Fragile Industries

The Woman Who Mistook Her Brain For A Dog

Lazarus walks -- I'm yet again clearing out the Return Of The Collyer Brothers around the house, particularly in my studio.  When it’s tamed in there, I may unearth all the constituent parts of several projects languishing since March and finish them.  Two art books, one altered book, and the long-awaited vintage family album of photos taken between the Civil War and 1900.  This result is the happy outcome of some brain science I've been reading about.  The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge describes the revolutionary advances in the field of neuroplasticity. It's a great follow-up to all the Oliver Sacks books about "funny brains" I've gobbled since the first of the year.

Basically, neuroplasticity is how the brain can and does physically wire and re-wire itself, adapting to brain injury, using unused territory, making new and breaking old connections.  Old school neurology thought that various skills were locked into specific sites, and while the normal brain has its preferences, its physiology is sufficiently plastic, i.e. changeable, to adapt. Electrical activity in the neurons and its chemical environment work symbiotically.  Brain chemistry reinforces bad or good neuronal associations, from fetishes and addictions to stoic strengths.  We all sorta knew this instinctively, but brain scans and other recent advances in mapping show just how dramatically this theory plays out. The useful part is knowing how to train or re-train brains, impaired or otherwise.  Unwittingly, I've served as my own lab rat, or lab dog, as it were, over the last few years.

For me, 2003-2004 were such emotionally ghastly years that it bent my brain, more than it was already bent, which was considerably.  In the midst of the worst psychic pain of my life, I was committed to tasks that all involved organization, planning, creating (or trying to create) order out of chaos: house remodeling with limited funds, sorting and packing acres of possessions for three separate moves, the logistics of divorce and selling a house, etc.  I also embarked obsessively on physical self-improvement.  It just so happened that the accompanying brain chemistry and emotions were agonizing, so the payoff was more misery for completing these tasks.  (If they ever got finished ... I'm still cleaning up messes from 5 years ago.)  In effect, I was giving myself a mental training consisting of "good dog, here’s your whipping, and NO biscuit."  Like that beaten dog, my badly trained brain then whimpered and trembled when presented with any similar job -- whether actual physical clutter, attending to my diet and exercise, more abstract business or financial organization, or bringing any, ANY, plan to completion.  I thought that my mental abilities for these things, marginal at best, had become permanently lost, like speech for a stroke victim.

Well, neuroplasticity studies have shown hope for mistreated dogs and aphasiatics. "Neurons that fire together wire together," even damaged ones, and improvement can appear with astonishing rapidity when specially designed exercises are given to autistics, ADD's, OCD's, and brain injury patients, especially via computer.  I found a curative exercise in the unlikely and unexpected form of a computer game.  I normally avoid them, but I played "Hell's Kitchen" once and LURVED it so much that I bought it and played for 30-60 minutes every day for the past couple of weeks.  The game is idiotic on the surface.  It's based on the cooking reality show, where contestants run a restaurant under a tyrannical chef and brutal time constraints -- juggling customers, cooking, prioritizing service and preparation tasks.  The game didn't teach me knife skills or recipes, but as I got good at it, I was training, with positive rewards for completion, my ability to break down chaos into manageable tasks in an orderly fashion.  I found I had better mental energy all day if I played the game for about half an hour first thing in the morning.

 Within a week, I was able to start clearing clutter for short periods without panic attacks, and handled other small but long delayed jobs that formerly left me bedridden just to contemplate.  I made the connection between game and increased functionality only a couple of days ago, and it's undeniable.  Compared to less bent brains, I'm barely crawling, but I continue to improve and feel at no risk of overtraining and ending up as anal as Martha Stewart.  I plan to treat my beaten dog of a brain better in the future -- "Good dog, THREE biscuits!"

What confounds me, now that I’ve experienced a full cycle of neuroplasticity in action, is how some people facing even more agonizing psychic and work/life demands do not end up crippled.  I have a friend who endured two solid years of unimaginable emotional wreckage and adversity, yet she soldiers on, a little shaky, but intact.  I started with less skill and worse brain chemistry, I know, and maybe her coping abilities were just too hard-wired to break.  In other words, her dog could survive without biscuits for a while.  A close relation also had a full-life catastrophic meltdown, and very publicly, to boot.  I’m sure he has private scars, but he’s still in the game. Some folks have neuronal wiring as resilient under stress as a pit bull; fortunately, these friends are much less likely to bite.  

