As we approach the end of 2008, yes, Japanese neuroscientists are able to recreate what we see from activity in our brain.

Here is  a link to what people were looking at and what the computer recreated.

If you are into neuroscience, you might also enjoy this TED lecture on learning from watching our own bran scans.

Project H.M.

H.M. is considered to be one of the most famous cases in neuropsychology. His dense amnesia contributed significantly to our understanding of human memory. On December 2nd, exactly a year after his death, anyone interested will have the chance to watch the dissection of his brain. I’m really looking forward to this (that sounds a bit weird).

According to the Project H.M. official blog:

“On December 2nd, 2009 we will begin slicing the brain of the amnesic patient H.M. into giant histological sections. The brain specimen is going to be frozen and sectioned whole during one continuous session that we expect will last approximately 30 hours”

If you’re interested in finding more about the project and the next phase, visit the Project H.M. website

Clive Wearin’s Diaries @ Wellcome Trust Exhibition

A few months ago I wrote a post on Clive Wearing, another case of amnesia. If you’re lucky enough to live in London, you’d be interested to know that the Wellcome Trust’s new collection, titled “Identity: Eight Rooms, Nine Lives” hosts Wearing’s famous diaries in the Samuel Pepy’s room. The exhibition will be on from today until April and it’s a part of The Identity Project (Pressure Drop could also be interesting). Oh, and it’s free.  For more information visit the exhibition’s website. They have a special section on Clive Wearing including a number of interesting videos.

image: Salvador Dali’s – the disintegration of the persistence of memory

Most of us can agree that anger usually doesn’t solve or make a situation better. In fact anger has been linked to poorer treatment outcomes on a number of different disorders including Social Anxiety Disorder. Though for people who have social anxiety, where does this anger come from and how can we stop this negative process?

The Role of Rumination

Rumination is a word used to describe an aversive, repetitive and uncontrollable thought pattern. Rumination is seen in many clinical disorders and is linked to poorer health and mental health outcomes. Those who suffer from social anxiety are more often prone to have post-event rumination then those who are not socially anxious. This means that socially anxious people not only mull over these events in their heads but they continue to think about these events in an aversive way. It is like the story a Buddhist monk told me once and listed below. I have heard the story before and don’t know who to reference.

“Two Monks were walking home and on the way they came to a large puddle full of mud, which they had to cross. At the brink of the puddle they saw a young woman standing, afraid to cross it.

“Come”, said one of the monks, “I will carry you to the other side”. He took her on his back, and carried her to the other side of the puddle.

After crossing the road, the two monks continued walking silently for hours, until they reached their destination.

The other monk could not keep silent any longer and exclaimed:” How could you carry that girl on your back? We are monks and are not allowed to touch women.”

The monk who carried the women over the puddle smiled and said: “I have left the girl at the other side of the puddle, but it seems you are still carrying her with you!”

I have heard different versions of that story but it tells the point that some people tend to ruminate more about events then others and this thought pattern is maladaptive.

Origins of Anger

In a recent study (I make reference to below) they found that when controlling for rumination in people with social anxiety that there is no longer any anger. What this means is that people shouldn’t attempt to deal with the anger but instead with rumination. Anger should be seen as a sign of an inner turmoil that represents the negative internal thinking patterns. The study went further to show that reflective pondering helped with anger suppression meaning that treatments should focus on reflections of our own thought patterns.

I realize many people who are shy or suffer from social anxiety do not have anger about themselves or other people, but for those who do treatment of their condition will be increasingly difficult. For more information on please check out my post on self-forgiveness and look forward to more posts on this aspect of shyness.

References:

Trew, J., Alden, L. (2009). Predicting anger in social anxiety: The mediating role of rumination. BehaviouralResearch Therapy, 47, 1079-1084.

There is no such syndrom as ADHD. It is a fraud a myth helping despaired people with pseudosientific och reductionistic means labeling their kids with brain dysfunction syndrom. This is actually a political biochemical castration of unhappy children.

Bicycling has an article about a young man who controls attention deficit and hyperactivity through exercise.

Adam was a rambunctious kid, but his behavior didn’t strike them as unusual. Adam’s ADHD wasn’t extreme or debilitating, the assistant principal told the Leibovitzes. But that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The boy’s condition was acute enough to cause learning problems but mild enough that he’d likely slip through the system’s safety net for special-needs students….

His parents worried that he wouldn’t keep up. “As he grew older, every year he’d be expected to concentrate a little harder and sit a little longer in his seat,” his mother says. “When it came time to do his homework, he’d be rolling around under the table or running into the next room. He’d shout out the answers to us. He always knew the answers. He just couldn’t sit still to write them down.”…

For the past 30 years, athletes, coaches, sports psychologists and medical researchers have probed and debated one of the most complex mysteries of the human body: How does exercise affect the brain? Common sense and our own experience tell us it does something. Every parent knows the best way to settle down a hopped-up kid is to take him out to the playground and run the bug juice out of him. A generation ago, teachers and coaches frequently used this approach as well.

This seemed a homespun, intuitive remedy, but in fact there was a scientific basis for it. In 1978, two years before the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) recognized ADHD as a condition, W. Mark Shipman, MD, conducted a simple test. Shipman was medical director of the San Diego Center for Children, an institute for psychologically troubled children. Back then, kids at the center were among the few in the United States taking psychostimulants such as Ritalin to calm what was then called hyperactivity. Kids can be naturally impulsive, inattentive and overactive, but those with ADHD are more so, all the time. (ADHD is an umbrella term that also includes ADD, attention deficit disorder.)

Shipman sent a group of hyperactive kids running for as much as 45 minutes a day, four days a week. An amazing thing happened: The running kids started acting as if they were getting extra doses of medication. After a while, the doctors who monitored the behavior of each child began lowering drug doses for most of the runners. Very few nonrunning participants had their doses reduced. The doctors who were administering the doses didn’t know which students were running; the changes in behavior were that clear.

Shipman’s study might have led to a boom in physical fitness programs for ADHD-identified kids. It didn’t. Instead, just the opposite occurred: Doctors began writing more prescriptions.

Read more.

