Dana Foundation Blog

After brain surgery, she runs unrestrained

It’s not every day that the a sports page has a fascinating article about the brain, but yesterday’s New York Times piece on a woman who became an “ultra-runner” after having part of her brain removed certainly fits the bill.

The runner, 49-year-old Diane Van Deren of Colorado, had part of her temporal lobe removed to bring her epileptic seizures to an end. Now she competes in races of 100 miles or more, boosted in part by short-term memory problems that keep her from tracking how long she has been running and how far she has gone.

She also has trouble remembering where she is going and where she has been, and she can no longer read maps. Her family starts to worry only when she has been gone for 24 hours.

The next time my alarm clock rings at a too-early hour so I can go on a 20-minute jog around my neighborhood, I’ll think twice before grumbling.

—Dan Gordon

Be an early reviewer for Treating the Brain

Here's your chance to read and review a Dana Press book before it’s released to the general public.

July’s title is Treating the Brain: What the Best Doctors Know, by eminent neuroscientist Walter Bradley:

Even in this information age, people dealing with often-serious neurological problems face the daunting task of finding accurate, credible and understandable information—the essential medical fact. Using case histories as examples, Dr. Bradley, one of the world’s leading neurologists, explains the neurological examinations, tests, clinical features, causes and treatments available for Alzheimer’s disease, migraines, stroke, epilepsy, Parkinson’s and other frequently diagnosed neurological disorders.

Known by medical students and physicians across the globe as the editor of the leading neurology textbook, Neurology in Clinical Practice, Dr. Bradley now provides a definitive resource for patients, caregivers and other health practitioners. Treating the Brain is for anyone who has ever had a neurological symptom, from a headache to tingling hands, and for anyone with a personal interest in how the brain works in health and disease.

Requests for this book are due by July 24; we will mail an advance reading edition by July 29 and seek your reviews by August 21. Stay tuned as more books become available later this year.

—Leticia Barnes

Games for life: Using Wii to treat Parkinson’s

If Ben Herz has anything to say about it, doctors treating various neurological conditions may soon be prescribing some quality video game time—and the latest developments in video game technology may make this a lot easier.

Herz, an assistant professor of occupational therapy at the Medical College of Georgia, recently found that a regimen of Wii Sports, consisting of rounds of virtual bowling, boxing and tennis three times a week for a month, improved movement scores, quality of life measures and mood levels in people with mild Parkinson’s disease.

Herz chose Wii Sports because it relies on visual perception, specific movements and hand-eye coordination, elements that suffer early in Parkinson’s. He also hoped to take advantage of the increases in dopamine levels previous researchers had found during video game play. Such increases often help counter depression, another common symptom of Parkinson’s.

“My impression is that we would do well, and we did,” says Herz, who has also used three other games for Nintendo’s Wii console—Active Life: Outdoor Challenge, EA Sports Active and Cooking Mama—to treat people with spinal cord injuries, stroke and traumatic brain injury. For instance, measures of depression dropped significantly for 14 of the 20 people in the Parkinson’s study, and unlike physical therapy, the treatment kept participants largely motivated and eager.

The findings, which were initially presented in June at the fifth annual Games for Health Conference, will soon be submitted for publication to major research journals, Herz says. In the meantime, he hopes to do a controlled study pitting the Wii, which employs a motion-sensitive remote, against more traditionally controlled games from Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s Playstation 3. To help children who have autism, he also hopes to test the effects of Wii Fit, which adds a balance-board device to help simulate yoga, skiing and other activities, and use Wii Music, which allows players to play numerous virtual instruments.

The Wii is not the first video game system to employ a unique method of control. Arcade games have long used mock guns, steering wheels, vehicle cockpits and other elaborate input devices. At home, gamers have used plastic guitars, microphones and drum kits for Guitar Hero and other music games, and Dance Dance Revolution, which lets players step on a padded floor controller in time with hit songs, has been touted as a potential exercise tool.

But the Wii, in large part by being the first to make such a motion-control scheme standard, has significantly outsold the other next-generation consoles, bringing “active” games to millions who previously had considered video gaming a thumbs-only activity. That excitement has translated not just into new entertainment experiences but also serious attempts to solve problems, particularly health issues. Surgeons have found that they perform better after using the Wii to warm up before operations or to perform mock procedures, and software developers are working on programs for specific kinds of therapy, including some for Parkinson’s.

But the Wii’s window of dominance in this area may be in danger. At the E3 conference in early June, both Microsoft and Sony announced their own motion-control systems, both scheduled to come out as soon as next year. Microsoft’s Project Natal takes things one step further by using a motion-tracking camera instead of a controller, allowing a player to control with a game without holding on to anything. Sony’s new technology will use a “wand” device that resembles the Wii’s controller.