How’s your dog doing these days? Sit, Ubu, sit.

PS: It's amazing how many hits my blog gets through Google searches for "Collyer Brothers."  Occasionally, someone leaves an anguished comment about the effects of compulsive cluttering and hoarding.  There's not much out there to read -- it's a hidden illness by its nature until exposed by a dramatic denoument, as with the Collyer Brothers.  My version is mild and the improvement merely anecdotal, but suggestive.  Perhaps more serious cases could benefit from similar neural calisthenics.  If a neuroplasticity researcher stumbles across this account, I urge this for your next grant application.  It could be an interesting study.

Happy Birthday, Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation

Courtesy of Wikipedia:

"The first working laser was demonstrated on May 16, 1960 by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories."

There was major scientific ferment in my childhood about lasers.  Lots of it at Bell Labs, which engaged in a prolonged patent fight over the focused light beam.  Of course there was lots of nerd energy expended before and after on its demonstration and application.  Wiki "laser" and you can read it all.  For some reason, I was fascinated by lasers as a kid.  I remember watching "Goldfinger" and wincing as James Bond nearly lost his dangly bits to the latest ray gun, a laser.  Details here.  Maybe that was the first time it popped into my consciousness.  Maybe I had heard of it before.  But somewhere in the early-mid-60's, the science of light was big on my baby-nerd radar screen.

Some of the first lasers were dependent on crystal amplification with a ruby.  Ruby is my birth stone.  I had a Junior Rock Hound Kit at home -- I don't know what the educational purpose was, but there were samples of feldspar and quartz and jasper and so on, each neatly contained in its own precisely labeled square on a cardboard grid.  There was a sample of some stone with tiny, non-gem quality ruby inclusions.  That might have captured my attention.  I remember holding up the ruby to sunlight and standing back warily.  Or maybe it was the advance-placement geek-certified science summer school class before 5th grade taught by a Bell Labs nerd.  We both wore coke-bottle thick glasses, he had a crew cut and the first pocket protector I'd ever seen -- I immediately wanted one.  There I first saw fiber optics (this was maybe 1965) -- wow, those little plastic fibers glowed in the dark.  Cool.  I asked him why a succession of mirrors couldn't work to save light forever.  He glowed with pleasure at his superiority, then explained why not.  Turns out mirrors are terribly inefficient, and the speed of light is too fast.  So much for my ideas on secret weapons.  But mirrors were key to laser technology, and he complimented my grasp of the subject.  I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

Then he treated us, in the elementary school auditorium, to a boffo showcase of the latest Bell Labs neat stuff.  First he demonstrated a -- hold on to your hats -- push button phone.  He challenged poor little Susan Campell to a race.  He gave her the phone we all knew and had at home.  (We didn't have a cell in our backpacks.  This was the dark ages, kiddies.  We were still waiting for our wrist-radio like Dick Tracy.)  In case you weren't born yet, our phone looked like this:

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

The Bell guy had buttons.  Poor Susan had to dial while he pushed buttons.  Fixed race.  Of course he won.  I'm sitting there thinking, "Brave new world, saving 30 seconds on phoning home.  Big woop.  He beat a 10-year-old kid.  This is a totally useless invention."

But then he brought out the big guns, literally.  He had an actual laser in his bag of tricks.  He set up a device the size of a sewing machine.  We all shifted uneasily in our seats.  This madman could blow us all up.  That thing for sure would suck the oxygen out of the air, burn down the school, hey, maybe that isn't such a bad idea.  He actually proposed to fire it at the wall.  I waited for Armageddon to let loose, a mushroom cloud over R.D. White Elementary.  With many wizardly flourishes, he fiddled with the controls and pressed buttons and we heard a mild "whoomp."  Right below the school clock a 2-inch diameter pale patch appeared, all the dust and muck of the ages was blown off the institutional green.  We all "ooooohed" appreciatively.  Every school assembly thereafter, my eyes were drawn to that patch.  It faded, new dust and muck adhering over time, but I could still see it years later.

