Dyslexia caused by faulty signal processing in brain | Hacker News Reader

Dyslexia caused by faulty signal processing in brain

sciencedaily.com

17 pointsllambda12 comments

"... shown that many difficulties associated with dyslexia can potentially be traced back to a malfunction of the medial geniculate body in the thalamus."

I always wonder if things like Dyslexia are more a symptom from something else, like how ADD can be caused in people who have food sensitivities or allergies but don't realize it - or perhaps a terrible childhood where the person / mind / brain learned distraction behaviours for coping, and therefore until those distraction behaviours are explored that ADD person will never learn how to focus.

And why is it considered faulty? How can one determine the pros and cons of how a mind will develop due to how the brain works? It really bothers me that much of very narrow scientifically-done research doesn't reach back out into a holistic view. I understand that if you keep the narrow context than their statements remain 'true' - however that isn't beneficial on an individual-by-individual basis when our body and minds are so complex.

A quick fix sounds nice, is 'cheap' in cost (if you ignore side-effects and that many times medications are bandaids that tend to fall off or let symptoms [from something underlying] worsen), and is purely driven by profit-motive - at least that's where funding comes from, even if it's in researcher's hearts to trying to find answers to help others. We know things like MSG and artificial red food dies cause ADD in a large percentage of the population, though in North America we still allow it in our food - whereas in much of Europe such things are ban.

Anyway, clearly I am for preventative/proactive health and not putting temporary bandaids on things. Research is showing more and more that bandaids (not literally) end up costing society more than dealing with the base issues.

"We know things like MSG and artificial red food dies cause ADD in a large percentage of the population, though in North America we still allow it in our food - whereas in much of Europe such things are ban."

First, MSG has not been banned in Europe, and you can buy this food additive and use it for your own home cooking, I should know because I sometimes use it instead of salt. Second, you'll have a hard time finding an actual study proving the harmful effect of MSG, and links to websites with no credibility like rense.com doesn't count. It's not a coincidence that most links point to stuff like that on the first page of google when you search for MSG and they are popular among conspiracy nuts/fear mongers.

If you listen to the conspiracy theorists, MSG causes diabetes, alzheimer, autism, heavy migraine/headaches, parkinson, seizures, addiction to MSG itself.. stop propagating the bull*.

So, I know nothing about MSG, but when I see people say things like "you'll have a hard time finding an actual study proving the harmful effect of X" I tend to go check, as it is do easy to do so: it makes for a good check of academic honesty.

Regardless, this claim is clearly wrong: PubMed has tons of papers about random things being associated or impplicated with MSG, including neurological effects. In particular, here are some papers about excitotoxins (MSG in particular) and fibromyalgia.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11408989

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22766026

Unfortunately for you, you haven't proven anything about MSG being the root of any disease whatsoever, as both links only proves what it can do to someone who already has some kind of disease (fibromyalgia in this case). This is not so different from the harmful effect of gluten to someone who has coeliac, or sugar to a diabetic, but no sane person is going to demonize gluten or sugar just because a very small subset of the population are harmed by those substances. Or milk. Or peanuts.

Almost any type of food source could be thought of as harmful based on your own criteria. I can find the kind of study you link to for so many things that you'd develop a fear of eating itself.

The truth remains : there is no STRONG correlation between MSG and the kind of horrors the demonization campaign stirred up by conspiracy theorists pretends it to do to the human body. You type "monosodium glutamate" in google and one of the links on the FIRST page is a link to rense.com, a website maintained by 9/11 deniers and UFO believers, and it's for a good reason if that link is on the first page, because talk about MSG is most popular amongst that group of people.

Anything that is not "natural" (for some highly subjective value of) is prone to be hated and part of a fear mongering campaign from the type of people that are obsessed with fear, fear of technology, of progress, of science, of politics [...]

The fact that there are nut jobs that believe something extreme that have high page rank does not mean that a more moderate position is false. Meanwhile, the argument that science cannot "prove" anything undermines the idea of science being valuable at all.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=MSG+glutamate

That search result is littered with articles in legitimate sources testing MSG in various contexts, showing random negative effects on hormone regulation and brain function in general. Are these important effects? Maybe not; but you have to look at the effects in question.

