Podoholic

When you're in the middle of a full-blown podcast addiction you don't listen primarily because you're interested, but in order to drown out the deafening silence. The emptiness of your own thoughts hurts and terrifies you, gives you the shakes. Sometimes the continuing flow of spoken words barely cover the neurotic, nihilistic whirlpool, but ultimately the podcasts are slightly more dopaminergic - or "motivating" as we used to say back in the day - than the solitary confinement of your own thoughts. So you keep on listening, religiously. You're an information-junkie, and your drug of choice is the spoken word. The iTunes Store is your pusher and the BBC is a meth lab.

Every now and then, however, you stumble across something of extraordinary value. You're struck by delightful surprise as the words pouring into your ears suddenly speak to you in more ways than you thought possible. For 30 minutes, or an hour, or two if you're as lucky as I was todya, you're engulfed; your poor addicted brain, so accutely sensitized to extracting value from those streaming headphones, is showered in relevance, meaning, expectation, monoamines, creative memory formation and retrieval. For that short duration of time, your personality grows and you're completely attentive.

Nowhere are such experiences more likely than in Professor Robert Harrison's Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature), live from the Stanford campus. Seventy four hours of material, and counting. For the longest time I avoided the two-part program entitled The Rescurrection, despite an interesting earlier program with the same guest (Prof Thomas Sheehan) entitled The Historical Jesus (that show preceeds the monumental '1910', with Harrison's brother Thomas). I guess I thought The Rescurrection would be a dry mulling over the relation between culture, scripture and historical data (don't get me wrong: some episodes of Entitled Opinions, like the most recent one on the heart, are pretty lousy). It was anything but dull.

In the first hour, Sheehan, a professor of religion and a catholic, subjects the fundamentalist conception of Christ's resurrection to intense critizism, scrutinizing historical and biblical sources and presenting a strikingly unorthordox account of what really happened after Joshua's death on the cross, almost two milennia ago. In the second hour, Sheehan's scrutiny turns to Harrison's own latent catholisism. I won't try to recount this second hour, let's just say that topics include the profound absurdity of human existence and of Christian faith, and how the two connect and mirror eachother, as well as the limits of human understanding and the exceptionality of life. It's a great exchange, and I'll end with a quote from it:

"If there is not an agency of mystification, then somehow the sacrality even of these everyday things with which we live or eat - bread and wine - cannot assume, let's say the proper dignity, or absolute value associated with life, that they deserve." -Robert Harrison

Brainbeat

I'm standing on the vibrating, billowing hills of the tegmentum. Spherical and star-shaped cells; thin, sprawling nerve fibres; and thick, pulsating blood vessles stretch out in all directions. The ground is thick with receptors; twisting out of the bulging membranes like weeds and crystal algae.

The fluid is thick with glutamate; it envelops the cells, pulls on them, tears on their branches, and they willingly suck the salty fluid. Every few hundred milliseconds they trip eachother over the theshold, fluctuate, and generate a single, synchronized electrical impulse that shoots off along the medial forebrain bundle. It's a tonic, steady beat. Far away in the frontal lobe, that rhythm keeps the cortex active, keeps the thoughts alive, even in dreams.

234 151 dopamine neurons in this lobe. The cells are warm, depolarized, expectant; singing their neverending tonic song at three hertz, with more than usual synchrony. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. In the distance below, the dark substantia nigra cells warm up to the tune.

There. The steady rhythm is interrupted. The single expected nerve impulse is trippled. Pandemonium. The ground is trasformed as dopamine floods from neighbour to neighbour. Branches extend and reconnect. Entire cell bodies move as gap junctions synapse and pull cell membranes closer together. Again. Another tripplet. The background rhythm is up to four hertz now. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse pulse pulse. And then silence. A whole second passes before the tonic song is resumed and the cells begin to break rank and recover.

Something just happened.

中国

 Conversations with History: China and the United States (52min)

Not been getting your China fix lately? Here's an excellent, up-to-date Conversation with History about where the country is right now. Focus is on economy, workers, power balance with the US and the current financial slowdown.

