Blowing Off Your Friends As Lethal As Obesity, Alcholism

A few months ago a friend and I were supposed to meet for coffee on a Thursday night. I wanted to exercise after work and shower and so I asked to meet at 7:30. She complained that I got off at 5:15 so there was no reason that I couldn't meet her at 6 so that she could meet someone else at 8:30. Annoyed at feeling like a business appointment, I canceled all together.

A few weeks prior to that another friend and I were supposed to meet for lunch at 1pm on a Saturday. When I got there I ordered a drink and texted her to tell her that I was there. She didn't respond and after a half hour I called another friend who lives in the neighborhood and bought him a drink. She texted at 2:30 to tell me that she forgot and that she's sorry (not bothering with an actual phone call). She did this same thing a few weeks later. When I received a mass text from her a few weeks after that, I deleted her number.

I used to visit a third friend about once a week at the cafe where he works and we chat. I told him that instead of us talking while he's on the clock and has to frequently leave to tend to customers, maybe we should grab a beer sometime. He said that he was too busy. Eventually I no longer make the time either.

I work full time, go to the gym an hour a day and am studying for medical school as well as writing when I can, and I make a point to set aside time for my personal relationships and yet it's a rare person indeed who also puts in that sort of effort. I can't say that I understand it. I'm a witty and fun person - ask anyone who's blown me off this week! If I didn't know so many people who also complained of last minute ditches (who 'falls asleep' at 8pm on a Friday night?) I'd be having an identity crisis. Since the war years, the number of close friends that a person reports has dropped from three to one. Why is this? Is it technology - do you 'poke' when you should call?

Those who don't return phone calls or remember birthdays, here's a fair warning: You're probably going to die a lot sooner than those of us who value our friendships. Researchers at Brigham Young University in Utah reviewed 148 medical articles analying 300,000 people and concluded that those with a good social network had a 50% chance of living longer than those with poor personal relationships. "In our study we compared [loneliness] to being twice the risk of being obese, about being twice the risk of not exercising physically when you should and about equivalent to being alcoholic," says lead researcher Timothy Smith. It's hard to pinpoint physiologically why that is, but we know for a fact that people losing a spouse have weaker immune systems, so it stands to reason that friendless people might be experiencing a similiar reaction.

This reminded me of Dan Buettner's recent TED talk where he outlined the three aspects of life in a culture where people consistently lived to see age 100. The first one was a plant based diet, not a vegan diet, per se, but one where most of the nutrients came from plant resources, allowing for occasional servings of meat and cheese. The second aspect was physical activity being buildt into daily life, not bouts of exercise followed by inactivity, but rather lots of walking to get around and only very seldom times of complete inactivity. The final discovery was something that most people probably don't think a lot about; extensive kinship networks. The people he studied had lots of friends, family members and interpersonal relationships. There was less stress because there was less social anxiety and more people around meant that you don't have to do as much work, that people listen to your problems and that people help you when they're needed. They also need you and as we can see from elderly people who live longer when they have pets or jobs , people need to be needed.

Stress literally runs down your organ systems and kills you. And I'm sure that anyone reading this has had the experience of a stress migraine or an incredible stomach ache after a bad day. This weekend, do yourself a favor: call that friend that you've meaning to call for two months, buy your mother lunch and then go out for few drinks with your friends, you just might add some years to your life.

Motherhood Of The Future! Frozen Eggs, Timed Menopause, Robots

There are a lot of ways in which our cultural standards haven't caught up to our scientific prowess. Arguably, the number one area where biology, culture and science are emeshed in a three way of psychological violence and tormenting expectations is motherhood. Our bodies round into baby making machines early in our teenage years and for some bizarre reason our brains aren't fully developed for another ten. Biology wants your not yet declining body to create life, but how respectfully do we look upon teenage mothers? Of course, there are a plethora of very good reasons why teenagers shouldn't be procreating (no.1: they're dumb), so when is a good time to make a baby?

Fertility rates start dropping as early as 25 for some women and by age 44, the chance of getting pregnant without the use of fertility drugs or IVF can be as low as 1%. Recently, a survey showed that many women entering a profession where training tends to take quite a few years (such as medicine) are considering freezing their eggs so that they may use them when they're ready. Still others are choosing to freeze their eggs because they haven't found themselves in the right relationship and want to take the pressure off. Currently in the works is a test that will be able to predict when one enters menopause. This in conjunction with frozen eggs may buy a few more years - but what about life expectancy? It might be cruel to point out, but if you have your children in your forties, what is the chance (especially if they wait as long) that you'll ever meet your grandchildren?