Time-lapse imaging in live zebrafish embryos reveals that cerebellar granule cells migrate in chain-like structures as discovered by a recent article [1] [Köster et al., PLoS, Nov. 2009]. Figure above – Granule cells taken from the cerebellum of a pigeon (above, B) are shown in this 1899 drawing by legendary neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

Did talk about sticky objects and self-organization in the past,  how positive and negative feedback’s  stigmergic-like agents integrated could promote changes and learning over a complex system.  Same happens to bacteria as also ants. On the other hand, we do know memes are also sticky (e.g. Chip Heath, Dan Heath, “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die“, Random House, ISBN 978-1-4000-6428-1, January 2007). What’s new however, is that there are increasing proofs that our own brains my follow similar mechanisms (as Douglas Hofstadter in the past did made some analogies with how brains could work and how ant colonies raid different environments). In this recent new study, Köster and colleagues [1] [PLoS, Nov. 2009] reveal crucial pieces of this puzzle, showing how (neuronal) cells orient themselves to migrate together (like bacteria, above). The team studied zebrafish, one of the workhorses of developmental neurobiology, because its transparent body allows researchers to track movements of cells inside of it. As explained by Mason Inman [2]:

[...] Neurons in the developing brain complete their own self-organized waltz, coordinating with their neighbors to migrate to the right spots to form the cerebellum, visual cortex, or other parts of the brain. In this issue of PLoS Biology, Reinhard Köster and colleagues show that some of these brain cells behave much like slime molds, coordinating with other cells of the same type to migrate in a herd. They found that one particular protein called Cadherin-2 is crucial in allowing the cells to adhere to their neighbors so they can coordinate their movements and all wind up in the right spot. [...] Slime molds provide a textbook example of self-organization. They live as single cells until food becomes scarce. Then, they broadcast chemical signals that trigger their mass assembly into a fruiting body, with some cells forming a stalk and others turning into spores that cast about in the winds to spread far and wide. [...] Neurons in the developing brain complete their own self-organized waltz, coordinating with their neighbors to migrate to the right spots to form the cerebellum, visual cortex, or other parts of the brain. In this issue of PLoS Biology, Reinhard Köster and colleagues show that some of these brain cells behave much like slime molds, coordinating with other cells of the same type to migrate in a herd. They found that one particular protein called Cadherin-2 is crucial in allowing the cells to adhere to their neighbors so they can coordinate their movements and all wind up in the right spot.[...]

[...] But the mechanisms behind this coordinated movement – in particular, how each cell adjusts its inner workings to move to the right place at the right time – are only now starting to be revealed, using imaging that tracks these cells in live animals as they develop. [...] To figure out what triggers the cells to line up and move together, the authors looked at what other kinds of cells were in the neighborhood. Many studies have shown that support cells, known as glial cells, often help guide neurons during these kinds of migrations. But during the first few days of the zebrafish embryo’s development, Köster and colleagues found, there were no glial cells along the granular cells’ migration route. That means these cells must go it alone, the team reasoned, with their own mechanism for signaling between each other to line up into chains and make their move. [...] Although the study focused on just one type of brain cell, the findings could explain how many types of neurons find their way to their proper spots as the brain develops. There are still some pieces of the puzzle missing, however. While the findings explain how the granule cells are able to coordinate and follow their neighbors, it’s still not clear how the first few cells to head out on the journey – those at the front of the “conga line” – get oriented in the right direction. This suggests there must be some kind of signal from surrounding cells to get them headed in the right direction, the authors argue – yet another level of organization. [...] , in Mason Inman (Nov., 2009) Migrating Brain Cells Stick Together, PloS. [2]

[1] Rieger S, Senghaas N, Walch A, Köster RW (Nov., 2009) Cadherin-2 Controls Directional Chain Migration of Cerebellar Granule Neurons. PLoS Biology.
[2] Mason Inman (Nov., 2009) Migrating Brain Cells Stick Together, PloS Biology.

The JFK50, 2009–for me and for 999 others–is now done.  It was a challenge to be sure.  For starters, we ran over a mountain, South Mountain, to be more exact. I found this to be both the best and the worst part of the 50.  Really, it is all about the mountain. Now I understand. We ran along the ridge for a while. Some of the views were amazing. When the stony trail smoothed out a little, you had a chance to look up–and then down to see the valleys on either side. Even in the grey of November, it is a bit breathtaking. This is Appalachian trail,  some of which I’d hiked before, and experiencing at such a pace was, well, kind of thrilling. More than kind of.

We took our time on the up-hills, walking or at a half-trot. Part of the up-hill where we mounted the trail is paved, and this felt highly unnatural, even after running up a couple of miles of road. But then we reached the summit, ran along the rocky ridge, through a series of ups and downs, and finally down some treacherous switchbacks to the river.

Once again, I found myself at several points racing down a trail, trashing my quads for the sheer joy of it and not caring one bit how I would pay later.  Only now I had to worry about having something left for the flat-ish 34 miles to come. There is something so primal about running trails. I really couldn’t help myself. At one point I just gave up, threw caution to the wind and just let the horse go. I reminded myself that more than anything, even more than finishing that day, my main goal was to enjoy this experience, and there may be nothing on this planet I like more than nimbly flying–or crashing–down a stony mountain trail. A couple of face plants and a twisted ankle later reminded me to take it easy a bit. But I was by no means out of commission.  Training mostly on the flat dirt of the tow path, city streets and the hamster mill, I soon became mindful again that running trails is so much more physically taxing than road racing, or at least taxing in a different way. Mentally taxing, you must focus on every step–and quickly. One false step could be devastating, and much like climbing, it will remind you later of muscles you didn’t know you had.

Coming down the mountain switchbacks brought on a serious bout of runner’s euphoria, and I began quietly singing to myself in Gaelic. I was careful to do it quietly. Hope I didn’t annoy anyone. From here, we could hear the crowd at the first pit stop below cheering, and this drove us on, some of us a bit delirious from the mountain run.

I was proudly running with the Reston Runners a well-established club that among its vast and varied membership includes a large contingency of seasoned ultra runners who run the JFK every year. They kindly adopted me for the experience, despite my Maryland residency, and proved to be the warmest, most conscientious and supportive group a person could be honored to have stumbled upon.

At the pit stop, I was greeted with the familiar face of my friend Leslie, a Reston member with whom I had run several times over the summer in training. She has run the JFK 4 times.  She was there cheering me on, waving and smiling. Others in the club had my drop bag ready for me, the first of a series of personally-packed bags the club’s crew delivered to various points on the run.  Much like a race car pit crew, they soon had me finely tuned and oiled with water, gels and anything else I needed for the next round.  They were invaluable to say the least. This early on,  I needed nothing more than some water and a gel, but the psychological support got me much further.

After the mountain, we only had 34 miles of nice flat and semi-flat coasting to go. As ultras go, the JFK is a piece of cake–only one small mountain, and you get it over with early. And we’d had perfect weather. It’s hard for me to imagine minding those leaf-covered rocks at such a pace in a cold rain. It made me realize what a newbie I am to this sport, and well, to life–at knowing myself–how I’ve only but grazed the surface when it comes to getting myself into shape and understanding my own needs, limits and abilities.

On the tow path, my beloved training ground, I relaxed and ran–took my time. I adopted the recommended pacing for first-timers–an on-off combination of running with tiny walk breaks.  I ran with a Marine for a long stretch as we seemed to be traveling in a similar pace pattern. We’d pass eachother, then run for a stretch together.  People were most friendly and talkative throughout, and there were people from all walks of life.

