What's New in Neurofeedback

• Bad Memories Stick Better Than Good
• Breakthrough drug for schizophrenia
• Study Probes Roots of Fearful Memories

  All links at: news.yahoo.com/fc/Science/Brain_Research

In adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated. It is for the science of the future to change, if possible, this harsh decree. --Santiago Ramon y Cajal, 1928, founder of modern neuroanatomy

Our brain is the most adaptable structure in nature, child or adult. New connections are created and new neurons born every moment of life (Lledo et al., 2006; Eriksson et al., 1998). There is still some question as to the extent of neurogenesis in the adult brain (Sohur et al, 2006), but the corpus callosum only gets better with age: it continues to myelinate in the frontal regions until age 70 and beyond (Aboitiz et al., 1996). Synaptogenesis, neurogenesis, and myelination are all life-long, as is learning. In fact learning and synaptogenesis are nearly psychobiological synonyms.

Our modern sense of mind emerged in a select few 2,500 years ago and it took the better part of two millenia before most people joined this experiment in self-government and self-understanding. One of the first controversies surrounding the concept of mind was its surroundings -- where was it? Was it in the chest? the arms? the eyes? the head? the genitals? The first mention we have of the brain in an ancient Egyptian papyrus 2000 BCE speaks nothing about mental faculties. In fact the brain was considered useless in the afterlife; Egyptians hooked and pulled it out through a nostril and tossed it aside during mummification (whereas viscera were preserved in jars and the heart was left intact within the body). It would take the Greeks 700 miles to the north, fifteen hundred years later, to begin the discussion about what function the brain might serve.

Aristotle placed the mind in the chest and considered our brain to be a radiator, cooling the heart. His teacher Plato and Hippocrates from Socrates' generation placed their minds in head, a more modern view, cerebrocentric, but nothing is ever neatly decided when it comes to self-understanding. The heart/head controversy remains with us to this day, although in a more diluted form. Mind may be largly situated in the brain but how can we discard the contributions of body? Body must be part mind as it is our source of sensory information as well as the end point of interaction with the environment. (Ironically, Aristotle's cardiocentric view held sway over the academic world until the 19th century when enough courage and political will collectively began to overturn his views of nature.)

Returning to the formative years of neuroscience, little was known about brain structure during the Roman empire. Galen, a renown 2nd century physician, ignited a revolution in medicine with his dissection of animals and evaluation of wounded gladiators, but he passed off knowledge of nonhuman neuroanatomy as human, causing some confusion for later generations. To his credit he clearly described brain divisions but he considered the empty spaces more relevant to function than brain tissue. By focusing on the brain vesicles, spinal fluid reservoirs within the head, and assigning executive, sensory, and memory function to this liquidy realm, he propelled the field forward while simultaneously pushing it backwards.

In the mid 16th century Andreas Vesalius realized Galen's description of neuroanatomy was based on nonhuman primates -- which made sense given Roman prohibitions against human dissection -- and correctly described some of the overlooked peculiarities of human neuroanatomy. As it often happens in science, moving us closer to truth enrages those who considered themselves guardians of the truth, and his publications turned his mentor and the older generation of physicians against him.

In the 17th century Rene Descartes centralized the correspondence between mind and body which for him was soul-to-body. There are a handful of unique, unduplicated structures in our brain, those structures which lay in the center between or below the hemispheres, and he chose perhaps the most modular central structure, the pineal gland, a producer of melatonin. Others who followed suggested the corpus callosum, the fibers connecting cerebral cortices, as the seat of reason or soul. This search for locality, where soul meets body, evolved into our theory of cerebral localization, that specific brain tissue is dedicated to specific mental operations.