While it may be bad for the Wii’s sales, such standardization of motion-control inputs will make cheap and fun exercise, therapy and health training regimens like Herz’s available to tens of millions all across the world, especially since all three consoles have online stores where players can directly download games. All that remains is for researchers to quantify exactly what works best—and to convince doctors and insurers to embrace their inner gamer.

—Aalok Mehta

New in BrainWork

In our Summer issue, stories include: 

Imaging Reveals Alzheimer’s Clues both Before and After Disease Develops—Signs of Alzheimer’s may be detectable years before symptoms emerge. New brain imaging techniques and other approaches are giving scientists new insight into disease risk and may one day help them start treatment earlier and develop better methods.

Safer than Marijuana, a Natural Chemical Strengthens Memories—A chemical in the amygdala that stimulates the same receptors as marijuana, but more safely, is involved in shoring up highly emotional memories, evidence shows.

Brain Training May Help Stroke Victims Recover Vision—A form of visual therapy that employs computer exercises may help restore some vision to patients who lost sight as a result of stroke. Some researchers are skeptical that the patients were truly blind, however.

‘Neuroeducation’ Emerges as Insights into Brain Development, Learning Abilities Grow—As scientists learn more about how the brain grows and learns, universities are developing programs to translate those insights into practical classroom strategies.

And in News from the Frontier: REM sleep stimulates creativity; an active brain and body help maintain cognitive function; synchronized brain waves focus attention; and an animal model gives insight into antidepressants. 

Brain boosters in the news

The July 13 Newsweek features “Brain Boosters,” an interesting article about advances in brain research and potential therapies that may help build a “smarter brain.” As neuroscientists gain a greater understanding of the human brain, we all will have to consider the advantages and consequences of the use of enhancements to the normal brain to sharpen thinking or slow memory loss. “Brain boosters” are already an important topic of debate for the emerging field of neuroethics.

Just in case you’re not familiar with neuroethics, here’s a brief definition from the preface of The Ethical Brain by Michael Gazzaniga, a pioneer in cognitive neuroscience: “I would define neuroethics as the examination of how we want to deal with the social issues of disease, normality, mortality, lifestyle, and the philosophy of living informed by our understanding of underlying brain mechanisms” (emphasis in the original).

—Leticia Barnes

[See also our neuroethics page.]

Bridging the gap between teachers and brain scientists

For the nascent field of neuroeducation to progress, the first thing researchers need to learn is how to talk to one another. That’s one of the primary concerns for organizers of the Neuroscience Research in Education Summit, which ends today at the Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine.

Neuroeducation, which aims to translate new brain science discoveries directly into better classroom practices and materials, is one of several interdisciplinary fields that have sprung up following the development of new research tools. One such tool is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which allows researchers to image the brains of conscious people directly and makes possible a novel class of experiments that could eventually have direct practical applications.

Seeing that potential, major universities—including Harvard and Johns Hopkins—are racing to put together top-notch new research centers to explore the intersection of brain science and classroom practice. Hopkins played host to its first neuroeducation summit, “Learning, Arts, and the Brain,” on May 6 [see stories including “Brain Scientists Identify Close Links between Arts, Learning”].

But, as early writers on the topic repeatedly point out, neuroscientists and education researchers work in different ways and on different topics, framed by distinct conceptual understandings of the world. For instance, neuroscientists adopt a reductionist outlook that doesn’t gel well with the messy real-world situations teachers face, while educators’ focus on variables such as context would mess up the precision that neuroscientific experimentation demands. There are pragmatic concerns, too, such as worries that neuroscience is too expensive or that its insights are too preliminary to inform educational practice. The result, some say, has been a wariness and hostility toward collaboration from both groups.

At the summit, which is sponsored by the Society for Neuroscience, about 60 experts from both sides of the equation are trying to come up with concrete steps to better collaborate. At the heart of the meeting are small-group discussions of two key questions: How can neuroscience research inform education strategies, and how can what teachers want and need to know about how students think and learn drive neuroscience research?

There are no easy answers. Both teachers and neuroscientists are busy professionals who undergo years of training in their respective fields, and overcoming the habits and deeply rooted beliefs that come with such intense education can be difficult. The gap between the world of neuroscience, with its controlled experiments, quantitative rigor and relative abstraction, and education, which must navigate the often conflicting needs of administration, teachers, parents and students, is particularly large.