The day was lovely.  I watched the river move, and stared up at points into the endless blue. It was a joy to run along the river, the woods, and the cliffs on that stretch of tow path that was my old stomping grounds–where I used to train before I moved last March. I recalled a lot of my runs there.  I had really grown and changed on this familiar stretch of ground. And during that time, I had told myself that someday I would run the JFK, and now here I was, looking from this past perspective as if I were experiencing a tiny sliver of the future rather than the present. It was unique. It was timeless. It was real.

 It took me 10 hours and 11 minutes to finish. I didn’t push it. My goal was to finish and enjoy the experience. And I did. Still, I  managed to find it in me to sprint across the finish; passed my husband in the crowd on the way, slapped him five. It was a great, strong ending to a wonderful race. Worries of dredging up bad states of mind and fears of  where the distance would take me were completely unfounded. I believe this may be due to the fact that all of the early running required a great deal of concentration, and once I reached the flat stretches, I had already reached a euphoric state. I wondered if this would wear off eventually, giving way to fatigue, but it never did. I was ecstatic from mile 28 on–and for the next two days.

Now I have had just a small taste of what is to come.  Of this, I was assured by my new friend Anna, who had just run her 15th JFK. She regularly runs 100-milers, so this was for her, but a walk in the park.  When she saw me after the race, she asked, “Well, how was it?”

I was still grinning, and before I could gather my thoughts to properly express my full joy and amazment at the experience, I paused as I saw that look of recognition in her eye. She just smiled, and said, “Ah, you’ll be back.”

The strangest thing about the experience, over-all, was how entirely natural it felt.

A friend recently sent me this nifty article.

Here are some of my favorite snippets.

On “knowledge”:

“Knowing is not an activity of the
brain but of human beings, and knowledge is
not contained in the brain but in books and
computers, and is possessed by human beings,
but not by their brains. It makes no sense and
explains nothing to divide the brain up into
bits that contain different kinds of knowledge
and know different sorts of things, because the
brain does not contain knowledge or know
anything.”

On “consciousness”:

“Dispositional consciousness is a general
tendency to be conscious of certain
things—money-conscious, for example. Such
a generalized tendency is indicated by various
sorts of behavior—money-conscious people
are likely to save their money, spend it
carefully, talk about it and think about it more
than others, and so forth. Such a tendency
almost certainly is learned, and therefore one
can be ‘‘better’’ or ‘‘worse’’ at it depending on
one’s experience, if ‘‘better’’ and ‘‘worse’’
refer to a greater or lesser probability of
behaving in ways consistent with the disposition.
So the authors’ assertion that consciousness
is not something we can become ‘‘good
at’’ may be argued with, both in its dispositional
sense and in its occurrent transitive sense
(a current consciousness of some thing or state
of affairs). I may not become conscious of the
subtle French horn part in a piece of music
until after I have read about the composer’s
penchant for using the French horn in subtle
ways—has my learning not enhanced my
ability to be conscious of the French horn in
the composer’s music? More broadly, is there
no sense in which the common Californian
pastime of ‘‘expanding’’ or ‘‘developing’’
consciousness is true?”

On “strange loopness” of human biology:

“Far more
difficult to achieve, I believe, will be an
understanding of the fundamental nestedness
of the brain, the rest of the body, and the
person in the world, each entity executing
processes that overlap and turn back on
themselves and each other in time and space.”

On metaphors as a tool for communication, not analysis:

“The point is
that it may be the ability of metaphors and
analogies to help researchers accomplish their
theoretical goals, and not how well they stand
up to connective analysis relative to their
conventional counterparts, that is the better
basis for approving or disapproving of them.”

Language always lacks fidelity. One can only put into words some subset of what we experience. What we “experience” is only a subset of what is happening around us. What happens around us in a way that could affect us is only a subset of what there is.

Folks have a tendency in all science (and non science) to analyze and report at our “level” of experience. No, it’s not possible to apply an analysis of single cell behavior to a scene study of Shakespeare. Though we often talk of “motivation” in both studies. It’s a terribly inaccurate description in both cases but it does, often times, communicate something of value.

For an alternative, but equal misapplication of language from the “human experience” level, let’s consider quantum physics.  We experience things in 3 spacial and 1 temporal dimensions. We have NO WAY to experience the world in any other context. Thus it is incredibly hard for one to conceptualize and explain what happens at a quantum level (where things don’t follow space and time as we experience it.) It is NONsense to describe, diagram, or otherwise model the quantum world on our “human” level with expectation of accuracy. Our description of quantum mechanics is a very gross description.

Where this all gets counter-productive to the progress of knowledge is mistaking a description (model, report…) of something (a system, situation, behavior…) as the thing itself.  The use of psychological “Freudian” terms can sometimes be useful to short cutting long winded discussions but one must be disciplined to recognize that high level concepts cannot be applied to what’s actually going on.

I think there’s another reason we accept gross descriptions of the world. They work for all practical purposes. You don’t need to have a perfect description of the world to be successful in achieving whatever it is you might be doing. In fact, WE HAVE TO MAKE THIS TRADE OFF. If we didn’t short cut and take on gross descriptions of the world few of us would be able to operate. At the very least, few scientists would be able to publish if they actually had to drill down and tie up the loose ends without these gross misrepresentations.

Oh, and for those that care, I don’t think there is something like “consciousness”. We are more or less affected by things happening around and in us. We are not “aware” of our experiences in some binary way (the lightbulb never really just flips on). The linked article gets at some of this and there are other synthesis that argue this point better than I can at this stage.  A further implication is that “thought” isn’t really a THING by itself either. We don’t THINK THOUGHTS. and yes, I lack the syntax to describe my synthesis any further at this time

For more insight you might turn to this very recent Edge talk.  In particular, read the responses from Sam Harris and others.  Kinda embodies everything in this post…. from baggage terms to metaphors as description to just how far away we are from reasonably deep insight.

Just a heads up I will not be posting over Thanksgiving weekend.

For now, a cool article from the BBC about the Neuroscience of an actor’s mind.

Excerpt:

For an actor, the performance conditions weren’t exactly ideal: flat on her back in a large machine, under strict instructions to lie as still as possible, speaking in short bursts interspersed with the shrill sound of a magnetic resonance imaging scanner.

But last week Fiona Shaw, one of Britain’s leading actresses – who has in her time played everything from the tragic heroine Medea to Shakespeare’s Richard II – volunteered in the cause of science to spend an hour having her brain scanned while “acting”.

Describes two sets of experiments to see whether the large, bulbous calyx of Held is a true “fail-safe” synaptic structure that always fires, or not, and the evolutionary reasoning behind either case.

Synapse #fail, Science #win « Building Blogs of Science.

