Day: 11/03/2014

New research suggests you make better decisions when you’re hungry

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A new study suggests that you have a better perception of rewards on an empty stomach, which could lead to making better long-term decisions.

hungry

You might think that it’s better to be well-fed rather than starving when you’re trying to make a big, life-changing decision, but new research suggests quite the opposite. ‘Hot states’ – a term used to describe a high level of emotion caused by something like hunger – actually improve your ability to make long-term decisions.

Researchers from Utrecht University in the Netherlands conducted three separate experiments on a group of students to test whether hunger led to advantageous strategic decision-making. In all experiments, the students were split up into two groups – fasting and non-fasting. The fasting participants ate nothing for approximately 10 hours before taking a test, while the non-fasting group was treated to a generous breakfast, where they were free to eat and drink as much as they wanted.

In the first two experiments, the students played the ‘Iowa gambling task’, a card game that mirrors complex real-life decision-making related to gambling that involves various risks and rewards. Interestingly, the fasting group performed better than the non-fasting group, managing to understand the pattern of long-term rewards over short-term gains.

These results, the team reports in the journal PLOS One, “show that people who were hungry because of having fasted overnight performed better on a complex decision task than sated people and thus provides a first piece of evidence that the hot state of hunger improves, rather than compromises, advantageous decision making.”

In the third experiment, the participants were presented with a set of questions that required them to choose between being given a small amount of money at that moment or a larger amount of money in the future. This experiment supported the findings of the first two experiments, as the fasting participants opted for the larger amount of money in the future, whereas non-fasting participants were more likely to choose the first option.

The evidence suggests that the “hot state of hunger promoted rather than compromised complex decisions with uncertain outcomes that are advantageous in the long run as hungry participants were better able to resist (hypothetical) choices that brought immediate big (but not medium or small) rewards but were ultimately disadvantageous,” write the authors.

This is the first study that challenges previous research suggesting that hot states tend to compromise decision-making, but the team notes that further research is required before drawing to any concrete conclusions about the impact of emotions on the decision-making process.

“Hunger and appetite do not necessarily make people more impulsive, but rather make them rely more on gut feeling, which benefits complex decisions with uncertain outcomes,” the authors report. “Alternatively, it may be that hot states do increase impulsivity, but that impulsivity is not necessarily bad.”

While the study isn’t making any conclusions just yet, perhaps it isn’t such a bad thing to make big decisions when your stomach is grumbling – excluding food related choices, of course.

Do Parallel Worlds Interact with One Another?

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Griffith University academics are challenging the foundations of quantum science with a radical new theory based on the existence of, and interactions between, parallel universes.

In a paper published in the prestigious journal Physical Review X, Professor Howard Wiseman and Dr Michael Hall from Griffith’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics, and Dr Dirk-Andre Deckert from the University of California, take interacting parallel worlds out of the realm of science fiction and into that of hard science.

The team proposes that parallel universes really exist, and that they interact. That is, rather than evolving independently, nearby worlds influence one another by a subtle force of repulsion. They show that such an interaction could explain everything that is bizarre about quantum mechanics

Quantum theory is needed to explain how the universe works at the microscopic scale, and is believed to apply to all matter. But it is notoriously difficult to fathom, exhibiting weird phenomena which seem to violate the laws of cause and effect.

 

Cataract Symptoms Can Signal Other Diseases That Need Treatment Now.

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Is it time for cataract surgery? It turns out, there are lots of good answers to that question – but only one best choice.

Cataracts, as it turns out, can be taken care of at any time. However, there is one very good reason to be evaluated right away, Dr. Gans says. Cataract-like symptoms may signal other problems – and those mayneed to be addressed immediately.

“The time to have them removed is when a patient notices changes,” he says. “The only problem is, the symptoms can be signs of other eye diseases that are much more time-sensitive. So you have to make sure it’s not something that needs to be treated more quickly and more aggressively.”