Let's take society's outline of a perfect scenario: you graduate college (all A's!) at age 22, go to grad school (or law school or medical school because life is easy) and get married around say, 28 (allowing for a few years to bang around Europe). The choice then becomes: give up the career that you worked hard for and probably got into debt for or spend your child bearing years working your way into a situation successful enough that no one will call you under ambitious for taking a few months off to give birth, get the stitches removed and then go right back to the grind.

But how possible is it to 'have it all'? Can you have a healthy romantic marriage with someone you adore, a few beautiful happy children and a robust blossoming career? Probably not. And it isn't your fault. American society sets things up so you'll always have an idea in your mind of how much better things could be if you were smarter, stronger or just worked a little harder. However, society and science are progressing. Here are a few ways I predict motherhood will follow suit in the next few decades:

Marriage and Children Will Become Separate Entities: Sixty years ago, you couldn't have sex without being married and today we understand that pitting culture against nature is a very poor idea. The time will come when motherhood and marriage no longer go hand in hand. I don't mean to say that people will stop getting married, although many already have. Rather, some will understand that sometimes they are ready for children before they have found a partnership that fits all of their needs, and some may simply acknowledge that they will never be interested in being with one person for their entire lives. Conversely, sometimes one partner will want a child and the other won't and rather then separating or compromising (and let's face it, compromising on this isn't going to make anyone happy) they will maintain the relationship while seeking out a separate party to have a child with. It'll be as uncommon as open marriages are now, but it won't be totally alien.

The nature of having a partnership for child rearing will also change. Because people will no longer need to be in romantic relationships to procreate, they're be an surging of people who choose to become parents with their best friends, siblings or others whom they're sought out through personal ads. Science indicates that two mothers are better than one but if we'll no longer need to pair up to have children, then your baby's 'other mother' needn't even be a lesbian.

Egg Donation, Surrogacy and Adoption: The number of young women donating their eggs will grow at such a steady pace that it'll one day be akin to a rite of passage. Additionally, allowing for the population of women who want their own biological children but are unwilling or unable to endure a pregnancy, the number of surrogates will also rise. Unwanted children will always be a byproduct of industrial society and this won't change, but as stigmas about adoption melt away, more and more people will choose instead to adopt a child then to go through the process of creating one.

Robots: Even when a woman has a Dr. at the front of her name, she still ends up doing more work then her male counterpart. Ideally, the government will begin to subsidize household workers, nannies and maids, to ensure that everyone has a living wage and maybe the men out there who haven't been helping will wake up and understand that the dishes haven't been doing themselves. Maybe the government will start offering a reasonable maternity leave (six months or more) and not the blessed two months that you'll be lucky to get now if you work for a top of the line company. But let's remember that I'm making predictions and not outlining a fantasy novel. Rather, I see robots, lots of lots of robots with soft plastic hands and sensors that detect when baby's crying is for food, to get changed or just because it wants to be held in the robots temperature controlled arms. Very expensive robots will provide cleaning and nannies services with built in camera eyes so that a mother or father may check in whenever they want. You won't have to pay them and over time (yes, they'll be some casualties), they will be foolproof. 

We'll Take A Que From The Commie Chinese: As more and more resources deplete (i.e. the massive health care crisis), the government will begin to tax people who have more than two children. With the effects of a bad economy and global warming, we will understand that there simply isn't enough for large families. People are already having less children then they once did, but there will one day be tax incentives for those who choose to remain completely child free. The stigma of being without children will gradually drop away until half of women in their childbearing years will not have children.

The Government Will Learn To Respect Mothers: It might seem like a lot's changed in the last paragraph, but hear me out. If the birth rate drops down far enough, this will be the only option left. Any government that see it's population decline will start to get a little scared. This is contingent on woman stopping reproduction now, or at least cutting back significantly. Parenthood will become less of something people do and more of a career choice, complete with lots of government help and financial encouragement.

How to Give Yourself Schizophrenia

If you've ever been curious about how schizophrenics experience the world, trying taking PCP or ketamine. No really. The experience of being on these drugs create symptoms identical to what 1% of the worlds population experience every day while coping with their condition. These symptoms can be as pleasant as euphoria, but more likely, they result in paranoia, hallucinations, suicidal impulses and aggressive behavior. If you're trying to get some insight into schizophrenia, you might want to try it. There is however one type of person who should never experiment with these drugs (or any) and that type is someone who a family history of schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia isn't quite genetic and it isn't quite environmental, but more or less a combination of both. If someone in your immediate family has it, you have about a 10% chance of developing it yourself. Even if you have an identical twin with the disease, the chance rises to only about 50%. Imagine, with almost exact genetic material it's still hit or miss. What's also known is that people who are related to those with schizophrenia are much more likely to be highly creative thinkers. What makes the leap between being 'highly creative' and schizophrenic could be substance abuse.

