Category: Article
Enriched Environments: Neuroscience Learns From Poverty
In the last century, treatment of social and learning disabilities has drastically changed. Through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, every student who qualifies for special education is entitled to a free and appropriate public education, delivered through an individualized education plan. An ‘IEP’ is designed through the collaboration of parents, teachers, and special education specialists. The largest category of learning disability is the specific learning disability, of which dyslexia is a typical example.
The amount of care put into special education has drastically changed the lives of many individuals, however, special education excludes those who have a learning disability due to economic situations. This reflects a longstanding social and educational belief that learning disabilities are innate, the result of genetic predisposition and not due to upbringing. The prevailing paradigm did not believe that upbringing could have a significant effect on the development on the brain.
To little surprise, neuroscience is showing otherwise.
Every Student is Entitled to a Free and Appropriate Public Education.
We have always known that acute incidents can have a significant effect on brain development and function (such as in the effects of repeated physical trauma on function), but recent research is suggesting that external factors during development, including many associated with poverty, can have significant, long-term effects. These factors include higher levels of environmental toxins, lower nutritional levels, and increased levels of parental neglect. Recent research suggests that external factors, including poverty, can have significant internal effects on the brain, including brain development and function. Poverty affects the development of the brain in multiple ways, including through poverty-associated factors such as higher environmental toxins, lower nutritional levels, and higher levels of parental neglect. However, the research of Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University indicates that solely the added stress of low socioeconomic status is responsible for these effects.
Cupidity of Commodity
WARNING: the following article features sentences written either by professionals or under the supervision of professionals. Accordingly, Matt and the producers must insist that no one attempt to recreate or re-enact any sentence or thought described in this article.
Personal Note from the Producers: Don't feed into the character Matt creates, he truly is a good person. #NWTS
Cue the Pink Floyd...
Boom boom ba boom boom boom ching ching guitar riff...."MONEY!"
What do you want? What do you need? Food? Water? Shelter? Sure, sure, yes maybe, but what do you want? Dream bigger, you're thinking too realistically! Stop limiting yourself, open up! Close your eyes, relax, paint the picture how you see it. Don't tell me, just visualize it, taste it, feel it! C'mon man, it's in there somewhere! Yes Yes, exactly bottle up all those 'it's not gonna happen' or 'yeah right' moments you experienced and strangle the life out of them! You want the Arancio Argos Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 with the matte wheels to match, okay. You liked that bachelor pad in Phuket didn't you? The one with the wrap around balcony, snug love seat, black leather couch, gourmet kitchen, his/her bathrooms...yeah that's the one. But how? That's impossible right? How do you expect to reward yourself with such prodigal riches at such a young age? Who are you trying to follow? Me: Floyd "Money" Mayweather, Adrien Broner, Scott Disick, Lavish P! Because we're all rich peasants! If you can't afford to roll with the crew baby, then you're merely a campesino (shout out to to the Spanish readers). We get everything we want! There ain't no morality in this [bleep]! We might as well call ourselves the seven deadly sins! We take pride in our beliefs, feed off of your envy, consume more than we require, lust in the beauty of those we surround ourselves with, avoid physical labor, laugh at your anger, and most importantly: ignore the realm of the spiritual because its not worth a dime! Now, I love me some greed in the morning, especially served with a bowl of lucky charms. But is the idea of greed more innate than we think it is? Are the moral perceptions of greed and neuroscience more intertwined than we think? Shall we...
New Methods in Brain Scans to Examine Running Rats and Flying Bats
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Johns Hopkins Medical School, the University of Maryland, and Weizmann Institute's Neurobiology Department have all developed new and improved brain scanning techniques. These new methods allow scientists to monitor brain activity in fully-awake, moving animals.
At Brookhaven, researchers combined light-activated proteins that stimulate specific brain cells, a technique known as optogenetics, with positron emission tomography (PET) to observe the effects of stimulation throughout the entire brain. Their paper in the Journal of Neuroscience describes this method, which will allow researchers to map exactly which neurological pathways are activated or deactivated downstream by stimulation in specific brain areas. Hopefully, following these pathways will enable researchers to correlate the brain activity with observed behaviors or certain symptoms of disease.
Three markers on the head of a mouse enable the AwakeSPECT system to obtain functional images of the brain of a conscious mouse as it moves around. (Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility)
A Brave New World: You
The Pasteurian Revolution of the 1800's heralded in a new paradigm of disease. Previously unexplained health phenomena could now be shown to be derived from "germs" - microorganisms invisible to the naked eye. The term "germ" quickly took on a negative connotation and until recently the microbial world has been seen primarily as a breeding ground for invisible enemies to human health. Its pretty incredible actually, the distaste the word "bacteria" instills in us, when really, it simply refers to a domain of prokaryotes. So, is the entire microbial world bent on our demise? I think the answer to this question can be summed up in one simple statistic:
Inside of you there are 1013 human cells and 1014 bacteria cells.