The disease, which is the most common cause of vision loss among people over age 40, does not cause permanent damage to the eye. So if patients simply have cataracts and no other eye issues, they have the power to decide when to get cataract treatment, says ophthalmologist Richard Gans, MD.

“The patient’s in the driver’s seat as far as when the time is to have something done,” Dr. Gans says. “Cataracts don’t hurt the eye; they don’t damage the eye in any way. If you see well enough, there’s no rush. If you can’t see well enough, it’s time to get something done,” he says.

When to treat cataracts is very individual. Some people with limited visual needs choose not to have their cataracts removed. Others have 20-20 vision but are troubled by the amount of glare, perhaps due to their profession. They may choose to have something done sooner.

Warning signs

In general, cataracts cause a progressive, slow, steady decline in vision. Cloudy areas spread and intensify over a period of months or years, Dr. Gans says. The signs of their advance vary among the three different types of cataracts.

You may be bothered by glare from headlights and other bright sources of light, halos around bright lights when the surrounding area is dim, decreased color perception or the need for more light to see common objects.

“Patients may experience an inability to read, an inability to drive, or an inability to do the normal things people want to do each day because their vision is getting progressively worse,” Dr. Gans says.

Three types of cataracts

Each of the three types of cataracts has its own somewhat varying symptoms and its own time course. The timing can range from a six-month progression with severe glare and difficulty recognizing faces to a 20-year course that changes overall clarity and ability to see in dim lighting. Cataracts break down into three different types:

  • Nuclear sclerotic cataracts exhibit a slow steady progression in vision clarity, color perception and ability to see small details. As this type progresses, patients notice halos around bright objects at night as well as difficulty driving at night. “If we live long enough, everybody gets one of those,” Dr. Gans says.
  • Cortical cataracts also tend to have a slow, steady progression but cause more trouble with glare and haziness. “It’s almost like you’re looking through a fog fairly early on,” he says.
  • Posterior subcapsular cataracts can develop more rapidly, over a few months. It’s more common in younger individuals, diabetics and people who have taken steroid medications. This causes glare early in its course, inability to see when lighting is very bright and the inability to recognize faces.

The bottom line is that surgery for cataracts is very safe and successful — and we can even correct astigmatism using computer-guided lasers, Dr. Gans says. “There are new technologies that are available to us now that offer greater opportunities for restored vision.”

 

Enhancing Neurotransmitter Production Naturally .

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Enhancing Neurotransmitter Production Naturally

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In my previous article, Is Your Brain Firing As It Should?, I discussed natural supplements that will help your brain cope with stress, anxiety and sleep disturbances. While they may not be cures to your anguish, it’s my hope that they will help alleviate some of your distress while you resolve the root causes of your anxiety.

In this article I’ll be explaining the benefits of supplements that will assist your body to overcome depressive mood states when rough times enter your life.

Depression & Anxiety

Life events can trigger changes in our moods, and this can put our brain chemistry out of whack. Ourneurotransmitters begin to mis-fire, leading to chronic states of anxiety and depression.

But when it comes to ideal neurotransmitter functioning and performance, dopamine is ‘King of the Chemistry’. And many alternative physicians consider that the amino acid tyrosine – a precursor to dopamine production in the brain – surpasses the performance of the majority of anti-depressant drugs. It costs less, it helps you think better, and it can lift your mood when you’re feeling gloomy.

So let’s begin to delve into our mental chemistry and learn how we can enhance the production of dopamine using the readily available supplement – tyrosine.

The hormone dopamine has a hand in almost every human interaction. In its most refined state, dopamine is a precursor for norepinephrine, which is a hormone that is most responsible for our cognitive alertness. In turn, norepinephrine controls our mood, motivation, anxiety and even sex drive. So, if you’re an aspiring mental health professional or a person who is committed to their own long-term health and wellbeing, it’s important to note that a mis-firing of dopamine in our brain can result in a host of issues.

Parkinson’s Disease: a Lack of Dopamine

Parkinson ’s Disease, a degenerative condition, is the result of an insufficient supply of dopamine within the middle parts of the brain. Essentially, the dopamine-generating cells in patients with Parkinson’s are experiencing apoptosis, otherwise known as cell death. Ultimately, for a physician to reach a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease, there must be clear damage to the dopamine pathways called the substantia nigra.