Take for instance this story of legendary science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. Dick's writing had always had themes of shifting boundaries, universes, times and identities. He's one of my favorite authors because you can't predict which way the narrative is going to turn and once you find out, you never know what hit you. Dick was a well established writer prior to 1974, but in that year he was prescribed sodium thiopental for pain relief following the extraction of a wisdom tooth. The thing is about sodium thiopental is that it isn't exactly a pain reliever. It's used most frequently to medically induce comas as well as for euthanasia. What's most interesting, however, is that it's also used as a truth serum as it's in a barbiturate class that decreases higher cortical functioning and since lying involves more energy, it can get people to talk. Because of this, it's frequently used in psychiatry.

While under the influence, Dick answered his front door and noted a fish symbol on the pendant of the delivery woman who was delivering more analgesic. Dick would never be the same. He began having visions; sometimes they were laser beams, others times they were geometric patterns, and still others were brief scenes of Jesus and Ancient Rome. The visions grew longer and more frequent and eventually Dick began to lead a double life, one as himself and the other as 'Thomas', a Christian persecuted by ancient Romans in the first century AD. You can read all about his experience in his semi autobiographical novel, Valis, but prepare to be unnerved.

Even a drug as seemingly benign as marijuana has been shown to worsen schizophrenic symptoms within a few hours. While marijuana users experience an initial and pleasant high, their hallucinations are forever made worse. People who are already at risk for mental illnesses have been known to be pushed over the edge by marijuana abuse, such as going from schizoaffective disorder to full blown schizophrenia. According to research conducted by The Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands, schizophrenics are also far more sensitive to the positive and negative aspects of the drug. These findings might explain why schizophrenics who are marijuana users require more hospitalization, respond less well to medication and have more trouble with memory tests.

Around 50% of people with schizophrenia abuse alcohol, marijuana or cocaine, thereby making their symptoms all the worse. Abstainers however get along far better than users and in fact, behave no more violently than the rest of the population. I don't think we need tougher drug laws and I would never say that drugs lead one down the path of damnation, but we should recognize that just as people with a family history of diabetes should make an extra effort to watch what they eat and people who are pale should limit their time in the sun, people with a family history of psychosis should avoid engaging in behaviors that alter their minds irreparably. Consciousness expansion is desirable for those of us who were born with brains that more or less function normally, but for those who already have a hard time recognizing fact from fiction, this can alter ones life permanently and for the worse. Taking PCP might be a powerful and worthwhile experience, but living that way forever most certainly isn't.

Start Exercising Today: Obesity and Diabetes Linked to Brain Diseases

Heart disease, which is largely preventable, will account for 26% of American deaths this year, making it the number one killer in the country. Compare this to all combined forms of cancer which will account for around 23% of deaths. While we don't know exactly what causes cancer, we do understand that eating low fat and high fiber natural foods and having an active life style all but eliminate the risk for heart disease. What is seldom talked about, however, is how being overweight and obese not only destroys your body, but it's becoming increasingly clear that it also affects how well your mind works. Here are just a few recent examples:

Diabetes and Schizophrenia: In March of 2009 researchers at the Medical College of Georgia discovered that people who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia (regardless of whether they are being medicated or not) are at an increased risk for type 2 (lifestyle choices) diabetes. They found that in a group of people who were newly diagnosed with schizophrenia or a related psychotic disorder with no other known risk factors, 16% had either diabetes or an abnormal rate of glucose metabolism or blood sugar. In the general American population, only 7.8% have diabetes.

Obesity and Alzheimer's: In May of this year, researchers at Boston University School of Medicine, lead by Sudha Seshadri found that middle aged people with an excess of abdominal fat may be at an increased risk for dementia. Notice in the picture below how the 250 lb person has yellow spots in their brain (fat) and also how much more black area (liquid erosion) they have, as well as how much smaller the overall brain is. Once the body has fat packed into all other areas, excess fat starts to develop around and lean against the brain. Having so much extra weight on the brain put you at risk for burst blood vessels, also known as strokes. The researchers measured BMI, hip to waist ratio, waist circumference and abdominal fat. They then measured both brain volume and function. The correlation was stronger in older participants then younger participants which means that if you are overweight and young, you still have time to work off those pounds and save your brain.

Dopamine and Insulin: Scientists don't need to tell you that when people experience a drop in blood sugar, they get mean. It stands to reason that this is an evolutionary response triggered by your body being afraid it's dying and therefore becoming less compassionate and more selfish. The complex reasoning behind this, found by Dr. Aurelio Galli at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, is that insulin, the hormone that regulates glucose metabolism (blood sugar) in the body, also regulates the brain's supply of dopamine. Dopamine as far as your brain is concerned is the nectar of the gods. It regulates such varied and critical factors as motor activity, pleasure, sociability, and pain relief. Dopamine signaling problems have been associated with Parkinson's disease, depression, schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).


