Category: Brain Mechanisms

Mental Health in the Aging

The average life expectancy is at its highest ever in history. Brain cells are built to live up to 127 years. However, they do not divide and replicate the same way other cells do, and so their vulnerability to attack by radiation and free radicals is more problematic. Cell loss in the normal ageing brain is patchy. There is a small stock of stem cells from which neuronal regeneration is possible, but scientists are still only just learning of their full functions now. It is believed that the brain shrinks with age. Amongst European populations it can shrink by as much as 15% between the ages of fifty and sixty-five.  Much of this reduction is due to brain cells shrinking as they lose water, while the spaces in the brain (called ventricles) and the folds of the cortex (called sulci) enlarge. Blood supply also diminishes slightly with age.

Of greatest importance are the connections between nerve cells. It is these connections that must constantly battle for survival. The gift of prolonged life is not without its anxieties. We worry about losing our memory and about the reduction in our cognitive performance. While there is an increase in the range and complexity of our language, this is accompanied by an increased frequency of mistakes, forgetting words or misnaming objects. We should remind ourselves that with age, there are greater powers of reflection and contemplation. The wonderful gift of experience is to be rejoiced. The aging brain has a greater capacity to deal with complex emotions and to complement decisions with a raft of knowledge. While the ageing brain is slower, it is this slowness in decision-making that allows time for better decisions to be made—this is called wisdom.

 

Links:

                               

Australian Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health

Alzheimers Association Brain Health                                

American Society on Aging                                    

Alliance for Aging Research                                               

Cognitive and Emotional Health                             

Mental Health and Aging                                         

Aging and Mental Health                                         

Mental Health through the lifespan                         

Mental Health and Wellbeing                                              

Ageing and Mental Health                                       

Center for Mental Health and Aging                                   

Department of Aging and Mental Health   

Integrative Neuroscience

Integrative Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary endeavour to build unified models of the brain from the various disciplines within the neurosciences. It is an effort to break down the boundaries and encourage a freer exchange of information across disciplines and scales. The highly jargonised world of science can often mean that findings from one area of science are completely incomprehensible to another. However, it is crucial that efforts are made to consolidate the knowledge from various streams within the brain sciences. From the micro-scale findings to the macro-scale findings, integrative neuroscience deeply informs clinical research and practice. It means that when a patient is diagnosed with a brain disease, we can typify the genetic, neurological, social and environmental influences on his/her condition. It is a form of diagnosis and treatment that has never existed before.

While two brains may perform the same function, the way in which they do it is never the same. Statistically it is almost impossible for the underlying connections of any two brains to be exactly the same. What does this mean? Well, it means that no two brains react to the same actions or events in the same way. You may jump out from a hiding place and scream “boo” at your best friend who freezes in fright, while someone else might react more aggressively. Similarly, if you administer a neuroactive drug to two different people, the effects can be dramatically different. That is why some patients who are prescribed medication for a brain disorder may get better, while other patients may have little or no reaction to the same drug. You will often find that Psychiatrists, neurologists and other clinicians will personalise treatments for patients. Whether the treatment is behavioural, cognitive or pharmacological, nearly all treatments must be personalized. These treatments can only become better when more people share their experience and knowledge of personalized medicine. So what is your story?

LINKS:

Integrative Neuroscience Links         

Journal of Integrative Neuroscience   

Brain Dynamics Centre                                                

Integrative Neuroscience Facility                                             

Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neuroengineering

Brainnet

Brain Resource Company

 

 

                          

Personalized Medicine

There is a large amount of variation in the manifestation of brain disease. There is also a large amount of variation in the response to treatment. Often patients are prescribed drugs on a trial-and-error basis until the right drug is found. This situation, multiplied across many cases, can lead to over-servicing, inefficiency and high expenses in the healthcare industry—not to mention the stress this places on individuals, their families and friends. Integrated Neuroscience could be heading towards an answer in dealing with the large amount of variation in the symptoms, diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders. This answer is called ‘Personalized Medicine’. A Brain-related Personalized Medicine approach matches genetic markers (gene-related information) with neuromarkers (brain-related information).