While the cause of this illness can vary from patient to patient – for example, excessive skull trauma (boxers and other aggressive sports), environmental toxins, and even genetic factors – fundamentally the symptoms are quite similar ‘across the board’. The results of this drastic loss of dopamine functionality often results in the stereotypical tremor and motor impairment which is characterized by ‘shaky’ hand and head movements. Parkinson’s sufferers’ capacity for movement is quite low; their movement is slow and their posture can be quite poor. However, there are prescription medications which physicians can use to treat patients – primarily a drug called L-dopa.

L-dopa is a molecule which serves as a precursor to dopamine, mirroring the chemical structure of dopamine. Once a person’s symptoms become severe enough for a definitive diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease, a physician will prescribe a synthesized “drug” form of L-dopa  to mitigate the patient’s overwhelming symptoms. So, by ingesting this substance in pill form, it will inevitably promise an influx of dopamine production.

Unfortunately, like many other prescription medication, the benefits of L-dopa can often come with unwelcome side effects; fatigue, anxiety, agitation and nausea are just a few of those unwelcome side effects. While L-dopa has an important role in the current treatment protocol of Parkinson’s, it is also important to consider that the dopamine precursor, tyrosine, can be ingested in a natural form to enhance dopamine production – without the side effects.

Tyrosine

Tyrosine is responsible for the production of an organic compound, called catecholamines. Without getting too scientific here, the more prominent examples of catecholamines are norepinephrine, epinephrine (adrenaline) and dopamine. The more tyrosine we have on hand, the better equipped we are to handle stress, fatigue, anger, aggression, and those dips in our moods.

Tyrosine-rich foods include meats, fish, eggs, nuts, beans, oats, and wheat, with the highest amounts found in animal sources. Vegan diets may fall short of minimum requirements, and there are some researchers who consider it is a lack of tyrosine in the diet that can lead to ‘angry vegan syndrome’, so proponents of a Vegan diet may need to consider supplementation if they begin to suffer symptoms of deficiency.

Indications you may need to give your dopamine levels a good boost with some supplemental tyrosine include lethargy, depression, sadness, anger, dark moodiness, low self-esteem, loneliness, and a low sex drive. If you are experiencing any of these symptoms regularly, it’s important not to sweep them under the rug, because they may form a nasty ‘dust bunny’ you’ll have to face later!

Considering that dopamine controls so many crucial areas of our daily activities, it is crucial to realize you have the ability to optimize your mental and physical potential accordingly. As mentioned, dopamine helps us coordinate movements efficiently; if I knew as much about dopamine when I was pitching in high school, there’s no doubt I would be playing major league baseball right now (sarcasm, of course!) Nevertheless, with the amount of control that dopamine has on our mind and body it’s important to become aware of your body’s signals, and to adjust your tyrosine supplementation to what best fits your needs.

Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid

Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid (GABA) is both an amino acid and a neurotransmitter, and is known for its ability to reduce anxiety, elevate moods and actually tone muscle! In fact, GABA could even be considered the perfect natural tranquilizer for those times when you’re feeling overtly anxious, agitated and overwrought.

As a certified kettlebellinstructor and fitness enthusiast, the topic of GABA supplements is a recurring discussion amongst friends and colleagues. So, what’s the hoopla?

Like Tyrosine and L-dopa, GABA too can allow us to create our own ‘mood lifter’. This is not pseudoscience, this is simple chemistry. You can purchase GABA supplements – usually they are sold in increments of 750 mg per pill. While you should consult with your preferred health professional about your ability to cope with a bout of depression or anxiety, it should be comforting knowing that these ‘over the counter’ supplements do exist

At-home brain stimulation gaining followers .

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DIY head zappers hope to become better gamers and problem solvers, but the technology may not be ready for prime time

man with electrodes on his head

BRAIN HACK Brain stimulators have escaped the lab — ready or not — and people are juicing their brains from the comfort of home.

