Amyloid Plaques of Alzheimer's Disease

A recent study which utilized brain imaging scans suggests the following:  that people who have remained mentally active throughout their lives develop fewer beta amyloid plaques.  This new study is not about the brain's response to amyloid (which the older studies dealt with), but rather, it is about the actual accumulation of amyloid.  Beta amyloid is the protein that many scientists believe causes  Alzheimer's disease.  It is this protein that is found in the plaques of the brains of people who suffer from Alzheimer's.

According to Dr. William Jagust of the University of California at Berkely, this is a brand new finding.  This recent study was spearheaded by Dr. Jagust whose report appears in the most recent edition of the Archives of Neurology.

The study, however, has two important weaknesses, though one of its strengths lies in the fact that brain imaging was utilized.  The weaknesses are: it was a small group that was studied and the study relied on the memory of the participants' mental activity from age 6 and after.

With respect to the brain imaging that was used in the study, the compound used to visualize areas of the brain is known as PiB (Pittsburgh Compound B) which works with PET (positron emission tomography) scans to show the beta amyloid deposits.  PiB sticks to the deposits so they can be visualized by investigators.

The study itself looked at the brains of 65 healthy, cognitively intact people aged 60 and above.  These participants were asked myriad questions with respect to how mentally active they had been during different periods of their lives, beginning at age 6.

The questions covered topics like emails, game playing, newspaper reading, library outings, and letter writing.   Their memories and thinking skills were assessed and PET scans were conducted in order to locate any amyloid deposits in the brain.  The researchers then compared the brain scans with those of 10 patients with Alzheimer's and 11 healthy people in their 20's.

The investigation revealed that people who had been the most mentally active throughout their lives had the least amount of beta amyloid deposit than the others who had been less mentally active.

Furthermore, according to Susan Landau, another researcher from Berkeley who worked on the study, the data suggested that a whole lifetime of mental activity has a bigger effect than does mental activity just in older age.  Amyloid probably starts accumulating many years before symptoms appear, so by the time memory problems start, there is little that can be done. 

D.

This article was based on the following:  "Brain Exercises Prevent Alzheimer's Proteins", January 24, 2012, Newsmax Health, a publication of Reuters, found at www.newsmaxhealth.com

Signs of Deception

Contrary to popular beliefs promulgated by television police dramas, there are no sure 'tells' that a person is trying to deceive you.  A lack of eye contact, facial tics, swallowing hard, hesitations in speaking, a quavering voice or vague descriptive answers can all be signs of lying - but they can also be signs of anxiety, nervousness, or simply be personal quirks, cultural differences, or deviations from the normal population.   For example, a person who buries her head in her hands, takes a deep breath before speaking, then hesitates while closing her eyes for a split second is just as apt to be disclosing a painful truth as she is to be stating a falsehood.

Unless trained, most people wouldn't even recognize signs of deceit, nor would they necessarily know how to correctly interpret them even if they did notice them. Successful determinations of deception depend on successfully decoding shades of emotion. According to Dr. Paul Ekman, an eminent psychologist and researcher who has studied deception for over 30 years: "You have to be able to read an emotion that a person is aware of, recognize emotions that a person is experiencing that he or she is unaware of, and recognize emotions that people are aware of but don't want you to know." (1)  The most reliable signals of deception pertain to the cognitive effort and emotion that surround the lie itself.  Deception pertaining to emotion is the most difficult for most people - trained or untrained - to discern.

Tiny flashes of expression (termed 'microexpressions') which show on an individual's face for only the briefest amount of time - less than a mere second - are key.  Things like fear, or anger, or perhaps a compressed smile may flash across a face revealing much more than the person himself realizes that he is revealing.  One example which quickly comes to mind, is of a young woman being asked whether or not she took fifty dollars from an envelope.  Her eyes do a pretty good job at conveying sincerity when she denies having taken the money, but her microexpression of a very brief pout gives away her lie because it does not fit with her other facial expressions, nor does it fit with the words she is speaking. Additionally, while speaking, changes in word usage, word flow, tone, or voice pitch may signal the extra cognitive power that is required to lie.

Accurate signal reading is only the first step in decoding lies.  Why an emotion is in play is the next piece of the puzzle.  In other words, what motivates this person in this moment? 