Cerebral localization moved to the forefront of brain science two centuries later when Franz Gall's childhood observations (1758-1828) ignited a firestorm of interest and controversy into brain function. During this school years Franz had been often bested verbally by a student with bulging eyes and Gall decided that the boy's overdeveloped sense of language was due to this bulge, due to additional brain tissue beneath the boy's eyes. He went on to speculate as an adult that the shape of a skull revealed the quality or amount of mind underneath. He identified 27 personality features which he associated from skull topography. Phrenology, as it came to be called, became the rage in Europe, in both senses of the word. It grew to be extremely popular with laypeople, a common practice at parties, and it enraged medical professionals. Today we live in a new age of phrenology, for good or bad, with the only real change being greater abstraction of the behaviors we attempt to map to brain areas. Gall linked brain areas to large general habits, such as veneration, criminality, and spirituality, while modern neuroscientists have whittled behaviors down to smaller brain habits, such as assigning sounds to written words and other mental operations. Gall was also early in associating frontal lobe injury to loss of language, which is the issue that propelled (functional) neurology for more than a century (1850-1981).

Gall's detractors were many. In the early 19th century Pierre Flourens set up one of the first neuroscience labs to discredit Gall's mind-brain equivalence. Ironically, Flourens would in the end validate Gall' paradigm, although he never recognized this. Flourens argued that all functions are everywhere in the brain, based on religious conceptions, and he cut away brain areas of small birds and mammals to prove his point. He proved the opposite. When he removed the cerebrum of pigeons or rabbits, perceptions, motor function, and judgment were abolished; removal of the cerebellum affected equilibrium and motor coordination; destruction of the brain stem caused death.

"The function of the cerebral lobes is to will, to judge, to remember, to see, to hear, or - in a word - to feel. [They] wish and feel; that is their proper action. The suppression of these lobes weakens the activity of the entire nervous system." (Flourens, translated, 1824)

Flourens' rigorous experimentation established functional localization, though not in line with those higher functions Gall was concerned with. A few years later Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1796-1881) defended Gall in debates before French Medical Academy. The question or thesis of cerebral localization was very important, polarizing scientific institutions throughout Europe, as this question was another step in our endless struggle to contest the divinity of humankind. The mind may possess many faculties but the brain must be unitary to receive the soul, according to prominent thinkers of the day. Cerebral holism, as it was called, was losing the day, until neurologist John Hughlings Jackson considered localization too narrow a concept to explain brain-mind correspondence and suggested that the central nervous system might better be considered as a series of interactive hierarchies, which is a reasonable medium of localization and holism.

"To locate the damage which destroys speech and to localise speech [itself] are two different things." (Jackson, 1864)

Or as British physician Henry Head more clearly stated the idea, "The processes which underlie an act of speech run through the nervous system like a prairie fire from bush to bush; remove all inflammable material at any one point and the fire stops. So, when a break occurs in the functional chain, orderly speech becomes impossible, because the basic physiological processes which subserve it have been disturbed... The site of such a breach of continuity is not a 'center for speech', but solely a place where it can be interrupted or changed." (Head, 1926).

The contest between holism and localization of cerebral function continues to this day, reformulated into networks versus modules. Where is the mind? Where is consciousness? Is self-awareness the function of a single brain area or is it an emergent network property?

Both, seems to be a common answer.

-DK

News & Reviews NEW BOOKS

The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome
by Tony Attwood
From "intersensory marriages" to day-to-day functioning of AS. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1843104954/eegspectrum

Human Brain and Spinal Cord
by Lennart Heimer
Clinical cases and functional neuroanatomy. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387942270/eegspectrum

How to Be an Adult in Relationships
by David Richo
Guide to healthier love relationships --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1570628122/eegspectrum

Finding Out About Asperger's Syndrome, High-Functioning Autism and PDD
by Gunilla Gerland
Layperson resource and guide to AS. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1853028401/eegspectrum

Misdiagnosis And Dual Diagnoses Of Gifted Children And Adults
by James T. Webb
Discussion of dual diagnoses and giftedness --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0910707642/eegspectrum

Principles of Cognitive Neurology
by M.-Marsel Mesulam
Essential text to important field of study --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195134753/eegspectrum

Efficiency of prefrontal cortex during working memory in ADHD : Evidence of cognitive and behavioral deficits associated with ADHD are due to low efficiency of prefrontal cortex. www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=1788557

