Yes, I know it’s a little bit early to be bringing this up. While the holiday itself may have already passed, many of you are probably still recovering from the hangover that the entire country was forced to endure. I mean really, this isn’t even a good feeling to wake up from this hangover, not that a hangover is something you should usually look forward to. But lets be honest, there is more damage done than overall achievement. This isn’t the morning after where you reminisce about the absolutely stupendous series of events that took place hours ago. This isn’t one of those mornings where you are left in shambles in a downright disgusting alley looking around for your best friend who was lost the day of a wedding. Plain and simple, this is not a good time.

Your groggy, you must resume your daily routine, you have to be at work in an hour, the clock already says your going to be 30 minutes late with the estimated travel time, and you probably gained a minimum of 5 lbs considering how many potatoes you’ve consumed. Hell, you nearly re-enacted the exact opposite of the Irish potato famine in your dining room, not to mention the 20 loafs of bread consumed in ‘this that and another’ stuffing. And then to add insult to injury, you have to open the fridge and think to yourself, “Hmm what the hell am I gonna have for lunch today” right? Wrong! What your really saying to yourself is, “How the hell am I supposed to make turkey or thanksgiving leftovers of any sort sound appetizing again?” And while this may be true, that should be the least of your problems. What your primary worry should be is, “How am I going to stay awake for this crucial late afternoon presentation my boss conveniently scheduled the day after this lovely thanksgiving massacre, when I’m stuffing (pun intended) down marshmallow covered sweet potatoes, [explicit] turkey sandwiches, and some classic Campbell’s green bean casserole at the 2 o’clock lunch break?” Tie all these delightful dishes together and you yourself have found the ultimate thanksgiving myth: Are turkey and all the other thanksgiving fixings responsible for your holiday hangover? Let us find out shall we…

Now let me first jump in and suggest that Thanksgiving isn’t all that bad. It’s a holiday where you have the green light to gorge until you either throw up or the food disappears. Your granted the opportunity to catch up with family that you quite honestly may have never met in your life. And how could you forget that lovely early morning workout known as ‘Black Friday’ in which case as long as your readily equipped with a can of pepper spray and a riot-level baton, you can subconsciously lose the few pounds you may have gained by dropping stacks of money on bargains you may or may not need to take advantage of. Nevertheless this hangover is about the one thing and one thing only: the food.

The Breakdown

Turkey is in most cases the first victim to be accused of causing lethargy during the post-meal recovery, however, is equally to blame as anything else on the dining table. Sure turkey contains L-Tryptophan, an essential amino acid with critical sleep inducing effects, but other foods contain as much if not more of this amino acid. Nevertheless, tryptophan can be metabolized into seratonin and melatonin; the feel good + sleep regulating neurotransmitters that result in the perfect combination to knock you out for a few hours. However, L-Tryptophan must be taken on an empty stomach for drowsiness to occur and the last thing you’d expect to have on Thanksgiving is an empty stomach. So does this make turkey solely responsible for your poultry induced hangover? Not exactly! A carbohydrate-rich meal is what really increases levels of L-Tryptophan and leads to serotonin synthesis in the brain. Breaking it down scientifically, carbohydrates cause the pancreas to secrete insulin. This then leads to higher levels of Tryptophan in the bloodstream which ultimately triggers the synthesis of serotonin; producing that relaxed and drowsy sensation.

But let us consider everything else on the dining table, for example fats. Fats account for the most strain on the digestive system, so your body is going to require that excess energy to break all that down. This loss of energy in other areas of the body is yet another reason you may feel sluggish. Throw in some spiked apple cider or other forms of alcohol for additional nap-factor. Combine it all with excessive over-eating in order to please your crazed relatives who seemingly slaved over the kitchen for each of their homemade delicacies, and you have comatose. Moreover: a big meal + blood being directed to break down the intake = hibernation :)

So what have we learned today. Don’t blame the turkey when you need an excuse for being late to work or your black Friday destination of choice, seeing as all foods play their part in what is the Thanksgiving Day Hangover. Yes, two cans of pepper spray is always better than one when it comes to fending off children for an Xbox 360. Pumpkin pie is a classic and should always be a dessert option, but apple pie cheesecake is better. Fortunately, if you pass out with your shoes on during Thanksgiving, you don’t have to worry about waking up with certain drawings on your face. Finally, turkey leftovers have no limits…seriously! #gettingcreative

