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.

Remember Last Night?

Remember that time in first grade when you were sitting on the bus home from summer camp, and suddenly you started to feel something a little wet and suspicious in between your legs? And then, two seconds later, you realize there is a very distinct smell to accompany that uncomfortable feeling? Before you knew it, the whole bus is pointing and laughing at you and the puddle of pee you’re currently sitting in. It’s happened to all of us…right?

But fear no more! Thanks to that thing called science, a pill to “erase” painful memories could be on its way in the very near future. Hold up. Let’s recap what I just said: a pill that erases bad memories. But how can something like that possibly exist? It sounds more like a potion from one of the Harry Potter books than a medication. Well, as it turns out, science and magic may not be to separate from one another, because neuroscientists have already made many significant steps toward the development of such a pill. But, before we talk about memory erasure, it is first necessary to give a brief overview of how memories are stored and recalled.

Memory storage in the human brain is the result of a process known as long-term potentiation, which is essentially a strengthening of the neural networks that encode for that memory. A wise man named Donald Hebb once said “neurons that fire together, wire together,” and there is no better example of this phenomenon than in long-term­ potentiation. For example, let’s say that every time I said hello to my friend Max, he punched me in the face. If I said hello to him enough times, the connection between the neurons in my brain that fire when I say hello to Max and the neurons in my brain that fire in response to getting punched in the face by Max would grow strong enough that, eventually, I would learn to stop saying hello to that dick. Many molecular factors are acting to strengthen these neural connections, including, but not limited to, increased neurotransmitter release, increased conductance of calcium (calcium aids in the release of neurotransmitter), and even growth of dendritic spines (these receive neurotransmitters).

Once memories are formed, they stay in the brain forever, stagnant and unchanged, like an engraving in a tablet, right? Wrong. Recent studies seem to suggest that every time a memory is recalled, new proteins are put in motion to alter and change the original memory. It appears that every time a memory is recalled, it changes slightly. It is this fact that would enable a memory erasure pill to work its magic.

In a study conducted by Karim Nader and Joseph LeDoux at NYU, rats were trained to associate a loud noise with an electrical shock, and thus exhibited behavioral characteristics associated with fear whenever the noise was sounded. After an injection of a chemical known to block certain proteins involved in memory synthesis and recall, however, the rats failed to exhibit fear upon hearing the noise. More astounding, after the chemical had worn off, the rats still showed no fear of the noise. When put in a situation where memory recall was necessary, but with no access to the proteins involved in memory recall, the memory, essentially, vanished.

Neuroscientists already have a jump on one protein, PKMzeta, that seems to be heavily involved in memory consolidation and recall. The implications of this pill for treatment of syndromes like PTSD are ridiculous, and I’m sure the ethical debate surrounding its production will be long and controversial. Right now, however, the concept is pretty cool.

Magic Berries

The BBB Society will be hosting a "Magic Berries" charity event to raise money for the Delaware Valley Chapter of the Alzheimer's Association on Friday, February 10th in Huntsman 270 from 4 - 6 pm.

facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/events/106585796133311/

For only $3 you will receive a magic berry, a variety of foods to test its effects, and a lesson by Neuroscientist Professor, Dr. Mike Kaplan, explaining how the magic berry works. Make sure to stop by to try out a berry that makes sour and bitter foods taste sweet! For more information about how exactly these berries work, read the entry below:

Sweet Science

by Noah Sanders

Sometimes, I feel like we are all robots. I’m not having a nervous breakdown or trying to start any sort of philosophical discussion. No, I’m merely commenting on the fact that the human brain is a miraculous contraption, an intricate web of axons and dendrites, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes, whose function and precision more than closely resembles that of a computer. Moreover, if you tweak the human brain and its “subservient” body parts, you make the human body do some pretty cool things.

Before I get into the “juice” of this article (you’ll get that pun later), a brief overview of the gustatory system (how we taste things) is in order. Lets say you put something sweet in your mouth, like a lollipop. As soon as the candy touches your tongue, special taste molecules, called “tastants” trigger sweet receptors embedded in taste receptor cells in your taste buds. Once triggered, the receptors, called G-Protein Coupled Receptors, recruit a G-Protein subunit and trigger, with the help of a few more enzymes and kinases, an enormous signal cascade. There are millions of these taste receptor cells all over the tongue, and its up to the brain to receive these millions of signals, sift through them, and tell you that whatever is in your mouth tastes sweet. Everything I just wrote is a gross oversimplification, but hey, it gets the point across (and who really wants to think that much about what they’re eating anyway!).