But both groups have a large stake in finding middle ground. Neuroscience insights into learning and teaching could help ease the difficulties faced by children who struggle with formal schooling and increase the effectiveness and appeal of school for everyone. Neuroeducation also serves as a litmus test for the broader application of “social neuroscience.” A success here could bode well for other genre-crossing research such as neuroadvertising and neuroeconomics; a failure could cement the suspicion that brain science is interesting only on a theoretical level.

—Aalok Mehta

Wednesday on PBS: “The Music Instinct”

Musician and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, who followed his popular-science book This Is Your Brain on Music (2006) with The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature last year, is co-host of an interesting-looking two-hour documentary that explores the science behind music. The program will air on many PBS stations starting at 9 p.m. Wednesday.

Musicians abound in the show, “The Music Instinct: Science and Song,” including Yo-Yo Ma, as well as co-host Bobby McFerrin doing an improvisation with his son, Taylor. Scientists interviewed include Oliver Sacks on whether we’re wired for music and Stephen Mithen on whether Neanderthals, who had no actual language, may have communicated through music. Other topics include music as therapy, how we hear a note’s duration and the importance of early musical training.

The section of PBS’s Web site for the show also has many short video clips, background reading and surveys, as well as extensive lesson plans for teachers on improvisation, rhythm and vibration.

—Nicky Penttila

Teaching artists are still learning their roles

Despite a long history, the exact roles that teaching artists play in schools and the best ways for them to interact with fellow teachers and school administrators remain fluid, according to veteran educators.

The role of the teaching artist “is a perpetual question in the field,” said Nick Rabkin, a researcher for the Teaching Artist Research Project at the University of Chicago. “It haunts us and vexes us—or we’d stop asking.”

Rabkin was one of four panelists who spoke during the June 19 Web symposium “Artists in Classrooms: What Is the Role of the Teaching Artist?” All agreed that teaching artists can have big effects at many levels, from individual children all the way up to whole-school administration, and that the ambiguity of their exact purpose offers both obstacles and opportunities.

Teaching artists have been around schools and communities for at least 100 years. As working musicians, writers, dancers, actors and visual artists who choose to spend part of their professional lives in public classrooms, they are a unique part of the educational system.

Thus far, Rabkin said, because of their unique nature, teaching artists have “invented the work they do.” Depending on context, he said, they serve to increase access to arts education, improve arts appreciation, improve student performance, engage reluctant learners, connect school life to real life, help students express themselves and even “bring light in what can be a somewhat dreary school day.”

Such ambiguity may allow teaching artists the opportunity to actively shape their place in the school system to maximize the good they do. “Public education needs help from outside; teaching artists are one of the resources bringing that help,” he said. The proper question may not be what role they play, but rather “what role do you, teaching artists, want to play in public education?”

One of the significant roles of teaching artists is to “de-isolate” arts teachers, who can suffer in comparison with those who teach subjects regularly tested at the national level, such as reading and math, said Sarah Johnson, director of the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall. The combination of a dedicated arts teacher and teaching artist in the same room is particularly powerful, she added—“if you are a teaching artist fortunate enough to have an arts teacher, you maximize the opportunities for connectivity,” she said.

Echoing those comments, Naho Shioya, production manager and teaching artist at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center in Seattle, said, “We are teaching artists to both students and teachers in the classroom.” The mere presence of the teaching artist, for instance, can bring back the optimism and joy that spurred many arts teachers to enter the field but that can quickly become lost amidst restrictive school policies and dwindling resources. But at the same time, teaching artists need to follow school guidelines and administrative policies that may limit what they originally had envisioned.

Learning to navigate school policies is just a first step to practicing a kind of “subterfuge” that allows teaching artists to reshape school policies and content, said Lisa Fitzhugh, founder and former executive director of Arts Corps. Particularly important, she said, is bringing “the language of love and learning” back to schools that have become increasingly dominated by “technocratic language.”

About 600 people registered for the symposium, which closed with a reminder for teaching artists to participate in Rabkin’s research project, a 12-city survey that aims to offer, by August 2010, quantitative answers to some of these issues and possible new directions for teaching artists. Moderated by Russell Granet, founder of Arts Education Resource, the event was sponsored in part by the Dana Foundation and will be available for re-viewing on the Association of Teaching Artists Web site starting on July 10.

—Aalok Mehta

The lasting effects of childhood stress

Whether they are as small as a fender bender or as profound as a family tragedy, events that cause us stress leave us feeling drained. Yet the toll of unresolved stress may go far deeper.