We live in a society that sets us up to ruin our bodies and therefore erode our minds. Fast food industries have far too much of a hand in food production and because of that America is in an incredible obesity crisis that drain us not only of ourselves but also taxes the health care system in such detrimental ways that it's impossible to afford to pay for everyone. If you don't already work out on a regular basis, start today. You'll not only live to meet your grandchildren, but you'll even remember their names.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090330165808.htm
http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/diabetes-statistics
http://www.healthcentral.com/alzheimers/news-515419-98.html 
http://www.betterhealthresearch.com/news/overweight-patients-more-likely-to-develop-dementia-2-19793265/

Your Mind is Showing: Analysis of Writing Predicts Alzheimer's

It’s debatable whether your can spot mental illness from your friend’s depressing Live Journal posts or your girlfriend’s hot and cold text messages, but Ian Lancashire, an English Professor at the University of Toronto believes that it may be possible to detect Alzheimer’s by analyzing the way in which a person’s writing changes over time. He does this by making concordances or alphabetical lists of all the words used and the contexts in which they appear in a body of work. He’s studied many of the great English writers, Shakespeare, Milton (who never used the word ‘because’), and Chaucer, but in the mid 90’s, he decided to turn his attention to a less esteemed writer, but certainly a no less prolific one – Agatha Christie.

Lancashire amassed 16 of Christie's novels, written over a more than fifty year span and fed the text into a computer program. The program computed the numbers of words she used as well as the frequency in which they appeared. When looking at the data for her 73rd novel (written when she was 81 years old), Lancashire made an interesting discovery. Her use of nonspecific words, such as ‘thing,’ ‘anything’, ‘something’, and ‘nothing,’ spiked. At the same time, her overall vocabulary dropped by 20%. One fifth of her original vocabulary was simply no longer in use. After two years of running the data by statisticians, linguists and pathologists, Lancashire concluded that the data supported the view that by the writing of her 73rd novel, Christie had developed Alzheimer’s.

It’s a hard theory to test because Christie was never officially diagnosed. In fact, don’t writing styles change over time? Isn’t it possible that her editors and publisher wanted a simpler more accessible text to attract a younger demographic? We’ll never actually know, but there is a lot of good evidence to support the Alzheimer’s view. Christie often complained of an inability to concentrate in her later years, and friends reported that she would have fits of anger (an almost telltale sign of the disease) and that she sometimes wouldn’t make sense in conversation.

This isn’t the first time that linguistic research has been used to speculate about Alzheimer’s. In 2004 Peter Garrard, a cognitive scientist at University College London, found similar changes in the last book by British author Iris Murdoch. Shortly before his study was published, Murdoch was diagnosed.

In the “Nun Study” of 1990, David Snowdon of the University of Minnesota looked at the biographies of 678 nuns, all over the age of 75 that were written upon entering the order, when they were, on average, age 22. His team evaluated the essays based on grammatical complexity and idea density – the average number of discrete ideas contained in every 10 written words. What he found was that sisters who scored poorly on those two measures were much more likely to develop Alzheimer’s. Sisters within the lower third of the sample with respect to idea density were 60 times more likely to develop the disease than a sister in the upper third. In fact, using the essays, the researchers could predict with 92% accuracy whether the brain of a particular sister, investigated after her death, had been damaged by Alzheimer’s. What this is suggesting is that a writing taken in your early twenties may be able to predict what could happen to you fifty years later. But we don’t know exactly how. Do sentences with simpler ideas mean that a person, even in their early 20’s already has a less healthy brain than someone who uses rich sentences? Or does this mean that people who create idea dense sentences are stronger readers and writers and that this is what keeps the brain fit and healthy?

The cruel predicament that those who have Alzheimer’s are in is that as the brain deteriorates, one is left with just enough wherewithal to understand that something is being lost. It may sound silly, but I just turned 25 last month, and I seem to remember in earlier years having a much richer vocabulary, and I even remember typing nonstop for pages and never once making a mistake, where as now when I type this, I don’t go so much as a paragraph without struggling to find a more descriptive word, or going back to fix something underlined in orange. As a young, healthy woman, I can only begin to imagine the hell someone must go through when their brain is actually in physical decay.

In Christie’s 73rd novel, Elephants Can Remember the main character is a female novelist who is struggling with memory loss as she tries to help Hercule Poirot solve a long forgotten crime. Perhaps Christie needed to pen it to come to terms with what was happening in her internal world. When Lancashire read the book, he couldn’t help but see the tragic irony of the tale and imagine Christie fighting the terrain of her own mind. Of her continuing to write, he says, it “struck me as heroic."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127211884

As Your Brain Lays Dying

 It isn’t hard to find anecdotal accounts of Near Death Experiences (NDE). We can never know how many people imagine it, dream it or simply fake it, but what we do know is that something peculiar is happening in the brain upon its death.