What is quite clear, though, is that tons of actual scientists have studied MSG and have turned out actual papers showing actually statistically significant effects, albeit in models that you might disagree with under dosages you might consider absurd. Others, of course, might find them highly reasonable.

You can't, however, just wave your hands and dismiss all of this work: to do so is just ignoring science, and apparently trusting some combination of your gut feelings on the matter and Google's page rank algorithm to establish truth. There is science out there, and that science should be discussed.

People who are NOT researchers but spreading the same shit everywhere on the internet are nothing but conspirationists. Including you. Because you contest what is officially recognized as OK, and do so without yourself having the medical authority/background to back up your claims. A random hodge podge of various, completely unrelated studies does not a point make. The experts of the FDA and various health authorities around the world have read the same studies as you do, and allowed MSG to be used in our food, and you have no authority to contest that.

I can bring up the same hodge podge about gluten and ask for a ban.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16436335

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18787912

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16423158

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1727768

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19664354

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20170845

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15497770

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16436335

Here you have equivalent material on gluten, hell you'll even find an association with schizophrenia. Let's fear-monger and stop eating bread and pasta !

With your really low, actually unscientific standard of using science studies, I can make it so that you'll never eat any food again, because I can find the same stuff about most food sources.

Since everything is so unsafe why don't you just kill yourself and be done with the unsafe misery that is life, cowering in your primal fears. You can't eat msg, but you can't eat gluten either, nor table salt, or sugar, or various carbohydrates, or milk.. oh but you can't eat some meat either because there are correlations to cancer. In fact, studies on meat have shown greater negative effects on the body than studies on MSG.

"A 2011 study of 17,000 individuals found that people consuming the most grilled and well-done meat had a 56 and 59% higher rate of cancer" http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v106/n3/full/bjc2011549a.h...

Are you going to stop eating meat forever because of the relatively small increase of risk of getting cancer ?

This is why I call you a conspirationist. There are "natural" food sources, like red meat, that have been proven as much more dangerous (and it's still a relatively small danger, statistically speaking) than MSG yet people like you focus on MSG and Aspartame because FUCK ARTIFICIAL PRODUCTS right ? Red meat is natural so it's all good right ?

My point wasn't that I trust pagerank more than science. It's that there is a popular FOCUS on something that ISN'T MORE dangerous than stuff like read meat, and it's for a reason : fear mongering about anything that's artificial, man-made, call it whatever you like. The science speaks for itself because none of the study you will link to will prove MSG as a bigger danger than something like red meat. And yet, you don't see anyone trying to bring up a fear-mongering campaign against meat. The only people who campaign against meat are the psychotic vegetarians from PETA who do so in the name of a ridiculous "ethics", being against the killing of animals.

Seeing educated people like you spreading this bullshit against MSG doesn't help to educate most people about the reality of food. Most of your food sources can be toxic to a % of the population. Big fucking deal.

There are lots of benign substances that cause issues to people that have malfunctions: allergies and gluten intolerance are two simple examples.

I pulled out two articles I found interesting. You are welcome to do the search yourself and see the large number of other articles showing other interesting things. This said, I ate MSG yesterday (I have not eaten anything yet today): I have no skin in the MSG game, I'm just bothered when someone makes obviously false hand-wavy comments about entire bodies of work. MSG might very well be harmless, but the argument will need to be more interesting than "no real reaearch has shown any negative effects from it", as that is clearly false: do the pubmed or google scholar search.

Where you make factual claims, cite your sources.

And why is it considered faulty?

Because dyslexia is annoying. If I want to visually differentiate among pqdb and I can't, I deem my visual system "faulty".

> how ADD can be caused

I'm sorry, but there is no definitive cause to ADD at this point.

Secondly, medication has been proven over and over again as the single most effective method to mitigating the symptoms. Medication plus behavior modification is the most effective treatment.

There is no cure for ADD so they have to treat the symptoms (bandaids).

> We know things like MSG and artificial red food dies cause ADD in a large percentage of the population

We only "know" it in the way that we "know" vaccines cause autism.

The grammar in the article is terrible. For a minute i wondered if i were looking at some kind of spammy fake article.

But now, i think it more likely it is a poorly written summary of legitamite research.

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