Extra Sensory Stimulation in Synesthesia

My high school once brought a band to play at an assembly that had a particularly unique approach to how they played their music.  They described that they did not have particular songs they had learned, but instead would pick shapes and colors and play whatever came to their mind.  They went on to then play for us a blue circle.  Needless to say, everyone thought they were crazy!

The more I learn about synesthesia however, the more I wonder if these musicians might have had this condition.  Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which an individual has cross-sensory activation by particular stimuli.  For example, the most common manifestation is that letters and numbers are linked with colors (grapheme – color), such that a sentence might look like this, when it is really black text on a white background.  Another common manifestation is music inducing colors.  How terrible would it be to have mirror-pain synesthesia, where watching another person get hurt will actually illicit pain in the observer?  Mirror-touch on the other hand might not be so bad…

The traditional interpretation of this condition is that it is due to structural connectivity, for example, neurons that recognize letters are connected to and innervating neurons that interpret colors.  Recent research however challenges this view.  Wasowicz and Werning  have been able to show that individuals with color-motor synesthesia can evoke color activation just by thinking about swimming motions (2012).  These findings further complicate synesthesia since imagining motor activation is sufficient enough to stimulate color perception. 

In a recent case study, an individual has been found who has had synesthesia induced following head trauma (Brogard et al. 2012).  This individual sees moving or rounded objects as having additional complex geometrical structures.

 

For example, he drew what he saw when presented with a wheel and a balloon (left).  Remarkably, when presented with the same stimuli 3 months later, he saw nearly the same thing.  Additionally, after taking a high level math class, mathematical formula’s evoke complex shapes as well.

This is what he sees when presented with 2⁹ (left) and hf = mc² (right). 

fMRI analysis revealed increases in both regions activated and intensity of activations with image-inducing formulas (left) compared to non image-inducing formulas (right).  The authors of this paper support a previous studies conclusion, that synesthesia might exist in everyone, but it takes a disruption in brain function to be consciously aware of it!

References
Brogaard, B., Vannie, S., Silvanto, J. Seeing mathematics: Perceptual experience and brain activity in acquired synesthesia.  Neurocase: The Neural Basis of Cognition, 1-10, 2012.

Mroczko-Wasowicz, A., Werning, M. Synesthesia, sensory-motor contingency, and semantic emulation: how swimming style-color synesthesia challenges the traditional view of synesthesia.  Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 279, 1-12, 2012.

Juice Cleanses: Miracle Detox or Marketing Scam?

As some of you may know, my family owns a smoothie store in Los Angeles. Lately we have had a HUGE demand for fresh vegetable juices and juice cleanses. My family and I have been juicing our own fruits and vegetables for the past year, but we haven’t been brave enough to try a juice cleanse.

I am always being bombarded with juice cleanse deals from websites like Groupon and Living Social, so I decided to do a little investigating. I wanted to look up some scientific literature backing up this latest fad to hopefully better explain to myself and to you all why this latest health craze is positive and beneficial. To my great surprise and dismay I was unable to find any scientific evidence supporting juice cleanses or detoxes.

Instead I found several blogs that have sought to disprove this latest diet fad including a group called Sense About Science (http://www.senseaboutscience.org/pages/debunking-detox.html). Here is an article from a sub group of Sense About Science, called the Voice of Young Science. It is an interesting review of various detoxing products done by young scientists.

Since “detoxing” and “juicing” seemed to be journal article dead ends for me, I decided to look up “antioxidants” and “free radicals”. Here is a great review article from 2010 about both. According to the article, free radicals are connected with several diseases and are naturally found in our body, cigarette smoke, and environmental pollutants to name a few. Antioxidants are naturally found in the body and can be supplemented through our diet. The article also discusses several foods that are found to be rich sources of antioxidants, especially foods found in a traditional Indian diet.