Dr. Lakhmir Chawla of George Washington University used electroencephalograph (EEG), a device that measures brain activity, to monitor seven terminally ill patients. He did this to make sure that his patients, suffering from conditions such as cancer and heart failure were sedated enough to be out of pain. What he found, however was that moments before death, the patients experienced a burst in brainwave activity lasting from 30 seconds to three minutes, and this surge traveled slowly from one end of the brain to the other. As it turns out, upon death, a brain doesn’t simply stop, but rather it releases all of its energy in a cascade as it runs out of oxygen. After the surge runs its course, the patient is pronounced dead.

Doctors believe that this unusual surge of energy making its way through the brain as it dies, could account for the vivid and intense experiences reported by those who are literally brought back from the dead. Whether it is a bright light, a religious experience or the unshakable feeling of floating above ones body, a dying brain, releasing all of its energy would certainly account for some highly usual experiences.

This research, published in The Journal of Palliative Medicine is thought to be the first to suggest that Near Death Experiences have a particular physiological cause. Dr. Chawla, however, isn’t attempting to use his findings to disprove the idea of life after death, “Our findings do not really tell us anything about whether there is an afterlife or not. Even if these near death experiences turn out to be a purely biochemical event, there could still be a God.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7785944/A-cascade-of-brain-activity-as-people-die-could-explain-near-death-experiences.html

Brains of Schizophrenics and Artists Work Similarly

 Schizophrenia may be the most fascinating of all the mental diseases in that it’s the quintessential ‘bad’ one. Schizophrenics experience the inability to identify their own inner voice and therefore imagine that the voice inside their minds is coming from someone else. Most of the time, they draw the same conclusions that anyone would, that they’re being spoken to by demons, aliens, the government or God. In addition to this, they have unstable mood swings, are quick to anger and suffer delusions. Even being heavily medicated, many end up institutionalized, impoverished and living in the streets. By all accounts, schizophrenia is a terrible condition, but we now know that at least part of what is happening in the schizophrenic mind is also what is happening in the minds of highly creative people.

Associate professor Fredrik Ullen of the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institute looked at brain scans taken of people with schizophrenia and compared them to people who did exceptionally well on a test of divergent (creative) thought. He found that both groups had a lower than expected density of D2 receptors. In short, “Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus,” said Professor Ullen. He believes it’s this flow of uncensored information that ignites the creative spark. In some this could lead to painting an ethereal scene of another world, in schizophrenics this ability is taken to the extreme and they’re not able to get away from their own disturbing thoughts.

But how much value can we place on this finding? By itself, I don’t think this is very surprising, but taken with the fact that when one identical twin has schizophrenia, the other identical twin has only a 50% chance of developing it, I find this very compelling. This means that even when someone has the genetic make – up to develop schizophrenia, it can go either way. Ullen’s findings support this. When people have a history of mental illness in their families, be it bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, they’re more likely to be creative, meaning that the same genes that control mental illness may control creativity, but perhaps the eternal environment is what pushes people to become either artistic or insane. While most can’t keep jobs and many will end up homeless, some schizophrenics, the mathematician John Nash, the artist Louis Wain (whose descent is illustrated by his changing artistic style below), or the writers Jack Kerouac, John Kennedy Toole or (I imagine) Philip K Dick had actually managed to use that creative streak to tap into an internal world that most of us simply don’t have. We understand that schizophrenic symptoms are exacerbated by drugs and alcohol, but what we don’t understand is how many people per year make the leap between being highly creative and becoming schizophrenic because of the abuse of these.

It’s about time we start recognizing the inherent value in what we deem as mental illness. Society is tailor made to one specific type of person and for this reason; people with minds that work differently are often pushed to the periphery and left to lead a terrible existence. The most brilliant thinker of our times could be the homeless person that you’ve passed over a hundred times on your way to work who always seems to be talking to someone you can’t see. As long as we’re quick to stigmatize people with mental disorders (or perhaps simply just mental variations) we’ll never truly understand all the different ways that the human mind works and the beauty that can come from it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/10154775.stm

Be Happy. Eat Dirt.

If you’ve ever wondered why gardeners seem to be so laid back and friendly, scientists at Sage College in Troy, NY just might have your answer. It isn’t just the vitamin D in the sunshine or the endorphins through physical exertion; it might simply be the dirt.

Research done by Dorothy Matthews and Susan Jenks suggest that Mycobacterium Vaccae, a common bacteria that people breathe and ingest when they’re around soil may not only decrease anxiety but may also increase intelligence as well as the ability to learn.