OK, so I didn't grow up to be a scientist, I never developed any application for my fascination, this isn't one of those magic turning point stories.  But still.  At about the same age, I used to quiz my mother's mother (born in 1892) about her encounters with new technologies.  She told me about the first time she saw an automobile, about her first movie (and then she went on to be a silent film actress), and how scared she had been of technological marvels I accepted so casually.

By 1969, lasers were first being used medically.  My aunt, who came to live with our family due to failing health from life-long diabetes, had the broken blood vessels in her eyes experimentally treated with a laser at UCLA.  I expected her to come home with gory dead eye sockets like "Night Of The Living Dead."  Instead, her vision improved marginally for a while.  Ooooooh.  It was still early days.

Now, of course, we all have many lasers in our homes, in DVD and CD players and lots else.  A few years ago, I gave away my coke-bottle glasses after Lasik surgery.  I should have done it years ago.  I had little skin cancers and age spots blown off last year by laser at my dermatologist's office. Lasers are now tame helpers, not the herald of the End of Days.

I don't really have a point here, it's not one of those stories.  I just wanted to mark the 48th birthday of something that was as memorable as my granny's first automobile.  Oooooh.  Brave new world.

Angels in America(n E-Mail)

(apologies for copyright violation to the left -- I hope this falls within "fair use" parameters) 

Yesterday I received one of those egregious e-mail chain letters, this one promising an angelically-inspired message and/or blessing at a (computer generated) appointed time, so long as the message was passed on to 7 or more people.  The skeptic in me was curious to see what happened at my appointed time, 9:21 am today.  I selected 10 people from my address book -- those who either dislike me already or like me enough to forgive me for sending them that kind of crap.  I promised the recipients to let them know and asked them to return the favor if they played along, and apologized in the name of applied science.

I had the time written out on a Post-it next to my computer terminal so I wouldn't forget it. At about 9 am, I started checking my e-mail, sort of to keep all sources of communication open.  This takes a little background to explain, but bear with me.

I have an ongoing dialog with my Uncle John through e-mail.  He frequently sends just the kind of e-mail spam I love to ignore.  I had included him in the mailing list of the angelic message thing as payback.  He is 83 or so, screamingly reactionary, bigoted, and fundamentalist Christian.  However, our communication makes him happy and he is unfailingly kind to his sister, my mother, and I appreciate it.  Also, he is very pleased that late in life I am rediscovering Christianity and have found it compatible with my VERY different perspective, so long as I stay away from organized religion and ponder the words and actions of Jesus in my heart, without cant.

. 

John forwarded a few days ago a hateful "blame the victim" e-mail tract about Louisiana and the Katrina disaster.  It never said the word "black" but argued that the lack of recovery in Louisiana is the fault of the corrupt Democratic state government repeatedly re-elected by "ignorant voters" and other code words, and the message went on to say this proves Bush is blameless.  It was a classic piece of illogical pseudo-racism of the kind that, like those "pass it on" e-mails, I usually ignore, but this was so full of BS and struck on a topic I feel so strongly about that I wrote back, lovingly but clearly saying that we must agree to disagree on the subject and please don't send me anything similar about Katrina or the people of the Gulf Coast.  (I spent 3 weeks in the area immediately post-Katrina with the Red Cross, for those who don't know, and it changed my life, including bringing me, eventually, to accept Christianity as a viable faith.)  Also, I froth at the mouth at the thought of excusing Bush for anything, much less the Katrina recovery debacle.  The corruption of Bush's government dwarfs anything in Louisiana a hundred fold.

 

Uncle John wrote back immediately, surprising me by agreeing with me for the most part, and astonishingly announcing he will support Clinton because the Republican party is so flawed (actually, he believes it's demonic possession, he said, along with a lot of crap about Obama being a black Muslim who will bring us down in flames, etc., but I'll ignore that easily.  It's not how well the bear dances, it's that it dances at all!)  Anyway, this morning at about 9:15 I got caught up with my reply, which closed with the following, then I looked at the clock:

.