The brain is arguably the most complex organ of the body. It is subject to biological and environmental influences as well as the personal life history and experiences of individuals. A Personalized Medicine approach hopes to match treatment programs with the biological and psychological profile of each individual. With recent advances in biomedical science, this treatment ethic may be more realistic than ever before. Neurogenomics has gone some way in elucidating a vast number of genes that play a role in various brain disorders. However, a genetic approach alone is insufficient to diagnose and treat the development of brain disease. The combination of both genetic-markers and neuro- markers is crucial in the ultimate success of any one particular treatment.

Neuromarkers include observations of brain structure (using MRI), imaging of brain function (EEG, ERP, MEG, fMRI and PET) and psychological tests measuring social, emotional and cognitive performance. Further research is needed towards the orientation of Brain-related Personalized Medicine. Research will need to establish the links between genetic-markers and neuromarkers (genomic-neuromarkers) for use in diagnostics, drug development, treatment prediction and treatment efficacy monitoring. From here, clinicians will be able to better match the appropriate treatment for each patient according to the developmental stage of their disorder. The outcomes may even extend further to a preventative medicine that contributes to disability management, harm minimization, psychosocial and quality of life recovery.

Links:

The Biomarkers Consortium

The Personalized Medicine Coalition

Personalized Medicine Coalition

The Food and Drug Administration

The Royal Society

Dan Segal Report

The Brain Resource Company

 

The Brain Resource International Database is one methodology used to acquire genomic-neuromarker profiles. The Database pools data about genetic make-up, brain structure and function, cognition and psychology as well as the life history of participants.

These ‘genomic-neuromarkers’ will be incorporated in the next version of the DSM (DSM V) expected to be released in 2011.

Mental Health Tips

10 steps to better brain health:

 

 

1. A healthy diet. Glucose is the brain’s major source of energy, but a balanced diet is essential to body and brain function. Food with a low glycemic index (GI) like oats and bran as well as dark green leafy vegetables that are rich in magnesium are both believed to help brain function. Choline rich foods such as eggs and red meat are also thought to assist healthy communication between brain cells. Also, avoid substances that stress the brain and limit drugs like caffeine, nicotine and alcohol.

 

2. Stimulate your brain. No, put the super-charged magnetic coil down! I’m not talking about Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. I’m talking about involving yourself in new activities, playing an instrument, learning to speak a foreign language, solving brain teasers. Exercise the brain as you would the body. The Brain operates on a use-it or lose-it policy. So use it! Play sudoku, solve a crossword puzzle and test your skills at scrabble!

 

3. Keep a diary. A great way to deal with stress, emotional worries and to relax at the end of a hectic day or a busy week is to sit down and write. It’s a fantastic way to see what you have achieved, frame new goals and keep your emotions in balance. Also, writing notes for yourself helps convert information stored in your short-term memory to long-term memory. So get that creative energy flowing and put pen to pad!

 

4. Sleep well! Getting a good night sleep is essential for concentration. It has been shown that regular sleep-wake cycles are important in daily cognitive performance. Dreams may be important in the consolidation of memory. As we all know, it feels great to rise and shine after we have slept like a baby!

           

5. Regular exercise! It is important for your entire body. Exercise is believed to be important in maintaining neural plasticity in old age and aerobic fitness may in fact reduce the loss of brain tissue common in ageing. Exercise also releases natural hormones that lead to those ‘feel good’ sensations. Feeling good about your body is vital to brain health.

 

6. Regulate your couch-time. Too much TV weakens brain power. But a little TV is great mental stimulation. Balance is the key!

 

7. Socialise! Familiar smiles, friendly conversations and meaningful interactions are all part of a healthy lifestyle. The brain is the organ of society and socialisation is an integral part of brain health. Join a book-club, learn to dance, smile at a colleague!

 

8. Organisation. We all know the anxiety that misplacing the house-keys or forgetting an appointment creates. Avoid the stress and make a special place for items such as reading glasses, wallets/purses or the TV remote.

 

9. Relax. Spend time on a hobby, take your dog for a walk or just sit back in a comfortable armchair with a great book. Technique to relax are not only useful to reduce stress and enhance brain performance, relaxation methods have also been shown to play a positive role in emotional health. For example, mindfulness meditation has been shown to decrease the recurrence of depression. Find a stress-reducing practice that suits your lifestyle and personal taste and then devote a balanced amount of time each week to it.

