I have discovered what may be the Best Thing Ever. It’s a 2002 episode of the BBC’s Look Around You dedicated to the brain. Take out your copy books, as you will learn things such as the following:
"The brain is basically a wrinkled bag of skin, filled with warm water, veins, and thought muscles. Think of it as a kind of modified heart, only with a mind, or brain."
Your grandparents were right. Rock and roll will rot your brain. (And if they know what trance music was, they’d be scared shitless.)
For years scientists have debated whether using ecstasy causes brain damage. (With no small amount of drama, thanks to the likes of George Ricaurte and his bobbled bottle debacle, the Hwang Woo-Suk-tastophe of the ecstasy wars.) But stimulant studies regularly rely on mice and monkeys distanced from human habits of use. Who sits in a silent cage and pops pills for fun?
To address the issue, Michelangelo Iannone and a team of scientists in Italy threw a rave for their rats. Well, with a few differences. Instead of music, there was loud static, and instead of scalp massages, there were holes in the scull and electrodes on the brain. The goal was to test if acoustic stimulation would affect the neurotoxicity of MDMA (ecstasy.)
The results? Yes. Blasting white noise at the maximum volume Italian nightclubs allow (95 dB) decreased neural activity in rats dosed with E. Depending on dosage, the brain blotto lasted from several hours to several days. You can download the report, published last week, here, or read about it here.
In the paper, the authors admit, "it is very difficult to indicate the mechanism underlying these effects." So I wondered whether the form the auditory stimuli took mattered. Listening to static at 95 dB can give anyone a headache, but I know subjectively (from taking E at raves as a teenager) that music can greatly enhance the experience of a trip. And I know objectively (from programming neural networks on computers) that random input like static can destroy the organization of a system. A high noise-to-signal ratio washes out meaningful relationships between neurons.
I asked Iannone if using input with some structure, such as actual music, instead of white noise would make a difference. He replied: "We made a lot of preliminary (and unpublished) experiments to assess if there is a difference between the two stimuli, using a brief ‘techno music’ brain. And I can say that there is no difference (in our hands) between discomusic and loud noise, in terms of effects." Oh well. Actually, it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s no difference. At the level of the effects that they’re measuring, the brain wouldn’t pay much mind to the informational complexity of the input. It’s all noise to the neurons.
Fortunately, the brain works at many levels. Under the right circumstances the benefits of E and other drugs can far outweigh the risks. Ecstasy was widely used in psychotherapy until it was outlawed in 1985, and today, researchers such as John Halpern at Harvard are fighting to bring it back. Click here to read about the attempts of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) to make ecstasy an FDA-approved prescription medicine.
In the Italian study, the authors report: "One of the questions which need addressing by research is how other factors typical of the ‘rave scene’, such as sensorial auditory (techno music) stimuli, can affect higher neural functions…" Now that they’ve tackled music, expect future studies to involve tripping rats subjected to candy necklaces and glow sticks.
Prepare for a whole new species of e-tard.
Good science writing for a popular audience needs to be (at least) two things: entertaining and informative. Starting your article with a catchy headline and a snappy opening is always good, as long as they’re not misleading. Yesterday I encountered a prime example of snap over substance.
It’s an article in Wired News about an emerging treatment for depression.
The hed: "Shock Therapy, Version 2.0"
The lede: "Shock treatment for depression is making a comeback, and it no longer resembles a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest."
Here’s the thing: The article is NOT ABOUT SHOCK TREATMENT.
It’s about repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, or rTMS. In rTMS, a device that causes a focused magnetic field is held against the head.
Shock treatment is electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT. In ECT, an electric current is briefly applied to the head to induce a seizure. (The therapeutic aspect actually results from the seizure, which lasts 30 seconds, not the jolt of current that triggers it, which lasts half a second. Originally, from 1933-1938, the seizures were induced by injecting chemicals.)
The article says rTMS and shock treatment are "based on the same therapeutic principle." But they are very different. rTMS: magnets. Shock treatment: seizures. rTMS is not the "comeback" of shock treatment. It is a replacement for shock treatment.
I might also note that shock treatment has already had a comeback–the comeback began in the 1970’s, and ECT is still in wide use. To boot, it has not resembled the scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest since the early 1950’s. Patients are now given an IV carrying an anesthetic and a muscle relaxant, so they’re not awake, and their bodies don’t shake.
Now, why would rTMS replace ECT? Both are safe and effective. In the short term they’re even better than Prozac. But ECT has this nasty side effect of memory loss and confusion.
