Meditation Saves Brains?

Finals week is upon us, and we're all fighting to cram tons of information into our noggins. It's times like these that I wish I had a photographic memory, or a ridiculously high IQ. I need a bigger brain! As it turns out, there may be a simple way to increase brain size. Results from a collaborative study by researchers from Yale, Harvard and MIT in 2005 suggested that those who meditate have increased cortical thickness in brain areas associated with attention and sensory input. The study compared individuals that meditate around forty minutes a day with those who never meditate. Those who meditated had thicker gray matter surrounding sensory and attention structures (by 4 to 8 thousandths of an inch, but every bit counts!).

These participants practice Buddhist insight meditation, in which they focus on their sensations; the noises in their environment, the air blowing through their hair, or their own breathing. They don't actually consider these stimuli, they try to block out all outside thoughts and worry only about their pure, current experience. Further analysis showed that the years spent meditating correlated directly with cortical thickness; more experienced meditators had larger brains than rookies. In some brain areas, the increased thickness was even more pronounced in older meditators than younger ones, despite the expected thinning in these regions that occurs with age.

So what does this mean? At the moment, not much of anything. Further research is required to reveal whether or not there are any cognitive or behavioral effects associated with the increased cortical thickness in those who meditate. Could meditation reverse the thinning of grey matter that comes with age? Could it turn back the neural clock, so to speak? No doubt more data on this subject will emerge in the near future.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go meditate. When it comes to finals, every inch of brain cortex counts!

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2006/02/meditation-found-to-increase-brain-size/

Don't I Know You From Somewhere?

Imagine you suffer a mild seizure. You take a trip to the hospital, and luckily you’re fine. Or are you? A few days later, you leave your home to walk to the local café. You see someone walking towards you that looks oddly familiar; you stop and ask them if you know them from somewhere. You don’t. Another person, looking very familiar to you, turns a corner. Suddenly you realize that everyone around you seems to be someone you know, but you can’t remember their names or where you’ve seen them before. You have a condition called Hyperfamiliarity for Faces, or HFF.

HFF is uncommon, and typically occurs following an epileptic seizure. In most cases, there are no concurrent effects, and patients seem perfectly healthy. It is not a permanent condition, but has been shown to last anywhere from a few seconds to several years. A review by Devinsky and colleagues in 2010 pooled all available information on HFF, including case studies and data from imaging research. They point to a miscommunication between the fusiform face area and the structures involved in autobiographical and episodic memory. Lesions are typically within the left hemisphere and temporal lobe. Devinsky and colleagues also explored research on déjà vu. They view déjà vu as another form of Hyperfamiliarity, but for experiences instead of faces. Seizures stimulating the amygdala, hippocampus, and perirhinal cortex have been implicated in the déjà vu experience. There is also evidence for hyperexcitability in the right hemisphere. Perhaps, in individuals with HFF, damage to the left hemisphere requires the right hemisphere to become overactive in an attempt to restore complete functionality. Devinsky et al. summarize that “HFF may be produced by impaired left hemisphere identification of unique facial features and excessive right hemisphere processes that link individual faces with emotional and personal meaning, leading to spurious familiarity feelings. Left temporal lobe dysfunction may impair novelty signaling and detection of specific facial features while disinhibiting right temporal regions that falsely signal familiarity.”

Pretty interesting stuff! It’s hard to imagine living with HFF. What about watching a movie, or your favorite TV show? Would you get an overwhelming feeling that Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp were pals from your past? Would the people that you actually know stand out in a sea of familiar faces? Could this be an unknown cause for uncomfortably friendly personality types (Mr. Rogers)? Thoughts to ponder!

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2848104/?tool=pmcentrez#__sec7

Trippin' on Tryptophan

Turkey and its associated essential amino acid L-tryptophan have long been blamed for the inevitable lethargy that follows the Thanksgiving meal. Does turkey really deserve this reputation? Not so much. L-tryptophan can be metabolized into serotonin and melatonin, which would explain the sleepy after-effect. However, the relatively low levels of L-tryptophan in turkey will typically cause drowsiness only when consumed on an empty stomach. When’s the last time you saw a family member sit down to a big plate of turkey (and nothing else) on Thanksgiving?

So what’s really causing ‘the itis?’ More than likely, it’s the carbo load associated with the Turkey Day meal. Stuffing, roles, mashed potatoes, pie...the list goes on. When we consume a ton of carbohydrates, insulin is secreted by the pancreas, forcing amino acids that would typically compete with tryptophan to move from the bloodstream to muscle cells. L-tryptophan can then be synthesized into serotonin and melatonin, inducing that naptime feeling.

Some more possible causes? Any time you eat a large meal, your body’s blood supply will flow away from the brain and towards the digestive system. Your energy reserves will take a serious hit as your body works hard to digest a feast. Let’s not forget booze. In my family, jell-o shots and beer are equally as essential as cranberry sauce or green bean casserole to the traditional meal. Alcohol acts as a sedative, enhancing the effects of the overall meal.

And let’s be honest, some of us are looking for any excuse to catch up on some z’s. Happy napping,
all!

http://chemistry.about.com/od/holidaysseasons/a/tiredturkey.htm

Celebrating Uncertainty

Watch this video! But it’s so long, I know. Do it anyway! Because not only are optical illusions fun, but you’re probably going to learn a thing or two about perception and the human experience.