Quantitative EEG indices of sub-acute ischaemic stroke : QEEG measures are helpful for management of stroke patients. www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17889600

Left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex imbalance in depression : Left DLPFC hypoactivity is associated with negative emotional judgment and right DLPFC hyperactivity with attentional modulation. www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17888408

Revised brain symmetry index. : QEEG indexes interhemispheric asymmetry and diffuse changes better than clinical EEG. www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17888719

Bipolar disorder preceded by substance abuse : Bipolar disorder preceded by substance misuse is likely a milder subtype. www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17886170

Attention problems during childhood predict poor teen executive function : Attention problems reflect impaired response inhibition. www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17894607

Persistent white matter alteration after early childhood TBI : White matter integrity remains abnormal after childhood moderate TBI, notably in genu of corpus callosum and intrahemispheric pathways. www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17905895

Functional neuroimaging of anxiety : PTSD involves emotional dysregulation beyond exaggerated fear response. www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17898336

Does meditation enhance cognition and brain longevity? : Meditation practices may be neuroprotective, although evidence is spotty. www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17905931

Cocaine effect on response to novel objects in familiar environments. : Cocaine diminishes investigation drive of novel stimuli in animal research. www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17897705

My father married 394 women during his lifetime. My mother was first, followed by hundreds he married off to other men. My father was a United Methodist minister. He passed away on Christmas Eve, 2000, gone but not forgotten. I'm fortunate to possess copies of most of his written word, along with a sprinkling of audio and video tapes including my wedding video (one of those women he married off was my wife). His extensive correspondence is scattered to the winds, but I have his doctoral dissertation and every sermon he wrote, 160 titles across 45 years (1955-2000), 1,000 pages of typewritten hand-corrected copy. A few years ago I assembled his sermons into a chronological five-volume set which I gave out as Christmas presents to immediate family. Each volume ran about 200 pages and sported a black-and-white photo of my father at the time. Volume 1 contained sermons written between 1955 and 57, 2: 1958-59, 3: 1960-62, 4: 1963-65, and 5: 1966-2000. His favorite sermon, given 82 times over his career, was "Life is too short to be little." (That I know the exact number speaks to my father's organizational skills, not mine.) This was his "Guest Pastor" sermon, his greatest hit, which he gave often after they kicked him upstairs in the 1980s to be District Superintendent of the United Methodist Church of Western Mass. and Eastern Connecticut.

Below is an excerpt from "Life is too short to be little," a sermon which counsels us in a way that is appropriate to this newsletter (psychological, spiritual). I cut the sermon short, but it makes the point, and you may notice a family resemblance in his writing style.

Life is too short to be little - by B.F. Kaiser, December 3, 1961

Benjamin Disraeli was one of the greatest men of the 19th century. At one time he was prime minister of England and during the last half of his life he enjoyed a great deal of fame as an author. He was also a man who possessed a great deal of practical wisdom, which today we would call "common sense." In fact he once made a statement which is one of the profoundest guides for living that has ever been uttered: "Life is too short to be little."

The great French novelist Andre Maurois once commented on this statement: "These words have helped me through many a painful experience: often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Here we are on this earth, with only a few more decades to live, and yet we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that in a year's time will be forgotten by us and by everybody. Therefore, let us devote our lives to worthwhile actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections, and enduring undertakings. For life is too short to be little."

Now I doubt if any of you would try to refute the truth of Disraeli's statement that "life is too short to be little." But while we accept it as theoretically true, we often deny it in our everyday lives, and as a result we tend to lead lives that are emotionally and spiritually stunted when we could be living on a much higher plane.

And yet life is too short to be little. For one thing it is too short to be little in our attitudes toward each other. This is particularly true so far as our feelings of resentment are concerned. All of us need to have engraved on our hearts the wise words of Confucius, who lived six centuries before Christ, "To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it."