In other words, for every one cell of you there are ten that are not you...Wait, what? The first question this recent discovery may fuel is a stumbled WHAT? But lets digress for a moment and ask, why?
Don’t Panic! – Mice Aren’t Actually the Smartest
"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons....In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioural research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures' plans." - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
As tempting as it may be to believe the science fiction version of the intelligence rankings, real-life science has spoken and suggests (much to my displeasure) that humans may actually be the highest on the intelligence scale.
Are you flushing away brain cells? How urine cells can give rise to neurons
Uh-oh, urine trouble! Well, now that that’s out of my system (ahem), how would you feel if you learned that you’ve been flushing away potential brain cells? I’m not talking about the copious amount of hours you’ve logged online or kicked back in front of the television just this past month. On a daily basis, you’re expelling 1-2 liters of a possible source of neurons in a way you’ve never expected – through urinating.
Back in 2009, stem-cell biologist Duanqing Pei demonstrated that kidney epithelial cells, a common component of urine, could be converted into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which have the ability to differentiate into any cell type found in the body. Recently, Pei and his colleagues at China’s Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health took this technique a step further by converting iPS cells into functioning neurons. More
A Blacked Out Memory
Social gatherings are often the scene of hippocampal disruptions. (Scene from the movie Twelve)
"White Mike and his father moved after his mother died of breast cancer. It ate her up and most of their money. They can't control the old radiators and its very hot in the spring time. In White Mike's room, old unpacked boxes stick out of the closet so he can see them. Maybe you know how it is, maybe you don't? But sometimes if you can't see what you're finished with its better. White Mike stripped to his shorts and laid down on the floor so he felt a little cooler. That's how it was the first night in his new room and that's how it still is. White Mike is thin and pale like smoke. White Mike has never smoked a cigarette in his life, never had a drink, never sucked down a doobie. He once went three days without sleep as a kind of experiment. That's as close as he's ever gotten to fucked up. White Mike has become a very good drug dealer.
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Connectionism
In light of the Obama Administration's decision to commit $3 billion over 10 years to NIH's Brain Activity Map project, we thought it may be important to go back to our roots.
Who are we? This is the ultimate question posed by all of Western thinking and perhaps NIH's Brain Activity Map is the culmination of our efforts. The goal of the project, in a nutshell, is "mapping the activity of every neuron in the human brain in 10 years." Absurd, outrageous, momentous, profound! Okay, so when did we decide that this was possible, or even that we should try? In their modern form, these beliefs spring from a movement in cognitive science called Connectionism.
"Stroking" Neurons
We have many different types of neurons within our peripheral somatosensory system. In addition to basic mechanoreceptors, we have neurons corresponding to pain sensations, and channels that are temperature sensitive. However, one phenomenon that was not explained at the neuronal level until recently, is the sensation of stroking. On the behavioral level, we know that stroking or grooming is pleasurable in such phenomenon as maternal care. But how is this transduced at the molecular level?
Researchers in David Anderson's lab at Caltech recently discovered a class of neurons that selectively responds to "massage-like" stimulations. Experiments were performed in-vivo to directly measure the effect of certain stimulations. Calcium imaging, a type of imaging designed to study activity of neurons, was used in the spinal cord, where the cell bodies of neurons projecting to the periphery are located. After mice were pinched, poked, and light-touch stroked on their paws, the researchers found that a subset of neurons was selectively activated to only the light-touch stimulus.
Looking for Fear
If I wanted to write about addiction today, my own NPR habit would be an excellent place to begin. News, blogs, radio, podcasts, it’s just so accessible! Today’s entry is not about addiction, but this story does start with “so I was reading NPR News…”
So I was reading NPR News, namely an article titled “What Makes You Feel Fear?” which turned out to be even more intriguing than I expected when I decided to read it. Evidently, researchers have used carbon dioxide inhalation to elicit panic and anxiety in patients with amygdala damage in both hemispheres: patients with no fear centers. How could this be?
(source: sciencedaily.com)
This startling discovery comes from a paper published this month in Nature Neuroscience by scientists at the University of Iowa. They tested three patients with Urbach-Wiethe disease (which resulted in bilateral amygdala lesions) by having them inhale CO2. All three experienced panic attacks as a result, and showed significantly increased respiration rates – even with respect to healthy controls. This finding lead the authors to hypothesize that the amygdala may even be able to temporarily inhibit panic, as it has many GABAergic outputs to brainstem regions responsible for panic responses. All of this is pretty stunning. (Of course, the results would have been more stunning if there were a larger group of lesioned patients – all three of them did experience panic attacks in response to the CO2 but so did three of the controls. Fortunately, though, people with bilateral amygdala damage are hard to come by. One could see how a lack of fear could be dangerous!)