“For the past twelve years”, says Dehaene, “my research team has been using every available brain research tool, from functional MRI to electro- and magneto-encephalography and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain, to shed light on the brain mechanisms of consciousness. I am now happy to report that we have acquired a good working hypothesis. In experiment after experiment, we have seen the same signatures of consciousness: physiological markers that all, simultaneously, show a massive change when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information say a word, a digit or a sound.”Furthermore, when we render the same information non-conscious or “subliminal”, all the signatures disappear. We have a theory about why these signatures occur, called the global neuronal workspace theory. Realistic computer simulations of neurons reproduce our main experimental findings: when the information processed exceeds a threshold for large-scale communication across many brain areas, the network ignites into a large-scale synchronous state, and all our signatures suddenly appear.But this is already more than a theory. We are now applying our ideas to non-communicating patients in coma, vegetative state, or locked-in syndromes. The test that we have designed with Tristan Bekinschtein, Lionel Naccache, and Laurent Cohen, based on our past experiments and theory, seems to reliably sort out which patients retain some residual conscious life and which do not.”My laboratory is now pursuing this research intensively on patients, animals, human adults and young children, with the hope of turning our brain-imaging measurements into a real-time monitor of conscious experience. The time thus seems ripe to share this work with a broader audience of readers interested in cutting-edge science and technology, but also those concerned with the philosophical, personal and ethical implications of these findings.”

via Edge In Paris: SIGNATURES OF CONSCIOUSNESS — A TALK BY STANISLAS DEHAENE.

The endbulb or calyx of Held is a very large synapse found in the auditory system. It consists of a very large ‘calyceal’ ending, literally wrapping around the cell body of the postsynaptic neuron. It was first described by H Held in the late 1800’s and has since been shown to characteristically be present in neuronal circuits that require very high temporal precision. (It is, by the way, my favourite synapse.)

Because the synapse is so large, there are numerous sites of contact where the neurotransmitters are released, which will happen whenever an action potential reaches the synaptic terminal. Because of this, it has always been thought that these synapses never fail to produce a response (action potential) on its target (postsynaptic) neuron, that is, that it is a fail-safe synapse: every time that there is neurotransmitter release, the postsynaptic neuron produces an action potential.

Barn owl endbulb of Held (by Kubke)

But is this true?

Jeannette Lorteije, Silviu Rusu, Christopher Kushmerick and Gerard Borst examined precisely this, and they did so in a series of really elegant experiments in mice. They examined whether the discrepancies in the data regarding the degree of reliability at the enbulb or calyx of Held could be attributed to different methodological approaches or differences in the interpretation of the raw data. To examine this they did a series of recordings from cells in the Medial Nucleus of the Trapezoid Body (MNTB), which is part of the mammalian auditory system. The authors conclude that that there is a significant incidence of failures of transmission at this level of the system.

This is in contrast with the results reported by Bernard Englitz, Santra Tolnai, Marey Typlt, Jürgen Jost and Rüdolf Rübsamen. Here the authors recorded the failure at the endbulb of Held in the auditory cochlear nucleus AVCN and the calyx of Held in the MNTB in mongolian gerbils. They report that although failures of transmission were often found in AVCN, this was not the case in MNTB.

Synaptic structures analogous to the endbulb or calyx of Held are found in neuronal circuits that require high temporal precision. In the auditory system high temporal resolution is necessary for the measurement of interaural time differences, which in mammals are used to localize low frequency sound in the horizontal plane. Benedikt Grothe has argued that low frequency hearing appeared later in mammalian evolution, and that anatomical differences in a nucleus that receives inputs from the MNTB and is involved in the detection of interaural time differences (MSO) reflect this evolution. He argues that although MSO may have evolved to detect ITDs in low frequency hearing mammals (such as gerbils), its function may be different in higher frequency hearing mammals. On therefore wonders whether the differences in the data between the two studies may be related to adaptations associated with different temporal processing requirements in mammals with different frequency hearing ranges.

What did Lorteije and collaborators do?

In order to decide whether there are times in which synaptic release fails to elicit an action potential on the target cell, one needs to simultaneously monitor the activity happening at the synapse as well as at the postsynaptic neuron. There are traditionally two ways of doing this: One is to record the currents near the synapse that are produced by the electrical activity of the synapse and the cell, and the endbulbs of Held are large enough to produce sufficient current that can be detected. The other is to actually record the activity simultaneously from the cell and the synaptic terminal, which is usually done in an ‘in vitro’ preparation.

Lorteije and colleagues produced a set of data that is simply amazing, and their findings explain many of the discrepancies that can be found in the literature. They answered some very straightforward questions:

1. Are the extracellular recordings done in vivo representative of what is actually going at a single endbulb-neuron contact? (the answer is yes)
2. Is there synaptic  release that fails to produce an action potential in the postsynaptic neuron? (the answer is also yes)
3. Is the short term synaptic depression seen in vitro also seen in the whole animal (in vivo)? (Short term depression is a reduction in the effect of synaptic release on the postsynaptic cell.). (The answer is basically no)

The authors recorded from cells in the Medial Nucleus of the Trapezoid Body (MNTB), which receives inputs in the form of the large calyces of Held and is involved in auditory processing. They did this by recording the spontaneous and auditory-evoked activity extracellularly (as most people do) as well as directly from the cells with a patch pipette in anaesthetized mice. They then repeated these experiments in vitro, this time simultaneously recording extracellularly and in whole cell patch, which allowed them to confirm that the extracellular recordings in vivo did indeed represent the activities of the terminal and the cell and that it could also provide information as to the size of the synaptic potential. Their results have two important findings:

1. in vivo there is no observable short term synaptic depression. The synaptic depression observed in vitro may be partly due to the concentration of Calcium in the bathing solution, but other factors may be involved.
2. They also found that the release of neurotransmitter at the synapse often failed to produce an action potential in the postsynaptic cell. A similar rate of failure to that observed in vivo can be obtained in vitro by lowering the calcium concentration of the bathing solution.

The authors summarize their findings by saying:

“Due to its low release probability and large number of release sites, its average output can be kept constant, regardless of firing frequency. Its low quantal output thus allows it to be a tonic synapse, but the price it pays is an increase in jitter and synaptic latency and occasional postsynaptic failures.”

This is a carefully designed study, and despite my concerns as to whether their results are generalizable to other mammals, they do provide data that will be welcome by many auditory neurophysiologists. Their ability to record from a patch in vivo is no small feat, and the correlation between intracellular and extracellular data is extremely useful. Further, there is a cautionary tale around the way that data obtained from in vitro data can be interpreted.

And if you think this post is long, try reading the paper! (There are heaps more gems in there.)