We've all seen optical illusions before. A typical response is something like "Wow...I guess my senses are tricking me; I guess I know less about my surroundings than I thought." Lotto does something truly profound with optical illusions. He appreciates the gaps between reality and our own perceptions, he sees these inconsistencies as windows into the brain and its functioning. As he explains, “context is everything.” Our awareness of the physical world is limited by our perception, a system that we know can be fooled. According to Lotto, there’s nothing wrong with the inaccuracies in our perception, they’re proof of the patterns in the world on which we base our experience. If humans weren’t able to transform the overwhelming amount of stimuli invading our sensory organs into a concise representation, we wouldn’t be able to function. Lotto explores how our experience-based expectations can be modified and combined. He looks at optical illusions in other species, something I had never considered before. He also explains how one sensory modality can be transformed into another, without a loss of understanding. Fascinating stuff! I don’t know about you, but I’ll be paying a little more attention to my perceptions from now on.

Who Needs Accurate Memories, Anyway?

Last year, Cambridge researchers stumbled across some revealing data on false memories. They were studying the effects of brain damage on memory in rats. Rats were presented with a small, elaborate object and given time to become familiar with its appearance. They were then placed in a normal cage environment, free of wacky objects, for an hour. When presented with the same object as before as well as a new object, rats without brain damage spent significantly more time exploring the new object, ignoring the one they’d seen an hour before. The researchers expected that rats with damage to the perirhinal cortex (involved in visual memory consolidation) would show no preference towards the previously shown object. The brain damaged rats took this hypothesis a step further. They actually spent LESS time investigating the new object than the normal rats, implying they had some sort of familiarity with the object, despite having never seen it before.
 

These findings propelled the research team into a new focus. They wondered if the stimuli in their regular holding environment, coupled with perirhinal damage, resulted in formation of false memories. To test this theory, a similar method was used, but rats were raised in a dark room, devoid of visual input. The visually impaired rats acted as the researchers had initially expected for rats raised in lit cages, supporting their hypothesis.

So what’s going on here? The perirhinal cortex is easily harmed in comparison to other brain areas. Damage to this area is common in diseases classified by memory impairment, such as Alzheimer’s. As it turns out, individuals with these impairments actually perform better on tests of memory if they’ve been in a dark, low-stimulus environment before testing. Connections, connections! According to the Cambridge researcher Lisa Saksida, the perirhinal cortex is responsible for formation of complex visual memories. When the area is damaged, less specialized regions will attempt to recreate memories using generalized environmental stimuli. This disadvantaged form of memory reformation produces what we know as false memories. Could the perirhinal cortex also be involved in sensations of déjà vu? Flashbulb memories? Who knows! I look forward to seeing more research emerge on this subject.

The original article can be found here: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6009/1408.abstract

Cocaine and Cupcakes, One in the Same?

While home in Minneapolis this past weekend, I took some time to catch up on recent Star Tribune articles. I came across the intriguing title, “Some foods as addictive as cocaine?” Apparently, 28 papers on food addiction have been published in this year alone, according to the National Library of Medicine. This is a hot topic, and the food and beverage industry is nervous. Researchers are picking apart the brains of food addicts and obese individuals to understand what makes them addicted to food. It is becoming clearer and clearer that the delicious beverages and foods we love can “hijack the brain in ways that resemble addictions to cocaine, nicotine and other drugs.”

Like me, you may be thinking to yourself “well, duh.” The human body has not evolved for the abundant, sugary, fatty foods common to American culture. The foods we tend to love most are also those that are the worst for us (fries dipped in ice cream, anyone?). Sugars and fats were rare in the hunter-gatherer’s environment, and they taste so great because of evolutionary pressures to search long and hard for them. When you only have access to fats and sugars once in a while, an affinity for them becomes essential for survival. Aside from searching the aisles for the items on our grocery list each week, we don’t do much hunting or gathering these days. The well-liked flavors that once helped us prosper are now killing us. As it turns out, not everyone appreciates this, which is why so many researchers are looking at the mechanisms behind food addiction. They need factual collateral to help the general public understand the ways in which food can modify their brains.

A widespread knowledge that food interacts with the brain in ways similar to that of lethal, illegal drugs could change the way we eat. This idea is frightening for the food and beverage industry, which the Trib article points out, is worth at least one TRILLION dollars. Though there is overwhelming evidence for the addictive nature of certain foods, “food company executives and lobbyists say nothing has been proven.” Ha! We can only hope that one of these days, the CEO of Frito-Lay will wake up in a cold sweat, fiending for his next potato chip fix, and think to himself “What have I done!?” Until then, it’s important to understand that food isn’t just sustenance. It can also be viewed as a delicious, fatty, drug.

Read the original Star Tribune article here: http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/wellness/133302438.html

No Brain Wave Is Safe

UC Berkeley researchers have recently undertaken a project (see www.nbcbayarea.com/news/tech/Brain-Scanner-Records-Dreams-on-Video-130497213.html) that is both fascinating and incredibly creepy (perfect for a Halloween post!). They utilized fMRI technology to create a visual response database. By showing participants an array of videos, and simultaneously recording brain activity, they collected a cornucopia of data on how the human brain responds to specific visual stimuli. The database allows them to (more or less) reconstruct an image that a subject in an fMRI machine is simply imagining. This means (hypothetically) that if you are sitting in this fMRI machine, and an inappropriate visual memory pops into your head, BOOM. They've caught you, they saw it on their own computer screen. The database has outed your private thoughts. The system is far from perfect, as this video makes clear:



But within a decade or two, as the system is improved, this technology could have some pretty serious implications. We could see what people are dreaming, dive into the subconscious. Revealing, previously unavailable data would become available to numerous research areas. For example, flashbulb memories could be reconstructed on screen, then compared with actual happenings. There is, of course, the terrifying thought of the government getting their hands on this system and going on a brain invasion spree. Let's take a moment to appreciate the premature nature of this technology. Our thoughts are safe...for now.