The first time Nathan Whitmore zapped his brain, he had a college friend standing by, ready to pull the cord in case he had a seizure. That didn’t happen. Instead, Whitmore started experimenting with the surges of electricity, and he liked the effects. Since that first cautious attempt, he’s become a frequent user of, and advocate for, homemade brain stimulators.

Depending on where he puts the electrodes, Whitmore says, he has expanded his memory, improved his math skills and solved previously intractable problems. The 22-year-old, a researcher in a National Institute on Aging neuroscience lab in Baltimore, writes computer programs in his spare time. When he attaches an electrode to a spot on his forehead, his brain goes into a “flow state,” he says, where tricky coding solutions appear effortlessly. “It’s like the computer is programming itself.”

Whitmore no longer asks a friend to keep him company while he plugs in, but he is far from alone. The movement to use electricity to change the brain, while still relatively fringe, appears to be growing, as evidenced by a steady increase in active participants in an online brain-hacking message board that Whitmore moderates. This do-it-yourself community, some of whom make their own devices, includes people who want to get better test scores or crush the competition in video games as well as people struggling with depression and chronic pain, Whitmore says.

Many of the scientists who are leading the charge, however, insist that this simple, relatively safe and cheap technology isn’t ready for home use. The research is too preliminary, and such stimulation may prove to be ineffective at best or, at worst, dangerous, some say. Certain kinds of stimulation may cause unintended harm; brain stimulation is not as foolproof as many people would like to believe.

Still, “humans have a long history of playing with their brains,” says neuroscientist Vincent Clark of the University of New Mexico and the Mind Research Network, a nonprofit neuro­science research institute in Albuquerque. And it’s unlikely that scientists’ protests will change that. Right now, scientists, policy makers and DIYers are all wrestling with whether — and how — the technology should be regulated.

Ethical quandaries as well as questions about efficacy and safety call for restraint. But demand, fueled by tantalizing news of promising studies, has largely drowned out those cautionary calls. “We are in such a fog of ignorance,” says neuroethicist Hank Greely of Stanford Law School, who studies how brain research intersects with society. “We really need to know more about how this works.”

The promise

The brain traffics in electricity. Minuscule electrical bursts create the signals that allow people to think, remember and feel, so it makes perfect sense that external electricity might influence how the brain operates.

That insight isn’t new. A physician to the Roman emperor Claudius eased headaches by placing a live, electric torpedo ray (similar to a stingray) onto the heads of long-suffering patients. In the 11th century, electric catfish were proposed as treatment for epilepsy. In the 1800s, the nephew of Italian bioelectrical pioneer Luigi Galvani, who harnessed lightning to make dead frogs’ legs jump, used electrical stimulation to treat people’s melancholia.

Today’s burgeoning field of “electroceuticals ” takes advantage of the same principle. Clinicians use various delivery methods — both external and implanted — to transform the brain’s electrical activity. For some people, electroconvulsive therapy can ease severe depression or mania that drugs don’t touch. This wallop of electricity sparks a short seizure that’s thought to reset the brain and lessen symptoms. Some people with Parkinson’s disease have also found relief in electricity: Rhythmic zaps from electrodes implanted deep into their brains can reduce tremors and rigidity.

Those methods are different from the one that has captured the attention of the DIY crowd. Transcranial direct current stimulation, known as tDCS, sends small amounts of stable electric current into the scalp. Although the details are still hazy, tDCS is thought to work by coaxing nerve cells to become either more or less active, depending on whether the anode or the cathode of the device is placed over the neurons. The electricity doesn’t compel neurons to fire off messages or stay silent; instead, it gently tips the scales toward action or inaction, studies have found.