38th annual Society for Neuroscience conference in 3 weeks, iPlants in clinical trials by 2015?

iPlants in clinical trials by 2015 say the FutureBlogger polls (poll 1 poll 2). With the recent FDA approval of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for depression and the very successful early studies using deep brain stimulation (DBS) to treat the same disorder, you start to wonder. IF the estimation is accurate we should be able to observe the idea developing in the neuroscientific community right now. Search for rewarding brain stimulation/brain stimulation reward/deep brain stimulation in the SfN database of abstracts submitted to the upcomming 38th Annual Society for Neuroscience Conference in Washington DC (Nov 15-19). Most of it seems to be biochemistry I don't understand. Maybe you do. Please let me know what you find. Just started going through them now. An example: a search for ICSS (intra cranial self stimulation) returns 15 abstracts: Endocannabinoid modulation of mesolimbic reward substrates; Evaluating operant contingencies of brain reward self stimulation in mice; Intraventricular serotonin does not affect the reward of ventral tegmental self-stimulation; Effect of mesocorticolimbic microinjections of the kappa-opioid agonist U50,488 on intracranial self-stimulation in rats; Both GABAB receptor activation and blockade exacerbated anhedonic aspects of nicotine withdrawal in rats; Biphasic effects of the kappa opioid receptor agonist salvinorin A on hedonic state; Susceptibility and resilience to the acute and long-term effects of chronic social defeat on anhedonia in rats: implications for a model of depressive disorders; Intracranial self-stimulation as a positive reinforcer to study impulsivity as measured in the probability discounting paradigm; Behavioral and electrochemical indices of afferent modulation of cue-evoked dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens; Effects of T-817MA on the nigrostriatal dopaminergic systems and spatial motor learning in MPTP-treaded mice; Inducible elevation of ΔFosB in striatal regions enhances cocaine-induced facilitation of intracranial self-stimulation (ICSS) in mice; Addiction-like reward dysfunction in obese rats; Orexin signaling in the insula regulates nicotine reinforcement; Anatomical specificity of morphine, but not amphetamine, potentiation of medial forebrain brain stimulation reward; Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol or ACEA, but not by methanandamide, enhances electrical brain-stimulation reward in rats, likely by activation of cannabinoid CB1 receptors.

Obama at the Alfred E Smith dinner :)

New blogs

www.shockmd.com

neuro-modulation.blogspot.com

Deeeeeeep tip of the hat to Laura

James Martin 21st Century School

So Oxford and Cambridge have finally started making lectures accessible on iTunes U. I'd like to recommend the handful of talks available from the James Martin 21st Century School. Speakers include Joseph Stiglitz and Craig Venter and two speakers so scientifically progressive they manage to shock Richard Dawkins :)

Fluctuations

Can you believe they named it HAL? :)

Read on Slashdot: "A robotic suit that reads brain signals and helps people with mobility problems will be available to rent in Japan for $2,200 a month starting Friday"



MyTelus: "Daiwa House Industry Co. will lease HAL suits to Japanese care facilities for the elderly and others for those with disabilities. It plans to rent 500 units over the next year. Japan is a rapidly aging society and taking care of the elderly population is widely viewed as a growing challenge here." Growing challenge you say?

Hat tip to Buzz Out Loud

So yeah, we've now got HAL (or 'hybrid assistive limb') AND SkyNet. Microsoft should name their next OS Windows Matrix :)

