The Curious Science of Our Minds
E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-912454-01-3
Verlag: Canbury
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Wasserzeichen (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
Ever wondered how Scandinavians cope with 24-hour darkness, why we feel pain - or whether smartphones really make children stupid?
Have you heard about the US army's research into supercharging minds?
You need some Brainology. Written for Wellcome, the health charity, these stories follow doctors as they solve the puzzle of our emotions, nerves and behaviour.
Discover fascinating and intriguing stories from the world of science.
Contents
Ouch! The science of pain - John Walsh
Why doctors are reclaiming LSD and ecstasy - Sam Wong
Inside the mind of an interpreter - Geoff Watts
How should we deal with dark winters? - Linda Geddes
Smartphones won't* make your kids dumb (*Probably) - Olivia Solon
You can train your mind into 'receiving' medicine - Jo Marchant
Charting the phenomenon of deep grief - Andrea Volpe
The mirror cure for phantom limb pain - Srinath Perur
Can you think yourself into a different person? - Will Storr
How to survive a troubled childhood - Lucy Maddox
What tail-chasing dogs reveal about humans - Shayla Love
A central nervous solution to arthritis - Gaia Vince
Could virtual reality headsets relieve pain? - Jo Marchant
What it means to be homesick in the 21st Century - John Osborne
Lighting up brain tumours with Project Violet - Alex O'Brien
The US military plan to supercharge brains - Emma Young
EXTRACT
Ouch! The science of pain
John Walsh
One night in May, my wife sat up in bed and said, 'I've got this awful pain just here.' She prodded her abdomen and made a face. 'It feels like something's really wrong.' Woozily noting that it was 2am, I asked what kind of pain it was. 'Like something's biting into me and won't stop,' she said.
'Hold on,' I said blearily, 'help is at hand.' I brought her a couple of ibuprofen with some water, which she downed, clutching my hand and waiting for the ache to subside.
An hour later, she was sitting up in bed again, in real distress. 'It's worse now,' she said, 'really nasty. Can you phone thedoctor?' Miraculously, the family doctor answered the phone at 3am, listened to her recital of symptoms and concluded, 'It might be your appendix. Have you had yours taken out?' No, she hadn't. 'It could be appendicitis,' he surmised, 'but if it was dangerous you'd be in much worse pain than you're in. Go to the hospital in the morning, but for now, take some paracetamol and try to sleep.'
Barely half an hour later, the balloon went up. She was awakened for the third time, but now with a pain so savage and uncontainable it made her howl like a tortured witch face down on a bonfire. The time for murmured assurances and spousal procrastination was over. I rang a local minicab, struggled into my clothes, bundled her into a dressing gown, and we sped to St Mary's Paddington at just before 4am.
The flurry of action made the pain subside, if only through distraction, and we sat for hours while doctors brought forms to be filled, took her blood pressure and ran tests. A registrar poked a needle into my wife's wrist and said, 'Does that hurt? Does that? How about that?' before concluding: 'Impressive. You have a very high pain threshold.'
The pain was from pancreatitis, brought on by rogue gallstones that had escaped from her gall bladder and made their way, like fleeing convicts, to a refuge in her pancreas, causing agony. She was given a course of antibiotics and, a month later, had an operation to remove her gall bladder.
'It's keyhole surgery,' said the surgeon breezily, 'so you'll be back to normal very soon. Some people feel well enough to take the bus home after the operation.' His optimism was misplaced. My lovely wife, she of the admirably high pain threshold, had to stay overnight, and came home the following day filled with painkillers; when they wore off, she writhed with suffering.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
INTRODUCTION. All of the stories in this book were first published by Mosaic (mosaicscience.com), created by Wellcome, a global charitable foundation dedicated to improving human health. They are republished here under a Creative Commons licence. Some edits have been made, including to the headlines
1. OOUCH! THE SCIENCE OF PAIN. There seemed to be a chasm of understanding in human discussions of pain. Let's find out how the medical profession apprehends pain – the language it uses for something that's invisible, that can't be measured save for asking for a sufferer's subjective description
2. WHY DOCTORS ARE RECLAIMING LSD AND ECSTASY. The early LSD researchers had no way to look at what it was doing inside the brain. Now we have brain scans. Robin Carhart-Harris has carried out such studies with psilocybin, LSD and MDMA. He says there are two basic principles of how psychedelics work
3. INSIDE THE MIND OF AN INTERPRETER. So much goes on in an interpreter's brain that it's hard even to know where to start. Recently, however, a handful of enthusiasts have taken up the challenge, and one region of the brain – the caudate nucleus – has already caught their attention
4. HOW SHOULD WE DEAL WITH DARK WINTERS? For most, it's a mild malaise, winter blues. For a few seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a form of depression. Now the town of Rjukan in southern Norway has installed giant mirrors to make the most of the winter sun. Do they cheer up the inhabitants?