Depending on which part of the brain gets nudged, tDCS can influence things like attention, working memory, visual abilities and mathematical skills. For instance, stimulation to the top of the brain caused 15 healthy people to learn a made-up number system better than healthy people who received no stimulation, and the benefit lasted months after the stimulation stopped, neuroscientist Roi Cohen Kadosh of the University of Oxford and colleagues reported in Current Biology in 2010.

tDCS may also alleviate symptoms of depression, other small studies suggest. In a randomized trial of 120 people with moderate to severe depression, tDCS, with positive stimulation (anode) over the left side of the brain and negative (cathode) over the right, boosted the effects of the drug sertraline, or Zoloft, scientists reported in 2013 in JAMA Psychiatry. Over a six-week period, people who received both tDCS and sertraline scored on average 11.5 points better on a depression rating scale than people who received placebos. (A drop of three points was considered clinically relevant.) tDCS alone caused a smaller drop — 5.6 points — versus sham, and sertra­line alone caused an even smaller drop: 2.9 points less than placebo.

NEURONS WORKING TOGETHER tDCS can cause changes in blood flow, detected by functional MRI. Here, some brain regions show higher levels of cooperation (red) or lower levels (blue) during tDCS compared with sham stimulation.

MARCUS MEINZER ET AL/J. VIS. EXP. 2014

The technique might influence depression as well as other brain processes by boosting the brain’s ability to flexibly respond to new situations or problems — a feature known as plasticity. Electricity can boost plasticity by kicking off a series of events that ultimately change how neurons communicate with one another. Researchers have seen tDCS-induced changes among certain molecules that help send and receive messages between neurons. Those molecules, including NMDA receptors, GABA and glutamate, have been implicated in depression and other brain disorders in numerous studies.Other more wide-ranging effects of electricity may be involved. tDCS appears to influence the behavior of large cohorts of neurons. Even more generally, electricity can influence blood flow in the brain, inflammation and probably a whole range of other processes.

Despite an incomplete understanding of the technology, clinicians have already taken note of the findings, particularly the antidepressant effects of tDCS. Several clinics offer tDCS therapy to patients, often outside of research studies.

Some people, however, don’t want to go to the trouble of visiting a doctor or enrolling in a lab study to experience tDCS. Prefab tDCS machines can be purchased online for a few hundred dollars or less. DIY plans for building a tDCS system are available to anyone with an Internet connection. So people are making their own.

“I have a graduate student whose background is in philosophy, and he was able to build one in an afternoon for less than $50,” says neuroscientist and ethicist Peter Reiner of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “The device is shockingly simple, and a little scary because of that.”

Enter the DIYers

No one really knows how many people use this technology at home, Greely says. His Stanford colleague Anita Jwa sent a questionnaire to participants in online tDCS chat groups, and heard back from about 120 respondents. The survey is anything but comprehensive, but it attempts for the first time to study the DIY community, which Jwa found is overwhelmingly male, and not necessarily young. About 23 percent of respondents were 40 or older, the survey revealed. “It’s not just the pimply kid in the basement playing a massive online role-playing game,” Greely says.

In fact, many of the people who use tDCS have an illness that hasn’t been treated successfully and are trying it out of desperation, says Brent Williams, who maintains a tDCS website. With a background in engineering, Williams had no trouble building a unit for himself and his wife. They use it to boost their creativity and memory, among other things.

Williams, who directs an educational outreach program at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, became convinced that the technology can change lives. He began to proselytize about it on his website. “I get e-mails every day from people who are doing tDCS stuff,” he says. “A lot of those e-mails come from, frankly, pretty desperate people who live in countries or regions where they don’t have access to the doctors that we have access to. They are desperate to do tDCS for depression or chronic pain or whatever the case may be,” he says.

That idea — people turning to tDCS instead of working with a doctor or using tDCS regularly to improve performance — worries some scientists and physicians. Notably, most of the scientists who regularly zap subjects’ brains in their labs aren’t likely to use the technology on their own brains, according to a study published in the July-August Brain Stimulation. Of 287 researchers who study noninvasive brain stimulation (including but not limited to tDCS), only 8 percent said they juice themselves. Common reasons for abstaining included believing the benefit was too small and concern about safety.

