Dana Foundation Blog

Sports mentality

Like millions of others worldwide, I’ve spent many of my nights recently glued to the coverage of the Olympics. As I watch the gymnasts swinging onto the uneven bars, the divers launching themselves from their boards and the volleyball players throwing themselves enthusiastically into the sand, all I can think is, “How do they do it?”

Our own Ben Mauk began to explain the technicalities of competition and the competitive edge in his recent blog, “Marathon Mind.” My question is, how do Olympians handle the pressure?

According to this fascinating page on stress and the brain from the Franklin Institute, whenever we perceive a threat—for instance, another competitor closing in on the gold—our sympathetic nervous systems trigger our adrenal glands to produce the hormone adrenaline. As adrenaline is released, our senses heighten, memory sharpens and our sense of pain diminishes (at least temporarily).

This adrenaline rush might explain the gold-medal performance of gymnast Kerri Strug. At the 1996 Olympics, Strug missed on the vault and injured her ankle but then went on to nail a perfect finish on the second vault. After that landing, she collapsed in pain and was carried from the floor. It seemed an almost superhuman feat. No doubt Strug’s body was full of adrenaline, pushing her forward until she had reached the safety of having finished her routine.

As the Olympians are receiving this adrenaline rush, the area of their brain known as the frontal lobe is also particularly active. According to The Dana Guide to Brain Health, the frontal lobe controls so-called “executive functions” such as recognizing the consequences of your actions (if I score this high, where will that put me in the rankings?), choosing between alternatives (to do a triple twist or a measly double?) and modulating socially appropriate responses (it is not acceptable to flee the arena in fear or trip the competitor next to me).

The Olympics are truly a full-body event. And, the Franklin Institute page points out, while chronic stress can shut down other body systems and make us sick, short bursts of stress do not have the same effect. As our mind struggles to overcome challenges in the moment, growth occurs in the brain as new connections are formed. Being an Olympic athlete may not only make you fit and famous—it may help sharpen your intellect! I wonder if I get the same benefits from cheering on the sidelines.

—Juliana Avery

Aneurysms: a grim prognosis—for now

Even with prompt treatment, the chances of recovering from a burst aneurysm—like the one that killed Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a Democrat from Ohio, yesterday evening—remain low, a prominent neurologist says.

Aneurysms are balloon-like bulges that occur in blood vessels because of disease or a weakening of the vessel wells. Though they often occur in the brain, they can also occur in other places, such as the aorta.

When the bulges burst, they leak out highly pressurized blood that can instantaneously cause severe damage, says Louis Caplan of Harvard University Medical School, who was not involved in treating Jones and is not familiar with her exact medical situation. For those who survive, the blood vessel is likely to rupture again in the same place, he adds.

“Unfortunately, mortality is very high because of that initial bleed,” Caplan says. Though prompt diagnosis and treatment by trained experts can reduce the risk of death, recovery largely depends on how bad the initial bleeding is.

Scientists have made significant advances in diagnosing and treating aneurysms in recent years, he adds. Doctors are now better at pre-emptively spotting aneurysms, tracking genetic risk factors, and diagnosing ruptures when they do happen.

Though surgery can be used to close off the afflicted blood vessel, treatment now often includes the use of coils or other devices to induce clots that serve to strengthen the vessel walls. This has the advantage of not requiring cutting open the skull—the coils are threaded into the blood vessel endoscopically, usually through the femoral artery in the groin.

In the case of a rupture, drugs are also used to control the constriction of nearby blood vessels, a common complication.

—Aalok Mehta

In One Ear but Not Out the Other

The other day I made the mistake of going swimming—a mistake not because I find swimming unenjoyable, but because some water seems to have taken up permanent residence in my ear. Oddly enough, shortly before this unfortunate event, I had been telling my friends about an interesting new discovery linking childhood ear infections and obesity.

Everyone knows the connection between smell and taste—who hasn’t bemoaned having a cold the night of an expensive dinner?—but scientists recently found a possible connection between ear problems and taste, as reported here. How is it possible that something that seems unrelated could have such a big effect? Five studies from across the globe reported that the cause was nerve damage to the taste buds. Sufferers of chronic childhood ear infections showed an increased preference for sweet and fatty foods.

While many find this explanation implausible, I can tell you that even the water in my ear has affected my ability to taste. Sweet things are stronger, while everything else tastes watered down. But then, maybe it’s all in my head.

—Amanda Cushman

Shakespeare’s word use embiggens the brain

Shakespeare’s word use embiggens the brain

A famous philosopher once said “verbing weirds language.” While I admit that Calvin doesn’t exactly have the ivory tower cred of, say, his namesake, in this case not even Wittgenstein could have said it better.

Of course, Calvin (the tiger-towing tyke, not the theologian) couldn’t have known that, years after he coined his linguistic maxim, I would Google the phrase in order to find a JPEG (jay-peg) of the strip, to which I could hyperlink while blogging. In fact, the previous sentence would have seemed like so much gibberish to Calvin, who philosophized from the funny pages between 1985 and 1995, before Internet-speak invaded our vernacular. Language weirds quickly these days.

But then, writers have always weirded words, for practicality or contrived effect. The recent Literary Review article “The Shakespeared Brain” looks at how the Bard reinvented nouns as verbs and verbs as adjectives in his offerings of “the great creative example of what the human mind can do”:

I told my brain scientists that one small but powerful example of this quick Elizabethan shorthand is what is now called functional shift or word-class conversion … . For example: an adjective is made a verb when in The Winter's Tale heavy thoughts are said to 'thick my blood.' A pronoun is made into a noun when Olivia in Twelfth Night is called 'the cruellest she alive.'

In an experiment detailed in the article, functional shift is found to have a distinct and unique effect on the brain, one that this author argues makes us “more alive, at a level of neural excitement never fully exorcised by later conceptualization.”

As with music, we’re a long way from explaining the mysterious pleasures of the spoken word. Our brains revel in both, “those sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”

However, these studies at least suggest hopeful beginnings, as does The Bard on the Brain from Dana Press, which explores Shakespeare’s dramatization of the human mind and brain, including the magic of language, through brain imaging.

—Ben Mauk

‘Patient voices’ on Parkinson’s—and more

The New York Times has an interesting health feature under way: an interactive story for which patients speak for themselves about their experiences. These features have been posted monthly since April, and four of the first five have been brain-related.

In this month’s edition, we hear from people with Parkinson’s disease. Don’t miss the pictures as you listen to their stories. Related materials include a blog post by Times health columnist Tara Parker-Pope (with 30 comments so far) and an undated Q&A with researcher Irene Richard.

The previous brain-related “Patient Voices” topics include bipolar disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and stroke.

—Dan Gordon