My mom had several sessions of rTMS in 1999 (with Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, the leading American researcher in the field), and I could sit in the room and talk with her during her appointments. Shock treatment, on the other hand, fucks you up. Between 1997 and 1999 my mom had 28 ECT sessions. In 1997, she had six sessions after doing her Christmas shopping for the year. Christmas morning, we would open gifts from her and she would say, with genuine surprise, "What a great gift! Who gave you that?" We could only grin and say, "You did, Mom. Thanks."
Actually, it was quite funny.
Another thought on Natalie Angier’s exegesis of cuteness. (Recall: "The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby…")
The anthropomorphism of robots is especially revealing of our instincts and cognition. Eight years ago I went to a talk titled "Emergent, Situated, and Embodied: alternative AI and the aesthetics of behavior." (I got a woody from the title alone. I know, I’m dork.) Here’s what I wrote about it afterward:
Discovery News reported last month on a Japanese robot that’s been designed to recognize itself in a mirror and to imitate other robots. I had to blink a couple times when the reporter threw in this WTF comment from the researcher (emphasis mine):
"Imitation, said Takeno, is an act that requires both seeing a behavior in another and instantly transferring it to oneself and is the best evidence of consciousness."
Well, um, apparently not.
Okay, presumably Junichi Takeno doesn’t believe his aping Aibo is conscious. But one of the aims of his group’s research is to model and understand human consciousness by developing self-aware robots. The article says the Roomba reproduction has "artificial nerve cell groups built into the robot’s computer brain." Whatever that means.
Do people with better memories store more information in their brains? Maybe not. Last month a cognitive neuroscientist (Edward Vogel at the University of Oregon) published a paper in Nature showing that certain types of memory capacity may have less to do with how much raw data you can store than with how selective you are at letting in relevant information. (Here‘s a press release describing the experiment.)
Notably, Vogel describes the brain filter that keeps the bad stuff out as a nightclub bouncer. Regrettably, I think my brain hires bouncers from a temp service. Sometimes I get the "come one, come all" circus caller who will let in hobos, Hiltons, and stray cats ("Hey look at that piece of lint! Oh, wow, tin foil!") and sometimes I get the off-duty SWAT team member ("I’m sorry, did you just say something?").
I nearly shed a tear today reading a brief quote by Nicholas Negroponte about his effort to provide $100-laptops to every child in the developing world, whether they want one or not. (They may not even know they want one.) The part that misted my eyes I’ve put in bold.
Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it’s a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way — and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things — is one of the best ways to learn. Particularly to learn about thinking and algorithms and problem solving and so forth.
As mental prosthetics, computers are literally mind-bending, mind-expanding tools. Giving naive, undereducated children, presumably bubbling with glorious potential, their own personal computers will explode their universes. I’m talking new dimensions. Now imagine giving them the freedom to PLAY in that space, to BE CHILDISH and create things from scratch. That’s an experience perhaps as powerfully transformative as learning to read and write.
I can only compare it to my own bursts of self-realization within the worlds of LEGO, HyperCard, and LSD. But next to those, this is like handing a kid a fucking magic wand.
Sunday’s New York Times Magazine carries an essay by D.T. Max on literary Darwinism, the use of evolutionary psychology to analyze the behavior of characters in literature. Near the end, it takes a moment to ask, "What can the purpose of literature be, assuming it is not just a harmless oddity?" Some possibilities:
All this talk of disturbed pets reminds me of my family’s second dog, a spritely English Setter puppy that I named Sassafras, or Sassy for short. Our first dog, an adorable black and white Cocker Spaniel named Katie lived until 15, but she faded slowly, so her death was somewhat of a relief, and I was ready to start fresh.
Sassy’s name turned out to be quite fitting, as her spirited nature often got the best of her. She’d go from a lapwarmer to a blur, a circular torrent of energy, tearing around the coffee table unprovoked for minutes at a time. Her behavioral quirks just made me love her more, perhaps because I could relate <grin>. Sassy and I were quite a pair.
Giving psychoactive meds to pets has become a pretty common practice, but I never considered whether zoo animals need them too. Apparently they do, as National Geographic documents. I only question one of Nat Geo’s examples:
"Polar bears are notorious for pacing," explained zoo veterinarian Doug Whiteside. "They wander in the wild for long distances and probably have this internal drive to walk, and zoos can’t provide them with the huge distance."
Whiteside said Misty significantly reduced her pacing when she was given the drug [Prozac] in 1995. She only had to stay on it for five months to cure the disorder. [emphasis mine]