Category: general

100,000!

Last night we hit 100,000 on-site vists. Greg and I want to thank everyone who has come to our blog. It’s been a great ride over the past months, something we’ve both enjoyed. We never imagined that the site would grow so quickly.

Thank you as well to everyone out there who has stumbled or linked or commented or otherwise enriched what we do here. And thanks also to the people who read the blog through the feed. While you don’t go into the official stats, we know there are a lot of you!

Finally, if any of you are interested in what the top 10 have been since last December, here they are:

Cultural Aspects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Thinking on Meaning and Risk

Poverty Poisons the Brain

Girls Gone Guilty: Evolutionary Psych on Sex #2

Brain Doping Poll Results In

Brain vs. Philosophy: Howard Gardner Get Us Across!

Synesthesia and Methaphor – I’m Not Feeling It

Psychopharma-parenting

Steven Pinker and the Moral Instinct

Dopamine and Addiction – Part One

Anthropology and Neuroscience Podcasts

New Four Stone Hearth

So the new Four Stone Hearth, the blog carnival of anthropology, is up at Almost Diamonds. Stephanie may not be an anthropologist, but she puts together a formidable list, including several Olympic-related posts, such as Rex’s (he’s still Alex to me) contribution at Savage Minds, Well I guess we should say something about the Olympics and a fascinating short post by Vaughn at Mind Hacks on cross-cultural studies of the immediate reaction to winning and losing among sighted and blind athletes. There’s a number of good archaeological posts (including Stone Pages pointing to a story about Australia’s less-than-enthusiastic attempts to preserve archaeological sites), a cluster on Neandertal research, and a fascinating piece on artificial language evolution in the laboratory from Anthropology.net (with actual people instead of computers doing the learning).

Lots of good stuff — so why are you still here and not reading it?!

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.

Magic and Mind Tricks

Benedict Carey has a NY Times article today, While a Magician Works, the Mind Does the Tricks. Cognitive neuroscience and magic has been receiving a lot of attention lately. Mind Hacks has written extensively on magic and Neurophilosophy has a more general post.

Carey covers much the same ground, beginning with the recent paper “Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic: Turning Tricks into Research” (full paper) by Stephen Macknik and colleages in Nature Neuroscience Reviews. Carey writes about the visual and tactile tricks of magic, of a red flash that lingers in vision to hide the stripping away of a white dress or gripping the wrist to leave a “somatosensory afterimage” before neatly stealing a man’s watch.

Carey also links to an extensive collection of videos that accompanied the Nature article. That’s one of the things I definitely want to highlight. These are videos of magicians doing their tricks, as well as some talks at a recent conference.

Magic would make a great neuroanthropology research project, similar to the placebo effect or video games. Anthropologists have long studied “magic, witchcraft and religion” (a typical course title), and are well placed to understand the techniques and training of magicians, the cultural knowledge and biases that magic seems to subvert or surprise, and how audiences read intentions into actions by the magician.