References

Lorteije, J., Rusu, S., Kushmerick, C., & Borst, J. (2009). Reliability and Precision of the Mouse Calyx of Held Synapse Journal of Neuroscience, 29 (44), 13770-13784 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3285-09.2009
Englitz, B., Tolnai, S., Typlt, M., Jost, J., & Rübsamen, R. (2009). Reliability of Synaptic Transmission at the Synapses of Held In Vivo under Acoustic Stimulation PLoS ONE, 4 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0007014
Grothe, B. (2000). The evolution of temporal processing in the medial superior olive, an auditory brainstem structure Progress in Neurobiology, 61 (6), 581-610 DOI: 10.1016/S0301-0082(99)00068-4

The human brain is bombarded with all kinds of information, from the memory of last night’s delicious dinner to the instructions from your boss at your morning meeting. But how do you “tune in” to just one thought or idea and ignore all the rest of what is going on around you, until it comes time to think of something else?

Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for the Biology of Memory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have discovered a mechanism that the brain uses to filter out distracting thoughts to focus on a single bit of information. Their results are reported in 19 November issue of Nature.

Think of your brain like a radio: You’re turning the knob to find your favourite station, but the knob jams, and you’re stuck listening to something that’s in between stations. It’s a frustrating combination that makes it quite hard to get an update on swine flu while a Michael Jackson song wavers in and out. Staying on the right frequency is the only way to really hear what you’re after. In much the same way, the brain’s nerve cells are able to “tune in” to the right station to get exactly the information they need, says researcher Laura Colgin, who was the paper’s first author. “Just like radio stations play songs and news on different frequencies, the brain uses different frequencies of waves to send different kinds of information,” she says.

Gamma waves as information carriers

Colgin and her colleagues measured brain waves in rats, in three different parts of the hippocampus, which is a key memory center in the brain. While listening in on the rat brain wave transmissions, the researchers started to realize that there might be something more to a specific sub-set of brain waves, called gamma waves. Researchers have thought these waves are linked to the formation of consciousness, but no one really knew why their frequency differed so much from one region to another and from one moment to the next.

Information is carried on top of gamma waves, just like songs are carried by radio waves. These “carrier waves” transmit information from one brain region to another. “We found that there are slow gamma waves and fast gamma waves coming from different brain areas, just like radio stations transmit on different frequencies,” she says.

You really can “be on the same wavelength”

“You know how when you feel like you really connect with someone, you say you are on the same wavelength? When brain cells want to connect with each other, they synchronize their activity,” Colgin explains. “The cells literally tune into each other’s wavelength. We investigated how gamma waves in particular were involved in communication across cell groups in the hippocampus. What we found could be described as a radio-like system inside the brain. The lower frequencies are used to transmit memories of past experiences, and the higher frequencies are used to convey what is happening where you are right now.”

If you think of the example of the jammed radio, the way to hear what you want out of the messy signals would be to listen really hard for the latest news while trying to filter out the unwanted music. The hippocampus does this more efficiently. It simply tunes in to the right frequency to get the station it wants. As the cells tune into the station they’re after, they are actually able to filter out the other station at the same time, because its signal is being transmitted on a different frequency.

The switch

“The cells can rapidly switch their activity to tune in to the slow waves or the fast waves,” Colgin says, “but it seems as though they cannot listen to both at the exact same time. This is like when you are listening to your radio and you tune in to a frequency that is midway between two stations- you can’t understand anything- it’s just noise.” In this way, the brain cells can distinguish between an internal world of memories and a person’s current experiences. If the messages were carried on the same frequency, our perceptions of the world might be completely confused. “Your current perceptions of a place would get mixed up with your memories of how the place used to be,” Colgin says.

The cells that tune into different wavelengths work like a switch, or rather, like zapping between radio stations that are already programmed into your radio. The cells can switch back and forth between different channels several times per second. The switch allows the cells to attend to one piece at a time, sorting out what’s on your mind from what’s happening and where you are at any point in time. The researchers believe this is an underlying principle for how information is handled throughout the brain.

“This switch mechanism points to superfast routing as a general mode of information handling in the brain,” says Edvard Moser, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience director. “The classical view has been that signaling inside the brain is hardwired, subject to changes caused by modification of connections between neurons. Our results suggest that the brain is a lot more flexible. Among the thousands of inputs to a given brain cell, the cell can choose to listen to some and ignore the rest and the selection of inputs is changing all the time. We believe that the gamma switch is a general principle of the brain, employed throughout the brain to enhance interregional communication.”

Can a switch malfunction explain schizophrenia?

People who are schizophrenic have problems keeping these brain signals straight. They cannot tell, for example, if they are listening to voices from people who are present or if the voices are from the memory of a movie they have seen. “We cannot tell for sure if it is this switch that is malfunctioning, but we do know that gamma waves are abnormal in schizophrenic patients,” Colgin says. “Schizophrenics’ perceptions of the world around them are mixed up, like a radio stuck between stations.”

Nature 462, 353-357 (19 November 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature08573; Received 10 July 2009; Accepted 9 October 2009
Frequency of gamma oscillations routes flow of information in the hippocampus.
Laura Lee Colgin1, Tobias Denninger1,3, Marianne Fyhn1,3, Torkel Hafting1,3, Tora Bonnevie1, Ole Jensen2, May-Britt Moser1 & Edvard I. Moser1

Gamma oscillations are thought to transiently link distributed cell assemblies that are processing related information, a function that is probably important for network processes such as perception attentional selection and memory. This ‘binding’ mechanism requires that spatially distributed cells fire together with millisecond range precision; however, it is not clear how such coordinated timing is achieved given that the frequency of gamma oscillations varies substantially across space and time, from approx 25 to almost 150 Hz. Here we show that gamma oscillations in the CA1 area of the hippocampus split into distinct fast and slow frequency components that differentially couple CA1 to inputs from the medial entorhinal cortex, an area that provides information about the animal’s current position, and CA3, a hippocampal subfield essential for storage of such information. Fast gamma oscillations in CA1 were synchronized with fast gamma in medial entorhinal cortex, and slow gamma oscillations in CA1 were coherent with slow gamma in CA3. Significant proportions of cells in medial entorhinal cortex and CA3 were phase-locked to fast and slow CA1 gamma waves, respectively. The two types of gamma occurred at different phases of the CA1 theta rhythm and mostly on different theta cycles. These results point to routeing of information as a possible function of gamma frequency variations in the brain and provide a mechanism for temporal segregation of potentially interfering information from different sources.

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Shyness is universal in that we can find it within people all across the world. I’m sure you could even find it within members of a tribe in the Amazon. However, what remains the difference is how shyness is treated amongst the people of a particular area. In this post I will examine the differences between North America and Asia’s view on shyness.

In North American societies, children who are shy are likely to have difficulties in peer relations, school performance. These children realize their difficulties in social situations and many develop negative self-perceptions of their competence and other problems such as depression and loneliness. Studies have also shown that this may contribute to later adjustment problems in education or career stability. The adjustment difficulties are seen to be caused by Western society’s emphasis on assertiveness, competitiveness, and self-expression. The qualities North American’s generally expect from their children is to be assertive rather than reserved and restrained, and shyness is often considered a problem of socially immaturity or incompetence.