Sources:

Myths about Thanksgiving – Scientific American

Turkey makes you sleepy? – About.com

The Tryptophan Effect – TLC

In 2007, Albert Hofmann, the creator of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), wrote a letter to Steve Jobs on behalf of his friend Rick Doblin, who was the founder of the nonprofit organization Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).  Hofmann was with hopes, at the age of 101, that Jobs might want to make a donation to support Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Peter Gasser’s proposed study of LSD-assisted psychotherapy.  The main mission of MAPS is to develop psychedelics and marijuana into prescription drugs that could be made available to treat people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), pain, drug dependence, anxiety, and depression.  Hofmann, a large supporter of the organization, pushed the idea that his creation has helped others and could provide crucial benefits in future health treatments and so asked Jobs for “help in the transformation of [his] problem child into a wonder child.” Many others who have had the opportunity to experiment with this psychedelic drug brought on an entirely different perspective of what LSD provides: an awakening of the Self and for many innovative thinkers an eye-opening journey in expanding their creativity.

An artistic portrait of a young Steve Jobs (source unknown). Could LSD have played a role in the creation of Apple computers?

In an interview with Jobs for John Markoff’s book, “What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry”, Jobs called his LSD experiences as “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.”  As a dropout from Reed College in Portland, Jobs did in fact pursue a counterculture lifestyle experimenting with drugs before and after co-founding Apple.  Jobs who recently passed away early October will always be remembered as someone who changed the high-tech world and someone to have always “maintained close emotional ties to the era in which he grew up”, which were the late 60′s-early 70′s.  Could LSD have played a role in the creative thought that lead to the creation of Apple computers? Does the use of LSD even make one more creative?

As I have learned from my Drugs and Behavior course, LSD has been noted to cause hallucinations, synesthesia, altered temporal perception and certain side-effects that include paranoid psychoses, depression, “flashbacks”, or intoxication-induced anxiety (otherwise known as a “bad-trip”).  The action of LSD is on the 5-HT-2A receptor where it works as a partial agonist just like many other hallucinogens. It is also extremely potent requiring as little as 20 micrograms to elicit an effect.  LSD is ingested orally, typically as a liquid drop, on absorbant blotter paper or a sugar cube, and the effects generally are normally reported beginning around 30 minutes later. Tolerance has been found to be profound and there have been no reported cases of LSD negatively affecting the brain after use.

Through the course of an LSD experiment, an artist compiled nine drawings.

In previous studies, LSD has been administered to subjects, particularly artists who were told to create a piece of artwork during the course of the experiment. Their artworks were then compared before, during, and after the intake of a tablet. Many studies have used similar methods. One art historian has observed these acid-influenced pieces to be “more abstract, symbolic, brighter, more emotional and aesthetically adventuresome, and non-representational, and they tended to use all available space on the canvas.”  Markoff describes in his book that people in the 1960′s “tried LSD neither for kicks nor therapy, but to gain glimpses of new and rich worlds of consciousness.” Perhaps it was these “new and rich worlds” which later inspired many of today’s massive success stories like Steve Jobs. LSD also seemed to be an inspirational favorite of Chemists: Sir Francis Crick claimed in an interviewer that he first imagined the structure of DNA under the influence of LSD, and Kary Mullis believed LSD helped him to develop the polymerase chain reaction, which later won him the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Steve Jobs recently passed away, but left behind a legacy.

Think

Did Dropping Acid Make Steve Jobs More Creative? – Slate.com

Nine Drawings – Cowboy Books

“What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry” By: John Markoff

Dr. LSD to Steve Jobs: How was your trip? – CNN Money

Read the Never-Before-Published Letter From LSD-Inventor Albert Hofmann to Apple CEO Steve Jobs – Huffington Post

The Pharmacology of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide: A Review – MAPS.org

Going on vacation with my family for thirteen days was both exciting and daunting. The West Coast adventure was extremely appealing and I couldn’t wait to see the Grand Canyon, explore Yosemite National Park, and drive a convertible down the Pacific Coast Highway. But where was I going to get my brain fix? The Scientific American issue I bought for the flight to Phoenix wasn’t doing it for me. Some hope was gained at The Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum in San Francisco that managed to convince my thirteen-year-old sister that neuroscience might be almost potentially cool, but it wasn’t until a trip to Sonoma County that my curiosity was finally piqued.