Establishing rapport with a person puts that person at ease, and asking innocuous questions provides a baseline against which the answers to more probing questions can be measured.  It is possible to obtain a baseline simply by observing a person.  In addition to facial expressions (both macro and micro), body language is an essential piece of the puzzle.  "Gestures are often deployed in moments of stress, making them all the more critical to grasp, because stressful reactions are worthy of further exploration." (2)

A baseline reading allows an interviewer to distinguish between a personal quirk and a 'tell' or 'hotspot'.  Some people are naturally jittery, agitated, or move around a lot even when relaxed.  Others are not.  Hot spots show up as contradictions in behaviour or demeanour:  a gesture (like the graze of a hand against the forehead), or the shaking of the head from side to side indicating 'no' when stating how much they like/love someone (a technique well-used in the world of soap opera characters), can be revealing as can the type and direction of a gaze.  Hotspots don't necessarily signal deception per se, but rather they may simply suggest that there is more to the matter than first meets the eye.  If you call out ' a lie' you could very well be wrong, but a hotspot is never wrong if it is simply used to notice that a person's account of a situation or event is not consistent with how he or she normally displays information.  Training in the differences between cultures is essential here.

A shrewd interviewer foments hotspots - he doesn't just look for them.  One highly trained FBI investigator found a fugitive hiding in his mother's closet after he questioned the mother several times with respect to her son's whereabouts.  Each time the mother was asked if the son was in the home, her hand went to, and lingered on, the suprasternal notch just below the neck as she stated that she did not know where he was.  Research had previously shown this to be a protective gesture that indicates discomfort, especially in women.  (In men, stroking of the neck is the more likely gesture.)  The mother's consistent denials were to no avail:  a search of the house was launched and her son was found hiding in a bedroom closet.

While microexpressions, gestures and gazes are all critical cues to discomfort (and possible deception), words also play a key role.  Verbal signals that important facts may have been omitted include qualifying words like 'sometimes' and 'most of the time' and words that provide opportunities to omit facts such as 'so' and 'while'. 

The speed-reading of multiple incoming messages - words, gestures, gaze, microexpressions - add up to expert intuition.  The more that recognizing the basics becomes automatic, the more room the questioner has left for evaluation and the higher the success rate in the detection of deception.

Good 'lie detectors' can often be found working as therapists, writers, lawyers and, of course, as law enforcement officers. Many of these people have inborn talents like visual acuity, pattern recognition and emotional sensitivity. They also have the motivation to read people. One study has found that children raised in adverse circumstances have more highly tuned radar for detecting lies than do those raised in stable environments.

D.

(1) and (2)  Psychology Today, "Secrets of Special Agents", Kaja Perina, p. 61 and p. 63.

Alzheimer's News and High Blood Pressure

According to an article in the December 13th, 2011 issue of The Globe and Mail newspaper, scientists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada are currently working on a procedure to prevent the development of the degenerative plaques which form in the brain which lead to Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.  These plaques interfere with connections between neurons thereby leading to memory and other hallmark losses in functioning which are associated with types of dementia.  Despite the fact that Alzheimer's is not understood to be an immune disorder, but a neurological one, scientists foresee that a type of immunotherapy or vaccination would be the procedure of choice in order to inoculate people against it.  Estimates are that this type of treatment is at least four years away.

In the meantime, we have to do what we can to try to prevent this disorder.  One thing that seems to be a factor in the development of Alzheimer's (and other types of dementia) is high blood pressure. 

The small arteries of the brain are quite sensitive to elevations in blood pressure.  Long-term hypertension carries the risk of injury to these small vessels, impairing blood flow and resulting in damage to, and atrophy of, brain tissue.  Our risk of developing vascular dementia, Alzheimer's disease, or some form of cognitive impairment increases with the development of hypertension.

It turns out that high diastolic pressure at age 50 predicts poor cognitive function at age 70.  High systolic pressure (in, or above, the range of 140 - 160) is associated with white matter lesions - a type of brain tissue damage that forms due to poor circulation - and an increased risk of developing dementia. (1)

D.

(1)  "High Blood Pressure Increases Dementia Risk", January 19, 2011, Deana Ferreri, www.diseaseproof.com

Men and Women as Friends

I've had a fairly high number of friendships with men over the past few decades, so I found an article I recently came across which discusses whether men and women can truly be friends - as opposed to romantic or sexual partners - to be of interest.  I wanted to see how my experiences stacked up against what the so-called experts had to say about the matter.  What I am going to do here is simply highlight some of the answers to a (quite unscientific) survey contained in the article from over 1,450 members of the Match.com dating site.

When asked whether individuals believed that men and women can be platonic friends, 83 percent said yes while 62 percent stated that they had had a platonic friendship which ended up crossing the line and becoming romantic or sexual.