There is evidence that shyness is perceived as less problematic in many Asian countries such as Korea, and Indonesia. Shy children in China have tended to be accepted by peers and seen as competent by teachers and adults. This appreciation of shyness in China may be due to it’s endorsement of socially restrained behaviours in society. In Taoism and Confucianism philosophies behavioural restraint is considered to indicate social maturity and mastery. Also shy children may obtain support more easily from an environment that is more understanding and these shy children feel more competence to seek school achievement and develop positive emotions about themselves. However, in this same study I make reference to below, they find that the larger city urban areas in China are becoming more North American and along with this is the view of being assertive.

Implications:

In terms of education I believe that teachers must have more training on how to teach shy children and how to help them become apart of peer relations. As this study pointed out, children adjust better to life when they are seen as competent and this can help to develop a positive self-perception. Shy children are put into schools with the disadvantage that they way they act are considered immature and incompetent. While it would be impossible to change the view society has on shy children, teachers have the power to help develop shy children to feel confident going into a North American society. On a personal note I was put into the special education classes all throughout my early childhood years based purely on the fact that I was shy. I wouldn’t answer questions because I had to do so in front of the whole class which was extremely anxiety provoking. Now after attaining many years of academic success and higher education I look back on those years and shake my head because the teachers were trying to solve a learning problem when it was an anxiety problem.

References:

Chen, X., Wang, L., Wang, Z. (2009). Shyness-sensitivity and social, school, and psychologyical adjustment in rural migrant urban children in China. Child Development, 80, 1499-1513.

Difference between Mind and Matter is one of degree ,not of kind.While mind vibrates at a higher rate, matter vibrates at a lower frequency.
Lower frequencies are associated with past experiences, higher frequencies are linked to present and Ultra high frequencies with the future.
Consciousness is a stream that is Universal.Individual variations are due to limitations of Space and Time.Mind can relate to and transcend Time and Space with proper discipline.
The exposition of this thought will take too much space;separate blog follows.
What the current studies attempt to prove and proved partially have already been practiced in Hinduism.
ScienceDaily (Nov. 23, 2009) — The human brain is bombarded with all kinds of information, from the memory of last night’s delicious dinner to the instructions from your boss at your morning meeting. But how do you “tune in” to just one thought or idea and ignore all the rest of what is going on around you, until it comes time to think of something else?

Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for the Biology of Memory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have discovered a mechanism that the brain uses to filter out distracting thoughts to focus on a single bit of information. Their results are reported in 19 November issue of Nature.
Think of your brain like a radio: You’re turning the knob to find your favourite station, but the knob jams, and you’re stuck listening to something that’s in between stations. It’s a frustrating combination that makes it quite hard to get an update on swine flu while a Michael Jackson song wavers in and out. Staying on the right frequency is the only way to really hear what you’re after. In much the same way, the brain’s nerve cells are able to “tune in” to the right station to get exactly the information they need, says researcher Laura Colgin, who was the paper’s first author. “Just like radio stations play songs and news on different frequencies, the brain uses different frequencies of waves to send different kinds of information,” she says.
Gamma waves as information carriers
Colgin and her colleagues measured brain waves in rats, in three different parts of the hippocampus, which is a key memory center in the brain. While listening in on the rat brain wave transmissions, the researchers started to realize that there might be something more to a specific sub-set of brain waves, called gamma waves. Researchers have thought these waves are linked to the formation of consciousness, but no one really knew why their frequency differed so much from one region to another and from one moment to the next.
Information is carried on top of gamma waves, just like songs are carried by radio waves. These “carrier waves” transmit information from one brain region to another. “We found that there are slow gamma waves and fast gamma waves coming from different brain areas, just like radio stations transmit on different frequencies,” she says.
You really can “be on the same wavelength”
“You know how when you feel like you really connect with someone, you say you are on the same wavelength? When brain cells want to connect with each other, they synchronize their activity,” Colgin explains. “The cells literally tune into each other’s wavelength. We investigated how gamma waves in particular were involved in communication across cell groups in the hippocampus. What we found could be described as a radio-like system inside the brain. The lower frequencies are used to transmit memories of past experiences, and the higher frequencies are used to convey what is happening where you are right now.”
If you think of the example of the jammed radio, the way to hear what you want out of the messy signals would be to listen really hard for the latest news while trying to filter out the unwanted music. The hippocampus does this more efficiently. It simply tunes in to the right frequency to get the station it wants. As the cells tune into the station they’re after, they are actually able to filter out the other station at the same time, because its signal is being transmitted on a different frequency.
The switch
“The cells can rapidly switch their activity to tune in to the slow waves or the fast waves,” Colgin says, “but it seems as though they cannot listen to both at the exact same time. This is like when you are listening to your radio and you tune in to a frequency that is midway between two stations- you can’t understand anything- it’s just noise.” In this way, the brain cells can distinguish between an internal world of memories and a person’s current experiences. If the messages were carried on the same frequency, our perceptions of the world might be completely confused. “Your current perceptions of a place would get mixed up with your memories of how the place used to be,” Colgin says.
The cells that tune into different wavelengths work like a switch, or rather, like zapping between radio stations that are already programmed into your radio. The cells can switch back and forth between different channels several times per second. The switch allows the cells to attend to one piece at a time, sorting out what’s on your mind from what’s happening and where you are at any point in time. The researchers believe this is an underlying principle for how information is handled throughout the brain.
“This switch mechanism points to superfast routing as a general mode of information handling in the brain,” says Edvard Moser, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience director. “The classical view has been that signaling inside the brain is hardwired, subject to changes caused by modification of connections between neurons. Our results suggest that the brain is a lot more flexible. Among the thousands of inputs to a given brain cell, the cell can choose to listen to some and ignore the rest and the selection of inputs is changing all the time. We believe that the gamma switch is a general principle of the brain, employed throughout the brain to enhance interregional communication.”
Can a switch malfunction explain schizophrenia?
People who are schizophrenic have problems keeping these brain signals straight. They cannot tell, for example, if they are listening to voices from people who are present or if the voices are from the memory of a movie they have seen. “We cannot tell for sure if it is this switch that is malfunctioning, but we do know that gamma waves are abnormal in schizophrenic patients,” Colgin says. “Schizophrenics’ perceptions of the world around them are mixed up, like a radio stuck between stations.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091120000140.htm

There are currently 1.8 million children who have at least one parent in the military and currently over 230,000 children who have at least one parent who is deployed. Unlike previous wars, US military have faced multiple deployments, leading to stresses that are different than those found in past conflicts. While many military personnel deal well with these challenges, others have catastrophic problems that impact their lives as a result. Approximately 20 percent of military sent to Iraq and Afghanistan come home with posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD], traumatic brain injury, or depression; others find it impossible to adjust to life away from the war front, finding that relationships, mood, and cognition are impaired or disrupted. When a parent with one or more problems returns to a family on the home front, there is a ripple effect on the partner, extended family, and children. For some, the first deployment is the most stressful; for others the cumulative affect of returning to battle and then to home increases the chance of trauma reactions, marital problems, and even family violence and child abuse at home.

