TMS sends a harmless magnetic pulse through your skull to alter brain activity. In experiments, sleeping volunteers immediately began reproducing the slow, deep waves seen in Stage Three and Stage Four sleep.

“With a single pulse, we were able to induce a wave that looks identical to the waves that the brain makes normally during sleep,” said Giulio Tononi.

Scientists refer to four stages of sleep. In Stage One, the body becomes more relaxed; some areas of the brain are already “asleep.” In Stage Two, or light sleep, theta brain waves signal changes in how the brain is working. Stage Three is a deep sleep characterized by both theta and finally delta waves, the deepest stage of sleep. Finally, Stage Four sleep, with only delta waves, arrives, driving your body’s respiration, heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature to its lowest point during your day.

The safety of the device is still being tested, but it sounds like a great napping tool - ie if you feel tired during the day, use this device, skip stages 1 & 2 of sleep, and wake up a few minutes later, refreshed. Personally, I’ve never mastered the art of the power nap, but polyphasic sleep has aways fascinated me. Anyway, check out the article at LifeScience.com.

In the study, partially funded by the federal government, 36 volunteers who had never taken halucinogenic drugs were given a single dose of either psilocybin or the stimulant methylphenidate (Ritalin). The volunteers "lay on a couch in a living-room-like setting, wearing an eye mask and listening to classical music" during their 6 hour trip and then were asked about their experience.

Twenty-two of the 36 volunteers reported having a "complete" mystical experience, compared to four of those getting methylphenidate.

That experience included such things as a sense of pure awareness and a merging with ultimate reality, a transcendence of time and space, a feeling of sacredness or awe, and deeply felt positive mood like joy, peace and love. People say "they can't possibly put it into words," Griffiths said.

Two months later, 24 of the participants filled out a questionnaire. Two-thirds called their reaction to psilocybin one of the five top most meaningful experiences of their lives. On another measure, one-third called it the most spiritually significant experience of their lives, with another 40 percent ranking it in the top five.

About 80 percent said that because of the psilocybin experience, they still had a sense of well-being or life satisfaction that was raised either "moderately" or "very much."

Maybe psychedelic drug experimentation will make a comeback after all.

Source: LiveScience

Medical researcher Ted Kaptchuk wanted to see if it was possible to manipulate the placebo effect, so in a study sponsored by teh National Institutes of Health, he recruited 266 volunteers suffering from chronic arm pain which they rated at least a 3 on a 10-point scale.

Then he prescribed two types of fake medicines. 133 subjects received pretend acupuncture - the needles had retractable tips so they never penetrated the skin. The other 133 subjects were given a blue cornstarch pill.

25 percent of the acupuncture group experienced side effects from the nonexistent needle pricks, including 19 people who felt pain and 4 whose skin became red or swollen. 31 percent of the pill group experienced side effects from the make-believe drug, including dizziness, restlessness, rashes, headaches, nausea, and 4 cases of nightmares. Dry mouth and fatigue were the most common side effects, and 3 subjects withdrew from the study after reducing the dosage failed to control their symptoms. The reported side effects exactly matched those described by the doctors at the beginning of the study.

After 10 weeks, subjects taking sham pills said their pain decreased an average of 1.50 points on the 10-point scale. After 8 weeks, those receiving fake acupuncture reported a drop of 2.64 points. In other words, not receiving acupuncture reduces pain more than not taking drugs.

Kaptchuk chalks the results up to the ritual - acupuncture is more elaborate so patients think it works better.

One of the biggest questions raised against the theory was how the human mind could have evolved from a more primitive animal brain. Humans make complex decisions, are driven by emotions, impose social and moral constructs, and participate in religious activities. Surely, there was a distinction between the human mind and the animal mind. In addition, since at least the Greeks, philosophers had been arguing for a mind/body dualism, meaning the two were fundamentally other and separate.

Darwin was the first to argue that the human brain wasn't so different from the animal brain and that the mind/body distinction was an illusion.

Today, scientists are still trying to explain what the mind is and how it works. A recent article in Scientific American Mind by Professor Eric Kandel of Columbia University describes this new science of mind. (subscription required)

First, mind and brain are inseparable. The brain is a complex biological organ of great computational capability that constructs our sensory experiences, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions. The brain is responsible not only for relatively simple motor behaviors such as running and eating, but also for the complex acts that we consider quintessentially human, such as thinking, speaking and creating works of art. Looked at from this perspective, mind is a set of operations carried out by the brain, much as walking is a set of operations carried out by the legs, except dramatically more complex.

Second, each mental function in the brain - from the simplest reflex to the most creative acts in language, music and art - is carried out by specialized neural circuits in different regions of the brain. This is why it is preferable to use the term 'biology of mind' to refer to the set of mental operations carried out by these specialized neural circuits rather than 'biology of the mind' which connoted a place and implies a single brain location that carries out all mental operations.

Third, all of these circuits are made up of the same elementary signaling units, the nerve cells. Fourth, the neural circuits use specific molecules to generate signals within and between nerve cells. Finally, these specific signaling molecules have been conserved - retained, as it were - through millions of years of evolution.