Matthews and Jenks injected dead strains of the bacteria into mice, spurring neurons to greatly increase their output of serotonin. The immediate effect of this output(sort of like a subtle version of taking Ecstasy) was that the mice experienced decreased anxiety levels. Because serotonin plays a role in learning, Matthews and Jenks wondered what would happened if the mice were injected and then allowed to run a maze.
To test this, Matthews and Jenks had two groups of mice; the experimental group was fed live strains of the bacteria while the control group was fed a normal diet. Both groups were tested in a maze and the results were impressive. The injected mice navigated the maze twice as fast as the control mice and with much less demonstrated anxiety.

The mice were retested twice after the bacterium was removed from their diet. Immediately afterward, they weren’t quite as adept, but still got through the maze much faster than the control group. Three weeks later, the mice were a little faster, but not enough to be significantly interesting. What this could mean is that even though the bacteria were out of their systems, they still retained the benefits of having been temporarily ‘smarter’. What this could mean for humans, is that you should get outside as often and for as long as possible. Or cut out the middle man and simply sprinkle dirt over your next meal.

In another study, conducted by researchers at the University of Bristol and University College London, writing for Neuroscience in 2007, researchers found the bacteria to have an antidepressant effect on the mive. This bacterium has also been linked to the treatment of leprosy, tuberculosis and Raynaud’s disease.
In our neat freak, clean obsessed culture, it's good to see an acknowledgement that bacteria aren't bad, and in fact can help you lead a better life.

www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/67146.php
www.physorg.com/news193928997.html

Feeling Magnetic: Brain Imaging at Northwestern

When I walk into the Olson Pavilion on the Northwestern University campus on a sunny but cold Sunday afternoon, one thought goes through my mind, ‘This is serious.’ The campus is large and beautiful and there are guards on every floor and people in lab coats meandering. It gives you that feeling you had when you were a little kid and went to an older relative’s house and spent the whole time feeling anxious that you were going to break something. I have however, followed all the instructions. I’m not wearing any jewelry or glasses, my hair is completely dry and my eyelashes are devoid of the mascara whose microscopic pieces of metal could throw off MRI results.

MRI is magnetic resonance imaging and it’s quite basically a giant and incredibly loud magnet. What MRI does is takes internal pictures of your body by aligning the hydrogen atoms in the water in the body to provide a contrast between tissues. This means that tumors, broken bones or other abnormalities can be detected. What it also means is that by setting the MRI for a brain scan you can study how the brain is responding to certain stimuli. Of course, research like this is invaluable. Being able to see what part of the brain is most responsive to word problems over math problems (to give a simple example) could be a step towards understanding how to communicate with people who’ve had brain injuries to these parts. I’m been considering becoming a MRI technician myself, and because I love all things brain, I was especially eager to participate in this study.

When I make it down to the MRI area, I’m asked to sit in a medium sized room and fill out a questionnaire. It asks me such varied questions as “Do you have a pacemaker?” to “Have you ever had an accident where metallic flecks have penetrated your eyes?” I stumble over the “Do you have tattoos or piercings?” question and my researcher Rachna gives me the day’s fun fact in that war era tattoos may have a metallic component. I am then asked to work on a series of syllogisms on a laptop. These are pretty basic philosophy of logic questions:

All animals are mortal.
All humans are animals.
John is a human.
John is mortal.

But instead of asking anything that could distract you into deep thought, they use made up words like ‘flobs’ and ‘scafs’ and therefore everything has a Dr. Seuss feel to it. When the statement is true, I’m to press the left button and when it’s false, I’m to press the right one. In addition, there are occasionally X’s on the screen. When those are blue, I press the left button, but when they’re any other color, I leave it alone. Mixed in with these questions, I am shown pictures of what look like one letter, repeated of sometimes Thai, sometimes Hebrew and sometimes Japanese, descending, ascending or going straight across. This appears and then a moment later another image appears and if I think that they went in the same direction, I press the left button, but if not, the right. There are similar questions where I am shown one group of dots, it disappears and then another and I am to figure out which image had more dots. All these questions by themselves are very easy, but when you switch back and forth, it gets quite challenging, not knowing what to expect. After I ask (for the second time) if my dental crowns are MRI safe (they are), I am given a pair of scrubs to change into and asked to wait while the last person is finishing up.

I’m told that I’m more than welcome to use the computer but I don’t because I’m worried that it’ll be another layer of the study and that I’ll be barred from future studies because of some inane Facebook activity. I also notice a camera in the corner of the wall and after giving in a smile and a wink I study the room. It’s comfortable and cozy and something about it feels strangely familiar but it isn’t until I notice the gaily colorful carpet that I realize that this room has the exact same Ikea furniture as my own front room, albeit in leather instead of fabric.