In our article “How Stress Affects the Brain May Depend on Age,” writer Kayt Sukel describes research showing how stressful events during different stages in children’s development may affect the physical growth of their brains. Trauma between infancy and age 2 can delay the development of the hippocampus, causing it to be smaller than average through adulthood. Traumatic events that occur when children are between the ages of 8 and 14 can affect the development of their frontal lobes. In these ways and others, a particular terrible event might have a long-term effect on the brain that accounts for the range of ways individuals handle stress throughout their lives.

In “Neuroscience, Molecular Biology, and the Childhood Roots of Health Disparities,” in the June 3 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, doctors W. Thomas Boyce, Bruce McEwen and Jack P. Shonkoff consider the effect of stress, both as a single traumatic event and as a cumulative experience, on the body. (McEwen is the author of our 2002 book The End of Stress as We Know It.) Traumatic childhood events have been linked to later alcoholism, depression and drug abuse, and long-term exposure to stress has been tied to major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Such stress affects not only the brain but the body as a whole, they report, as traumatic childhood events also are often linked to the higher rates of coronary artery disease, chronic pulmonary disease and cancer.

Children from more difficult socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to be exposed to traumatic events and long-term stress, and the authors recommend social and medical intervention: “Cost-benefit assessments of effective early childhood intervention for low-income children have documented significant financial returns to society through greater economic productivity, decreased welfare dependence, and lower rates of incarceration.”

Decreasing stress, in both the short term and long term, can be good for body, mind and society as a whole.

—Juliana Avery

The limits of fMRI

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a brain scan might well be worth far more, in terms of publicity, professional renown and even product sales. In particular, functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, whose output is often digitized into splashy, colorful brain-scan pictures, has captured the hearts of both researchers and the public, both sometimes seemingly without careful consideration. News stories (and the occasional research paper) now routinely announce the discovery of the brain region for X, where X can be pretty much anything from morality to lust to lapses in judgment.

No doubt, fMRI is a revolutionary technique. Though so far it has not been of much use in the clinic, it is one of few tools that allow real-time observation of how the brain changes in healthy people, making possible many studies previously relegated to wishful thinking.

But just because something lets us study the imagination doesn’t make it immune to our own flights of imagination. FMRI is useful but imperfect, its current results more suggestive than explanatory. Cataloging and detailing its flaws are vital, because fMRI is increasingly being recruited, sometimes with great recklessness, as a technological clairvoyant. At least two companies have formed to conduct fMRI-based lie detection; marketing companies use it to attempt to perceive consumer behavior—and some people are even considering a role for it in matchmaking and marriage counseling.

But these images are not real, they are representation; MRI machines spit out numbers, and the subsequent pictures are graphical estimations created after those data have been parsed, analyzed and cleaned up (the process has been the topic of a major recent controversy in neuroscience). The numbers themselves are also a proxy, since they measure blood flow as a sign of brain activity instead of measuring the activity itself. The blood response takes up to 15 seconds, far slower than many of the thought processes being studied. And for a research participant, being in an MRI machine is unpleasant; it’s small enough that it can induce claustrophobia, and moving your head even a bit can throw off the results. How genuine results from such an alien environment can be is debatable.

As Russell A. Poldrack points out in a new Cerebrum article, there are other limitations, too. These types of imaging studies usually use small numbers of test subjects, and results often have not been verified by other research groups. They measure group averages, leaving their usefulness for individuals in doubt.

Saying there is a brain region for something is inevitably an oversimplification, since much of the brain is always active and every brain process involves disparate regions. Some brain regions activate to shut down activity in other regions, making interpretation of the data trickier.

Yes, fMRI scans have potential, he says, especially for lending some much-needed quantitative rigor to our understanding and diagnosis of psychiatric disorders. But we’re not there yet, he adds, and understanding precisely why is vital to keeping expectations reasonable and ensuring that we are savvy enough to assess the research and marketing claims we encounter.

—Aalok Mehta

Put down the crossword, pick up the quilt

A June 11 post on the New York Times’ blog “The New Old Age: Caring and Coping” focuses on preventing memory loss, and Denise Park, who also wrote a December 2008 Cerebrum article, is quoted.

Park, director of the Productive Aging Laboratory and T. Boone Pickens Distinguished Chair in Clinical Brain Science at the University of Texas, points out in the blog post that quilting provides a mental workout. Learning to quilt is part of a National Institute on Aging trial in which researchers are trying to discern whether learning a new skill can preserve cognitive function. Neuroscientists think that doing so “may be even more effective than mental games at keeping the brain sharp,” the article notes.

photo courtesy of Denise Park

Park’s Cerebrum article goes deeper: She explains her “Scaffolding Theory of Aging and Cognition,” which holds that a demanding task—quilting, for example, or continuing a mentally challenging job later in life—causes new circuitry to develop in the brain. Such “scaffolding” may compensate for areas of the brain that are becoming less efficient.