]]> http://www.sciencereport.net/2006/04/14/darwin-human-evolution-and-the-science-of-mind/feed/ http://www.sciencereport.net/2006/04/14/reconciling-psychoanalysis-and-neurology/ http://www.sciencereport.net/2006/04/14/reconciling-psychoanalysis-and-neurology/#comments Fri, 14 Apr 2006 09:55:03 +0000 Krista http://72.249.45.163/~science/2006/04/14/reconciling-psychoanalysis-and-neurology/ As neurologists learn more about the brain, there's been renewed interest in merging psychiatry with neurology - and that means renewed interest in many of Sigmund Freud's ideas. A recent Scientific American Mind (subscription required) article discusses how modern neuroscience supports many of the ideas Freud proposed and is creating a 'new intellectual framework for psychiatry.' Some of the ideas include:

1) Unconscious Motivation - Freud believed that many of our mental processes that determine our thoughts and feelings occur unconsciously. Today, cognitive neurologists study the behavior of patients who cannot consciously remember certain events that occurred after damage to particular areas of their brains. For instance in 1996, Dr. Joseph LeDoux showed that there is a neuronal pathway that lies under the conscious cortex which connects perceptual information with the primitive brain structures responsible for generating fear responses.

Because this pathway bypasses the hippocampus - which generates conscious memories - current events routinely trigger unconscious memories - current events routinely trigger unconscious remembrances of emotionally important past events causing conscious feelings that seem irrational such as 'Men with beards make me uneasy.'

Similarly, Freud introduced a concept called infantile amnesia - where we can't remember our earliest memories as infants. Neuroscience explains this by demonstrating that major brain structures that contribute to conscious thought are not functional during the first two years of life.

2) Repression Vindicated - Freud believed that we actively repress ideas we don't like. In a 1994 experiment at the University of California, San Diego, behavioral neurologist, Dr. Ramachandran, studied a patient with damage to the right parietal region of her brain. The patient had suffered a stroke eight days before that had paralyzed her left arm yet she denied that anything was wrong with her. After Dr. Ramachandran stimulated her right hemisphere, she suddenly recognized that her left arm was paralyzed. However, when the effects of the stimulation wore off, she reverted back to the belief that there was nothing wrong with her arm. Similarly, she remembered being interviewed by Dr. Ramachandran but forgot the part where she acknowledged her arm was paralyzed.

3) Pleasure Principle - Freud believed that the repressed part of our unconscious mind is governed by wishful thinking that disregards logic and reality. In modern neuroscience, there are cases involving patients with damage to the frontal limbic region of the brain, which controls aspects of self-awareness. For instance, Dr. Solms saw a patient with a tumor in his frontal lobe that caused amnesia. Though they met 50 minutes every day for 12 consecutive days, the patient failed to recall that he had ever met Dr. Solms or underwent an operation to remove the tumor. Instead, he fabricated reasons why he was there, why there was a scar on his head, and who Dr. Solms was. Each day, he invented a new story consistent with what he believed on that day. One day, he believed that Dr. Solms was a drinking buddy and kept looking around the room for his beer. Or, to quote the article, 'The man simply recast reality as he wanted it to be.'

4) Animal Within - According to Freud, the pleasure principle drives primitive, animal urges. He believed the id was the reason why humans sought instant gratification to their primitive urges of sex and aggression. Modern neuroscience has expanded the concept into at least four classifications

They are the 'seeking' or reward system (which motivates the pursuit of pleasure); the 'anger-rage' system (which governs angry aggression but not predatory aggression); the 'fear-anxiety system; and the 'panic' system (which includes complex instincts such as those that govern social bonding).

The seeking system is a lot like Freud's libido. It is regulated by dopamine and is involved in most forms of craving and addiction.

5) Dreams Have Meaning - Finally, Freud believed that dreams were glimpses into the unconsciousness. Neuroscientists believe that dreaming is generated by the forebrain and that the seeking system 'might be the primary generator of dreams.'

I think it's easy to dub Freud irrelevant to modern neuroscience with all his focus on sex and aggression and odd concepts like his Oedipus complex theory. So many people poke fun at him for outdated ideas - and even the associations listed above are hotly debated among neuroscientists.

Still, I have to admit I find it extremely interesting that some of his ideas are starting to re-emerge in neurocognitive research. One of these days I'll have to pick up Dr. Solms' book, The Brain and the Inner World.

To understand how the brain reacts to humor, Reiss and his team had test subjects rate the hilarity of cartoons while undergoing fMRI brain scans. Although men and women described the cartoons as equally funny, the areas of their brains that lit up as a result differed. Women activated the left prefrontal cortex more than men, indicating that their processing of humor is rooted more heavily in language. This explains why women are more likely to appreciate wordplay over, say, the slapstick antics of a dim-witted water boy. Reiss also found that women showed a stronger response in the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward center, suggesting that they ultimately derived bigger pleasure hits from punch lines.

I wonder where I fit in. I happen to -like- most Adam Sandler films.