Blood and Mental Disorders

Mental health disorders including depression, schizophrenia, and anorexia show links to biological markers detected in routine blood tests, according to our new study of genetic, biochemical and psychiatric data from almost a million people.

The research will increase our understanding of what causes mental illness and may help to identify new treatments.

Healthy body, healthy mind
People often consider mental health as separate from the health of the rest of the body. This is far from true: there is clear evidence many biochemical substances involved in diseases such as diabetes and autoimmune conditions directly impact the function of our brain.

Many studies have tried to address this by focusing on substances called biomarkers that can be readily measured in blood.

A biomarker is simply something in the body that is a sign of a particular disease or process. These often relate to the kind of things reported in a blood test ordered by your doctor, such as cholesterol, blood sugar, liver enzymes, vitamins, or markers of inflammation.

Biomarkers found in routine blood tests are useful as they are often affected by diet and lifestyle, or by treatment with a drug.

The complex role of genetics in mental health
It's often difficult to study the role of these blood biomarkers in mental health conditions. Many studies in this area are often not large enough to make strong conclusions.

One solution is to look at genetic influences on both mental illness and substances measured in blood. Genetics is useful as we now have data from millions of individuals who have volunteered in research studies.  READ MORE...

Secret Tunnels Between Skull and Brain

Did you know you have tiny tunnels in your head? That's OK, no one else did either until recently! But that's exactly what a team of medical researchers confirmed in mice and humans in 2018 – tiny channels that connect skull bone marrow to the lining of the brain.

The research shows they may provide a direct route for immune cells to rush from the marrow into the brain in the event of damage.

Previously, scientists had thought immune cells were transported via the bloodstream from other parts of the body to deal with brain inflammation following a stroke, injury, or brain disorder.  This discovery suggests these cells have had a shortcut all along.

The tiny tunnels were uncovered when a team of researchers set out to learn whether immune cells delivered to the brain following a stroke or meningitis originated from the skull, or the larger of the two bones in the shin – the tibia.

The specific immune cells they followed were neutrophils, the "first responders" of the immune squad. When something goes awry, these are among the first cells the body sends to the site to help mitigate whatever is causing the inflammation.

The team developed a technique to tag cells with fluorescent membrane dyes that act as cell trackers. They treated these cells with the dyes, and injected them into bone marrow sites in mice. Red-tagged cells were injected into the skull, and green-tagged cells into the tibia.    READ MORE...

Our Curious Experiencs

Imagine you are walking on warm sand, on a sunny summer’s day, holding hands with your partner. While perceiving this environment, your brain receives and needs to integrate a cascade of sensory information coming from both outside and inside your body: the warmth of the sand, the brightness of the sunlight, the salty smell of the air, the sound of your heart pounding in your chest, the warmth of your partner’s skin touching your hand.

We usually experience a ‘real me’ that is linked to the body and which lies at the core of all of our sensory experiences, emotions, memories, and thoughts. This ‘I’ or ‘me’ is somehow always there, even if only in the background – transparently, so to speak; and it is felt as being distinct from the world and other people (the sand and your partner, let’s say).

This sense of being a ‘real me’ connected with a real world ‘out there’ makes us feel present and immersed in the flow of our daily lives. But how exactly does this work?

In a seminal paper entitled ‘Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science’, Andy Clark1 proposed that the brain’s job is to predict whatever information is coming next based on the information perceived before. 

Instead of being a passive sponge receiving information from inside and outside our bodies, the brain actively anticipates the world through the lens of past experiences. Whatever we have perceived and experienced before leaves traces, so to speak, in our nervous and perceptual systems. The brain uses these ‘traces’ prevailingly to spot danger. 

This is why it’s so difficult to forget negative events: the brain wants to keep us out of trouble. Harmless information, like the colour of the doorknob at my hotel, will likely be treated as boring and erased from memory. However, the colour of the jacket on the thief that attacked me on the street stays with me. This is an important insight stressed by Clark and other researchers like Karl Friston2 and Jakob Hohwy.  READ MORE...

Quantum Computer Mind

Quick: what’s 4 + 5? Nine right? Slightly less quick: what’s five plus four? Still nine, right?

Okay, let’s wait a few seconds. Bear with me. Feel free to have a quick stretch.

Now, without looking, what was the answer to the first question?

It’s still nine, isn’t it?