The perils

And those 8 percent of researchers probably used adequately tested machines to deliver an appropriate dose of electricity. Home use is only as good as the person who builds and operates the system. Just ask the people who have posted online images of scalp burns from improper current.

Burns and even more severe reactions, such as reports of manic episodes and even temporary paralysis caused by brain stimulation, seem to be rare. “It’s not like people are dropping dead or having their teeth fall out,” Greely says.

screenshots from video game

Training sessions coupled with tDCS improved test subjects’ ability to tell a harmless scene (top) from one that holds hidden danger (bottom, bomb circled).

V. P. CLARK ET AL/NEUROIMAGE 2012

Aside from trouble sleeping in the hours after he has used his tDCS system, Whitmore says he has never experienced any negative effects from tDCS. But some effects might be subtle.In a 2013 paper in the Journal of Neuroscience, Cohen Kadosh and a colleague reported that the math gains people experienced from experimental stimulation weakened a different math skill. “We can improve one function but it comes at the cost of another function,” he says. It’s entirely possible that other deficits brought about by tDCS have remained hidden because not many people have looked for them.

Assuming safety wasn’t an issue, there are plenty of reasons a person at home wouldn’t achieve the same results as participants in a carefully done lab study, says Cohen Kadosh. The best brain locale to stimulate is probably different in every person. Depending on culture, expertise and age, people rely on different parts of their brains to do math, for instance. Plus, brain regions can be found at slightly different physical coordinates from person to person.

The question of dose isn’t settled, either. Many studies use about 20 minutes of 1 to 2 milliamps of current at a time. But the effect of that dose may vary widely from person to person. Antidepressants can change the brain’s baseline excitability, as can other drugs, both legal and illicit. Age, sex and smoking status have all been linked to differences in brain behavior. And the movement of electrical current can be influenced by wrinkles in the brain, the thickness of the skull and the shape of the head. These individual quirks shift the goal line, making it nearly impossible for someone at home to know exactly where and how long stimulation should be applied.

For years, Cohen Kadosh has meticulously researched how best to safely and effectively transmit electricity to the brain. But even he has qualms about using tDCS. “People are adults. They’re free to do whatever they want,” he says. “But I would not do this myself.”

To regulate or not?

The fact that the desire for this technology is running ahead of adequate safety and efficacy studies is something that Cohen Kadosh has become acutely aware of during his research with tDCS. “I’ve been contacted in the past by parents who want to improve their children’s performance in order to get into an excellent university or be better in school,” he says.

Philosophically, external brain stimulation is no different than making a child take piano lessons, Greely says, so long as the technique is proven safe and effective. And that’s a big caveat. “I know enough about brains to know that they’re really complicated,” he says. Without a firm understanding of how the brain works, Greely is loath to start meddling with his. “At this point, I wouldn’t encourage my kids to do it,” he says.

Right now, it’s perfectly legal to build or buy a tDCS system. The $249 tDCS headset called “foc.us” is advertised as a tool to “excite your prefrontal cortex and get the edge in online gaming.” And Thync, a company that’s developing a headset to “shift your state of mind,” claims it will allow users to tailor their moods, creating energized, relaxed or focused experiences.

The independent, nonprofit Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C., will hold a workshop early next year to explore the role of external brain stimulation in society. Discussions, sponsored by a collection of federal agencies, patient groups, industry and nonprofits, will include potential benefits and risks of the technology, regulatory quandaries and ethical dilemmas such as whether it’s acceptable to use the technology for cognitive enhancement in healthy people and the implications of involuntary or coercive use.

For his part, Williams, the Georgia DIYer, has written about how to safely and ethically use tDCS and has even suggested a code of safety standards for fellow DIY users. His rules include seeking out a medical professional for advice, treatment and follow-up, never using tDCS alone and never using the technology on children or animals.

It’s not clear whether tDCS will really take off and become the next killer app, Greely says. But as the science hums along, people will probably keep pushing the technology’s boundaries. That means scientists’ cautious “Don’t try this at home” may continue to fall on deaf ears and tingling scalps.