 

10. Positive thinking. Always look on the bright side of life (someone should turn that into a song)!

 

 

 

Transcultural Psychiatrists would certainly have a few dilemmas with the above list. The serious Neuroanthropologist probably does too! But what the heck, I put them here just for fun! Mind you, the list might lead to some interesting questions about what could be considered the definitive TOP 10 FOR BRAIN HEALTH applicable across cultures!

 

And now for some links:

 

How Culture May effect depression diagnosis

Mental Health Resources

Mental Health

Mental Health news

Mental Health America

Neurological Examinations

Interactive Health Tutorials:

Brain, The world inside your head

Brain Fitness

Cognitive and Emotional Health

Mental Health Council of Australia

The Human Brain

Brain Food

Meditation and Depression

Brain Activity influences immune function

Food for the brain

Brain Health

The Healthy Brain Program

Feed Your Brain

 

 

The Cultural Brain in Five Flavors

By Daniel Lende

Next week is the Critical Neurosciences workshop, where I will help lead a discussion of the cultural brain. So I better figure out what I want to say!

Thinking about it yesterday, I came up with this. Rather than one “cultural brain” and lots of arguing about what that means, I will argue that we have five distinct varieties of the cultural brain to consider.

Each flavor deals with a different sort of problem at the intersection of human culture and neuroscience. I will outline these different intersections below, and provide links to our posts to give further depth.

Here are our five flavors:

-The Symbolic Brain: Culture, meaning and the brain combined
-The Inequality Brain: Bad outcomes through society, power, and the brain
-The Theory Brain: Neuroscience impacts social science theory
-The Brain Transformed: Social science impacts brain theory
-The Critical Brain: Taking down bad brain justifications and examining the cultural uses of the brain

The Symbolic Brain

The symbolic brain represents the increasing convergence of work in anthropology and in neuroscience on questions of meaning, symbolism, subjective experience, and behavior. To take an example from my own work, understanding compulsive drug use has required that I examine how processes of attention and behavioral involvement are altered by consistent drug use and how people interpret their own use, from the reasons they had to use to what the experience of use represents to them.

In many ways, this work focuses on a central problem raised but not resolved by Clifford Geertz when he wrote that we should treat human behavior as “symbolic action—action, which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in music, signifies (1973: 9).” Today, rather than reducing that significance to either a cultural pattern or a brain function (both determinist approaches), people interested in the cultural brain are looking for synergies between different domains of research.

Continue reading “The Cultural Brain in Five Flavors”

Get into trance: Felicitas Goodman

Dr. Felicitas Goodman
Dr. Felicitas Goodman

Some readers may have thought I was doing my little anthropologist’s quibble with the research on gene expression in meditation in Relax your genes, when I wrote, ‘I’d be surprised if variations in these techniques (such as those that use chanting or movement, for example) had no effect at all on the resulting neural, cellular, and perhaps even genetic processes.’ Some of you might have thought to yourselves, ‘Sure, Greg, you always say stuff like that — you’re paid to say stuff like that as an anthropologist.’ But one of the things I was thinking about was the work of the late anthropologist, Felicitas Goodman, which I hadn’t really discussed at all on Neuroanthorpology.

I stumbled across the webpages for the Felicitas Goodman Institut (the page is in German), and the English discussion of her work, Ritual Body Postures and Ecstatic Trance, by Nana Nauwald, and the webpage for The Cuyamungue Institute, which Goodman founded, this morning. A bit of searching turned up an interview with Prof. Goodman at Conversations for Exploration.

Goodman’s own biography is pretty fascinating; she didn’t do her PhD in anthropology until she was in her 50s, already a veteran German professor at Ohio State where she emigrated after leaving Germany with an American husband (Glenn). She went on to teach anthropology at Denison University (Ohio), and is best known for her contributions to the study of ecstatic states, including trance and glossalalia (speaking in tongues). She wrote a number of works, including Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences and Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-Cultural Study of Glossolalia (now out in a new edition, according to Amazon). After falling in love with the area around Santa Fe, Goodman helped to found The Cuyamungue Institute in New Mexico, which, according to the institute’s website, ‘continues her research into altered states of consciousness and holds workshops about the postures which she admits are but one door to alternate reality.’

Continue reading “Get into trance: Felicitas Goodman”