I love you, Uncle John, and I hope you don't take offense when I speak my mind.  I do believe in tolerance and avoiding judgments (and this from a woman who worked with judges for almost 20 years!) with all my heart, and I do not judge you at all.  Sometimes, though, I stand on my hind legs when stuff touches a nerve and sound off.  Must be the lawyer in me.  Not exactly Christ-like, even if he did get tee'd off at the moneychangers in the temple.  That's the kind of corruption of power that causes direct suffering of those Christ would protect that gets my goat, and that's what I see in Washington today.

Wishing you all the best.

.

Love, Me

.

PS -- Ooooh, it's 9:23, and I realized that at 9:21, the time of my supposed "angelic message" or blessing, I wrote the last paragraph about Christ.  Maybe that's a sign?  It wasn't the lottery people calling me to tell me I'm rich, the message I was hoping for, but perhaps keeping Christ in my thoughts will make me spiritually rich down the road ... it has already ...

The phone didn't ring, no voice from the heavens, my cats did not speak in tongues at 9:21.  If there was any message, it came from me, or the Christ in me, the Holy Ghost if I want to get all trinitarian about it. 

An interesting experiment -- in the larger scale, I think the timed "blessing" idea is one of those tautologies that always produce results, but probably without divine cause.  It will always work because any moment in our lives, examined closely enough through a lens of "here's a message" will produce a message.  Humans are reason-seeking creatures, pattern-recognition hardwired, which explains seeing the Virgin Mary in tortillas and the like.  That's the cynical scientific side of the coin.

The other side of the coin says, who cares about the science, if you find a helpful kernel of truth or comfort.  The unexamined life, and all that.  If you like, call it the work of angels, the Holy Ghost, the whisperings of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, may she enfold me in her holy whiskers ... we can use all the help we can get in this life, regardless of how we find it.

Exploding Head Syndrome

I am not making this up.  This is a real medical condition, scientifically recognized:

Exploding head syndrome is a rare condition first reported by a British physician in 1988 that causes the sufferer to occasionally experience a tremendously loud noise as if from within his or her own head, usually described as an explosion or a roar. This usually occurs within an hour or two of falling asleep, but is not the result of a dream. Although perceived as tremendously loud, the noise is usually not accompanied by pain. Attacks appear to increase and decrease in frequency over time, with several attacks occurring in a space of days or weeks followed by months of remission. Sufferers often feel a sense of terror and anxiety after an attack, accompanied by elevated heart rate. Attacks are also often accompanied by perceived flashes of light or difficulty in breathing. The condition is also known as 'auditory sleep starts'. The noise may be accompanied by a perceived bright flash of light, and the light on its own is known as a 'visual sleep start'.

Note that Exploding Head Syndrome does not actually cause one's head to explode.

(Courtesy of Wikipedia, full article, with footnotes and citations, here.)

My favorite part of the above summary is the last line.  It reminds me of the prescription commercials where a cheery voice recites side effects of the wonder drug at a tobacco-auctioneer's pace.  Sidetrack:  I love the Viagra commercials when the customer is warned of the dangers of "an erection lasting four hours or longer."  Good god.  That will only cause men to take twice as much.  ("Hey, maybe I can have wood for eight hours!")  They probably will soon warn of other tempting side effects.  "The makers of Viagra are not responsible for gang-rape by sex-starved droves of topless dancers . . ."

Back to Exploding Head Syndrome:  This is common enough, yet so little is publicly disseminated, that there is a relieved chorus of "me too!" on discussion threads when the topic is raised.  Like here.

This is one mental dysfunction I haven't developed yet, thankfully, but I'm thinking of mentioning it the next time I catch my therapist nodding off.

What I have experienced, is the very common sensation of falling when I'm on the verge of sleep, then jerking awake.  This is called hypnagogic myoclonus, myoclonus being any sort of involuntary muscle spasm and hypnagogic referring to sleep. The twitches occur during very light sleep as the conscious brain gradually relinquishes control of the motor functions. Often they're accompanied by a sense of falling, or the feeling that something is flowing through the body, and sometimes people will experience vivid dreams or hallucinations.

One medical website states:
It's not known exactly what causes the twitches, but they appear to be associated (although by no means invariably) with (a) anxiety and (b) some faint stimulus, such as a noise. The twitches have been induced in test subjects who were instructed to push a button whenever they heard a low tone. When, as usually happened, the subjects nodded off after a while--you know how exciting psychology experiments are--the tone would often cause a subject to twitch after a lag of a few seconds.

