Category: Inside the Brain

Treatment Online has an interesting piece on the development of a cocaine vaccine. Unlike other drugs that reduce the pleasurable effect of addictive drugs, this is genuinely a vaccine – it persuades the immune system to attack cocaine molecules.

There are various drugs that are sometimes described conveniently, but inaccurately, as ‘vaccines’ for addictive substances.

For example, disufiram (aka Antabuse) creates a severe hangover 10 minutes after taking any alcoholic drink by inhibiting certain enzymes in the liver which break down alcohol. The idea is that it acts as an instant form of aversion therapy.

A drug called naltrexone blocks opioids in the brain which all pleasurable drugs trigger, either directly (in the case of heroin), or indirectly (in the case of alcohol). Naltrexone simply aims to reduce how ‘fun’ the drug is, leading to extinction of the link between the drug and the ‘high’.

However, neither of these are actually ‘vaccines‘ in the proper sense of the word.

Vaccines are substances that stimulate the immune system. The immune system identifies and adapts to the key features of the potentially dangerous invader, and works to destroy it.

Of course, this happens when foreign pathogens (like diseases) enter the body, but the immune system can be triggered by safe or less dangerous substances that share the ‘key features’ with the more dangerous disease. This safe or less dangerous substance is the vaccine.

Edward Jenner invented the procedure after working out that giving people a tiny amount of the non-lethal cowpox virus vaccinated them against the deadly smallpox virus. In fact, this is where the word ‘vaccinate’ comes from as ‘vacca’ means cow in Latin.

The developers of the new cocaine vaccine, known as ‘TA-CD’, are doing essentially the same thing by cleverly combining a deactivated cocaine molecule with a deactivated cholera toxin molecule.

The deactivated cholera toxin is enough to trigger the immune system, which finds and adapts to the new invader.

Because the cholera toxin and the cocaine molecule are combined, the immune system also adapts to the key features of cocaine, so works out how to seek and destroy cocaine molecules.

This means they never reach the brain in sufficient quantities to cause an effect.

A key advantage is that unlike other anti-addiction drugs, which have to be in the body to have their effect, the cocaine vaccine permanently changes the immune system to neutralise cocaine.

Of course, it may not be completely effective, or it may not work in all people, but that’s the aim.

The drug is about to studied with a Phase III clinical trial to see if it useful in treating cocaine addiction, after which, if it is shown to be safe and effective, it could be approved for widespread use.

Unlike the current concerns about the supposed ‘new ethical challenges’ of medical therapies being used by healthy people (which, as we’ve noted, are actually as old as drugs themselves), this therapy may present a relatively new ethical dilemma.

If effective, you can see that some parents might want to vaccinate their non-addicted, perfectly healthy children, so they are ‘immune’ to cocaine.

The difference here, is that once given, the ‘immunity’ may be permanent. In other words, you would make the decision that your child will never be able to experience the effects of cocaine for the rest of their life.

One interesting effect might be an ‘arms race’ between illicit drug producers and vaccine makers. As children become ‘vaccinated’ against the common drugs of abuse, the market for street drugs would fragment and diversify into drugs that don’t have vaccines yet.

A Brave New World indeed.

Link to Treatment Online on cocaine vaccine.
Link to PubMed papers on cocaine vaccine.
Link to Toronto Globe and Mail article on the vaccine.

BBC News has a report on the increasingly popularity of gamma-Butyrolactone or GBL as a recreational drug. Actually, it’s not a drug in itself, but once ingested it is metabolised into GHB, a drug often sold under the name ‘Liquid Ecstasy’.

Actually, the effects are much more like alcohol than ecstasy (the street name is just a marketing ploy) and the similarities to alcohol can be seen in its structure and effect on the brain, as both affect GABA receptors.

The increasing popularity of GBL is particularly interesting, however, as GBL is legal, but the body transforms it into the illegal UK Class C substance GHB.

Compounds that are weak or inactive until the body transforms them into an active drug are called prodrugs, and this is the first situation that I can think of where a legal prodrug has been found for an illegal drug.

Probably the most commonly used illicit prodrug is heroin, which is metabolised into morphine in the body, but both are Class A drugs in the UK so there’s no legal benefit to having one rather than the other.