Tiger the horse and I were riding along on a vineyard tour and I was talking to the tour guide about school. I’ve got yet another new response to “I’m studying neuroscience”: the tour guide told me about his son’s mysterious mental illness that may or may not be schizophrenia and we rode through wine country discussing psychiatrists, Thorazine, thought disorders and SSRIs. All in all, a good day.

This conversation got me wondering about the kinds of challenges psychologists and psychiatrists face when having to diagnose patients with schizophrenia. All the clinicians have to go on are whatever behavioral abnormalities make themselves apparent. But how do you weed out schizophrenia from other kinds of psychosis (some of which may respond to the typical treatment for schizophrenia)?

In March, scientists in Finland published a paper in Genome Medicine in which they described a study done on patients with DSM-IV primary psychosis – disorders that included schizophrenia, other non-affective psychosis (ONAP) and affective psychosis. The researchers measured cholesterol (HDL and LDL), triglycerides, glucose, insulin, C-reactive protein (CRP) and cotinine. They also measured blood pressure, weight, and waist circumference as well as asking for the participants’ use of butter versus vegetable oil, fat content in milk products, and use of raw vegetables. The study investigated various metabolic processes that could be associated with schizophrenia, with the hope that certain metabolites have the potential for use as diagnostic tests for the disorder.

Schizophrenics tend to have a high level of fasting total triglycerides and show insulin resistance, but this feature is usually seen as a side effect of antipsychotic medication. However, other recent studies have shown abnormal insulin secretion and glucose response, along with diabetes risk, to be common in new schizophrenia patients who have yet to start treatment. One study, published in Molecular Psychiatry last year, showed that despite normal to slightly elevated glucose levels, untreated schizophrenia patients showed heightened levels of insulin and related proteins (the precursor proinsulin, the intermediate des31,32-proinsulin, C-peptide, which links the A and B chains of insulin, and chromogranin A, a precursor to other secretory hormones) where their bipolar counterparts did not. The extra insulin could certainly have a negative effect on brain function.

In the Genome Medicine study, branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) from metabolic cluster MC3 were elevated in the schizophrenia patients. BCAAs are important to insulin secretion and they also compete with aromatic amino acids trying to cross the blood-brain barrier, suggesting a possible mechanism for psychosis. A drop in concentration of the amino acids needed to make catecholamines and serotonin in the brain (tyrosine and tryptophan, respectively) could be part of the problem. Perhaps this is why the tour guide’s son had spent some time on SSRIs when a clinician thought he was schizophrenic – although the drugs didn’t do much for his problem.

Catecholamines and serotonin don’t make up the whole story, which could have been why the SSRIs didn’t help this young man’s illness even if he definitely had schizophrenia. Another pathway that this article links to the schizophrenia mystery involves the up-regulation of proline that is apparent in schizophrenia patients. Many patients seem to be predisposed to variations of the PRODH gene that cause a decrease in proline oxidase. The result (excess proline in the brain) has been associated with cognitive dysfunction.

Too much proline and too much insulin, BCAAs competing with tyrosine and tryptophan – I’d never read this before, and my tour guide told me that his son was doing well on Thorazine, a drug (as I’d learned in school) was used to put the brakes on dopamine in patients with which disorder? Schizophrenia. 

What about dopamine, then? It turns out that the hypothesis relating overabundance of dopamine to schizophrenia is somewhat outdated. Studies have shown that patients who did not benefit from antipsychotics, like Thorazine, still had 90% of their D2 dopamine receptors blocked. Conversely, it has been demonstrated that patients that did benefit from treatment had low levels of D2 blockade. In addition, the up-regulation of D2 receptors noted in post-mortem examination of schizophrenics’ brains could have been the result of the treatment they were on, not of the illness itself. Imaging of living, yet-untreated schizophrenics has not shown an increase in D2 receptors. It seems likely, then, that whatever the Thorazine is treating in my tour guide’s son was not schizophrenia. The mystery as to what the disorder actually is remains…but now I know why there is a mystery to begin with!