5. SMARTPHONES WON'T* MAKE YOUR KIDS DUMB (*PROBABLY). The concern among some experts is that these devices, if used in particular ways, could be changing children's brains for the worse – potentially affecting their attention, motor control, language skills and eyesight, especially in under-fives
6. YOU CAN TRAIN YOUR BODY INTO 'RECEIVING' MEDICINE. A quiet revolution is taking place in immunology. Lowering drug doses could minimise harmful side effects and save billions in health costs. How? By teaching the body how to respond to a medicine, so it can trigger the same change on its own
7. CHARTING THE PHENOMENON OF DEEP GRIEF. 'Complicated grief' affects 10-20% of people after a spouse or romantic partner dies, or when the death of a loved one is sudden or violent. It is even more common among parents who have lost a child. It is very debilitating and treatable
8. THE MIRROR CURE FOR PHANTOM LIMB PAIN. An American, Stephen Sumner, is helping Cambodian amputees, who have lost a limb due to landmines, to stop suffering debilitating pain and anxiety – with a usual and highly successful technique. He cycles around villages and hospitals looking for amputees
9. CAN YOU THINK YOURSELF INTO A DIFFERENT PERSON? Divorced and with another break-up, Debbie Hampton took an overdose and damaged her brain: encephalopathy. Then she tried a new treatment called neurofeedback. Then she read The Brain That Changes Itself. Now she runs thebestbrainpossible.com
10. HOW TO SURVIVE A TROUBLED CHILDHOOD. In Hawaii, researchers into trauma found two-thirds of 'high-risk' children developed significant problems. But totally unexpectedly, one-third didn't. They became competent, confident and caring adults. Why?
11. WHAT TAIL-CHASING DOGS REVEAL ABOUT HUMANS. Sputnik has canine compulsive disorder (CCD) and is at Tufts for a checkup with Nicholas Dodman, a veterinarian who has been studying CCD for over two decades. When he started, he realised he had a potentially ideal animal study model for human OCD
12. A CENTRAL NERVOUS SOLUTION TO ARTHRITIS. Operating far below the level of our conscious minds, the vagus nerve is vital for keeping our bodies healthy. It is an essential part of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for calming organs after the adrenaline response to danger
13.
Can you think yourself into a different person? Will Storr For years she had tried to be the perfect wife and mother but now, divorced, with two sons, having gone through another break-up and in despair about her future, she felt as if she’d failed at it all, and she was tired of it. On 6 June 2007 Debbie Hampton, of Greensboro, North Carolina, took an overdose. That afternoon, she’d written a note on her computer: ‘I’ve screwed up this life so bad that there is no place here for me and nothing I can contribute.’ Then, in tears, she went upstairs, sat on her bed, and put on a Dido CD to listen to as she died. But then she woke up again. She’d been found, rushed to hospital, and saved. ‘I was mad,’ she says. ‘I’d messed it up. And, on top of that, I’d brain-damaged myself.’ After Debbie emerged from her one-week coma, her doctors gave her their diagnosis: encephalopathy. ‘That’s just a general term which means the brain’s not operating right,’ she says. She couldn’t swallow or control her bladder, and her hands constantly shook. Much of the time, she couldn’t understand what she was seeing. She could barely even speak. ‘All I could do was make sounds,’ she says. ‘It was like my mouth was full of marbles. It was shocking, because what I heard from my mouth didn’t match what I heard in my head.’ After a stay in a rehabilitation centre, she began recovering slowly. But, a year in, she plateaued. ‘My speech was very slow and slurred. My memory and thinking was unreliable. I didn’t have the energy to live a normal life. A good day for me was emptying the dishwasher.’ It was around this time that she tried a new treatment called neurofeedback. She was required to have her brain monitored while playing a simple Pac-Man-like game, controlling movements by manipulating her brain waves. ‘Within ten sessions, my speech improved.’ But Debbie’s real turnaround happened when her neurofeedback counsellor recommended a book: the international bestseller The Brain that Changes Itself by Canadian psychotherapist Norman Doidge. ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘For the first time it really showed me it was possible to heal my brain. Not only that it was possible, that it was up to me.’ After reading Doidge’s book, Debbie began living what she calls a ‘brain-healthy’ life. That includes yoga, meditation, visualisation, diet and the maintenance of a positive mental attitude. Today, she co-owns a yoga studio, has written an autobiography and a guide to ‘brain-healthy living’ and runs the website thebestbrainpossible.com. The science of neuroplasticity, she says, has taught her that, ‘You’re not stuck with the brain you’re born with. You may be given certain genes but what you do in your life changes your brain. And that’s the magic wand.’ Neuroplasticity, she says, ‘allows you to change your life and make happiness a reality. You can go from being a victim to a victor. It’s like a superpower. It’s like having X-ray vision.’ Debbie’s not alone in her enthusiasm for neuroplasticity, which is what we call the brain’s ability to change itself in response to things that happen in our environment. Claims for its benefits are widespread and startling. Half an hour on Google informs the curious browser that neuroplasticity is a ‘magical’ scientific discovery that shows that our brains are not hard-wired like computers, as was once thought, but like ‘play-doh’ or a ‘gooey butter cake’. This means that ‘our thoughts can change the structure and function of our brains’ and that by doing certain exercises we can actually, physically increase our brain’s ‘strength, size and density’. Neuroplasticity is a ‘series of miracles happening in your own cranium’ that means we can be better salespeople and better athletes, and learn to love the taste of broccoli. It can treat eating disorders, prevent cancer, lower our risk of dementia by 60 per cent and help us discover our ‘true essence of joy and peace’. We can teach ourselves the ‘skill’ of happiness and train our brains to be ‘awesome’. And age is no limitation: neuroplasticity shows that ‘our minds are designed to improve as we get older’. It doesn’t even have to be difficult. ‘Simply by changing your route to work, shopping at a different grocery store, or using your non-dominant hand to comb your hair will increase your brain power.’ As the celebrity alternative-medicine guru Deepak Chopra has said, ‘Most people think that their brain is in charge of them. We say we are in charge of our brain.’ Debbie’s story is a mystery. The techniques promising to change her brain via an understanding of the principles of neuroplasticity have clearly had tremendous positive effects for her. But is it true that neuroplasticity is a superpower, like X-ray vision? Can we really increase the weight of our brain just by thinking? Can we lower our risk of dementia by 60 per cent? And learn to love broccoli? Some of these seem like silly questions, but some of them don’t. That’s the problem. It’s hard, for the non-scientist, to understand what exactly neuroplasticity is and what its potential truly is. ‘I’ve seen tremendous exaggeration,’ says Greg Downey, an anthropologist at Macquarie University and co-author of the popular blog Neuroanthropology. ‘People are so excited about neuroplasticity they talk themselves into believing anything.’ § § § For many years, the consensus was that the human brain couldn’t generate new cells once it reached adulthood. Once you were grown, you entered a state of neural decline. This was a view perhaps most famously expressed by the so-called founder of modern neuroscience, Santiago Ramón y Cajal. After an early interest in plasticity, he became sceptical, writing in 1928, ‘In adult centres the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated. It is for the science of the future to change, if possible, this harsh decree.’ Cajal’s gloomy prognosis was to rumble through the 20th century. Although the notion that the adult brain could undergo significant positive changes received sporadic attention, throughout the 20th century, it was generally overlooked, as a young psychologist called Ian Robertson was to discover in 1980. He’d just begun working with people who had had strokes at the Astley Ainslie Hospital in Edinburgh, and found himself puzzled by what he was seeing. ‘I’d moved into what was a new field for me, neuro-rehabilitation,’ he says. At the hospital, he witnessed adults receiving occupational therapy and physiotherapy. Which made him think… if they’d had a stroke, that meant a part of their brain had been destroyed. And if a part of their brain had been destroyed, everyone knew it was gone for ever. So how come these repetitive physical therapies so often helped? It didn’t make sense. ‘I was trying to get my head around, what was the model?’ he says. ‘What was the theoretical basis for all this activity here?’ The people who answered him were, by today’s standards, pessimistic. ‘Their whole philosophy was compensatory,’ Robertson says. ‘They thought the external therapies were just preventing further negative things happening.’ At one point, still baffled, he asked for a textbook that explained how it all was supposed to work. ‘There was a chapter on wheelchairs and a chapter on walking sticks,’ he says. ‘But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, on this notion that the therapy might actually be influencing the physical reconnection of the brain. That attitude really went back to Cajal. He really influenced the whole mindset which said that the adult brain is hardwired, all you can do is lose neurons, and that if you have brain damage all you can do is help the surviving parts of the brain work around it.’ But Cajal’s prognosis also contained a challenge. And it wasn’t until the 1960s that the ‘science of the future’ first began to rise to it. Two stubborn pioneers, whose tales are recounted so effectively in Doidge’s bestseller, were Paul Bach-y-Rita and Michael Merzenich. Bach-y-Rita is perhaps best known for his work helping blind people ‘see’ in a new and radically different way. Rather than receiving information about the world from the eyes, he wondered if they could take it in in the form of vibrations on their skin. They’d sit on a chair and lean back on a metal sheet. Pressing up against the back side of that metal sheet were 400 plates that would vibrate in accord with the way an object was moving. As Bach-y-Rita’s devices became more sophisticated (the most recent version sits on the tongue), congenitally blind people began to report having the experience of ‘seeing’ in three dimensions. It wasn’t until the advent of brain-scanning technology that scientists began to see evidence for this incredible hypothesis: that information seemed to be being processed in the visual cortex. Although this hypothesis is yet to be firmly established, it seems as if their brains had rewired themselves in a radical and useful way that had long been thought impossible. Merzenich, meanwhile, helped to confirm in the late 1960s that the brain contains ‘maps’ of the body and the outside world, and that these maps have the ability to change. Next, he co-developed the cochlear implant, which helped deaf people hear. This relies on the principle of plasticity, as the brain needs to adapt to receive auditory information from the artificial implant instead of the cochlea (which, in the deaf person,...
