “This is the first study to show that the personality traits of listeners/readers have an effect on the interpretation of language. In this