MONDAY, AUGUST 25, 2008
Sports mentality
Like millions of others worldwide, I’ve spent many of my nights recently glued to the coverage of the Olympics. As I watch the gymnasts swinging onto the uneven bars, the divers launching themselves from their boards and the volleyball players throwing themselves enthusiastically into the sand, all I can think is, “How do they do it?”
Our own Ben Mauk began to explain the technicalities of competition and the competitive edge in his recent blog, “Marathon Mind.” My question is, how do Olympians handle the pressure?
According to this fascinating page on stress and the brain from the Franklin Institute, whenever we perceive a threat—for instance, another competitor closing in on the gold—our sympathetic nervous systems trigger our adrenal glands to produce the hormone adrenaline. As adrenaline is released, our senses heighten, memory sharpens and our sense of pain diminishes (at least temporarily).
This adrenaline rush might explain the gold-medal performance of gymnast Kerri Strug. At the 1996 Olympics, Strug missed on the vault and injured her ankle but then went on to nail a perfect finish on the second vault. After that landing, she collapsed in pain and was carried from the floor. It seemed an almost superhuman feat. No doubt Strug’s body was full of adrenaline, pushing her forward until she had reached the safety of having finished her routine.
As the Olympians are receiving this adrenaline rush, the area of their brain known as the frontal lobe is also particularly active. According to The Dana Guide to Brain Health, the frontal lobe controls so-called “executive functions” such as recognizing the consequences of your actions (if I score this high, where will that put me in the rankings?), choosing between alternatives (to do a triple twist or a measly double?) and modulating socially appropriate responses (it is not acceptable to flee the arena in fear or trip the competitor next to me).
The Olympics are truly a full-body event. And, the Franklin Institute page points out, while chronic stress can shut down other body systems and make us sick, short bursts of stress do not have the same effect. As our mind struggles to overcome challenges in the moment, growth occurs in the brain as new connections are formed. Being an Olympic athlete may not only make you fit and famous—it may help sharpen your intellect! I wonder if I get the same benefits from cheering on the sidelines.
—Juliana Avery
THURSDAY, AUGUST 21, 2008
Aneurysms: a grim prognosis—for now
Even with prompt treatment, the chances of recovering from a burst aneurysm—like the one that killed Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a Democrat from Ohio, yesterday evening—remain low, a prominent neurologist says.
Aneurysms are balloon-like bulges that occur in blood vessels because of disease or a weakening of the vessel wells. Though they often occur in the brain, they can also occur in other places, such as the aorta.
When the bulges burst, they leak out highly pressurized blood that can instantaneously cause severe damage, says Louis Caplan of Harvard University Medical School, who was not involved in treating Jones and is not familiar with her exact medical situation. For those who survive, the blood vessel is likely to rupture again in the same place, he adds.
“Unfortunately, mortality is very high because of that initial bleed,” Caplan says. Though prompt diagnosis and treatment by trained experts can reduce the risk of death, recovery largely depends on how bad the initial bleeding is.
Scientists have made significant advances in diagnosing and treating aneurysms in recent years, he adds. Doctors are now better at pre-emptively spotting aneurysms, tracking genetic risk factors, and diagnosing ruptures when they do happen.
Though surgery can be used to close off the afflicted blood vessel, treatment now often includes the use of coils or other devices to induce clots that serve to strengthen the vessel walls. This has the advantage of not requiring cutting open the skull—the coils are threaded into the blood vessel endoscopically, usually through the femoral artery in the groin.
In the case of a rupture, drugs are also used to control the constriction of nearby blood vessels, a common complication.
—Aalok Mehta
THURSDAY, AUGUST 21, 2008
In one ear but not out the other
The other day I made the mistake of going swimming—a mistake not because I find swimming unenjoyable, but because some water seems to have taken up permanent residence in my ear. Oddly enough, shortly before this unfortunate event, I had been telling my friends about an interesting new discovery linking childhood ear infections and obesity.
Everyone knows the connection between smell and taste—who hasn’t bemoaned having a cold the night of an expensive dinner?—but scientists recently found a possible connection between ear problems and taste, as reported here. How is it possible that something that seems unrelated could have such a big effect? Five studies from across the globe reported that the cause was nerve damage to the taste buds. Sufferers of chronic childhood ear infections showed an increased preference for sweet and fatty foods.
While many find this explanation implausible, I can tell you that even the water in my ear has affected my ability to taste. Sweet things are stronger, while everything else tastes watered down. But then, maybe it’s all in my head.
—Amanda Cushman
MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 2008
Shakespeare’s word use embiggens the brain
A famous philosopher once said “verbing weirds language.” While I admit that Calvin doesn’t exactly have the ivory tower cred of, say, his namesake, in this case not even Wittgenstein could have said it better.
Of course, Calvin (the tiger-towing tyke, not the theologian) couldn’t have known that, years after he coined his linguistic maxim, I would Google the phrase in order to find a JPEG (jay-peg) of the strip, to which I could hyperlink while blogging. In fact, the previous sentence would have seemed like so much gibberish to Calvin, who philosophized from the funny pages between 1985 and 1995, before Internet-speak invaded our vernacular. Language weirds quickly these days.