You’ve just performed a series of advanced brain functions. You did math based on prompts designed to appeal to entirely different parts of your brain and you displayed the ability to recall previous information when queried later. Great job!

This might seem like old hat to most of us, but it’s actually quite an amazing feat of brain power.

And, based on some recent research by a pair of teams from the University of Bonn and the University of Tübingen, these simple processes could indicate that you’re a quantum computer.

Let’s do the math

Your brain probably isn’t wired for numbers. It’s great at math, but numbers are a relatively new concept for humans.

Numbers showed up in human history approximately 6,000 years ago with the Mesopotamians, but our species has been around for about 300,000 years.

Prehistoric humans still had things to count. They didn’t randomly forget how many children they had just because there wasn’t a bespoke language for numerals yet.

Instead, they found other methods for expressing quantities or tracking objects such as holding up their fingers or using representative models.

If you had to keep track of dozens of cave-mates, for example, you might carry a pebble to represent each one. As people trickled in from a hard day of hunting, gathering, and whatnot, you could shift the pebbles from one container to another as an accounting method.

It might seem sub-optimal, but the human brain really doesn’t care whether you use numbers, words, or concepts when it comes to math.

Let’s do the research

The aforementioned research teams recently published a fascinating paper titled “Neuronal codes for arithmetic rule processing in the human brain.”

As the title intimates, the researchers identified an abstract code for processing addition and subtraction inside the human brain. This is significant because we really don’t know how the brain handles math.

You can’t just slap some electrodes on someone’s scalp or stick them in a CAT scan machine to suss out the nature of human calculation.

Math happens at the individual neuron level inside the human brain. EKG readings and CAT scans can only provide a general picture of all the noise our neurons produce.

And, as there are some 86 billion neurons making noise inside our heads, those kinds of readings aren’t what you’d call an “exact science.”

The Bonn and Tübingen teams got around this problem by conducting their research on volunteers who already had subcranial electrode implants for the treatment of epilepsy.

Nine volunteers met the study’s criteria and, because of the nature of their implants, they were able to provide what might be the world’s first glimpse into how the brain actually handles math.  READ MORE...

Strengthening the Brain

The MIND diet is a hybrid of the Mediterranean diet and the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension diet (its name is a combo of those two diets). And it just passed its latest test.

In a study published in September in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease scientists show the MIND diet can slow cognitive decline and reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease dementia.

This held true despite the fact that study participant’s brains still developed the abnormal clumps of proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

First author Klodian Dhana is an assistant professor at Rush University. His focus is on identifying risk factors of dementia. In the absence of a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, scientists aim to identify which modifiable lifestyle factors can lower the risk of cognitive decline. Nutrition, he tells me, “has gained interest because it can be readily modified.”

“I hope the findings of this study motivate people to practice a healthier lifestyle through nutrition, exercise, and cognitive activities,” he says.

HOW THE DISCOVERY WAS MADE — Dhana and colleagues examined data pulled from Rush University’s ongoing Memory and Aging Project representing 569 participants. These individuals lived in the greater Chicago area and began sharing their vitals in 1997. In 2004, an annual food frequency questionnaire was thrown into the mix, which evaluated how often they ate specific foods. All participants agreed to undergo clinical evaluations while they were alive and a brain autopsy when they died.

Each participant was assigned a MIND diet score based on how closely they adhered to meals within it. Within the MIND diet are 10 brain-healthy food groups and five unhealthy groups: The unhealthy group includes butter and stick margarine, cheese, fried and fast food, pastries and sweets, and red meat.  READ MORE...

Brains and Consciousness

PLANET EARTH

MIND
Brains Might Sync As People Interact — and That Could Upend Consciousness Research
When we cooperate on certain tasks, our brainwaves might synchronize. This finding could upend the current understanding of consciousness.
By Conor FeehlyJul 26, 2021 7:00 PM


(Credit: Katya Kovarzh/Shutterstock


People synchronize in various ways when we interact with one another. We subconsciously match our footsteps when we walk. During conversations, we mirror each other's postures and gestures.

To that end, studies have shown that people synchronize heart rates and breathing when watching emotional films together. The same happens when romantic partners share a bed. Some scientists think we do this to build trust and perceive people as similar to ourselves, which encourages us to behave compassionately.

Surprisingly, people synchronize their neural rhythms, too. Researchers like Tom Froese, a cognitive scientist from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, think that these findings could upend our current models of consciousness.  READ MORE

Hallucinating Consciousness