The Times blog makes other important points as well, such as the importance of physical exercise and a healthy diet and the unproven nature of supplements and software that claim to boost the brain.

In short: Beware fantastic claims. Keep that crossword puzzle around. But for staying mentally agile, learning something new may be your best bet.

—Dan Gordon

Robot see, robot predict

Robots, at least as a concept, have been around since long before their media popularization. For example, Chinese texts from two thousand years ago refer to a human automaton from a thousand years prior. In the past century, however, technology has allowed us to inch toward the fantastic machines described by writers such as Isaac Asimov.

A recent step toward these once far-fetched (and still quite distant) possibilities involves the creation of a robot with predictive powers. By studying the cognitive mechanisms of cooperative action, Joint-Action Science and Technology (JAST) project researchers in Europe hoped to learn the secret to creating a robot that could interact with humans as more than machine.

The scientists applied mirror neuron theory, which holds that some of our neurons act as if they are performing an activity when we merely observe another person doing so. The brain thus learns new actions and develops a sense of how to react. Keeping this in mind, scientists built a robot with a neural system that is able to observe and mirror actions shown to it. The robot is thus able anticipate future movements and needs and can even spot errors or ask questions if multiple outcomes are possible.

Understanding the brain enough to create robots capable of such decision making is a great achievement. Next step: Robot butlers!

—Amanda Cushman

Free Webposium for teaching artists

Join us online for a discussion about the evolving issues in the Teaching Artist profession. The event will be streamed live and viewers will be able to join in the Q and A at the end of the session.

Friday, June 19, 2009 from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. (PST); 1 p.m.-2:30 p.m. (EST)

Topic: Artists in Classrooms: What Is the Role of the Teaching Artist?

What is the role of the teaching artist in public education? How can schools maximize a partnership with an outside artist? What is the artist role in the classroom, in the art room, in the school? How can artists help build a culture in a school where creativity, innovation, and imagination are at the core of teaching and learning?

Panelists include:

Nick Rabkin, Lead Researcher, Teaching Artist Research Project, NORC at the University of Chicago

Lisa Fitzhugh, Founder, Former Executive Director, Arts Corps

Sarah Johnson, Director, Weill Music Institute, Carnegie Hall

Naho Shioya, Teaching Artist

Moderator: Russell Granet, Founder, Arts Education Resource

Register Now!

Registration ends on Thursday at 5 p.m. EST and will be capped at 499 people. As of Friday, June 12, 305 people had registered. Sponsored by the Dana Foundation.

Attention networks and information overload

Paying attention to the visual world is a highly coordinated dance of neurons across several regions of the brain. Neurons in the brain’s decision-making centers must synchronize firing with those in the physically distant visual cortex, according to a new study in Science.

Scientists already knew that synchronized firing is one way information travels by neurons, but they hadn’t known how the visual system was alerted to pay attention to a significant stimulus such as a blinking e-mail alert or a flashy subway ad. As it turns out, prefrontal neurons increase signaling at the so-called gamma frequency, and this is coupled with dual signaling in the visual cortex.

You don’t have to browse far to see that the brain’s attention network has captured the attention (sorry) of the science media. As for me, I can’t start clicking on Web stories or I’ll start leaping from link to link in the productivity-killing manner described in the contentious Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Well, is it? Has modern technology affected the brain’s ability to focus?

The New York Times urges caution in leaping to conclusions regarding modern information overload, in a question-and-answer session with attention researcher Robert Desimone.

“It’s not obvious that the attention load is higher today than it was in the past,” Desimone said. “Our ancestors had to attend to a lot of things that most of us can safely ignore. … My guess is that New Yorkers today learn to tune out stimuli that would have seemed inconceivably distracting to our ancestors.”

If you’re still reading this blog post, congratulations on your neurosurgeon-like concentration skills. But if you’re having trouble, I’ll also point out a recent article in Salon inquisitively titled “Why Can’t We Concentrate?” that helpfully mentions a few downloadable programs that will limit your Internet time or simplify your computer screen by weeding out distracters. As I read the article, a sidebar points out other recent Salon articles, a banner ad flashes at the top of the page, category tags invite me to browse similar articles in the archives and links within the text further tempt my info-hungry mouse.

Feeling a little unmoored, I search for a New Yorker story I remember reading—or, more likely, browsing—that looks at artificial brain enhancement at universities and in professional life, for the purpose of upping productivity by improving attention and focus.