GHB is usually described as a ‘date rape drug’ despite the fact that it is barely used in ‘date rapes’, unlike alcohol, which is used in the vast majority of cases and is a much better candidate for the ‘date rape drug’ label.

GBL is closely related to 1,4-Butanediol, which is also a GHB prodrug. 1,4-B recently caused a scare because a toy called ‘Aqua Dots’ was made using the compound and had to be withdrawn after several infants swallowed the plastic pellets and became dangerously intoxicated.

Needless to say, the news inspired some to swallow the plastic pellets for fun and the experience was, inevitably, reported online.

GHB is a nervous system depressant, and like all depressants, a major danger is unconsciousness, coma, and collapse of breathing and circulation.

Consequently, there have been a number of reports of these cases being admitted to hospital emergency rooms.

The long-term toxicity of these substances aren’t really known, but as both GBL and 1,4-B are used as industrial solvents and cleaning fluids, it’s likely that they give the body a fairly rough time.

Link to BBC News on the rise of GBL use.

Sam Harris is better known as a leading atheist, but he’s also completing a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and a forthcoming study by Harris is a flawed but important contribution to how we understand the neuropsychology of belief.

Harris and his colleagues asked participants to respond to a number of statements with buttons presses indicating that they either believed, disbelieved or were undecided about each proposition.

The participants were shown statements relating to mathematics, geography, word meaning, general knowledge, ethics, religion and their own life.

While they were doing this brain activity was measured by a fMRI scanner, with a view to finding out which areas of the brain were involved in ‘belief’ and ‘belief states’.

It’s a straightforward study and you may wonder why no-one has ever done it before. It’s possibly because, from what we know about belief, it’s not clear that this study tells us much more about belief rather than what happens when people respond to questions.

Belief is a concept that is used all the time in psychology but is a pain to define in a way that science would be happy with. If you’re not convinced Eric Schwitzgebel’s guide to the problem is about as good as you’re likely to read, but I’m going to give a quick run through of the most relevant issues here.

One of the main problems is that experimental neuropsychology relies on measuring brain and behaviour during activities, and there is no single activity that represents ‘believing’.

When do you believe Paris is the capital of France? Only when you think about it or all the time? Presumably, we believe it all the time as we don’t assume someone has stopped believing it when they think about something else or are unconscious, when asleep perhaps.

The above example treats belief as a proposition stored in memory (a semantic memory in psychology parlance), but you can easily respond to a belief question if you’ve never thought about a proposition before in your life.

Do you believe tigers wear pink pyjamas? Presumably you don’t, but it’s unlikely you’ve ever thought about this before. It’s an answer reconstructed from fragments of other information you have in memory, reasoning and ‘gut instinct’ to varying degrees.

Saying you believe something can work the same way, of course. You may never have thought about it before, but you can say you believe it.

Just these two examples show that saying you believe or disbelieve can involve retrieving a ‘fact’ from memory, or might involve any number of other mental processes to give an answer.

Furthermore, its not even clear that two people retrieving facts from memory are even thinking about the same thing.

Here’s another question. Do you believe snow is white? Imagine two people are asked this question. One believes snow is frozen water, the other believes it’s star dust.

Considering that each person believes that the subject is something completely different, are they answering the same belief question, or is one answering ‘I believe frozen water is white’ while the other is answering ‘I believe stardust is white’? Now scale that up to concepts like democracy or religion.

This is known as the atomism vs holism debate in philosophy and concerns whether we can ever consider belief is isolation (‘snow is white’), or whether we can only consider them in relation to other beliefs that might need to be accessed at the same time (what we believe a word represents, or, even, what we believe the about what we believe).

These issues are essential for neuropsychologists, because they predict different patterns of brain activity, even though the behaviour (e.g. responding ‘I believe’) is exactly the same.

The point of having so many topics in Harris study is that despite these issues, on average, there might be some brain differences involved in answering ‘believe’ or ‘disbelieve’ regardless of the topic, but the mental processes involved in answering these questions might be so diverse that it’s difficult to say whether the average brain activity actually describes ‘belief’ in any meaningful sense.

This doesn’t mean the study is worthless though, and in fact, it’s an essential step in the scientific study of belief.

Science tends to start big, obvious and practical, and work through objections, new ideas and problems over time with new experiments. This study is one of the early but essential, big, obvious and practical steps.