As trauma specialists, we really haven’t had to deal with anything like this before and many of us are finding ourselves in new territory when we attempt to intervene with children and families of today’s military. Multiple homecomings, re-integrations, and deployments are difficult for children to understand and may cause changes in behavior, social interactions, and even cognitive functioning. For example, children and teens who have endured multiple deployments of a parent may have problems with sleep, attention deficits in the classroom, and even higher blood pressure and increased heart rates. School-age children may have behavioral problems in school and lose interest in their favorite activities; adolescent development is exacerbated by the deployment of a parent. Young children [up to 5 years old] may regress to earlier behaviors or cling to parents, displaying otherwise unexpressed fear and worry. Do these reactions sound familiar? Of course they do; they are similar to the responses we see in children who have experienced extended or chronic trauma.

Presently there are some programs such as Zero to Three, the Military Child Education Coalition, and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America that address the stress of multiple deployments on children. However, we really know relatively very little about how the unique aspects of the recent wars have impacted military families, particularly children.  In order to address the lack of research on intervention for children of military families, the National Institute for Trauma and Loss in Children is currently working on developing programs to address the needs of children adjusting to parents with multiple deployments, including those children who are attending schools not associated with a military base.

TLC would like to know if you are working with children of military or if have you worked with military families. If so, TLC would like your contact and employer information so that you can be involved in this initiative as the project develops. Please send an email to bsteele@tlcinst.org or phone the TLC office at 877-306-5256. It is important that TLC hear from you as soon as possible so that we will have a comprehensive list of those trauma specialists encountering children of military in their work.

Look for more information on the TLC website, the official TLC Fan Page on Facebook, and TLC’s Twitter very soon. It’s exciting to envision how we all can more effectively provide intervention to children and military families to help these children cope, thrive, and become more resilient– and we look forward to hearing your experiences on how we can all make this happen.

Be well,

Cathy Malchiodi, PhD, LPAT, LPCC

Resource

Sesame Street provides free DVDs to help younger children cope with the cycle of deployment, homecoming, and reintegration. Visit “Talk Listen Connect” at  http://www.sesameworkshop.org/initiatives/emotion/tlc to find out more and to obtain these materials.

Follow TLC’s Twitter at http://twitter.com/TLCchildtrauma

Become a Fan of the National Institute for Trauma and Loss in Children– join our Facebook Fan Page today!

from
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/23/man-trapped-coma-23-years

Trapped in his own body for 23 years – the coma victim who screamed unheard

• Misdiagnosed man’s tale of rebirth thanks to doctor
• Total paralysis masked fully functioning brain

* Kate Connolly in Berlin
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 November 2009 13.13 GMT

For 23 years Rom Houben was ­imprisoned in his own body. He saw his doctors and nurses as they visited him during their daily rounds; he listened to the conversations of his carers; he heard his mother deliver the news to him that his father had died. But he could do nothing. He was unable to communicate with his doctors or family. He could not move his head or weep, he could only listen.

Doctors presumed he was in a vegetative state following a near-fatal car crash in 1983. They believed he could feel nothing and hear nothing. For 23 years.

Then a neurologist, Steven Laureys, who decided to take a radical look at the state of diagnosed coma patients, released him from his torture. Using a state-of-the-art scanning system, Laureys found to his amazement that his brain was functioning almost normally.

“I had dreamed myself away,” said Houben, now 46, whose real “state” was discovered three years ago, according to a report in the German magazine Der Spiegel this week.

Laureys, a neurologist at the ­University of Liege in Belgium, published a study in BMC Neurology earlier this year saying Houben could be one of many cases of falsely diagnosed comas around the world. He discovered that although Houben was completely paralysed, he was also completely conscious — it was just that he was unable to communicate the fact.

Houben now communicates with one finger and a special touchscreen on his wheelchair – he has developed some movement with the help of intense physiotherapy over the last three years.

He realised when he came round after his accident, which had caused his heart to stop and his brain to be starved of oxygen for several minutes, that his body was paralysed. Although he could hear every word his doctors spoke, he could not communicate with them.

“I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,” he said, via his keyboard.

The Belgian former engineering student, who speaks four languages, said he coped with being effectively trapped in his own body by meditating. He told doctors he had “travelled with my thoughts into the past, or into another existence altogether”. Sometimes, he said, “I was only my consciousness and nothing else”.

The moment it was discovered he was not in a vegetative state, said Houben, was like being born again. “I’ll never forget the day that they discovered me,” he said. “It was my second birth”.

Experts say Laureys’ findings are likely to reopen the debate over when the decision should be made to terminate the lives of those in comas who appear to be unconscious but may have almost fully-functioning brains.

Belgian doctors used an internationally-accepted scale to monitor Houben’s state over the years. Known as the Glasgow Coma Scale, it requires assessment of the eyes, verbal and motor responses. But they failed to assess him correctly and missed signs that his brain was still functioning.

Last night his mother, Fina, said in an interview with Belgian RTBF that they had taken him to the US five times for reexamination. The breakthrough came when it became clear that Houben could indicate yes and no with his foot.

“Powerlessness. Utter powerlessness. At first I was angry, then I learned to live with it,” he tapped out on to the screen during an interview with the Belgian network last night, AP reported.

Laureys, who is head of the Coma Science Group and department of neurology at Liege University hospital, has advised on several prominent coma cases, such as the American Terri Schiavo, whose life support was withdrawn in 2005 after 15 years in a coma.

Laureys concluded that coma patients are misdiagnosed “on a disturbingly regular basis”. He examined 44 patients believed to be in a vegetative state, and found that 18 of them responded to communication.

“Once someone is labelled as being without consciousness, it is very hard to get rid of that,” he told Der Spiegel.

He said patients suspected of being in a non-reversible coma should be “tested 10 times” and that comas, like sleep, have different stages and need to be monitored.

Houben hopes to write a book detailing his trauma and his “rebirth”.

Now let’s explore a clever website. Please click here to go to Learn.Genetics™, a creative resource developed by the Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah. If you will, keep that web page open in a separate browser window, then return to this blog.

If the above link does not take you to a web page entitled “Beyond the Rewards Pathway,” then find the Learn.Genetics™ microsite entitled “The New Science of Addiction: Genetics and the Brain.” From that page you can launch into a wide range of informative audiovisual resources about addiction. For example, if you want elemental neuroscience about how the brain processes feelings of motivation, reward or behavior—which alcohol directly affects—then explore interactives under the subhead “Drugs Alter the Brain’s Reward Pathway.” The most vivid selection is actually a teaching tool for children, “Mouse Party,” a cartoon-like audiovisual that specifically demonstrates alcohol’s impact on minute neurotransmitters and receptors, as well as on larger regions of the brain that form memories, make decisions and control impulses (By the way, “Mouse Party” also traces the effects of drugs like cocaine or meth). Other interactive visuals show, for example, how PET scans measure brain activity.

