I'm an aspiring scientist, hoping to be a neuroendocrinologist, and going to Boston University for neuroscience with pre-med. I love science and mathematics, and both never fail to fascinate me. Here, I share that which I find particularly interesting.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
HowStuffWorks “How Love Works”:
There are a lot of chemicals racing around your brain and body when you’re in love. Researchers are gradually learning more and more about the roles they play both when we are falling in love and when we’re in long-term relationships. Of course, estrogenand testosterone play a role in the sex drive area (see How Sex Works). Without them, we might never venture into the “real love” arena.
That initial giddiness that comes when we’re first falling in love includes a racing heart, flushed skin and sweaty palms. Researchers say this is due to the dopamine, norepinephrine and phenylethylamine we’re releasing. Dopamine is thought to be the “pleasure chemical,” producing a feeling of bliss. Norepinephrine is similar to adrenaline and produces the racing heart and excitement. According to Helen Fisher, anthropologist and well-known love researcher from Rutgers University, together these two chemicals produce elation, intense energy, sleeplessness, craving, loss of appetite and focused attention. She also says, “The human body releases the cocktail of love rapture only when certain conditions are met and … men more readily produce it than women, because of their more visual nature.”
Researchers are using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to watch people’s brains when they look at a photograph of their object of affection. According to Helen Fisher, a well-known love researcher and an anthropologist at Rutgers University, what they see in those scans during that “crazed, can’t-think-of-anything-but stage of romance” — the attraction stage — is the biological drive to focus on one person. The scans showed increased blood flow in areas of the brain with high concentrations of receptors for dopamine — associated with states of euphoria, craving and addiction. High levels of dopamine are also associated with norepinephrine, which heightens attention, short-term memory, hyperactivity, sleeplessness and goal-oriented behavior. In other words, couples in this stage of love focus intently on the relationship and often on little else.
Another possible explanation for the intense focus and idealizing view that occurs in the attraction stage comes from researchers at University College London. They discovered that people in love have lower levels of serotonin and also that neural circuits associated with the way we assess others are suppressed. These lower serotonin levels are the same as those found in people with obsessive-compulsive disorders, possibly explaining why those in love “obsess” about their partner.
Individuals with Depression or Bipolar Disorder are particularly sensitive to the consumption of aspartame, an artificial sweetener, and should be discouraged from consuming it.
Those who suffer depression or bipolar disorder be considered part of the general population? In 1993, Dr Walton, who is a psychiatrist, conducted a study of 40 patients with unipolar depression and a similar number without a psychiatric history. The subjects were given 30 mgs per kg of body weight a day of aspartame or a placebo for 20 days (about equal to daily consumption if it completely replaced sugar).
Thirteen individuals completed the study, then an institutional review board called the project to a halt “because of the severity of reactions within the group of patients with a history of depression.” In a smaller, shorter crossover design, “again there was a significant difference between aspartame and placebo in number and severity of symptoms for patients with a history of depression, whereas for individuals without such a history there was not.”
Accordingly, the author concluded that “individuals with mood disorders are particularly sensitive to this artificial sweetener and its use in this population should be discouraged.”
As to further particulars of the study, based on the eight depressed subjects and five healthy subjects who completed it:
Three quarters of the patients with a history of depression taking aspartame reported feeling depressed vs none of the healthy subjects taking aspartame and about 40 percent of both groups taking a placebo. The 40 percent is probably a statistical aberration owing to the small numbers who completed the study. Nevertheless, the figures consistently show the depressed/aspartame group experiencing an array of symptoms in far greater numbers and severity, including: fatigue, nausea, headache, trouble remembering, insomnia, and other symptoms.
The depressed/placebo group showed almost none of these symptoms, along with the healthy/aspartame and healthy/placebo groups
Dr Walton told this writer he believes aspartame inhibits serotonin synthesis by decreasing the availability of the precursor L-tryptophan, a finding borne out in another research team’s 1987 experiment on rats.
Remarkably, Dr Walton’s study is the only one we have related to both mood and aspartame. It would be helpful to get a second opinion, but no one else since, apparently, has tried to either replicate or refute his results. This may be due to the political and funding climate. “The NutraSweet company,” Dr Walton told this writer, “clearly tried to block our study.”
Grapheme-Color Synesthesia
Grapheme-color synesthesia is a peculiar neurological condition in which people involuntarily experience colors when thinking about letters, numbers or words.
They might, for instance, always see the color green along with the number four, or blue with the letter A.
Neuroscientists from the University of Oxford in England are trying to determine what exactly is different about the brains of those with this type of synesthesia.
In a new study, they report that people with the condition experience heightened activity in the brain region associated with vision. The study appears in the journal Current Biology.