But rather than Google for the nearest shady psychiatrist, I remember attending the recent “Learning and the Brain” conference in Washington, D.C., and writing that neuroscientist Michael Posner has suggested that arts training may help a child focus and perform better on cognitive tests. Perhaps that’ll help me, too—time for some new sheet music. Good thing Amazon is only a click away.

—Ben Mauk

To stay sharp, stay healthy

If it’s good for you now, chances are that it will still be good for you—and your brain—later. A large, lengthy study of the elderly has confirmed the conventional wisdom that exercise, education and healthy habits can help stave off not only physical ailments but also mental decline well into our twilight years.

“We don’t all decline. There is a lot of heterogeneity in the aging process, and that includes a subgroup that won’t suffer from cognitive decline,” says study author Alexandra Fiocco, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. “We can also predict who could decline, and these factors are modifiable.”

The study tracked 2,509 generally healthy people from Memphis and Pittsburgh, ages 70 to 79 at the outset, for eight years. Most previous research on the topic has either been of much smaller groups of people or looked at the effect of specific kinds of interventions on mental function.

The new results show that those with high school education levels or greater, with ninth-grade literacy levels or higher, who engaged in moderate or vigorous exercise each week and who did not smoke suffered fewer cases of mental decline. Though less statistically significant, people who maintained healthy brain function also more often lived with someone else, worked or volunteered, drank alcohol in moderation and had a relatively lower body-mass index.

The study, which will appear in the June 9 issue of Neurology, did not measure the effects on mental decline of mental stimulation or diet, according to Fiocco. These two factors have garnered much attention from both researchers and commercial companies in recent years as the U.S. population grows older.

The country’s changing demographics may seriously affect healthcare and health costs. For example, the number of people 65 or older who have Alzheimer’s disease is expected to increase by half, to 7.7 million, by 2030 in the United States, according to the Alzheimer’s Association 2009 Facts and Figures report. Each of these people will rack up medical bills more than three times as large as the other people in their age bracket and will need intense, often unpaid, care from friends and family.

The researchers say the study presents several things people can change right now to help stave off mental decline and dementia. “These findings are really important in terms of prevention programs as our population gets older,” Fiocco says. “Prevention, more than treatment, is really key right now.”

—Aalok Mehta

Illuminating genius: insights from science and the arts

Nancy C. Andreasen

Guest blogger: At the recent Learning and the Brain Conference in Washington D.C., Nancy C. Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D., discussed the importance of providing students with a “liberal education” that combines the study the arts and the sciences. She asked: How important are the arts for optimal development of the mind and brain? How important are the sciences? And how important is it to integrate both in our educational programs?

Concerns have been raised about the failure to integrate education in the arts and sciences for many years. In the 1950s the British writer C. P. Snow expressed concern about overspecialization and the creation of “Two Cultures,” producing a situation in which educated people from diverse backgrounds in the arts and sciences could no longer communicate with one another: “This is serious for our creative, intellectual, and above all, our normal life.” More recently E. O. Wilson addressed the issue again, in his book Consilience, arguing that consilience is a groundwork of explanation that crosses all branches of learning; he believed that in an ideal world knowledge should be unified across the humanities and the sciences.

The arbitrary division of domains of knowledge and the quest for specialization is a relatively recent phenomenon. During the Renaissance, one of the great eras of exuberant creativity, people did not divide the world into art and science. Instead they saw them as a seamless continuum. Michelangelo was a sculptor, architect, painter, engineer, poet and anatomist. Leonardo was an inventor, painter, engineer, sculptor and anatomist. Great naturalists, such as Charles Darwin, made discoveries that we call “science” while trying to understand the beauty and order of the natural world. As one great naturalist, Konrad Lorenz, has said, “He who has seen the intimate beauty of nature must become either a poet or a naturalist and, if his eyes are good enough and his powers of observation sharp enough, he may well become both.” To the extent that our current educational system fails to integrate art and science, it fails in an important aspect of nurturing creativity in young people.

What is the nature of the creative process? Many introspective accounts from individuals as diverse as Mozart or Poincaré or Coleridge share a common theme. Creative ideas, insights and solutions tend to occur rapidly and spontaneously, as sudden flashes of insight, although they may be preceded by an incubation phase. They are most likely to arise while a person is daydreaming or relaxing or engaging in “free association”—a state called REST (Random Episodic Silent Thought) or the “default state” in imaging research studies. During this state, regions of the association cortex are especially active, reflecting the fact that mental connections are being tossed around chaotically—until an original idea sometimes emerges. This process reflects the highly complex nature of brain organization. The brain is able to spontaneously generate novel ideas and content because it can function as a self-organizing system (a concept from “chaos theory”), a system in which components spontaneously organize to produce something new in a nonlinear, dynamic and unpredictable way.