After about twenty minutes of waiting, Rachna comes in and asks me to follow her to the MRI room. So, in scrubs, without the comfort of my bra, engagement ring or shoes, I follow her. The MRI technician is a tall Eastern European man with thinning hair and fashionable glasses. He has an assistant who might be Latino but who doesn’t say anything. The sociologist in me begins to wonder how many people in the sciences, in universities in the United States are foreign born and what this might mean for the American future.
The MRI room is spacious with comfortable lighting, but I begin to have second thoughts when I am asked to lay down on the bed that will eventually slide me into the magnet. My legs are on a sort of pillow that keeps them elevated and my head is on a flatter pillow and smaller pieces of something that looks like Styrofoam are packed around my neck so that I can’t move. My heart starts pounding and my hands start sweating as soon as I hear the platform rise and begin to slide me into the giant magnet. I’m given a rubber ball that I am to squeeze in case of an emergency and a remote with two buttons to answer more questions. My mother had to take an MRI years ago and hated it, but my best friend had to take one recently and loved it because it made her feel like an astronaut. I, unfortunately take after my mother.

Even with headphones on that are used to communicate with the researcher, the sound that the MRI emits is fast, high pitched and furious and makes me think of a bomb about to explode. With the use of a few mirrors, I can see the laptop of the researcher behind me while I’m in the machine. The point of this is to see what my brain is doing when I’m answering these types of questions, but I can’t help but think that I’m skewing the results. For one, I’m terrified. I’ve never thought of myself as claustrophobia before, but being in this small machine with my head packed in so tightly, I can’t help but think of the worst. If I were to vomit, I would choke on it, being unable to move my head. If I were to sneeze, I would undoubtedly smack my face into the surface of glass, breaking my nose. I also can’t help but to think that if I were to have a seizure right now (for the first time ever in my life) I would throw my head back into and against the restraints, thus breaking my neck and either killing or crippling myself. They probably even know this and that exact scenario was in the form I signed and I have thus waived all my legal rights. Even the idea that there might be a fire and I’d be stuck in here crosses my mind. In short, if they were looking for a picture of how my minds energy was focused when it was answering syllogisms, what they got was probably more about how my brain looked under stress and packed with fear.

Later on, after I’ve calmed down and my arm has fallen asleep, they are probably receiving a picture of what my brain looks like when it’s bored. I try to focus all of my energy on the tests, but having just completed them on the laptop beforehand, I know my way around them enough to let my mind wander. I think of a movie where a woman gets left at the altar, I think of different scenes from different TV shows. I wonder what people at work would think if they knew that I spent Super Bowl Sunday in a Neuroscience lab.

I make it through about 90% of the test, retaining dignity and sanity when in the last section of syllogisms which are also spoken aloud, the tape begins to play the wrong number, inserting completely different names and the entire effect is disorienting. There is already a steady vibration that goes along with MRI, so this; in combination with seeing one name and hearing another begins to make me feel very sick. When the researchers voice comes through the headphones and tells me that it’s just two more tests, I no longer care about getting them right or wrong, or even trying to concentrate so that the researchers get the information that they need, I just want so badly to get out of the machine.

Recently I have decided that I want to seek a career in something medical, although I don’t know what yet. I’ve been considering MRI technologies because of my fascination with brains, and I had intended to attempt to stay a little longer to ask some questions, or if possible (and I was really, really had my heart set on this) even have a print out of my brain scan. By the time I get out of the machine, however, I feel so awful that I head straight to the changing room, putting my head in my hands for several minutes before I’m well enough to change back into my clothes. My sympathy goes out to people who actually have to take MRI’s, whose ability to sit in that machine is literally a matter of life and death. Interestingly, my uncomfortable experience doesn’t sour me on the idea of being an MRI technician, but somehow makes it more reasonable. I like the idea of looking into a patient’s frightened face and telling them that I know how much this sucks, but that everything is going to be OK.

Drunk For Science: Caffeine & Alcohol at UIC

I was checking Facebook when I noticed my friend Paul’s status update. It read something like: “We need participants, get drunk for science!” Well, Paul’s a nice guy and I’d do anything for science, so I responded. 

I’m never chosen for those things anyway.
I have no interesting medical abnormalities, don’t smoke or abuse any substances and worse yet I’m biracial so I can’t even fit in one chart. 

The UIC Alcohol and Caffeine Research lab responded wanting more information and much to my surprise, three emails later, we made a science date for that upcoming Saturday morning. Caffeine enriched alcoholic beverages (vodka and Red Bull, Jack and Coke) aren’t really anything new but some research suggests that combining the two substances might lead to impaired judgment and probably makes it a whole lot harder for someone whose had too much liquor to sleep it off. There are certain bans on such drinks in some areas, but more research is needed to determine whether these beverages have any more of a detrimental effect than liquor alone. 