Interestingly, some philosophers (known as eliminative materialists) argue that the concept of belief is just one we’ve inherited from everyday or ‘folk psychology’ and because of the conceptual problems with it, we’ll eventually realise there are no distinct mind or brain process that can be coherently identified as ‘belief’.

Like the concept of ‘rooting for your team’, we’ll just realise its too broad to be scientifically useful and we’ll disregard the idea of ‘belief’ mechanisms in the brain in favour of a variety of better specified concepts that reliably map onto mind and brain processes.

Importantly, studies into the neuropsychology of belief, like this one, can help answer these questions, and eventually, they are likely to have profound implications for everything from lie detection to clinical medicine.

Link to full-text of Harris’s study.
Link to Schwitzgebel’s on belief for the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
Link to write-up from Time.

The Children’s Hospital Boston have created a fantastic ‘virtual neuron‘ which allows you to explore the basics of neural transmission with an interactive flash demo.

Strictly speaking, of course, it’s designed for children, but it’s remarkably good fun whatever your age.

Once you’ve got the demo window up, the options at the top of the screen allow you to choose different demonstrations, and the text below explains what’s happening.

Yay!

Link to virtual neuron.

I just found this jaw-dropping case study of a man who banged 11 nails into his head while sadly quite distressed and psychotic.

The X-ray images are striking on their own, and what is even more astounding is that he made a full recovery.

Penetrating head injury in planned and repetitive deliberate self-harm.

Mayo Clinic Proceedings. 2007 May;82(5):536.

Demetriades AK, Papadopoulos MC.

44-year-old man presented to his local emergency department wearing a baseball cap and complaining of headaches that had progressively worsened over the preceding 11 weeks. After we provided generous analgesia and performed simple investigations that failed to identify a diagnosis, the patient removed his cap to reveal an assortment of metallic objects embedded in his scalp. Plain radiographs showed 11 nails penetrating into his brain. A detailed history revealed a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, and the patient confirmed that he had hammered a nail into his head each week for the past 11 weeks to rid him of evil. The nails were removed with the patient under general anesthesia, and he made an uncomplicated recovery with no neurological deficits.

Link to abstract on PubMed.

Today’s Nature has a great article [pdf] on the neuroscience of psychopaths, as investigated by an ingenious study being run by a group of Dutch researchers.

Although there is a higher number of psychopaths among violent criminals, a psychopath is not necessarily someone who is violent.

The term describes someone who is considered to lack empathy or conscience, is superficially charming, manipulative, has ‘shallow affect’ (doesn’t have a big emotional range) and has poor impulse control.

More recently, psychopathy has become synonymous with the use of the PCL-R, the diagnostic tool also known as the Hare Psychopathy Checklist after it’s creator and psychopathy researcher Robert Hare.

The Dutch team, however, are working with psychopaths who are in prison for presumably quite serious crimes, precisely because they lack empathy.

They are comparing the brain activation between psychopaths and non-psychopaths when they view material that communicates emotions and normally evokes an empathy-driven reaction.

By looking at which areas are less active in the presumably empathy-less psychopaths, they hope to find out the crucial empathy-related brain circuits.

There are more details about the study in the article, but one bit is particularly interesting, where one of the participants, from a high security prison, comments on the study:

When he entered the prison five years ago, Boerema says, ‘borderline personality’ was the fashionable term, and his designated pigeonhole. “The psychopathy label is more damaging though ‚Äî it prompts everyone to see you as a potential serial killer, which I could never be.” (Note, in reporting this article it was agreed that inmates’ crimes would be neither asked about nor reported on.) But Boerema also wears the score as a badge of honour: “I think my high psychopath score is a talent, not a sickness ‚Äî I can make good strong decisions, and it’s good to have some distance with people.”

Interestingly, Boerema (not his real name) makes a couple of points that have also been made in the psychological literature.

Ian Pitchford proposed in a 2001 article that psychopathy could be an evolutionary advantage for a minority of individuals, as it allows them act violently or antisocially without any emotional cost to themselves.

Furthermore, discussion in both the psychological and legal literature has focused on whether labelling someone a ‘psychopath’ is unjustly stigmatising.

One article even goes as far as to suggest that ‘psychopathy’ is just a modern term we’ve invented to replace the world ‘evil’.

pdf of Nature article ‘Scanning Psychopaths’.