Juice cleanses and detoxing may be a fad, but being healthy is here to stay. There is no quick fix to make up for binging on processed foods and you do not have backed up toxins and poop that you need to force out of your body. Yes, you may lose a few quick pounds, but it will probably be just poop and you’ll most likely be very hungry and cranky. Your body already has a very good detox system in place (aka your liver, kidneys, etc.).

However, the idea of juicing fruits and vegetables can be a positive addition to a well-rounded diet, but you should not completely eliminate solid foods. There is scientific evidence to support antioxidants kicking free radical butt, so add a little vitamin E, C, and B-carotene to your diet. Synthetic oxidants may actually be harmful to your health, so stick to natural sources like berries, olives, and green or black tea as the article above suggests. Don’t forget to eat some Indian food too! 

Alzheimer's Disease is Type 3 Diabetes?

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia. It is a long-term disease characterized by the progressive loss of memory and cognitive functions. What begins as mild memory loss eventually leads to the inability to learn new information, long-term memory loss, cognitive impairment, and even depression and irritability.

So what causes AD? Without getting into the details, patients typically have decreased brain mass, amyloid‐beta (Aβ) plaques, tau tangles, chronic oxidative stress, impaired energy metabolism, activation of pro-apoptosis pathways, the list of symptoms goes on and on. Current therapies include cholinergic targets, NMDA receptor antagonists, anti-inflammatory agents, and more novel treatments for inhibiting the buildup of these plaques and tangles, none of these therapies prove to be a definitive treatment for AD.

So how does our brain accumulate so much damage? And what do all these symptoms have in common?

Steen et. al. in 2005 discovered something interesting about our brain, not only does our pancreas produce insulin, our brain also produces it’s own insulin and insulin receptors. More importantly, CNS in AD patients has markedly lower levels of both insulin and insulin receptors, leading to lowered expression of downstream pathways needed to maintain proper cell functioning. This has led some scientists to think about Alzheimer’s disease as a metabolic disease, and thus coining the term – Type 3 Diabetes.

So how far-fetched is this idea? AD is now a type of Diabetes? Actually, experiments show support for this hypothesis. AD animal models injected intracerebrally with anti-diabetic drugs (PPAR-δ agonist), showed significant improvements in learning and spatial-memory tasks. Not only that, well… read the following results from a review by de la Monte et. al.

“ …the PPAR agonists rescued the ic-STZ model by lowering critical AD associated indices of oxidative stress, including microglial and astrocyte activation, p53, nitric oxide synthase and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH) oxidase gene expression, lipid peroxidation, DNA damage, APP expression, and tau phosphorylation."

All this was accomplished by just manipulating the level of insulin and insulin receptors in the brain. That was in 2008. Today, better drugs such as GLP-1 is being developed in order to cross the BBB and affect the desired target sites. Hopefully thinking about AD as a metabolic disease is the key to finding an affective cure for this debilitating disease.

Good vibrations - send them out

According to Howard Bloom's book, Global Brain, a networked global brain attributes to evolution as opposed to individual selection. I'm not sure how much I agree with his notion, but I did find one of his supporting examples intriguing: that the "collective learning machine" provides information to the population to allow for evolution via a few mechanisms, one of which is "inner-judges" (page 43). This concept notes that we as individuals of a group have rushes in hormones when we are praised by the group that lead to increased energy and achievement and value to the group. However, if we are not valued by the group, we release stress hormones that eat away at our energy, our brain, and our self-worth and ultimately repel the group from the individual.

Seems intuitive from what we're learning about with stress' effect on the body. But most intriguing to me was finding out that this is observed not only in organisms like ourselves with complex social structures, but also with single-cell organisms (page 17). Through chemical signaling, primordial bacteria would communicate attraction and repulsion cues back to the group. Attraction cues would tell the group food was found and drive the group to the individual. Repulsion cues would signal the group to stay away from the individual and thus the individual would have no food and die.

Main takeaway: make sure you're giving out good vibrations to the group, ones that make the group see your value and further your chemical hormones that keep you active and achieving rather than vibrations that repel others and lead to stress hormones that lead to the degradation of yourself.