The researchers stimulated their subjects’ visual cortex using a method called transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Compared with normal subjects, people with the synesthesia required only one-third the stimulation to experience phosphenes, or transient flashes of light.
“We all have different thresholds in the brain, and synesthetes have a lower threshold,” said the study’s lead author, Devin Blair Terhune, a neuroscientist at Oxford.
Although grapheme-color synesthesia affects only about 1 percent of the population, the research provides clues into how the visual cortex works.
It could be useful in developing treatments for people who experience hallucinations and other atypical perceptions, Dr. Terhune said, adding:
“We all associate numbers and colors to some extent. The study provides some interesting insight into how cortical excitability may be related to conscious awareness.”
(Source: http)
Are High Neurotic People More Absorbed Into the Films they Watch than Low Neurotics?
In 2011, Weibel, Wissmath, and Stricker study whether people who are more neurotic are more absorbed into the films they watch. Using a 3 by 2 factorial design, 64 student participants complete the Neo Personality Inventory (NEO-FFI) that assesses neurotic level. Next, the participants are put into a Low or High Neurotic Groups based on NEO-FFI scores. Participants are also then asked to view three clips randomly ordered that are either funny, sad, or happy. The study then surveys the participant’s level of absorption into the clips (using Kim and Biocca’s (1997) Prsence Scale) and level of enjoyment (using a 5-point Likert Scale “Did you enjoy the film,” rate from 1-5, 5 for very much). The study finds that high neurotics rate level of absorption higher than low neurotics and that this was true regardless of whether the clips were funny, sad or happy. They also found that high neurotics rate level of enjoyment higher for the happy and funny clips and lower for the sad clip than the low neurotics. The researchers propose that high neurotics have a more reactive sympathetic nervous system and thus are more attentive to the clips and affected by emotions.
Neuroscience on Desire
Once scientists began studying the structure of the brain, and looking at activity in different areas, they began to gather evidence that feelings of desire occur in the brain regions that are also associated with reward and addiction. Helen Fisher, a scientist who has done fMRI studies of people who are in love, published a book called Why We Love that sums up a lot of the findings in this area. She suggests that love and its loss are functionally similar to addiction and getting sober.Somebody a long time ago had it right.
Other neuroscientists have focused on the sexual side of desire, exploring what your brain is doing when you get turned on and have orgasms. One of the pioneers in this field, neuroscientist Barry Komisaruk, havemapped the brain regions that become active in women who are aroused and orgasmic. It turns out that there is no single “pleasure center” in the brain - orgasms tend to light up a wide variety of brain regions related to everything from memory to higher reason. They’ve also discovered that, in women at least, orgasmic impulses can reach the brain even when the spinal cord is damaged, which suggests that there are non-spinal nerve connections between the vagina and the brain.
How Much Money is Love Worth?
(Source: thisisnotpsychology)
The Moral Perspective: Molecule-based morality
Neuroeconomist (yes, that’s a field of study) Paul Zak has been getting a lot of attention recently for his just-released TED talk, titled “Trust, morality, and oxytocin.” While you can watch the 16-minute lecture here, CNN has now published a short article by Zak that might be easier for you to digest. Here’s the intro:
The longest debate since humans have been having debates is whether we are good or evil. It underlies the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Jesus and Judas. What is our human nature? Of course, the answer is we can be both good and evil. But what determines which part of our character emerges?
About a decade ago, my lab made an unexpected breakthrough in the understanding of good and evil. We discovered that the neurochemical oxytocin makes people trustworthy. We then found oxytocin was responsible for many other moral behaviors, from being generous to sacrificing to help a stranger.
I was particularly pleased to learn that Zak is not the kind of neuroscientist who discards, or even discredits, ethics:
Morality has traditionally been the domain of theologians and philosophers, often providing prescriptions of what we must do. But in the past decade, neuroscientists have started analyzing brain activity while people think about, and engage in, moral or immoral acts. These findings have changed the inquiry into morals from prescriptive to descriptive. …
While neuroscience has provided new insights into our human nature, the philosophy of morality has not gone away. My talk identifies the philosophers whose insights and arguments are consistent with the way oxytocin works in the human brain.
Zak is correct: advances in science should inform our ethics, but philosophy still plays an important role in discussing, analyzing, and linking hard science and human thought and behavior.
THE SOUNDS OF NEURONS TALKING
In 2008, biologist and author Professor Brian Ford localised the sound of neurons communicating with one another.Cultured brain cells in the lab, when sending an impulse or what’s known as spiking, make a crazy little buzz sound around 40Mhz. Professor Ford took this sound and stretched it out to 20 seconds to hear what is inside the spike. He believes since nerve cells are the most developed, they do more than just turn on and off, which is what sends or receives signals and where many believe thought to originate from….he believes that the thought is in the nerve cell. Via. Image.
(Source: psydoctor8)
