quote:

Originally posted by xen0phile:
What books on neuroscience/neurobiology/philosophy of mind do you think are especially good? There are, of course, many web sites too, and I enjoy those, but love the format of a book. Plus, I can't afford a PDA for bus trips (cue WG's comment about sex on top of books vs. PDAs).

I've found the following books to be good places to start - they're well written and engaging enough to get you wanting to learn more:

The Agile Gene - How Nature turns on Nurture by Matt Ridley

Discovering the Brain by Sandra Ackerman

I also enjoyed The Creative Process by Brewster Ghiselin. It's a compilation of letters by several highly creative artists and scientists that discuss their insights into their own creative processes.

I realized a while back that I didn't have a good enough background in molecular biology to really 'get' what a neurotransmitter or a receptor really were or how they worked, so I've been doing some research on the internet to find out more about this stuff - I find it absolutely fascinating. FWIW, I've posted the notes I've been making here and here. The things I've found most helpful are the animations; I wouldn't have understood some of the concepts nearly as well by reading a standard textbook.

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Originally posted by Er c:
It's a radical idea-one that turns on its head accepted ideas of nature vs. nurture.

The longer I live the more I believe that most of what we do is mostly affected by genes, meaning the body not the brain. This is just my uneducated opinion - gotta read some Gage.

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from: Nobel Conference® XXXVIII Recent research in the neurosciences has created some mind-boggling speculation about how our brains develop normally and how impoverished or damaged brains might be restored. We also used to think that we were born with all the brain cells we'd ever get. Not so, says research by Fred Gage and others, who found evidence that the human brain does indeed convert stem cells into new neurons in the hippocampus, one of the same areas so important for learning and memory. Thus, we now know that, far from being a static process, development of mind and body is a never-ending saga of crucial interactions between genes and environment.

Gage had a conference on regulation and function of stem cells in the adult nervous system back in March. I'm looking for a transcript.

the lab-grown bladder stuff that went up last week said the guy was growning most organs in his lab.

that and the stem-cell work.

and that woman who taught a mouse to grow back its legs when they're cut off...

it just seems like it's so close. Replaceable organs.

"The Chinese," bellowed a drunken Australian, "Chinese and MIT bloody invented nerve splicing."

Optic nerve regrown with a nanofibre scaffold
Repairing the optic nerve requires the long, spidery branches of nerve cells, called axons, to grow again and reconnect. Achieving this is a “formidable barrier”, says Rutledge Ellis-Behnke, a biomedical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US. Axons can be encouraged to extend by exposing them to growth factors, but they rarely extend far enough to bridge the large gaps typical of most optic nerve injuries, he says.

To overcome this problem, Ellis-Behnke and colleagues from Hong Kong University and the Institute for Neuroscience in Xi’an, both in China, created a nerve-bridging scaffold, made up of nanoparticle fibres. They attempted to make these fibres the same size as the sugars and proteins on the surface of the torn axon, in the hope that this would encourage cell growth and migration.

To make their scaffold, the team turned to a discovery from the early 1990s by Shuguang Zhang of MIT’s Center for Biomedical Engineering. He found that certain sequences of peptides can be made to self-assemble into mesh-like sheets of nanofibres by immersing them in salt solutions at similar concentrations to those found in the body

Recent Interview April 6, 2006 (goes over some information previously posted in this thread)

Narration: But can we go further and actually reverse some dementia damage? Can old brains learn to grow new brain cells?

But here at the famous Salk Institute in San Diego, astonishing research is showing exactly that.

Prof. Fred Gage: So this is a movie where we have videotaped these neurons growing in real time.

Dr Jonica Newby, Reporter: Wow - so these are all new brain cells in the brain?

Prof. Fred Gage: That’s right.

Narration: Professor Fred Gage startled the world when he proved adult brain cells could undergo what’s known as neurogenesis.

Prof. Fred Gage: That was extraordinary enough but then the questions emerged as to whether or not it was regulated in some way - how did it happen? How was it controlled?