The abstract of a fascinating 1995 review paper by Maria Casagrande and colleagues which gathered experimental data together to try and work out which of the brain’s cortical hemispheres falls asleep first.

It turns out, it’s the left.

Which hemisphere falls asleep first?

Neuropsychologia, 33(7), 815-22.

Casagrande M, Violani C, De Gennaro L, Braibanti P, Bertini M.

Behavioral tasks (reaction times to acoustic stimuli and finger tapping tasks) performed by normal subjects when sleepy or attempting to fall asleep have been used as indices of hemispheric asymmetries during the sleep onset period. Results show a stronger impairment of the left hemisphere (right hand) both in reacting to external stimuli and in sustaining endogenous motor programs. The left hemisphere seems to fall asleep earlier than the right hemisphere.

Link to abstract of scientific paper.

The online Dana magazine Cerebrum has a great article on neurorehabilitation – the art and science of helping someone to recover from brain injury both by harnessing the brain’s natural ability to adapt, and by teaching the injured person new skills and abilities.

The article discuss both rehabilitation medicine, the practice of training patients to adapt and improve, and the neuroscience techniques which are being developed to try and tackle the problem at the cellular level.

One of the key processes which science is trying to understand and optimise is ‘neuroplasticity‘, the process by which the brain makes new connections, reorganises and routes around damage.

The article sets out six key questions for neuroscience that, when answered, should revolutionise who we can treat brain injury:

1. Since so much of what we think we know about regeneration is derived from experiments on immature nerve cells, are the mechanisms of regeneration in the injured mature nervous system the same as those that apply to the developing embryonic nervous system?

2. Since the vast majority of experiments in regeneration of nerve pathways have been done in rats and mice, how predictive are these experiments for results in human patients? Apart from molecular differences, rodents are much smaller than we are. Nerve fibers may have to regenerate much farther in humans in order to achieve the same level of reconnection that underlies functional improvement in smaller animals.

3. Even if sufficient nerve regeneration can be achieved, will the connections made be specific enough to underlie real function?

4. How helpful are stem cells? Can they survive after transplantation into the human spinal cord or will they be rejected? Can they replace damaged neurons or will they serve only as sources of chemical substances that support survival and growth of the brain’s own nerve cells?

5. Will we be able to identify a single approach that is so fundamental that it can yield dramatic improvements in recovery from brain injury, or will we need to develop a cocktail approach, using multiple treatments simultaneously?

6. Will approaches that enhance regeneration in one circumstance, for example spinal cord injury, also work in other situations, such as stroke or traumatic brain injury?

On a related note, Sharp Brains has picked up on the fact that American TV channel PBS will shortly be broadcasting a special on brain fitness and neuroplasticity.

It’ll probably focus on normal ageing and brain fitness rather than brain injury, but hopefully should tackle some of the neuroscience behind brain changes in general.

There’s a trailer available online.

Link to article ‘Harnessing the Brain’s Power to Adapt After Injury’.
Link to Sharp Brains on PBS neuroplasticity programme.

Retrospectacle has found an amazing case of a five year-old boy who impaled his left frontal lobe on a deer antler after he tripped and fell while carrying it.

The business end of the antler (which was thankfully no longer attached to a deer) went through his eye socket and into his brain.

Luckily, the young lad made a full recovery with no loss of eyesight and no long term brain damage.

Brains of children (particularly those under the age of 8) can make recoveries from injuries that would be much more serious in adults.

This is because young brains are still very ‘plastic’. In other words, they are still growing and re-shaping.

These recoveries can sometimes be quite astonishing. For example, as we’ve reported previously, some young kids can make a full recovery even when they’ve had half their cortex removed.

Interestingly, this child’s injury from the deer antler is similar to an ‘ice pick lobotomy’, detailed in a fantastic Neurophilosophy article.

One difference, however, is while both the ice pick and the deer antler have entered the brain the same way, the ice pick would be moved side to side to cause damage over a much wider area.

Link to Retrospectacle on amazing deer antler injury.

One of the reporters for Wired took part in an experiment that combines several key neuroscience technologies to pinpoint a brain area, switch it off, and measure the effects.

The experiment used a combination of fMRI, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and EEG.

