Under Pressure

By: Zoe Gan

Athletes with any kind of performance anxiety (so, all athletes!) may find a recent study pretty interesting: Athletes who clench their left fist before performing are less likely to choke under pressure.

Here's how it works: Because your left fist is controlled by your right brain, clenching it activates the right brain and results in a decreased activation of your left brain. Activation of certain areas in the left brain is associated with psyching ourselves out under pressure. This study was done with soccer players, judo players, and badminton players.

I'm thinking those sports are pretty different from, say, swimming, but it seems that the trick applies to any task that combines "precision, pressure, and highly automated tasks." The article cites surgeons and musicians as people who could potentially benefit from this finding.

I know the left brain is typically associated with logical thinking, while the right brain is associated more with artistry and creativity. It makes sense, since thinking too much about doing something tends to make you mess up.

If that's the case, then I might just try this before my next exam. I get tests back all the time where I'm pretty sure I overthought something or just choked. Does regurgitating information count as an "automated task"? Sure. Pressure? That's what you make it. And I wonder if the brain areas controlling "precision" are the same that involve how accurately you answer test questions... well, I guess we know precision and accuracy aren't the same, but I'd just like to think that this would help me!

Give it a try sometime.

  

Sources referenced:

http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2012/09/25/simple-tip-may-ease-athletes-performance-anxiety/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Existential Medicine

Earlier in the year I posted about the use of psychedelic drugs, particularly psilocybin (the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”), to treat the clinically depressed. I’ve just finished reading a recent piece in the New York Times on a growing number of psychiatrists nationwide who are currently conducting studies on the merits of psilocybin in mitigating fears of death in terminally ill patients. Rather than discuss neural basis for psilocybin’s potential psychiatric benefits (about which very little is known), I feel compelled to write about the ethics of such drug administration, which I have been struggling with since my initial post on the subject.

The New York Times piece describes two patients, suffering from a cancer, who were told they had very little time left to live. Initially, both patients struggled immensely with their respective diagnoses, but each found refuge in experimental studies in which psilocybin was administered, followed by prolonged sessions of meditation and introspection. At the end of their studies, each performed much better on a battery of depression and anxiety tests, and each reported a completely different world view, one in which death was not the end of life, but part of “…a process, a way of moving into a different sphere, a different way of being.”

Although psilocybin appears to be effective in mitigating anxiety in depressed or anxious patients, there is something very unsettling about the idea of administering a compound that effects the brain so drastically (in ways yet to be fully understood), so as to convert a state of near panic to one of placidity and tranquility.

While the ends of such administration may be appreciated by the patient, are the means ethical? Perhaps, with death so near, a patient deserves to die in peace, regardless of the ethical implications. But, every time I read about psilocybin as a clinical drug, I cannot help but think about Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World. True, there is a big difference between recreational use of a powerful psychedelic (as was the case in A Brace New World or 1960’s America) and prescribed use by terminally ill patients, but once the ball gets rolling, I fear it will be hard to stop. As Lauren Slater, author of the New York Time piece writes, “If, say, end-stage cancer patients can have it, then why not all individuals over the age of, say, 75? If treatment-resistant depressives can have it, then why not their dysthymic counterparts, who suffer in a lower key but whose lives are clearly compromised by their chronic pain? And if dysthymic individuals can have it, then why not those suffering from agoraphobia, shut up day and night in cramped quarters, Xanax bottles littered everywhere?” While some may say that such hypothetical scenarios will never come to be if psilocybin use is strictly regulated for terminally ill patients, people like Rick Doblin and his group MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Study) have already started petitioning for the legalization of psychedelics for use in a “wide range of clinical indications.”

Psychedelics, such as psilocybin, definitely hold promise for patients suffering crippling depression and anxiety. They also hold great potential for abuse, and when discussing the clinical merits of psychedelics, researchers and psychiatrists need do so with extreme prudence and caution.