In the Iowa Study of Creative Genius, highly creative people from both the arts and the sciences are currently being studied using neuroimaging tools, personality and cognitive tests, and structured interviews. Although the study is still in its early stages, imaging findings suggest that artists and scientists share similar brain activity during tasks chosen to stimulate the association cortex—thereby perhaps demonstrating scientifically that the arts and the sciences are indeed a unity.

Dr. Andreasen, a member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, is the author of the Dana Press book The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius.

Avoiding Strokes

To mark Stroke Awareness Month, we invited Cleo Hutton (Striking Back at Stroke: A Doctor-Patient Journal and After a Stroke: 300 Tips for Making Life Easier) to impart some of the wisdom she shares with people who recently have had a stroke.

Striking Back at Stroke is as relevant today as it was when it was written. But there are a few additional facts that should be noted. I am a co-author and stroke survivor, and I just celebrated my 60^th birthday. I am rejoicing with my family and friends 17 years post-stroke. My children are grown and my daughters have families of their own. At the end of the book, I take a walk with my 4-year-old granddaughter, a granddaughter who is today 10 years old. Two more grandchildren have been born since the book was written and published. My journal is far from ended.

Stroke will still be a major part of my medical history as it is for hundreds of thousands of others. “Cleo” survived and thrived in spite of difficult circumstances, but “stroke” has not stopped. The incidence of stroke in the United States is still at astronomical figures. Every minute a person has a stroke and every three minutes someone dies of a stroke. What are you doing in your community to prevent stroke?

Know your risk factors. Know your numbers. Learn what your normal blood pressure is and keep the numbers within limits by eating healthy foods and supplementing with medication if prescribed by your physician. Learn your cholesterol numbers to keep plaque from forming in your bloodstream. Keep your heart and vascular system healthy. Exercise daily. You don’t have to spend money to walk around the block or garden or mow the lawn. Just increasing your heart rate slowly and slightly for 15 minutes per day will do a great service for your heart. It’s spring, so if you are overweight, get outside and do an activity that you enjoy. Your heart and brain will thank you.

Hemorrhagic strokes, bleeds within the brain or skull, are the most dangerous type but not the most prevalent. Ischemic strokes, a sudden halt of blood flow to areas within the brain, are the most common type and the type of stroke I had.

Not all strokes can be prevented, so know that pain is not the only warning sign. After 17 years of working closely with stroke centers, neurologists, rehabilitation facilities, peer-to-peer counseling, speaking at conferences and visiting families affected by stroke, I continue to be alarmed at the response of stroke survivors who are able to formulate the sentence, “I didn’t know” or “It didn’t hurt” or “All of a sudden …” All these statements are correct. Ischemic strokes do not hurt, as the brain does not feel pain. Hemorrhagic strokes can be excruciatingly painful as pressure can build up within the skull.

Normally, what brings us to the emergency room is pain. Pain is the way our body tells us something is amiss. But the warning signs of stroke do not involve pain. Our bodies will not shout out, in the usual way, that something is wrong and that we need immediate care. Instead, one side of our body may not respond the way we expect it to, it may become numb or weak, or we may stumble for no apparent reason, or our eyesight may become blocked on one side. These symptoms may last a few seconds to a few minutes. They are painless. But they can be deadly.

If there is stroke in your family history or you have diabetes, make sure your family is aware of the warning signs and signals of stroke. If you suspect stroke, don’t wait. Call 911 or your local emergency number. The faster stroke is diagnosed the faster it can be treated and the shorter the recovery time.

Stroke Awareness Month is near its end, but it’s not too late to help alert your community about stroke. Ask your local hospital for a speaker on stroke awareness for your community club or upcoming event. Request information from the National Stroke Association or the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association and give these vital facts to your neighbors or co-workers. Visit friends, family, relatives, neighbors, and co-workers or church/synagogue members who have had a stroke and extend your hand of friendship and understanding. Make this Stroke Awareness Month your inspiration to spring into action for yourself and your family. Being heart healthy, brain active and body strong are the keys to living a full life.

Thank you to all the readers of Striking Back at Stroke: A Doctor-Patient Journal. It is truly a pleasure to be with you.

—Cleo Hutton

Twitterers near and far

Last month I blogged about the Twitter phenomenon and its effect on morals, and a couple of weeks later there is more news on how the short-message service is changing our communication. For example, the first “tweet” from space reached readers on earth a week ago. However, that was hardly the most exciting development for those interested in neuroscience.