One Step Closer to a Diagnostic Test for Schizophrenia – Science Daily

Metabolome in Schizophrenia and Other Psychiatric Disorders: a General Population-based Study – Genome Medicine

Increased Levels of Circulating Insulin-Related Peptides in First Onset, Antipsychotic Naive Schizophrenia Patients – Molecular Psychiatry

Dopamine and Antipsychotic Drug Action Revisited – The British Journal of Psychiatry

Using the human nervous system as a representational medium, are there parts of the universe that are innately unknowable to us- are there realities that we can experience but not objectively measure? Is spirituality real, or a man-made delusion to justify ambiguous emotions and guide behavior? Is consciousness an emergent property or does it extend beyond?

These are timeless ontological questions that have been posed by both philosophers and the common man for centuries. But only recently has the new field of neurotheology, the study of correlations between neural phenomena and subjective experiences of spirituality, emerged on the scene to advance our understanding of what the brain undergoes during religious practices. Whereas before we could only rely on logic and speculation in an attempt to tackle some of these controversial issues, today neuroscientists are beginning to uncover substantial information regarding the relationship between brain activity and “the feeling of God”.

Scientists have long been intrigued by claims of mystical encounters. Though these assertions may seem to be all too uncommon and even downright outlandish in an increasingly “secular” nation, still a survey by the Pew Form on Religion and Public Life demonstrated that nearly half of American adults today have had what they consider a “religious” or “mystical experience” of some kind. In order to investigate the biological basis of these obscure episodes, scientists first explored the effects of psychedelic drugs, which have a long history of traditional use in religion. Since users of psychedelics often report of the drug’s ability to elicit a sense of the spiritual, as well as promote mental healing, researchers sought empirical support for the notion that psychedelic drugs could facilitate “religious experiences”.

In fact, the first major study of psychedelics and spirituality took place on Good Friday, 1962 in the basement of Marsh Chapel right here at Boston University. In The Marsh Chapel Experiment, Harvard researchers administered LSD to ten divinity students to discover whether the sacred environment combined with the drug would educe a spiritual experience. Nine out of the ten reported a “profound sense of spiritual awe” and afterward similar research was conducted at other prominent universities until the LSD experiments were prohibited by the US government in the 70’s.

Current research suggests that the serotonin system is the key player in such mystical experiences. The neurotransmitter serotonin (5-HT)  has complex behavioral effects, specifically in the role it plays in regulation of mood and arousal.  Several hallucinogenic drugs produce their effects by interacting with serotonergic transmission, and LSD is a direct agonist for postsynaptic 5HT2a receptors in the forebrain. Some studies now are replicating the ones from the 1960s in which patients with end-stage cancer are given LSD to see if they’re convinced that life exists beyond death. The research raises the question: is God a delusion created by brain chemistry, or is brain chemistry a necessary conduit for people to reach God?

Andrew Newberg, Director of Research at the Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, and author of  “Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science & The Biology of Belief” offers his own insight: “It comes down to belief systems,” When a religious person looks at our brain scans, they say, ‘Ah, that’s where God has an interaction with me.’ An atheist looks at the data and says, ‘There it is. It’s nothing more than what’s in your brain.’ Even if I do a brain scan of somebody who tells me that they’ve seen God, that scan only tells me what their brain was doing when they had that experience, and it doesn’t tell me whether or not they actually did see God.”

Professor Orrin Devinsky, director of The Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at NYU Langone Medical, informs that sufferers of epilepsy often claim to have seen or heard religious figures- and that epileptic activity takes place in the temporal lobe, a key center of emotions and memory. Neurologists now propose that they’ve found  this to be the anatomical center where we perceive our ‘spirituality’. However, Devinsky also reveals himself to not be a complete reductionist as he gives this analogy in an interview on the issue of neurotheology: “If two people were together involved in an intimate conservation and realized that they loved each other, and experienced that emotion we refer to as love, there would be a change in their brain states, probably in the temporal lobe – however, does that negate the presence of true love between them? Of course not. When you get into spirituality, as a scientist, it becomes extremely difficult to say anything other than ‘it’s possible’.”

Institute For the Biocultural Study of Religion

NPR: This Is Your Brain On Religion

Andrew Newberg & Neurotheology