My Search for Ice Cream and How it Became a Lasting Memory

            My first memory is from when I was five years old. It is a pretty emotional memory, so I guess that’s why I still remember it. My mom and I were in the supermarket, and I was pretty upset with her for her lack of interest in the ice cream aisle. So I took the initiative and wandered off to go find it myself. Of course, the inevitable happened and I ended up losing my mom, and it wasn’t until one of the kind supermarket workers returned a very shaken up (and still ice cream-less) me to my mother that we were reunited.

            Since my first memory is from when I was five years old, I’ve always assumed we just don’t form memories before around that age. This was the prevailing view of society too until about the 1980s, at which point it was proven that even very young children do indeed have the capability to form memories. Until more recently, it was believed that these memories were only transient, with young children living only in the present. However that idea has been overturned as well.

            It turns out that very young children remember a lot like adults. In early infancy, the neural structures crucial for memory are coming online: the hippocampus, which is, very roughly, in charge of storing new memories; and the prefrontal cortex, which is, very roughly, in charge of retrieving those memories. But the difference between children and adults is that in children those neural pathways are still developing, so only part of the information is stored. Only part of the present is captured in young children as it goes by.

            Over time, children remember things for longer and longer; their memories are getting stickier so to say. That being said, we still can generally not remember anything before roughly the age of 4 or 5. So at what point do memories start becoming more permanent? New research indicates that this might have to do with society as much as neurology. Parents repeat and retell events to their children, and these events get cemented as more permanent memories. So here’s my question: Is the only reason I remember my excursion to get ice cream that my mom likes to retell the story of me making a fool of myself in search of sweets? If so, I still have no regrets. I just like ice cream a lot.

The Uncanny Valley

In recent years, human animating capabilities have soared. Companies like Pixar and Dream Works produce film after film, each with increasingly more realistic looking animated characters. Yet, when some of these films are viewed, the awe at the near perfect animations and the appreciation for what must have been a very skilled animator is replaced by uneasiness, even creepiness. Take for example, the recent Disney animation Mars Needs Moms. The characters in this movie are extremely well animated and look very humanoid, in fact, they look a little too humanoid. It is as if a threshold on animation anthropomorphism has been passed, causing all the characters to appear, well, weird.

Believe it or not, this phenomenon (things that look too human making us uneasy) has a name: The Uncanny Valley. This name, almost as strange sounding as the phenomenon it describes, refers to the visible dip in a graph created by roboticist Masahiro Mori that plots human empathy against how closely a non-humanoid object represents a human (see above). According to the graph, human empathy for human-like objects increases up to a point, at which things get a little too real and empathy drops sharply.

Although no one knows exactly why this Uncanny Valley exists, one theory emphasizes the evolutionary need for a brain mechanism that would trigger dislike for something almost human, but not quite. According to this theory, the reason humans are uneasy upon viewing things like the animations in Mars Needs Moms is that these animations appear to be very humanoid, enough to trick the brain into processing them as humans, yet do not resemble humans perfectly. This contradiction, something that looks human yet does not behave perfectly human, is what causes dislike in the human brain. If you understand the basis of the theory (it is very confusing!), then the evolutionary importance follows easily. Things like disease and mental disorders alter the appearance and actions of humans, and a functioning system to detect and generate fear of such evolutionarily dangerous things is a necessity for human survival.

Maybe someday animation companies will perfect the human form (appearance, movement, etc.), and this Uncanny Valley will disappear. I am not sure if I want that day to come, however, because it means that our brains will be unable to distinguish the animations from real humans, and that makes me feel more uneasy than the current state of humanoid animation.

Reading Really Does Broaden Your Mind

            I’ll admit it. I love to read. After a hard day of school, sometimes all I want to do is curl up with a good fiction book and possibly a box of cookies. I love the hours I spend reading, for it’s during that time that I get to escape into a whole other world. However, even though for me reading feels like being transported to a different world, new research describes how reading fiction actually activates many of the same centers of the brain that real-life experiences do. The brain, it seems, does not make distinctions between reading about something and experiencing it in real-life.

            A new article in the New York Times explores this connection between reading fiction and the areas of your brain it activates. As you read, the same areas get activated in your brain as would be activated if you were actually experiencing the book. For example, let’s just say the protagonist of your book smells the scent of his grandma’s “home-made apple pie wafting out from the open window”. As the reader, these lines would activate the primary olfactory cortex, the area of your brain primarily responsible for smelling. Cool, huh?