For me, it usually happens when I am finally nodding off after some form of sleep deprivation.  I think the transition to sleep is meant to be gradual, but if one is too tired, and the transition takes place too rapidly, the brain rejects it, sort of like the way my car's CD player spits out the disc if I ram it in too fast. 

Hypnagogic myoclonus, however exotic it sounds in Latin, still can't compete with the drama of Exploding Head Syndrome.  Now wouldn't that be a fun party trick?

Germ Soup

Dull headache pounds.  Heavy lungs wheeze.  Nose alternates between cement-packed and running like a faucet.  Sneezes explode every few minutes.  And I have a cough like Violetta in the last scene of La Traviata. 

Yep, after a respite of nearly three years, I got a cold.  This is not the end of the world, not life-threatening, but goddamn annoying.  See, for the last nearly three months, I have been taking a couple of dozen pills a day of food supplements, vitamins, minerals, green tea extract and other mysterious nostrums designed to keep me in the pink of health.  For the years previous, I treated my body like a toxic waste dump site.  I glowed with vibrant well-being despite the intoxicants, junk food (when I bothered to eat), copious butterfat and irregular sleeping habits.  Now I live like a nun, wholesome food, chaste habits, early to bed and to rise, ritualistic skin care and exercise.  And I decided that if I like taking pills, I could continue, but with chemical compounds designed to be Good For Me.

For two days after my return from SF on Tuesday, I fell out of the vitamin habit.  The tiny prop plane from LAX to My Little Town left me queasy and in no mood to swallow handfuls of horse pills.  I started back on my regimen a couple of days ago, and presto, I had the Crud.  I've soldiered on, but this morning it is Too Much.  I can only blame my lapse in vigilance and air travel.

"Now that space-age technology has made it increasingly feasible to fly hundreds of people quickly from city to remote city, some hazards relating to airline travel have recently been identified...More likely, however, is the spread of respiratory infections...In general the worst-case scenario may be the air-travel-related transmission of respiratory pathogens that are commonly spread by tiny droplet nuclei. Such droplet nuclei are dispersed widely and randomly (and) remain airborne for hours."

That's a doctor speaking here.  More evidence here,  here, and the following quote from this CDC article:

"Probably the most dramatic example of airborne spread in humans occurred during an airplane flight from Anchorage to Kodiak, Alaska (31). At an intermediate stop in Homer, Alaska, the plane had mechanical difficulty and remained on the tarmac for several hours with an inoperative ventilation system. A young woman had boarded the flight in Homer and within 15 minutes developed full-blown symptoms of acute influenza. A point-source outbreak of influenza ensued, and 72% of the 54 passengers became ill within 72 hours. The attack rate was highest in passengers who remained on the crippled plane the longest, and the six passengers who deplaned immediately remained well. Although the passengers who stayed on the plane moved about at will, influenza developed in few of those who had close contact with the index patient."

I'm an amateur virologist.  I have no science background. Still, I do love a good plague story and have graduated from The Hot Zone to keeping a link on my desktop for the CDC, keeping a wary eye on Ebola (the Ebola index patient "crashed out" on a jet, remember), bird flu and hantavirus.  I lap up tales of bioterrorism.  Articles like this about airplane transmission of drug-resistant tuberculosis cause me to tremble with delicious dread.

But did I take precautions?  NOOOooooooooooooo...  Instead, locking the barn door after the horse was stolen, I crept to Trader Joe's yesterday to re-stock my larder with even larger doses of megavitamins and homeopathic remedies.  On the check-out counter were stacked boxes of "Airborne", a supposed preventative for just what occurred to me, based on minerals and natural herbs.  Damn, I croaked to the checker, and explained my sad lot.  He cringed and reached for the package as I hefted my bag, no doubt to swallow the entire box, wrapping and all, once I was out of sight.

Chicken soup, anyone?

Nice SUV. Too Bad About Your Penis. Or, Biology in Action

Check it out.  More important scientific discoveries.  I'm thinkin', girlfirend, who needs the bladder infection?  The race IS to the swiftest.

File under: Too Much Information.

humor science