Sixty-four percent of the men surveyed as opposed to 25 percent of the women were more likely to misinterpret the intimacy of friendship for sexual desire.

Ninety-four percent of respondents answered that it was possible to fall in love with someone who was a friend, first and foremost.  Only 4 percent said it wasn't possible for them to do so.

Seventy-one percent of respondents hoped that when they did fall in love, their partner would have started out as a friend.

And, finally, respondents thought that women were better than men at keeping sex out of a platonic relationship:  67 percent thought women were better at this aspect of the friendship while only 13 percent thought men were.

D.

From "Can Men and Women Be Friends?", Camille Chatterjee, www.psychologytoday.com, September 1, 2001 

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream (And Possibly Solve a Problem or Two)

While you sleep, you enter an altered state of consciousness, a different biochemical state than while awake, and progress through a series of stages. I will highlight stage 2 sleep in this article.

Stage 2 is described as 'light' sleep.  It comprises anywhere from 40 to 50 percent of your time asleep.  During this stage, Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep occurs:  a period of rapid eye movement accompanied by heightened brain activity that is almost at the level of that which occurs while you are awake.  REM sleep usually begins about 90 minutes after falling asleep, although depressed/anxious people are thought to enter this stage much more quickly once they are asleep. A session of REM sleep can start out by lasting only 5 minutes, but as sleeping progresses, it may become longer and can eventually last up to 60 minutes.  I'm sure that most of you are aware that it is during REM sleep that dreams occur.  You have an average of five dreams per night though you may not remember most of what you dream.  If you awaken while experiencing a dream, or right at its conclusion, you may remember some or all of its details.  As the day progresses, most memories of dreams tend to fade away. 

For centuries, people have wondered why people dream and what dreams mean.  Theories abound.  Sigmund Freud believed that dreams expressed repressed wishes - usually impulses of an infantile sexual and/or aggressive nature.  Other psychoanalysts have theorized that dreams have more to do with narcissistic strivings or are compensation for feelings of inferiority.  More recently, psychologists have uncovered that it is during dreaming that information is processed, memories are fixed/set, and the nervous system is restored.

Though these theories may encompass some of your dreams, they can't account for every type of dream you may  have.  Just as thought while you are awake can drift through everything and anything, the process of dreaming, too, can cover similar types of thought, albeit during an altered biochemical state.  Simply put, the physiological demands of sleep alter the way the brain functions.  The sleeping brain makes sense of things very differently than the awake brain does, but as you sleep you continue to focus on issues/problems you may be facing, circumstances and events of your day, week, months - your life in general.  Simple triggers that determine some of the content of a dream can be something you noticed in an advertisment or television show, a conversation you had with someone, or some circumstance that happened during the day.  Dreams can tackle problems, or deal with deep-seated longings or desires.  Dreams may seem bizarre or nonsensical because the chemistry of the sleeping brain affects perception of thought, but as mentioned, the mind continues to drift through the same types of thoughts as it has during the waking hours: problems encountered, fears, worries, goals, desires, reminiscents, plans, people, ruminations or regrets.

Anything you've seen, heard, smelled, sensed that day, week, month, or anytime during your life may become tangled up in the seemingly nonsensical scenes in a dream.  It's amazing how people in dreams can start out as one person, then become someone so completely different as the dream progresses, or how you know the person in your dream to be a certain individual, but he/she looks completely different than in 'real life'.  You can also quickly move from place to place, desperately trying to escape something or someone, or deliver an envelope or brightly-wrapped package that suddenly morphs into a cello or cake.  You can find yourself at school or work or public speaking in your pyjamas, or perhaps in the nude. You can soar through the sky, you can run and lift off the ground, you can swim for miles underwater without oxygen, and you can get lost.  You can have anxious dreams about missing tests, or about trying to telephone for help only to find you keep getting the dialing wrong, or the phone doesn't work, or you can't properly explain to the person answering your call what your problem is.  You can have recurring dreams or nightmares.  On occasion, you can even break through the 'paralysis' of sleep and scream or cry out, waking yourself  (and others).  On and on it goes...  Dreams can so often seen incoherent, bizarre  - even simplistic at times. 