Several years ago I was serving a parish in the northeastern part of Massachusetts. It was a mill town and the church sat on a hill which looked out on Mill Street. One day I idly happened to look out a side window of the church and saw some children playing on the other side of the street. One little boy came down the long sloping sidewalk on a scooter; you can tell how many years ago this was, as there are not many scooters around today. He came down the hill faster than he anticipated and he lost control at the foot of the hill. He bounced off the curb that separated the sidewalk from the street, and this threw him and the scooter over into a yard beside a paper mill, from whence he arose, skinned, bruised, and more than a little tearful. Angrily he went over to the curb and kicked it just as hard as he could. Of course this hurt him far more than it did the curb, and he screamed some more.

Now this type of behavior is characteristic of all of us at times, even though most of us are quite a bit older than this little boy was at that time. We resent the injuries and the insults that are inflicted upon us, as so we harbor personal grudges against the people who inflicted them upon us, even though the harboring of such grudges does us far more harm than it does to those who inflicted the injuries. Most of us, when we are resentful toward others, feel that we have good reason to be, and we may be right. But having a good reason for our resentment does not justify permanently injuring our own spirits. After all, it is never a problem of how our resentment affects the one who offended us, for it seldom does; rather, it is a question of how it affects us. I suspect that when Jesus insisted that we should forgive "seventy times seven" He was not nearly so concerned about the soul of the person who needed forgiveness as He was about the one who could only be saved by forgiving.

Probably the most glorious victory that any of us will ever win in the spiritual realm is to come to the point in life that when someone else injures us, we shall retaliate with kindness and forgiveness. Granted that it is very hard to do that, but life is far too short to retaliate with anything else, and thus lead to an endless string of insults, injuries , and bitterness. For resentment is a spiritual cancer, and it will lead us to spiritual death if we harbor it in our hearts. Certainly life is too short to spend time and energy constantly worrying about personal slights and injuries. For life is too short to be little.

Life is also too short to be little in our purposes. All of us have to have some sort of purpose to live, but far too often, we are content with little purposes when we should have a far greater purpose that would really bring out the best that is in us.

A former parishioner of mine once told me that what he fears most when he stands before the great white throne of God is to hear the voice of the Lord ask: "Well, what did you see in My world?" and to have to answer: "I never had time to see it, Lord. I was always on the telephone." I suspect that all of us could identify with that, as we become wrapped up in our jobs and our everyday lives.

All of us have heard the story, in one form or another, of the man who was working on a new building with a hammer and a chisel. Finally, one of the sidewalk superintendents asked him, "Where does this stone you're working on fit into the building?" The man just shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know; I haven't seen the plans. I just do what they tell me. I keep hammering away." Oh, what a parable of life this is! So many of us spend our lives this way, just hammering away Monday through Friday, occasionally Saturday and Sunday, just doing what "they" tell us, with no other purpose except to get through life in the easiest way possible. And yet life is too short for this sort of thing. We have only one life to spend; let us spend it for the highest purposes that we can find instead of squandering it on anything that comes along. For life is too short to be little in our purpose...

Finally, life is too short to be little in our faith. We often hear today that people do not have as much faith as they used to have, but don't you believe it. All of us have faith in a great many things, whether we realize it or not. We have faith in our doctor, or we would not go to that doctor for diagnosis and treatment. We have faith in our bank, or we would not deposit our money in it. It is never a question of having faith or not having faith; rather, it is a question of what we shall put our faith in. Some of us, often without realizing it, put our faith in the little god of things, believing that the more things we have, the better off we will be. Others of us put our faith in the little god of pleasure, believing that the chief end of life is to extract every possible thrill from it that we can. Still others of us put our faith in the little god of power, believing that exercising influence and power over others is the way to the greatest fulfillment in life. Most of us tend to put our faith in everything else except Almighty God until we are at life's extremity. We are like the woman who raced up to the captain of an ocean liner in the midst of a storm, asking, "Are we in any danger?" "Madam," he replied, "we must have faith in God." "Oh, my goodness!" she said; "are things that bad?" I suspect that we could all identify with that; are things that bad?...

(Excerpted)