TMS is a technique that allows parts of the brain to be safely and temporarily shut down or stimulated for a few hundred milliseconds. It’s particularly useful because it allows you to be sure that the function of a brain area is involved in causing a particular behaviour.

Brain scans only allow you to see if an area is associated with a behaviour. The brain area might be reliably active when something important is in progress, but like a car radio, it might not actually be driving the outcome.

However, if you guess that an area is part of the cause, you can use TMS to change its function while the behaviour is in progress. If the behaviour changes, you know the brain area is involved.

Often, the brain area is chosen because it is commonly associated with that behaviour. The trouble is, each person varies slightly.

Doing an fMRI brain scanning experiment first will tell you exactly where activity occurs, so later on, you can use TMS to target the spot more precisely in each individual.

While using TMS to alter the function of a brain area, researchers can also use EEG to see the physiological effect of the stimulation. As well as seeing the behavioural outcome, you can also see it’s effect on the wider brain networks.

Combining these techniques is becoming increasingly common in cognitive neuroscience.

Some recent studies have even used TMS when people are lying in fMRI scanners using magnetic coils made of non-ferrous materials so as not to be dangerous in the powerful scanner magnet.

My favourite one is a recent study where they used TMS to trigger ‘movement’ in a phantom limb by stimulating the motor cortex. They then measured the brain activity linked to movement in the non-existent hand.

Link to Wired article.
Link to abstract of article on TMS-induced phantom hand movements.

The British Medical Association has just released a report on the ethics of using medical technology to increase cognitive function and optimise the brain. Although the report looks to possible futures, many of them are already upon us.

The report is an interesting sign that cognitive enhancement, using largely physical interventions such as drugs and implants, is now a topic important enough to trouble the UK’s professional medical association.

Many of the ethical concerns centre around a potential future where brain enhancing interventions are largely available to the wealthy, leading to a ‘brain gap’ where the less well off will have relatively poorer mental functioning because they can’t access the same cognitive benefits.

However, this is exactly the situation we already have.

Probably the single best cognitive enhancer available to the human race at the moment is a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle.

Poor health goes hand in hand with poverty, meaning those who have less money are likely to have brains that don’t function at their optimum because of increased stress, poor nutrition and increased susceptibility to damage and disease.

Martha Farah’s research group has been specifically researching the links between the neuropsychological development of children and poverty, and have found that children from poorer social groups have markedly poorer mental and neurological functioning.

It is possible that a drug or implant will be discovered in the future that will extend our abilities by an order of magnitude, but more likely the improvement will be much more modest. For example, an improvement of 10% would be considered to be clinically important.

So while it’s essential to consider the ethical implications of how specific cognitive technologies will affect us, the inequality-driven ‘brain gap’ is already here.

One ethical issue less commonly debated is whether we are justified in spending billions developing high-tech cognitive enhancers for a relatively small section of the population rather than support the widespread improvement in nutrition and lifestyle which we know has a strong, reliable and life-long effect.

Link to BMA report ‘Boosting your brainpower: Ethical aspects of cognitive enhancements’.

Technology Review has an article that looks at recent work on the neuroscience of chronic pain. While understanding the problem in terms of neurobiology is essential, understanding the psychology and social influences on pain is equally important.

Chronic pain is an interesting condition because it can continue even when the original tissue damage has healed.

The article talks about chronic pain purely in terms of its neurobiology, but there is now a great deal of evidence that we can explain how pain is maintained through social and psychological explanations.

This is remarkably hard for some people to take on board, as there is still the attitude that explaining something in psychological terms somehow implies the pain isn’t “real” or is somehow a figment of their imagination.

As he recounted in a recent article for the British Medical Journal, Ben Goldacre came across exactly this when he recently discussed the psychosocial aspects of pain on the radio and got a number of outraged listeners contact the programme to say they were offended by the implication that their suffering was imaginary.

This is exactly the opposite of what the standard scientific approach aims to do though. It accepts that pain is experienced, but attempts to work out the biological, psychological and social factors that can increase or decrease pain.

One of the most important findings in the last few decades is that psychological and social factors have a huge influence.

A recent review article, published in Psychological Bulletin [pdf], examined all of the factors and recounted some fascinating studies that have found that people’s beliefs about pain have a huge impact both on how unpleasant they rate the pain to be, and on how disabled they are in everyday life.