As a fan of “House, M.D.,” I am always intrigued by the show’s use of cutting-edge science (inaccurate though it may sometimes be). Recently on the show, a patient with “locked in” syndrome used brainwaves to move an arrow up or down. Not too interesting, I thought, since he could only answer yes or no questions. I also felt a certain amount of incredulity. But days later, reports of biomedical engineering doctoral student Adam Wilson’s twitter message, which he typed using only his brain waves, appeared in press releases.

With his brain connected to a computer, Wilson focused on one letter at a time on the screen to write a 23-character message. His experiment shows a new way in which patients with serious injuries might still be able to fully communicate with others, which could help them receive better medical care, among other benefits.

— Amanda Cushman

Juice as brain food?

Several weeks ago, I was watching TV when something I saw shocked me. No, it wasn’t the latest reality show or gruesome crime drama. It was a commercial for one of the popular “multipurpose” juice drinks, advertising ingredients that claimed to help boost brain development and immunity.

First, I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of special “juice” having anything to do with my brain. Second, and more important, I doubted the veracity of these bold claims. If a drink was going to help your brain and your immune system, you’d think there would have been a little bit more attention from the scientific community. What are these ingredients? What do they really do?

Juices targeted at “brain development” include DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) which, according to their advertising, is “a building block for brain development.” DHA is an essential fatty acid commonly found in fish oil. According to the Cerebrum article “Searching for a New Strategy to Protect the Brain,” more DHA is found in the human central nervous system than in any other part of the body, and it is used to help form and maintain neurons and photoreceptors. “DHA is involved in learning, memory, and vision,” writes Nicolas G. Bazan, the article’s author. But the juice-maker’s claims may not follow. Bazan also writes that “DHA’s neurobiological significance is just beginning to be clarified.” Another Cerebrum article, “The Great Brain Supplement Free-for-All,” is even more cautious about the use of DHA, author Gilbert Ross writing, “no human data show that DHA is effective in augmenting energy, concentration, or memory.” While DHA definitely plays a role in brain health, it is too early to say exactly what that role is.

Juices targeted at boosting “immunity” contain vitamin C, zinc and “prebiotic fiber” to supposedly strengthen the immune system and promote digestion. A Dana Guide entry on nutritional disorders says, “Ascorbic acid is essential in the body’s synthesis of collagen and other components of body tissues. Vitamin C deficiency causes bleeding, and neurological disease results from hemorrhage into muscles, peripheral nerves, or the brain.” Vitamin C is essential, but will it help your immune system specifically? Not necessarily.

The data on zinc and prebiotic fiber is similar to that on vitamin C. Zinc is a mineral that is essential for the function of the nervous system, according to the Dana Guide’s section on basic brain care. Just as with many other substances, though, zinc has its downsides. “Too much can be as bad as, or even worse than, too little,” writes Steven Nadis in the section. Prebiotics are defined in Wikipedia as “non-digestible food ingredients that stimulate the growth or activity of bacteria in the digestive system which are beneficial to the health of the body.^” It may be that in the case of prebiotic fiber, the juice-makers’ claims holds water.

But the he verdict is far from clear on most of the promises made by these extra-special juices. Certainly, DHA, vitamin C, zinc, and fiber are all parts of a healthy body. As “The Great Brain Supplement Free-for-All” warns, there can be consequences to overdoing it, even when it comes to vitamins, though it doesn’t seem likely that a bottle of fruit drink could have enough of any vitamin or mineral to help or to harm you.

Bottom line: Superjuices may be a fine drink but don’t start expecting your IQ to shoot up.

—Juliana Avery

'Neuroeducation' in the news

Two newspapers published stories covering the news from the Learning, Arts, and the Brain Summit, held May 6 at the American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore.

In “Art is smart, Roland Park teachers say,” Baltimore Messenger writer Larry Perl spoke with teachers who attended the summit, a chance for educators to hear from neuroscientists about the latest brain research on learning and for the scientists to hear where educators think more research should be done. While Roland Park Elementary School in Baltimore is "a school that oozes arts integration," it is an anomaly, said participant Amanda Barnes, the enrichment teacher at the school. "I'd love to see a position like mine in all Baltimore City schools," she said.

In “Arts appear to play role in brain development,” Baltimore Sun writer Liz Bowie focuses on the progress of research on learning and the brain, including that of Ellen Winner, Gottfried Schlaug and Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard, who spoke during the summit, and Charles Limb, a Johns Hopkins doctor and a jazz musician who was in the audience and invited to speak on his own research. Bowie quotes Harvard professor Jerome Kagan as saying that research into the effects of practicing the arts on the brain is "as deserving of a clinical trial as a drug for cancer that has not yet been shown to be effective."

—Nicky Penttila