Narration: For answers, they turned to mice. The bet around the lab was the trigger would be mental tasks – the mouse version of crossword puzzles.

As a control, some mice also got running wheels … which the oldest mice, equivalent to 70 year old humans, took to with surprising gusto.

Fred’s colleague Henriette van Praag then gave them a mental task; to learn and remember this water maze.

Dr Henriette van Praag: He has to find this little platform that’s right here – kind of hidden in the murky water. So basically he learns these cues that are all over the wall. He forms a little mental map in his mind.

Dr Jonica Newby, Reporter: Go little mouse!

Narration: To the researchers’ surprise, old mice who’d only done the mental tasks, never did learn the maze.

But the exercising oldies got better and better. Soon, they were remembering just as well as young mice.

More amazing, unlike the others, they actually sprouted new cells inside the memory centres of their brain.

Prof. Fred Gage: It surprised me. It is remarkable, frankly, that you can reverse - reverse a cognitive decline and reactivate cells in the brain that had apparently gone quite quiescent.

Dr Henriette van Praag: So running in and of itself is the strongest stimulus we know right now for neurogenesis.

Narration:So what’s going on? Again, they think it’s about blood flow - in this case healthy blood flow, caused by exercise, stimulating brain cell growth.

Prof. Fred Gage: So this experiment specifically shows that it is never too late to begin exercising and that will have an effect on your brain.

Narration: We still don’t know how much dementia is just genetic.

But this sea change in understanding the role of blood flow in dementia puts a lot of power back into our own hands.

Prof. Fred Gage: It means that you as an individual, has some control over not just your physical wellbeing but your mental wellbeing by virtue of what you do

What all does the blood take to the brain? It has to be more than just oxygen. But more oxygen is most likely the key.

quote:

Originally posted by Eric:
What all does the blood take to the brain? It has to be more than just oxygen. But more oxygen is most likely the key.

Found a few interesting answers...

Glucose
Your brain cells need two times more energy than the other cells in your body. Neurons, the cells that communicate with each other, have a high demand for energy because they're always in a state of metabolic activity. Even during sleep, neurons are still at work repairing and rebuilding their worn out structural components. They are manufacturing enzymes and neurotransmitters that must be transported out to the very ends of their– nerve branches, some that can be several inches, or feet, away.

Most demanding of a neuron's energy, however, are the bioelectric signals responsible for communication throughout the nervous system. This nerve transmission consumes one-half of all the brain's energy (nearly 10% of the whole body's energy
...
Dr. Carol Greenwood ... found that "eating carbohydrate foods can improve memory within an hour after ingestion in healthy elderly people with relatively poor memories."

In another study, Greenwood and her colleagues at the University of Toronto gave a group of healthy senior citizens a bowl of cereal and milk, along with white grape juice for breakfast. Another group only drank water. When tested twenty minutes later, the cereal-eaters had a better memory – able to remember 25% more facts.
Not only does a diet lacking in carbohydrates cut off the brain's main energy supply, Greenwood said a scarcity of glucose can impede the synthesis of acetylcholine, one of the brain's key neurotransmitters


Other stuff that gets past the Blood-Brain Barier:

Liposomes are being used in gene therapy to deliver genes to the brain.


Some hormones, e.g. Leptin is a hormone made by fat cells released into the blood. The amount of leptin released is related to the amount of body fat present. The leptin then gets transported to the brain where it binds to neurons in the hypothalamus. One of the effects of leptin is to reduce appetite and increase energy usage.

And some amino acids.
And ethanol.
And water, cuz "in order to dilute the alcohol and its breakdown products, water is drawn out of the tissues (including the brain) into the blood, dehydrating these tissues".

This message has been edited. Last edited by: DIT,

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DIT sayeth: And ethanol.
And water, cuz "in order to dilute the alcohol and its breakdown products, water is drawn out of the tissues (including the brain) into the blood, dehydrating these tissues".