This is just a sample from the huge amount of research done on the psychology of pain:

Appraisal and beliefs about pain can have a strong impact on an individual’s affective and behavioral response to pain. If a pain signal is interpreted as harmful (threat appraisal) and is believed to be associated with actual or potential tissue damage, it may be perceived as more intense and unpleasant and may evoke more escape or avoidance behavior. For instance, pain associated with cancer is rated as more unpleasant than labor pain, even when the intensity is rated as equivalent (Price, Harkins, & Baker, 1987). Similarly, Smith, Gracely, and Safer (1998) demonstrated that cancer patients, who attributed pain sensations after physiotherapy directly to cancer, reported more intense pain than patients who attributed this pain to other causes… These studies demonstrate the important role of people’s interpretations regarding the meaning of pain.

Pain appraisal and pain beliefs are also prominent determinants of adjustment to chronic pain (Jensen, Romano, Turner, Good, & Wald, 1999; Turner, Jensen, & Romano, 2000). The following pain beliefs have been identified as particularly maladaptive in dealing with pain: Pain is a signal of damage, activity should be avoided when one has pain, pain leads to disability, pain is uncontrollable, and pain is a permanent condition (Jensen, Turner, Romano, & Lawler, 1994; Turner et al., 2000). The belief that pain is a signal of damage and the belief that activity should be avoided in order to recover from pain appear to be widespread (Balderson, Lin, & Von Korff, 2004; Ihlebaek & Eriksen, 2003).

Because of the importance of our beliefs about pain on the experience of pain itself, we know that psychological therapy can lead to significant improvement.

A key 1999 study [pdf] gathered evidence from all the relevant clinical trials to date and found that cognitive behaviour therapy was a useful and powerful treatment.

Although we typically associate pain with physical damage to the body, thinking only in terms of physical damage is counter-productive. We also need to tackle the psychology and neuroscience of pain both to fully understand it and to help people affected by it.

Link to TechReview article on the neuroscience of chronic pain.
Link to Ben Goldacre on the challenges of communicating psychosocial factors.
pdf of scientific article on psychology and neuroscience of pain.
pdf of scientific article on effectiveness of CBT for pain.

The August edition of medical journal Epilepsy and Behaviour has an interesting case study of a patient who found that listening to Mozart could reduce his epileptic seizures.

The patient had what are known as ‘gelastic seizures’, meaning they trigger laughter when they occur.

Anticonvulsive drugs didn’t seem to help, and surgery to try and remove the focus of his seizures (often a successful treatment) had little significant effect.

We admitted for assessment a 56-year-old gentleman who had experienced gelastic seizures (laughing fits) since shortly after birth. He developed complex partial seizures during his teenage years and secondarily generalized tonic‚Äìclonic seizures in his midthirties…

It was agreed that he should be admitted for reassessment of his condition and to determine whether further surgical intervention could be of benefit.

A few months prior to his admission, he learned that Mozart’s music had been used, with some success, to enhance spatiotemporal reasoning. He therefore began to listen to Mozart for an average of 45 min a day. He did not listen to one particular piece of music.

Before he began listening to Mozart, he was having gelastic seizures with intense laughter, in association with altered perception and experiential phenomena, at a frequency of five or six per day, as well as secondarily generalized tonic–clonic seizures at an average frequency of seven per month. Electroencephalography revealed some evidence of right hemisphere involvement during the seizures that lasted 15–30 s. Seizures also were associated with a brief rise in heart rate.

Within days of starting to listen to Mozart regularly, he noticed a difference in the pattern of his seizures. In the 3 months during which he had listened to Mozart, he did not have any secondarily generalized tonic–clonic seizures. He continued to have five gelastic seizures a day, but these manifested as simply a brief smile (5–9 s), which he could disguise in the presence of others; in addition, the altered perception and experiential phenomena ceased.

Repeat MRI at this time revealed no change in the hypothalamic hamartoma and no definite or consistent EEG or ECG changes with any of the brief events.

No significant change has been observed during neuropsychometric testing since 2000.

The authors of the study mention in passing the so-called ‘Mozart effect‘ – where the music supposedly helps the brain operate more effectively owing to its typical rhythm which affects brain function.

It’s largely thought to be rubbish by most serious neuroscientists, although that hasn’t stopped a whole industry of ‘brain enhancing’ Mozart products being pushed onto unsuspecting punters.