Now click on (or return to) the subhead, “Beyond the Rewards Pathway,” and let’s study the text and graphics for Dopamine, Serotonin and Raphé Nuclei pathways. The latter is one brain area where drugs like alcohol co-mingle with disorders like depression to affect sleep, moods, appetite, pain and body temperature. Such brain pathways may even be where body, soul and alcoholism meet.

In any case, these pathways imply: that alcoholism is a disease; that mind-altering drugs clearly damage the brain; that there may be brain areas where the soul (or psyche) intersects with both the disease of addiction and its impacts on our brains and bodies; and that, yes, for those of us with faith, there may even be science-based parallels here to spirit-based healing. Said differently, our genes are not strangers to grace. Why should we be?

Copyright © 2009 by Randall E. Greene

The benefits of standing still and looking around at the systems around us never cease to reveal themselves.

Mindfulness is something that is most often associated with individuals. Mindfulness is a pillar of Buddhist practice and is increasingly being used in clinical settings to help people deal with stress and pain.

Mindfulness sometimes get unfairly linked to individuals, groups and movements that, for lack of a better term, could be described as ‘flaky’. Its association with many spiritual movements can also be problematic for those who are looking for something more aligned with science and less about religion or spirituality. Yet, the spiritual and scientific benefits of mindfulness need not be incompatible. Google, while innovative and often unusual in the way it runs its business, is certainly not flaky. As a company, it understands the power of mindfulness and has hosted a few talks on its application to everyday life and its neuroscientific foundations and benefits. For companies like Google, promoting mindfulness yields health benefits to its individual staff members, but also to its bottom line because being mindful as a company allows them to see trends and the emergence of new patterns in how people use the Internet and search for information. Indeed, one could say that Google with its search engine and productivity tools could be the ultimate mindfulness company, aiding us to become aware of the world around us (on the Internet anyway).

We are often profoundly ignorant of the systems that we are a part of and while the idea of having us all sit and mediate might sound appealing (particularly those of us who could use a moment of peace!) it is not a reasonable proposition. One of the things that meditation does is enable the mediator to become aware of themselves and their surroundings often through a type of mental visualization. Visualization allows the observer to see the relationships between entities in a system, their proximity, and the extended relationships beyond themselves. In systems research and evaluation, this might be done through the application of social network analysis or a system dynamics model. Through these kinds of tools that allow us to enhance visualization potential of systems, this is almost akin to creating a mindful systems thinking tool.

My colleague Tim Huerta and I have been developing methods and strategies to incorporate social network analysis into organizational decision making and published a paper in 2006 on how this could be done to support the development of communities of practice in tobacco control.  I’m also working on creating a system dynamics model of the relationships within the gambling system in Ontario with David Korn and Jennifer Reynolds.

By creating visuals of what the system looks like consciousness raising takes place and the invisible connections become visible. And by making things visible the impact, reach, scope and potential opportunities for collaboration and action are made aware. And with awareness comes insight into the connections between actions and consequences (past, current and potential) and that allows us to strategize ways to minimize or amplify such effects as necessary.

Here is a quote from Gandhi that I believe readers of my blog will enjoy.

“I must say that, beyond occasionally exposing me to laughter, my constitutional shyness has been no dis-advantage whatever. In fact I can see that, on the contrary, it has been all to my advantage. My hesitancy in speech, which was once an annoyance, is now a pleasure. Its greatest benefit has been that it has taught me the economy of words. I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts. And I can now give myself the certificate that a thoughtless word hardly ever escapes my tongue or pen. I do not recollect ever having had to regret anything in my speech or writing. I have thus been spared many a mishap and waste of time. Experience has taught my that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. Proneness to exaggerate, to suppress or modify the truth, wittingly or unwittingly, is a natural weakness of man, and silence is necessary in order to surmount it. A man of few words will rarely be thoughtless in his speech; he will measure every word. We find so many people impatient to talk. There is no chairman of a meeting who is not pestered with notes for permission to speak. And whenever the permission is given the speaker generally exceeds the time-limit, asks for more time, and keeps on talking without permission. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth.”

Reference: Gandhi: An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans. Mahaved Desai, (Boston, Beacon Press, 1993).

Like Lindsay, our class on chimeras really got me thinking.  This field of genetic experimentation has so much promise… but should the distant goal of miracle cures allow us to do whatever we want with test animals?  Creating a mouse with a functioning, thinking, and feeling human brain would be cruel.  I went on to the nat geo website to learn more about this controversial subject.

In 2005, a mouse with functioning human brain cells was created.  But, only one tenth of one percent of all the mouse’s brain cells were human.  This is not enough to make the mouse have a “human” brain, but it proved that embryonic human stem cells can grow functionally in a foreign environment.  This information is amazing, as it illustrates the amazingly promising versatility of stem cells.  Scientists hope that one day stem cells can be used to cure many degenerative nerve diseases.  In order to prevent ethical debate, they carefully monitor the subject mouse’s brain activity, to make sure that it doesn’t display any “human” brain activity.

But even if a mouse does not have a totally functioning human brain, is it ethical to put even a small amount of human brain cells into a mouse?  Machiavelli would say it is.  But many bioethicists say it is not.  The opposition to this research dubs it “inhumane,” and that it “crosses the natural border.”  Is this overreacting? One researcher states that “A few thousand human brain cells will not turn a house pest into Mickey Mouse.”  Maybe this is true, maybe it isn’t.  I honestly haven’t formed a concrete opinion on this issue yet, because both sides have such valid arguments.  Are we impeding the progress of finding miraculous cures to life-threatening human diseases in defense of mice?  Or are we putting innocent creatures through insufferable pain and defying Nature itself?  There are definitely boundaries to how much science should interfere with the life of an animal, but I think this early brain cell testing is ok for the time being.  The mouse is still a mouse with a mouse brain, just with a few human cells thrown into the stew.  Just like Robin Williams with his new bovine-valve heart is still human, the mouse is still a mouse.  The genetic change in its brain hasn’t changed how it lives (as of now).

Mickey mouse hasn’t been created just yet, and hopefully never will be.  There are many laws setting regulations on research such as this, defining just how “human” you can make an animal.  In Canada, it is forbidden to create a human-animal “chimera.”  Are there loopholes in laws such as these though?  At what point does an animal become “too human?”  Everything is very subjective.  I expect even more debate to emerge in the coming years over this controversial issue.  My advice for the scientists: cure the sick and ailing parents of the bioethicists with the results of your stem cell research.  That should quiet them.  My advice for the bioethicists: Keep a careful eye on those scheming scientists, but actually learn about the research being done before you condemn it.  Come off as educated people, not hippie-nazis.