The altered state of consciousness as you sleep gives rise to fertile ground for solving problems or finding solutions to things you couldn't quite achieve while awake because it helps you find solutions beyond your normal thought patterns. To provide just a few examples:  Friedrich August Kekule came up with the structure of benzene while dreaming, Dimitry Mendeleyev came up with his final form of the periodic table of the elements and Otto Loewi devised the neuroscience experiment that won him a Nobel Prize in medicine, both while dreaming.   "Modern engineers Paul Horowitz and Alan Huang dreamed designs for laser-telescope controls and laser computing, respectively.  Innumerable artists and filmmakers have depicted images that came to them in their sleep.  Mary Shelley dreamed the two main scenes that became Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson did the same with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  Ludwig van Beethoven, Paul McCartney and Billy Joel all awoke to discover new tunes ringing in their minds.  Mahatma Gandhi's call for a nonviolent protest of British rule of India was inspired by a dream." (1)

Over the past twenty years, "positron-emission tomography (PET) scans have allowed researchers to see which brain areas are involved in dreaming.  Parts of the cortex associated with visual imagery and the perception of movement become activated even more dramatically than while one is awake, as do some deep brain areas associated with emotion.  In contrast, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is less engaged during dreaming: this area is associated with volitional action and the evaluation of what is logical and socially appropriate.  These PET results fit the characteristics of dreams well; dream reports almost always contain visual imagery and often involve movement.  The prefrontal findings fit neatly with the fact that dreams have long been associated with less 'censorship' - not only in the Freudian sense of uninhibited sex and aggression, but also in terms of filtering out scenarios that are illogical or abnormal. " (2)

While you sleep, your senses continue to monitor the environment:  you can smell smoke, hear intruders or a dog bark, sense temperature changes and feel actual pain.  All of these may wake you up. You can also feel 'imaginary' pain inflicted on you in a dream, taste something that you are eating in a dream, or hear voices from a dream.  These things, too, can wake you up.  Though it is normal for a person's body to be 'paralyzed' while dreaming, sometimes individuals  break through this paralysis by screaming or jumping up in order to escape whatever is happening in the dream.  Some people walk around while asleep while others suffer from night terrors in which they can become agitated, violent or act out in some way as the circumstances of the dream break through the paralysis, but not the sleep.

Memory and learning are reinforced during REM sleep as the same circuits which were activated while awake continue to remain active during REM strengthening the circuits and, therefore, the memory and learning. 

Let's now think back to Kekule who understood the structure of benzene only after dreaming of a snake made of atoms taking its tail in its mouth.  (Benzene is a closed ring.)  Many studies of creativity suggest that disinhibition is a crucial component of creative thought and the brain areas that usually restrict our thinking to the logical and familiar are much less active during REM sleep.  As well, the "high activity in the visual areas of the sleeping brain allow it to visualize solutions more readily than in waking thought." (3)  Dreams, therefore, can be quite helpful for problems that require creativity or visualization to solve. How do you take steps before you sleep to solve problems or come up with new ideas while sleeping? Thinking about them just prior to sleep can increase the chance that a solution will become apparent while dreaming.

According to Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist who teaches at Harvard Medical School, you can practice 'dream incubation' in order to try to dream about a particular problem in the hope of finding a solution to it.  She suggests the following:

- write a note which outlines your problem and place it by your bed along with a pen, paper, nightlight or flashlight;

- review the problem prior to falling asleep and try to visualize it as a concrete image;

- tell yourself to dream about the problem as you start to drift off to sleep;

- upon waking, lie quietly while trying to recall details of dreams and write as many details down as you can remember. Any answers provided by the dream may not be obvious at first and may take some further thought to uncover.

For a more elaborate process add these two steps prior to drifting off to sleep: picture yourself dreaming about the problem, waking up, and writing on your bedside notepad.  And, arrange objects connected to the problem on your bedside table. (4)

D.

All references noted above are from "Answers in Your Dreams", Dierdre Barrett, Scientific American Mind, November/December 2011, pp. 27 - 33.

Midlife Depression in Women

Last week, I wrote exams in a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy course I've been taking.  A big component of the course dealt with depression.  In fact, I have a very thick text, written by Aaron T. Beck, which outlines everything there is to know about treating depression, utilizing the methods of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which, I understand, tends to work very well for resolving depression.

One of the prime times for depression to strike both men and women is during mid-life (ages 40 - 55).  I remember reading Dr. Christiane Northrup's book,"The Wisdom of Menopause" many years ago (not that I was there yet, but why not prepare!) and she wrote something which has stayed with me ever since and which in my own life I have found to be true.  She stated that women tend to become more introspective during their mid-life years.  This can lead to women questioning, among many other things, their choice of career and their choice of life partner.  Thinking too hard, evaluating and analyzing life, or 'navelgazing', if you will, can lead some people to evaluate themselves (and where they are at in their lives) too harshly.  Children leaving home, aging bodies and minds, and/or losing a life partner or a parent, can prompt us to question what has or not happened in our lives. Individuals are prompted by these and other life events to see their lives in a new light as they face the fact that their lives may not have turned out as planned, or as expected, or that life dreams and goals have been quelled due to some circumstance or another.

