I’ll be returning to my classic forensic psych roots for a bit. In the coming weeks, I’m going to sit down with a former KGB agent in a five part miniseries.
We will be discussing his work in Russia as well as in the U.S. from a psychological perspective, highlighting behavioral tactics used…
“Addiction Is Not A Disease Of The Brain”
…we haven’t discovered, in the reward reinforcement system, a neurochemical signature of addiction. We haven’t discovered the place where addiction happens in the brain. After all, the so-called highjacking of the reward system is not itself a neurochemical process; it is a process whereby neurochemical events get entrained within in a larger pattern of action and decision making.
Is addiction a disease of the brain? That’s a bit like saying that eating is a phenomenon of the stomach.
By Alva Noë, a professor of philosophy who works on perception and consciousness at the University of California, Berkeley.
Feel like you are being told the opposite of what was just recently declared by the American Society of Addiction Medicine? Then read more here.
Another good one from Neuropod:
Gut feelings: the emerging biology of gut–brain communication
Abstract: The concept that the gut and the brain are closely connected, and that this interaction plays an important part not only in gastrointestinal function but also in certain feeling states and in intuitive decision making, is deeply rooted in our language.
Recent neurobiological insights into this gut–brain crosstalk have revealed a complex, bidirectional communication system that not only ensures the proper maintenance of gastrointestinal homeostasis and digestion but is likely to have multiple effects on affect, motivation and higher cognitive functions, including intuitive decision making.
Moreover, disturbances of this system have been implicated in a wide range of disorders, including functional and inflammatory gastrointestinal disorders, obesity and eating disorders. via
Neocortical excitation/inhibition balance in information processing and social dysfunction
Abstract: Severe behavioural deficits in psychiatric diseases such as autism and schizophrenia have been hypothesized to arise from elevations in the cellular balance of excitation and inhibition (E/I balance) within neural microcircuitry. This hypothesis could unify diverse streams of pathophysiological and genetic evidence, but has not been susceptible to direct testing. Here we design and use several novel optogenetic tools to causally investigate the cellular E/I balance hypothesis in freely moving mammals, and explore the associated circuit physiology. Elevation, but not reduction, of cellular E/I balance within the mouse medial prefrontal cortex was found to elicit a profound impairment in cellular information processing, associated with specific behavioural impairments and increased high-frequency power in the 30–80 Hz range, which have both been observed in clinical conditions in humans. Consistent with the E/I balance hypothesis, compensatory elevation of inhibitory cell excitability partially rescued social deficits caused by E/I balance elevation. These results provide support for the elevated cellular E/I balance hypothesis of severe neuropsychiatric disease-related symptoms.
V.S. Ramachandran on “The neurons that shaped civilization”. He discusses the fascinating topic of “Mirror Neurons”.
I can’t wait until I take my classes with this guy in August.
He’s amazing.
Although out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are typically associated with migraine, epilepsy and psychopathology, they are quite common in healthy and psychologically normal individuals as well. However, they are poorly understood. A new study, published in the July 2011 issue of Elsevier’s Cortex, has linked these experiences to neural instabilities in the brain’s temporal lobes and to errors in the body’s sense of itself – even in non clinical populations.
Dr Jason Braithwaite from the Behavioural Brain Sciences Centre, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, has been investigating the underlying factors associated with the propensity for normal healthy individuals to have an OBE. As well as informing the scientific theories for how such hallucinations can occur, studying these unusual phenomena can also help us to understand how normal “in-the-body” mental processes work and why, when they break down, they produce such striking experiences.
Dr Braithwaite tested a group of individuals, including some “OBEers”, for their predisposition to unusual perceptual experiences, and found that the OBEers reported significantly more of a particular type of experience: those known to be associated with neuroelectrical anomalies in the temporal lobes of the brain, as well as those associated with distortions in the processing of body-based information. The OBEers were also less skilled at a task which required them to adopt the perspective of a figure shown on the computer screen. These findings suggest that, even in healthy people, striking hallucinations can and do occur and that these may reflect anomalies in neuroelectrical activity of the temporal lobes, as well as biases in “body representation” in the brain.(source)
Published today on PLoS, “A Possible Role for Integrin Signaling in Diffuse Axonal Injury” researchers shed light on understanding cellular injuries in the brain caused by explosion blasts. Unfortunately, the relevance of this expands further than the 300,000 soldiers that have experienced a traumatic brain injury. So how can a explosion of sound cause brain damage?
Through a microscope, the researchers saw that the “blast” caused swelling, breakage, and other signs of injuries to the neurons’ spindly axons and dendrites, which send and receive signals from other neurons. A series of biochemical experiments found that the mechanical force disrupted proteins called integrins that help anchor cells to the scaffold of protein that surrounds them. Integrins have roles in a wide range of biochemical signaling pathways, but Parker’s team identified one particular pathway that seems to play a role in injury to axons.
A previous, but related study found:
… recent findings of damage to the brain’s white matter, which is made up of axons, in Iraq war veterans injured in blasts, Parker says. All the same, he cautions that much more work will be needed to see whether these culture dish findings are relevant to what happens in the brain of a soldier exposed to a blast. “It would be inappropriate to extrapolate from a dish to some dude’s head,” Parker says. via
These results potentially can do two things: explain why Vasospasms can exist sans bleeding in the brain and of course lead toward treatments.