Thank God for those two

quote:

Some hormones, e.g. Leptin is a hormone made by fat cells released into the blood. The amount of leptin released is related to the amount of body fat present. The leptin then gets transported to the brain where it binds to neurons in the hypothalamus. One of the effects of leptin is to reduce appetite and increase energy usage.

I wonder if the Leptin plays a role in any of the neuron production in the hypothalamus that Gage has been studying; since leptin's effects appear related to exercise. Haven't checked the hormones hotlink yet.

Weird this was in ScienceDaily today

The image illustrates the brain regions suppressed by alcohol in the frontal lobes between visuomotor feedback conditions. (Courtesy of the Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences)

I need to tell someone that this is MUSIC TO MY EARS


This guy is publish work a bunch of patients like me put together...

quote:

Originally posted by greendreams:
I need to tell someone that this is MUSIC TO MY EARS


This guy is publish work a bunch of patients like me put together...

That is great news greendreams. Thanks for the naltrexone info. While I was reading on LDNers.org website, I saw an article about unavailability of naltrexone to MS patients. Will the study that you guys put together stand as the clinical trial to increase availability of naltrexone for MS patients? It should definitely help.

I read the umbilical cord stem cell treatment site , 350 case studies from patients with MS. Then I remembered this article about replicating cord blood stem cells. The ability for replication will increase the amount of donations.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Eric,

?

The LDN for MS Research Fund
We are very pleased to publicize the following information concerning The LDN for MS Research Fund. Its plan is sound and those responsible have demonstrated organizational skill and high integrity. It therefore holds promise as an important step forward toward achieving general scientific recognition for LDN. We will be among the first to contribute to the Fund. — LDN Website Editors

April 7, 2006 Conference

The guy that greendreams was talking about:
Dr. Yash Agrawal is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa. He has published the first hypothesis in a medical journal that explores the possibility of treating MS with LDN. See "Low dose naltrexone therapy in multiple sclerosis" Medical Hypotheses, 2005;64(4):721-4, Y.P. Agrawal. He is an organizer of the LDN (low dose naltrexone) for MS Research Fund.

Greendreams mentioned LDN here before. I didn't know what it was and hadn't looked until now.

I had to update my page of research on LDN (I think I was the first to put papers from the literature together on this...) I know Yash read my page.

I mean I had just come back from a weekend ski-ing at whistler and I was watching the new movie and Bihari says 'They aren't like other MS patients, they talk about their last ski trip'

and that made me put an addendum at the bottom.

Sorry if that was posted before:

P*ssw*rds on the brain

quote:

Advances in brain-computer interface technology have shown that electrical signals generated by our brains can be recorded and interpreted by man-made sensors. If Thorpe’s hypothesis that brain waves are unique and repeatable is true, it will be possible to transmit secure pass-thoughts directly to a computer.

quote:

If Thorpe’s hypothesis that brain waves are unique and repeatable is true

I think this is the key point, and frankly I'm skeptical. Unique perhaps, but repeatable?

If the waves are readable as an electrical signal, then they are also recordable and replayable, in other words, crackable (not crock o'bull).

Bank of America (I think they own MBNA now too) has been using a personal identification image chosen by the online user with personalized title as part of a series of password protection questions. Seems like good precursor training for the pass thought. Must already exist just being released slowly through publicized studies.

This seems like a very strange "solution" searching for a problem. Even if people wanted biometrics in their lives, there are already schemes like retina scanning that involve much less wiggle room in the actual procedure than trying to read a brain wave. Blood vessels in the eye probably change a lot more slowly than how you visualize a dog barking! It would seem more feasible to do something ulterior with the system - like flashing naked pictures of various sexes and ages at subliminal speed to figure out which clients are gay, etc. - than to measure a single specific thought. I suppose it's more likely, though, that a modern day researcher realizes the only way to get any interest in anything is to present it as some means of spying, tracking and tracing the general public, much as preceding generations learned to justify any academic project as "cancer research" regardless of how tenuous the link might really be.