Now that you understand how we taste sweet things, you can understand why humans are robots. One word, my friend: miraculin. Miraculin is a glycoprotein (a protein attached to a sugar) found in the berry Synsepalum dulcificum. When ingested, miraculin will, for up to about an hour, make anything you eat taste sweet. You can try it yourself. Just go to the store, buy some “magic berries,” pop them in your mouth and then suck on a lime – sweetest treat you’ve ever had. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why humans are robots. One tweak, and it is possible to alter the very way we perceive the world. We are not enlightened individuals, paving our own destiny, but slaves to our hard wiring.

I’m just kidding, but here’s how miraculin tricks the brain into tasting everything as sweet, it very simply and pretty cool: miraculin, when ingested, binds to the sweet tastant receptors I described to you two paragraphs ago. The miraculin does not, however, trigger the receptors upon binding. For reasons still poorly understood, it requires the binding of another type of tastant, lets say the H+ ions of a sour food, to activate the receptor and initiate a signal cascade.

If that’s too much science for you, think of it like this: “miraculin sits on your tastebuds and screams "sweet incoming" every time it sees sour. And the tastebuds buy it.”

(http://www.quora.com/How-does-Flavor-Tripping-with-the-protein-miraculin-work)

HIV and Burkitt's Lymphoma in the Brain

Chemotherapy typically follows after radiosurgery to treat small cancerous tumors in the human brain. However, when the tumors are the result of Burkitt's Lymphoma, the disease is exponentially more serious and requires many more treatments. Burkitt's Lymphoma is a fast-growing cancer of the lymphatic system, specifically B-Cells (classifying it as a type of leukemia). All types of Burkitt's are associated with HIV and immunodeficiency. In fact, 90% of AIDS cases are complicated by an onset of Burkitt's.

In the types of Burkitt's encountered in North America, the cancer usually starts in the belly area (abdomen). The disease can also start in the ovaries, testes, brain, and spinal fluid. Swelling of the lymph nodes is the primary symptom of the condition.

http://lymphoma.about.com/od/nonhodgkinlymphoma/p/burkitts.htm

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When diagnosed early, chemo can be extremely effective as a solution for Burkitt's ironically because of its naturally fast progression (the chemo progresses quickly when the cancer grows quickly). Patients treated with HAART (Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy) for HIV, have a typically better chance for survival with Burkitt's lymphoma as well. These patients are basically being treated with a drug cocktail of sorts since HAART is defined as treatment with at least three active anti-retroviral medications (ARV’s).

The chemotherapy treatments are administered through a ventricular cathoder that is surgically inserted. It is a short surgery and an easy insertion into the third ventricle of the brain once the tumor is located via MRI scan. Surgeons implant what is called an Ommaya Resevoir for easy drug administration:

http://www.cw.bc.ca/library/pamphlets/search_view.asp?keyword=373

If the patient, however, has already developed carcinomatosis and has widespread cancerous lesions throughout the body (as is often the result of lymphoma), the treatments are unfortunately less effective.

Clinical Applications of Hallucinogens

“Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Those are the famous words of the late psychologist Timothy Leary, a figurehead of the sixties famous for his experiments surrounding the psychological implications of hallucinogen, specifically LSD, use. Scientific interest in hallucinogen research more or less died with Leary’s dismissal from Harvard University in 1963, but, according to an article in Bloomberg Businessweek, it’s making a comeback.

This time, “magic mushrooms” are the focus of attention. Specifically, researchers are interested in psilocybin, the active compound responsible for the hallucinations mushroom users experience. Psilocybin accomplishes this, according to a very recent study, by acting as a “super agonist” to serotonin, a neurotransmitter associated with everything from depression to learning to hallucination. By binding to serotonin receptors, psilocybin both increases serotonin uptake and inhibits glutamate uptake. The resulting g-protein signal cascade is thought to trigger hallucinations, although the exact mechanisms are unknown.

Claimed clinical applications of the psychedelic compound range from anti-smoking therapy to chronic “suicide headache” relief. The most promising area of research surrounds the effect of psilocybin on the psyche of patients diagnosed with terminal illness. In a recent study, Roland Griffiths, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, administered psilocybin to 36 subjects, none of whom had taken the substance before. After taking the substance, the subjects were observed during their “trip,” an experience some described as “one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives.”

But that was expected. Psilocybin is known to produce mystical, sometimes even spiritual short-term experiences. What is remarkable is that, 14 months later, almost all of the volunteers reported viewing life through a better, more positive lens. According to a Wired.com article on the study, “over half [of the volunteers] reported substantial increases in life satisfaction and positive behavior, while no long-term negative effects were reported.”

Although the implications are immense for increasing the quality of life for patients with depression or patients diagnosed with terminal illnesses suffering severe anxiety, I still do not know how I feel about the production of a drug derived from psilocybin. There certainly are cases were neurological intervention is necessary to improve the quality of life, but a pill so closely related to a well known hallucinogenic drug scares me. Is happiness, caused by the neurological tweakings of a drug, actually happiness?