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Throughout the global coronavirus pandemic, we have seen an unprecedented volume of COVID-19 researchpublications. This vast body of evidence continues to grow, making it difficult for research users to keep up with the pace of evolving research findings. To enable the synthesis of this evidence for timely use by researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders, we developed an automated workflow to collect, categorise, and visualise the evidence from primary COVID-19 research studies. We trained a crowd of volunteer reviewers to annotate studies by relevance to COVID-19, study objectives, and methodological approaches. Using these human decisions, we are training machine learning classifiers and applying text-mining tools to continually categorise the findings and evaluate the quality of COVID-19 evidence.

BackgroundThe presence of visual imagery in dreams of congenitally blind people has long been a matter of substantial controversy. We set to systematically review body of published work on the presence and nature of oneiric visuo-spatial impressions in congenitally and early blind subjects across different areas of research, from experimental psychology, functional neuroimaging, sensory substitution, and sleep research.MethodsRelevant studies were identified using the following databases: EMBASE, MEDLINE and PsychINFO.ResultsStudies using diverse imaging techniques and sensory substitution devices broadly suggest that the “blind” occipital cortex may be able to integrate non-visual sensory inputs, and thus possibly also generate visuo-spatial impressions. Visual impressions have also been reported by blind subjects who had near-death or out-of-body experiences.ConclusionDeciphering the mechanistic nature of these visual impression could open new possibility in utilization of neuroplasticity and its potential role for treatment of neurodisability.

It is unclear to what extent the absence of vision affects the sensory sensitivity for oneiric construction. Similarly, the presence of visual imagery in the mentation of dreams of congenitally blind people has been largely disputed. We investigate the presence and nature of oneiric visuo-spatial impressions by analysing the dreams of the congenitally blind people identified from the online database DreamBank. A higher presence of auditory, haptic, olfactory and gustatory sensation in dreams of congenitally blind was demonstrated, by comparison to normally sighted individuals. Nonetheless, oneiric visual imagery in reports of congenitally blind subjects was also noted, in opposition to some previous studies and raising the questions about the possible underlying neuromechanisms.

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