But then, writers have always weirded words, for practicality or contrived effect. The recent Literary Review article “The Shakespeared Brain” looks at how the Bard reinvented nouns as verbs and verbs as adjectives in his offerings of “the great creative example of what the human mind can do”:
I told my brain scientists that one small but powerful example of this quick Elizabethan shorthand is what is now called functional shift or word-class conversion … . For example: an adjective is made a verb when in The Winter's Tale heavy thoughts are said to 'thick my blood.' A pronoun is made into a noun when Olivia in Twelfth Night is called 'the cruellest she alive.'
In an experiment detailed in the article, functional shift is found to have a distinct and unique effect on the brain, one that this author argues makes us “more alive, at a level of neural excitement never fully exorcised by later conceptualization.”
As with music, we’re a long way from explaining the mysterious pleasures of the spoken word. Our brains revel in both, “those sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”
However, these studies at least suggest hopeful beginnings, as does The Bard on the Brain from Dana Press, which explores Shakespeare’s dramatization of the human mind and brain, including the magic of language, through brain imaging.
—Ben Mauk
FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 2008
‘Patient voices’ on Parkinson’s—and more
The New York Times has an interesting health feature under way: an interactive story for which patients speak for themselves about their experiences. These features have been posted monthly since April, and four of the first five have been brain-related.
In this month’s edition, we hear from people with Parkinson’s disease. Don’t miss the pictures as you listen to their stories. Related materials include a blog post by Times health columnist Tara Parker-Pope (with 30 comments so far) and an undated Q&A with researcher Irene Richard.
The previous brain-related “Patient Voices” topics include bipolar disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and stroke.
—Dan Gordon
TUESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2008
Marathon Mind
Monday's Washington Post outpaces the typical Olympic news coverage with a curious story on the neuroscience of running.
The surprising study in “The Sprinter's Brain” suggests that all sprinters take off faster when they position their right-foot on the starter's block. The advantage holds for novice runners and Olympians alike, regardless of their handedness or preferred foot. Researchers chalk up the unexpected results to the asymmetric structure of our brains.
We know that the right hemisphere—which largely controls the left side of the body—plays a central role in reaction time. But because the left hemisphere dominates in overall movement control—especially in moving the right side of the body—the right-foot-back position has, on average, an 80-millisecond advantage. If you've been following the summer games, you know that such slivers of time cleave runners with gold feet from those with lead.
While reading this article and checking my e-mail Monday morning, I leaned awkwardly at my desk, holding an ice pack to my throbbing knee with one hand and typing with the other. After an hour of working diagonally, my work ethic was palling, and I began to wonder whether my decision two months ago to begin training for the Baltimore Marathon signaled some sort of brain disorder.
A quick scan through the Dana Guide to Brain Health failed to confirm this suspicion, but it did console my joints with the fact that regular exercise is linked to enhanced levels of a growth factor in the brain that sustains many types of neurons. News about the beneficial effects of exercise on brain health makes headlines regularly—our August issue of Brain in the News will feature a story focusing on Alzheimer's disease.
Less common are those stories on the neurology of sport. How would the brain scans of these Olympians contrast with mine?
I suppose I can test the movement, balance and coordination of my own motor cortex this October, when the marathon takes place. For now, the neurons are willing, but the knees are weak.
—Ben Mauk
FRIDAY, AUGUST 08, 2008
My neurovacation
Do other people take vacations to relax their brains? My recent 10-day trip through Turkey was a neuron-jangling ride of unfamiliar places and puzzles. Cross-continental travel jerked my brain out of its workaday habits and taxed it with wholly new sights and sounds.
Sound stressful? Perhaps my pale Polish skin has deprived me of the beach-bumming holidays enjoyed by my easily bronzed friends, who happily while away days with poolside naps, daiquiris and Dean Koontz novels. But I console myself that while they’re lounging toward melanoma, I’m engaged in a more rewarding, if less relaxing, “neurovacation.”
For more than a week, I massaged my cerebellum by navigating through the byzantine (and Byzantine) neighborhoods of Istanbul. Street map in tow, my traveling companion and I sampled the fish sandwiches cooked in carts along the Bosphorus River and survived a temporary 1 a.m. blackout in the bustling hotspot of Beyoğlu. (Ordering a foreign drink in near-total darkness made me feel like the subject of an experiment in human behavior!)
Our lobes boggled to behold the incredible vistas of Cappadocia and the ruins of ancient Ephesus, and in the small town of Selçuk we learned to play backgammon from a bartender who, for lack of a shared tongue, taught us with excited hand motions and frequent head-slaps. (This too had the feel of a study in social psychology.)
I prodded my Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas by learning merhaba for “hello,” lütfen for “please” and a dozen other foreign phrases. Most frequently, though, I pummeled my prefrontal cortex with problems of cultural differences. (Which hand do I eat with? How do I haggle a low price for souvenirs? How do I use this toilet?)
Aside from confusing my hypothalamus with all the time-zone hopping (thus inviting some serious jet lag), I feel the break from routine gave my mind a recharge. Dana Press has published books that suggest the brain thrives in novel situations. I plan to cite these findings to my tanned peers, who will no doubt be horrified to learn that I passed by all those Mediterranean beaches.
—Ben Mauk