Women spend a lot of time at this juncture analyzing how they feel, and if they use what they are thinking and feeling in order to take positive action as a result of their dissatisfaction - great - it can really be an empowering time.  If, instead, they ruminate or dwell on what they think is wrong with life, and on how they feel as a result of what they are thinking and experiencing, this can very well lead to anxiety and depression.
According to American psychologist, Dr. Dan Gottlieb, "for some, these thoughts inspire change, but for others they lead to hopelessness, which can turn into depression." (1)

Stress as a factor which leads to depression and anxiety needs to be highlighted here.  It is more and more common now for women to still be raising children or teenagers during the mid-life years.  The stress of doing so, coupled with unbalanced hormone levels and sleep deprivation, can increase stress tremendously.  When a person is tense - and when estrogen is dominant - the level of the stress hormone, cortisol, rises.  When cortisol remains chronically high, it affects the balance of mood chemicals in the brain in such a way that makes a person more susceptible to depression and anxiety.  It is very important for women to be able to take some time to nurture themselves during these years - any type of activity that promotes health and aids physical and mental relaxation - like a run through a beautiful park, a walk along a river, playing a few tunes on the piano, or some time spent meditating or simply breathing deeply can go a long way towards preventing acute mental and physical stress.  As well, reframing thoughts in a more positive direction can also cut stress and counter depression and anxiety.

Anxiety and depression, however, are multi-faceted disorders, with genetic, chemical, physiological, auto-immune, and circumstantial factors like upbringing and other personal events, feeding into both of them.  Some women tend for any number of reasons to be more vulnerable to developing either or both of these disorders. 

Mid-life, though, can also be a time for enhanced expression and creativity, as new drives are awakened and time is found to develop interests that schedules would not previously allow for.  This can lead to an increased self-assurance/self-confidence, and a boldness or more of a 'laissez-faire' attitude where what others think doesn't matter so much anymore.  A woman may find a new self-acceptance, a certain peace about who she is with a "I am who I am and if nobody likes it, so be it" attitude.  For many women, if they can get the help they need to navigate successfully through mid-life, they can thrive and achieve things they never before thought were possible.  And, some women find that the best years of their life began in their fifties.

D.

(1)  "Understanding Depression at Midlife", Cheryl Platzman Weinstock, October 5, 2010, www.womansday.com

Putting the Science into Romance

Helen Fisher is a very famous anthropologist from Rutgers Univeristy who loves to give talks on the science of romance.  She has carried out a number of brain scans of people who are newly in love and during the scans, she found that the ventral tegmental areas of the brain are working particularly hard.  This area near the base of the brain appears to be running like a little factory, sending dopamine to higher regions in the brain.  This creates craving, motivation, goal-oriented behaviour, and an acute feeling of ecstasy.

The ventral tegmental area, however, doesn't work alone.  The nucleus accumbens, located slightly higher and farther forward in the brain, converts the exhilaration of a new partner into something akin to an obsession.  "Thrill signals that start in the lower brain are processed in the nucleus accumbens via not just dopamine but also serotonin and, importantly, oxytocin, which is one of the chemicals that floods new mothers and creates such a fierce sense of connection to their babies." (1)  (In men who become parents, the 'bonding-to-baby chemical" is vasopressin.)  When oxytocin is at play between new lovers, it can create an equally strong connection between them. 

And, finally, we have the caudate nuclei, a pair of shrimp-size structures on either side of the head which have a seemingly indelible memory.  They are the last major stop for love signals in the brain, but are also involved in storing patterns and mundane abilities such as knowing how to ride a bicycle or knowing how to swim - motor skills which tend to stay with us for life (provided no damage occurs to these nuclei.)  Apply the same principle to connecting and patterning in love and one can see how passion can turn so quickly into commitment.

Having one part of the brain "involved in processing love would be enough to make the feeling powerful.  The fact that three are at work makes that powerful feeling downright consuming." (2)  Perhaps we are fooling ourselves to think that we, in fact, have any choice (or free will) in the matter when it comes to who we fall in love with.

D.

(1) and (2), "The Science of Romance", Jeffrey Kluger, Time magazine special edition, "Your Brain: A User's Guide", p. 37.