Later that day, I told my friend Rod about the conditions of the study. I was not to drink any alcohol within 24 hrs of the study. I was not to eat within 4 hours of the study. I was not to have caffeine within two hours of the study.
Rod: “You can’t eat and then they’re going to pump you full of caffeine and alcohol?”
Me: “Yep.”
Rod: “You’re going to puke.”
Me: “I am absolutely going to puke...Everywhere.”

The day of the study, I navigated the bizarrely structured building until I found the room where a friendly, yet serious young man sat waiting for me. He asked some preliminary questions and then asked me if I was comfortable taking a pregnancy test. Later in the bathroom, as I filled the Dixie cup, I thought how this would probably be one of the more interesting ways to find out that type of thing (apparently, it happened earlier this study). Establishing that I wasn’t pregnant, he took my height and weight and after telling me to blow really hard and then smirking to himself, I took a breathalyzer which yielded a curious .03, although my last drink had been a whole four days prior. Wikipedia tells me that the effects of having this BAC are mild euphoria, a sense of well – being, relaxation, joyous feelings, talkativeness and decreased inhibition, with impaired alertness, judgment, coordination and concentration. Mind you, this is how I came in.

Later I waited for another researcher in a small oddly shaped room on a leather chair, staring at three full bottles of vodka, sitting next to two bottles of cranberry juice. If this was any indication of how the study was going to go, I wasn’t going to make it to the grocery store that day. Ten minutes later, Dave, tall and precise, dressed in a white lab coat introduced himself and asked a few more questions. I then took a computer test that mostly asked questions attempting to ascertain my feelings, overall emotional state and how risky I became while intoxicated, or even if my judgment was impaired while feeling particularly happy. Afterwards, I played a computer game where every time I clicked on a balloon, I got one penny and I could keep clicking it until it exploded, but once it exploded (some could only be clicked a few times, others hundreds of times), I wouldn’t get anything and instead would have to move on to another balloon. However, there was a button that put money into the permanent bank and once I pressed that I got the money, but had to move on to a different balloon. There was 30 balloons total. Basically, risky behavior yields better results, but behavior that was too risky wouldn’t yield much. For this, I got a meager $5.43. 

The next game featured X’s and O’s falling down the screen and I had to move the mouse to grab X’s while avoiding O’s. Sometimes I’d have absolute control and other times I would feel like the mouse was fighting me. At the end of it, I’d have to rate how well I thought I did and how much control I felt I had. After these two computer games, Dave came back and opened the vodka. 

By some formula, known only to him, Dave calculated the amount of 100 proof (50% alcohol) vodka I was going to get, as well as how much cranberry juice would be mixed with it. He filled a 36 oz. pitcher with the solution and told me I’d be drinking one 12oz. drink every ten minutes for the next half hour. While this was happening, I would be watching The Fox and The Hound, to gently lower me into intoxication. So I sat there slugging my cocktail which tasted a lot like rubbing alcohol and watching the improbable interspecies relationship unfold.

I’d thought that I was supposed to get buzzed enough (or caffeinated and buzzed enough) to impact my decision making abilities, but after finishing the last drink, I was absolutely tanked. All of a sudden, everything was pretty damn funny and I was pretty damn relaxed. I sat there laughing to myself and watching the cartoon and altogether having a blast when Dave came in and told me it was time to switch off the movie. Trying to suppress the smirk that just wouldn’t go away I turned towards the late 1970’s model BAC reader and blew as hard as I could for ten seconds. The machine buzzed. 

That’s when Dave started to swear. A lot of ‘holy shit!’ and confused noises, followed by him leaving the room and making a phone call. I looked around, giggling and confused and straining to hear his conversation. A few minutes later, Dave came back. 

He explained that something was amiss. The study was only supposed to bring my BAC to .08, but interestingly, mine had skyrocketed to .11. Wikipedia tells me that this BAC corresponds with over expression, emotional swings, feeling angry, sad or boisterous, with impairments of reaction time, gross motor control, and staggering and slurred speech. I felt pretty good to be honest. I texted some friends with suggestions for what we ought to do that weekend, then I didn’t remember having texted them when they texted back. I called my fiancé and he had a damn hardy guffaw at my inability to stabilize my voice or pronunciation. During the second round of video games, I kicked ass on the balloon game, making around $10. After the videogame session, the lab was done, but waiting until my BAC dropped enough to head home alone would take another four hours which we filled with YouTube videos, political discussion and The Office Christmas Special. I was out by early evening which was good because as it turns out, I didn’t get the sample with caffeine.