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Virtual reality’s (VR) ability to reconcile immediacy and hyper-mediation is one of the most fascinating and contradictory aspects of it: hyper-mediated as the reality it allows access to is entirely constructed and made of media objects, and because the access is mediated by devices, VR is immediate as it fully involves the senses to which it is addressed, excluding other external stimuli. This aspect of exclusion is crucial for understanding the nature and potential of VR: today, immersing oneself in VR does not only mean temporarily estranging oneself from reality, but from a reality clogged with information flows, sensorial stimuli, diversion of attention; it means, in other words, artificially recreating the possibility of focus and daydream, a condition that has been made inaccessible – according to neuroscience – by hyperactivity and information overload. A daydream that’s guided and designed by the author of the VR environment, based on an unprecedented relationship between work and user and precisely for this reason capable of enabling the viewer with a new kind of autonomy and an attitude for digression. Through a selection of VR artworks as case studies, this paper wants to demonstrate how VR, often related to Surrealism for its ability to give life to alternative worlds and to host fragments of the unconscious, is rather closer to the “meridian dream” of De Chirico’s metaphysics, and able to stimulate flows of consciousness, inward looking and abstract thought.

It has been recently reported that a large proportion of patients with familial and sporadic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and/or frontotemporal dementia (FTD) carries the hexanucleotide (GGGGCC) repeat expansion in the first intron of C9ORF72. We describe a patient with a complex phenotype characterized by behavioural variant of FTD, Parkinsonism and ALS with predominant lower motor neuron involvement in which the C9ORF72 expansion was detected

Several studies, showing that attention disorders during encoding reduce later memory performance, have stressed the critical role of attention for the formation of durable memory traces. Accordingly, some studies suggest that attentive disturbances, together with declarative memory defects, can constitute the earliest cognitive disorders in Alzheimer's disease. Therefore, the analysis of these disorders can contribute to identify different forms of dementia and to detect demented patients characterized by a faster cognitive decline. In this study, we report the normative data (gathered in a large Italian population) of a short test that assess the ability to detect stimuli characterized by a conjunction of features: the 'Multiple Features Targets Cancellation' task (MFTC). Our sample of 465 subjects was composed by urban and rural people. Multiple linear regression analyses revealed significant relation of false alarms with age and educational level, and of time of execution with age, educational level and gender. Regression analyses on accuracy scores did not show any significant correlation with demographics variables. Based on non-parametric techniques, cutoff scores were obtained on the corrected scores of the patients, and equivalent scores were derived for each measure. The MFTC task represents a useful tool that explores attentional disorders (and in particular conjunction search disturbances) and that could be helpful both in discriminating different forms of dementia and to detect mild cognitive impairment patients at risk of conversion to dementia.

BACKGROUND: Cholinergic deficits have been largely correlated to behavioral disorders in dementia. However, cholinergic deficits are not homogeneous and they are distributed differently in the basal forebrain and brainstem among Alzheimer's disease (AD) and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). The different cholinergic networks involved suggest different patterns of behavior symptomatology in the two groups. OBJECTIVE: To correlate the deficit of cholinergic activity, measured in vivo by the short latency afferent inhibition (SAI) technique, with the behavioral symptoms in patients affected by DLB and AD. METHODS: Behavioral and neuropsychologic tests including Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI), mini-mental status examination (MMSE), and an extensive neuropsychologic investigation were administered to 18 DLB patients and 18 one-to-one matched AD patients. SAI data were compared with those from a control group of age-matched healthy individuals and the level of SAI in patients was correlated with behavioral measures. RESULTS: AD tended to be more impaired than DLB on long-term memory, whereas DLB were more impaired than AD on constructional praxis tasks. NPI total score was similar but with a different behavioural pattern in DLB and AD. In particular, delusions and hallucinations prevailed in DLB patients, whereas affective disturbances prevailed in AD patients. SAI was significantly reduced both in AD and DLB patients when compared with controls; SAI correlated with hallucinations in DLB patients and with euphoric manic state and disinhibition in AD patients. CONCLUSIONS: Reduction of cholinergic activity as evaluated by SAI measurement correlates with different behavior disorders in AD and DLB patients.