For some people, epileptics seizures can be triggered by very idiosyncratic things.

As we discussed previously on Mind Hacks, ‘musicogenic epilepsy’ can be triggered by types of music, specific tones, or even specific songs (there’s a good discussion of this in Oliver Sacks’ new book).

It is likely, therefore, that from some people, specific music or types of music will also reduced their chances of having a seizure.

Link to PubMed entry for case study in Epilepsy and Behaviour.

Artist Lee Pirozzi creates wonderful three-dimensional fabric brains and neuroanatomical structures.

The piece on the left is called ‘Blue Jean Brain II’.

Pirozzi’s portfolio also describes a few of the pieces like so:

…in “In Search of the Perfect Blue Jeans,” denim, sequins, and satin form the textured and nuanced surfaces of the human brain, while in “Amygdala of Terror,” a snakelike coil appears affixed to the brain itself.

The pieces make a lovely complement to The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art which displays the work of neuroscientists who carefully depict their favourite subject through needlecraft.

Link to Lee Pirozzi’s fabric brain sculptures (thanks mirbrewer!).
Link to The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art.

Neurophilosophy has just published another wonderfully illustrated article on a key moment in neuroscience: this one focuses on Alois Alzheimer, one of the first to discover the major brain changes in Alzheimer’s disease, and Auguste Deter, the middle aged woman in whom he first detected the pathology now inextricably linked to the disorder.

When in his care, Alzheimer carefully recorded Deter’s clinical symptoms of memory loss, impaired language and confusion, and later, when she died, he looked carefully at her brain during post-mortem.

Using a recently developed staining technique he found abnormal clumps of protein, peppered throughout the brain – which are now known to be amyloid plaques – one of the most recognisable features of the disease.

The article makes the interesting point that Alzheimer did not in fact discover this, but that the name has stuck because the head of the research group, Emil Kraepelin, highlighted the findings under the name ‘Alzheimer’s disease’ to promote the institution.

Although well known in his own right, it is true that Kraepelin gained much reflected glory from promoting the work of Alzheimer.

Unfortunately, Kraeplin’s reputation was to be tarnished by his other all-together less distinguished prot√©g√©, Ernst R√ºdin.

Rüdin was hired by Kraepelin to study the genetics of mental illness and found evidence of how mental instability could be inherited.

Later, Rüdin became a key player in drafting the Nazi Law to Prevent Hereditarily Sick Offspring which resulted in the forcible sterilisation of thousands of people with physical disabilities, drug addiction, and mental and neurological disorders.

This was the beginning of what was later to become Action T4 in which thousands upon thousands of people with supposed ‘hereditary defects’ were systematically killed by the Nazis.

Alzheimer’s contribution to neuroscience is thankfully notable for the right reasons, and the Neurophilosophy article is a great tour through his work, notes and original drawings.

Link to Neurophilosophy on ‘Alois Alzheimer’s first case’.

I love the way this completely startling fact is dropped into a sentence about one of the pioneers of German neurology:

The work of Wilhelm Griesinger (1817-1868) (whose father was murdered by the family’s insane piano teacher) marks the birth of neurology in Germany.

The excerpt is from a book I’m reading called Forced Normalization (ISBN 1871816378) by Trimble and Schmitz which is nothing to do with forcing people to be normal, but tackles the fascinating phenomenon where some people become psychotic as soon as their epilepsy is successfully treated (their EEG is ‘normalised’).

The person most associated with this concept is Heinrich Landolt, and the book contains a translation of his key 1958 paper in which he reported a case series of people with epilepsy. It contains this interesting conclusion:

Thus, these cases reveal an unmistakable correlation between the course of the psychotic process and the changes in the EEG, in the the paroxysmal focus which is active before and after the twilight state dissolves during this twilight state, and often so completely that the record is normalized. In other words, and putting it more crudely, there would seem to be epileptics who must have pathological EEG in order to be mentally sane…

Interestingly, this phenomenon may have been the basis of Meduna’s false belief that epilepsy and psychosis don’t occur together, leading him to try inducing seizures as a treatment. This was the birth of an idea that was later developed into electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

This is certainly not the most common pattern, however, as for the majority of people, epilepsy makes psychosis slightly more likely to occur.

Link to more info on ‘forced normalization’.