The interpretation of dreams

Yesterday I went to a lecture by Dr. Jim Hopkins, a former editor of MIND. The lecture was entitled Psychoanalysis, Dreams and Biosemantic Representation. I didn't expect my muse to be in the room, but Jim began the lecture by informing us that dopamine neurons resume normal, daytime-like activity during dreaming. Shock. Apparently dopamine neurons resume normal activity about once every hour during sleep, and this coincides with dreaming and the interruption of slow wave sleep. I've got no articles on it yet but it makes perfect sense: dopamine flow returns to the cortex, the slow rhythm pumping out of the thalamus is interrupted and the neruonal growth we call consciousness resumes. But it's a consciousness that is disconnected from sensory reality; unhinged; unreal; pure memory and imagination forming the dopaminergic narrative. Dreaming then, is just like waking life, a constant focus on that which generates most dopamine (see image below); but unrestrained and dissociated from the physical environment it lets us recombine and reevaluate our memories and aspirations. Jim tried to use the dopamine-reward connection to argue for the Freudian intepretation of dreams a wish fulfilment, but though dreams may share with waking-life a constant SEEKING, maybe they are better thought of simply as exploration: the blind, sleeping brain exploring itself, seeking the dopamine of fantasy and nightmare alike. Once a dopaminergic source has been found, the brain explores it, much like a day-dream, and a narrative is created. Dreaming is the cortical elaboration of a dopaminergic trace, in the chemical environment of a sleeping body, untethered by sensation, movement and the environment.



A month ago I wrote a few lines about endogenous activation of dopamine neurons. Here's an elaborated diagram. The frontal lobes are driven (SEEKING) to activate dopamine neurons, both directly and via their connections to the rest of the cortex. They can also use their connections to the motor cortex to make the eyes follow an attractive price, a strange animal or a threatening shadow, all of which would supply them with dopamine via other brain regions. They can go further into abstraction, plan ahead, and use their motor connections to orchestrate complex behaviors that eventually place the body in a situation where any (or all) of the other brain structures with direct connections to the dopamine neurons are stimulated (consider the things in red). This is will. But in dreaming, the frontal lobes have no access to the world, and must explore the dream using only their connections to the rest of the sleeping brain.

TED talks liberal/conservative moral psychology

Step step

Wake up to excited go online for news of the VP debate. Funny how the day always starts with what happened in the US the previous evening. But there's nothing new. Book a free trip to attend the Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington in November. Fill the Google calendar with guest lectures, seminars and courses on neuroscience, cognitive science and programming; get an introduction to Java from the library. Drink three cups of coffee. Little or no iPod, not today, not when the nervous system is finally starting to accept its new circumstances and generate the good routines. Lab work. Sandwiches with fried egg for lunch. The small efforts that prevent social isolation and serotonin depletion. Like sitting in the kitchen/livingroom with my books instead of in my own room; listening to the conversation flow seamlessly between English and Swahili.

But nothing lasts, so off for a run, over the railway tracks, up the hill and through the woods and out on a vast strech of dead, plowed earth, field, hill, whatever. Massive ups and downs, out on a gyrus overlooking sulci and further waves of the hills and the motorway, campus, forest and sunset beyond. All the while with Kieth Olbermann framing the debate in my iPod/ears/Wernicke.

iPlant in embryo

Tonight's episode of Buzz Out Loud mentions an entry on Technically Incorrect about a Mail Online article describing the latest in transcranial magentic stimulation (TMS) research. This time it's a 'thinking cap' from Sydney University that supposedly improves cognitive performance on a number of tasks, with a subsequent slump in performance when the hat is turned off. What's interesting here is the tone of the main researcher, Professor Allan Snyder:

'I believe that each of us has within us non-conscious machinery which can do extraordinary art, extraordinary memory and extraordinary mathematical calculations.' ... 'Imagine if I could temporarily give you a child's look at the world'.

Though this may be little more than a crackpot media stunt, what's important to me are the reactions it creates in the public mind, regardless of the actual scientific merits. Snyder is openly pushing for stimulation of the living human brain for the purpose of enhancement, i.e. not just for sick people but for EVERYONE. With so few scientists willing to acknowledge the imminence of neurological enhancement, people like Snyder and Kevin Warwick set the tone for the breaking of the blood brain barrier, our neural cherry, our innocence, our wishful myths.

So what was the reaction of the public mind? Quoting Buzz Out Loud guest-host Veronica Belmont: "No no, no, not OK with this, terrible terrible idea, something could go horribly wrong... I am not comfortable with this idea."

More from Allan Snyder's research centre here: http://www.centreforthemind.com/whoweare/index.cfm