            It goes even further than just sensory stimulation though. Reading books where the characters interact can actually help hone our real-life social skills. Scientists at the York University of Canada found that reading toddlers books can help with the development of their social skills from a young age and help them to develop a keen “theory of mind”.

            So in the end, I guess my elementary school teachers really were on to something when they told me reading is good for the brain, even if they didn’t mean it in such a literal sense.

If you want to read the full New York Times article, here is the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?pagewanted=all

Don't Try This At Home

            Sometimes I wish that there were a way to inject chemistry knowledge directly into my brain. (Okay, maybe I wish for this all the time.) Unfortunately, science has yet to create a way to do this. However, they’ve come up with the next best thing. Well, maybe not the next best thing, but something pretty awesome.

            Scientists at the University of Oxford have found that by passing a very mild current of electricity through a person’s brain, they can improve their math skills for the next sixth months. The scientists behind these alluring findings used a method known as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). This is a non-invasive technique that involves passing electricity through the skull to increase or decrease the activity of neurons, and it usually lasts around fifteen minutes.

            The scientists chose to stimulate the parietal lobe which is involved in number processing, a vital part of mathematics. Although math still requires practice, the subjects showed increased skills in number processing not just immediately after the stimulation but for the next six months!

            I, for one, am just about ready to buy a plane ticket to England so they can do this to me. Apparently I’m not the only one with that idea though. An enthusiastic do-it-yourself community of tDCS enthusiasts has sprung up. Machines that provide direct transcranial stimulation cost thousands of dollars and are generally only sold to researchers, but that hasn’t stopped the tDCS enthusiasts. Their online forums are filled stories of homemade experiments, some of which went wrong, and in one case left someone blind.

            To me it seems like the risk isn’t worth it. So for now I’ll stick with learning chemistry the old-fashioned way, and the only experiments I’ll be doing at home are the ones I can do with the chemistry set I got when I was eight.

Why Hitting the Gym Might Just Help You Ace Your Next Midterm

            I’m as liable as anyone to do it. Whenever I have a big midterm coming up, I forgo the gym in exchange for a couple extra hours of studying. After all, I reason, the exam is more important; the gym will still be there in a week. However, new research done by The Laboratory of Biochemistry and Neuroscience at the University of Tsukuba in Japan suggests that if you want to ace your exams, getting back on the treadmill might actually be a good idea.

            Exercise demands a lot from the brain. During exercise, countless neurons are activated; they generate, receive, and interpret messages from other neurons and coordinate everything from organ function to muscle movement to the balance that keeps you from falling over during your weekly yoga session (It’s okay, I have trouble with Tree Pose too). All of this work done by your brain requires an incredible amount of energy, and this energy often comes in the form of glycogen, stored carbohydrates.

            In the recent study done, published in The Journal of Physiology, researchers tested the effects of exercise on glycogen levels in the brain. What they found is that exercise depleted the majority of glycogen stores, but after a good meal of carbohydrates the glycogen levels were back up not only to where they were before exercise, but the brain had done a form of carbo-loading, and glycogen levels were even higher than before exercise!

            So how does increased glycogen levels in the brain relate to doing well on that one really hard midterm you’ve been dreading? You can think of glycogen as a kind of fuel for the brain, and an increase in fuel leads to an increase in productivity. What the experimenters found is that the increases in glycogen in the brain were predominantly in the areas of the cortex and the hippocampus—areas of the brain involved in learning and memory.

            But before you congratulate yourself and take a run on the treadmill in an effort to increase your chances of being able to learn all the material for your test, you should know there’s a catch—the study found that only working out once did not lead to a long-term increase in the baseline levels of glycogen in the brain. However, working out on a fairly consistent basis for four weeks did lead to a lasting increase in glycogen levels.

            So, on that note, I leave to go find my sneakers, Ipod, and a banana (remember to eat foods high in glycogen after working out), and hope that if I exercise enough, maybe I will finally be able to memorize everything for my tests.