Mind Sculpture: Your Brain's Untapped Potential by Ian H. Robertson

I bought a 1999 edition of Mind Sculpture: Your Brain's Untapped Potential, and although Ian Robertson has his own poetic phrases for many of neuroplastic concepts. it's worth noting that these neuroscience research topics have been around for well over a decade. I believe their importance has been very, very undervalued in psychotherapy, self-healing, and rehabilitation programs.

Robertson uses his description of "the trembling web" for what many now call neural networks or even the catch-phrace du jour, the connectome. He uses the concept of "mind sculpture" for neuroplastic change, or what others call "re-wiring your neural circuits." His information is sync with later theories and elaborations, and though the contemporary analogies and metaphors may have changed over the years, most of the key concepts are expertly outlined in his book. Thumbs up.

Mind Sculpture: Your Brain's Untapped Potential by Ian H. Robertson

Research into the brain in the last decade has dramatically changed our understanding of how we humans manage to escape our biological shackles by constantly re-molding ourselves in a near-infinite number of ways. Here one of the world's leading researchers of brain rehabilitation explains with remarkable lucidity the new discoveries to the general reader and the important implications this has for health and human potential.

Ian Robertson explains in fascinating detail how who and what we are is sculpted throughout our lifetime, second by second, by our interactions with the world, by our relationships with other people. “Your brain is changed physically by the conversations you have, the events you witness and the love you receive. This is true all through your life, not just when you are an infant,” writes Prof. Robertson. This process, which he calls “sculpting the brain,” occurs despite the genetic hard-wiring of Darwinian evolution. Indeed, evolution's gift to us, he says, is that we are no longer slaves of our biology, even if that biology hasn't endowed us with perfection. The evolutionary gift we have allows us to modify our inclinations in countless ways in a process which constantly shapes and reshapes us, as a trembling web of 100 billion brain cells fires off cascades of impulses which ultimately create the experiences which make us what we are.

Mind Sculpture shows:

• Why your brain is physically changed by what you do, see, feel and think
• How you can become physically stronger from the comfort of your armchair by carrying out mental exercises in your imagination
• Why learning molds the brain structurally, growing new connections between brain cells
• How education builds brain power — it's not all down to genes.
• How increasing your education over your lifetime will make you more likely to be mentally healthy in old age.
• Why stress can cause brain cells to shrink or even die.
• How keeping mentally active as you get older keeps your brain working better
• Why love grows the brain

From Publishers Weekly
In an engaging hybrid of scientific inquiry and personal discovery, Robertson, who teaches psychology at Trinity College in Dublin and has worked as science correspondent for the London Times, examines the functioning of the human brain. Presenting his ideas with energy, humor and clarity, Robertson's argument that "life sculpts your brain" runs counter to a fairly recent trend in brain research that assumes most, if not all, human behavior is already "hard-wired" through evolution and genetics.

Instead, Robertson claims there are many ways we can all "sculpt" our own realities by knowing how to exercise our brains in certain ways, thus affecting the "patterns of connections between neurons."

For example, education actually builds stronger connections between brain cells, according to Robertson, as neurons fire within the "trembling web" (the 100 billion brain cells that "make up 'you'").

Retirement and lassitude, on the other hand, can diminish the number and strength of these connections. To support his central point that "cells that fire together, wire together,"

Robertson draws mostly upon clinical case studies. In several chapters, he portrays an intriguing cross-section of the population who have experienced abnormal relations between brain and body (e.g., phantom limbs) or who have severe memory blockages. In other chapters, Robertson discusses the effects of trauma, fear and hatred on the brain's neural connections. His theory about the power we all possess to shape our own life experiences has far-reaching implications for all aspects of society, including the treatment of illness, education, the workplace and human relationships.

From Library Journal
Robertson (psychology, Trinity Coll., Dublin) has served as a science correspondent for several London newspapers, is a frequent contributor to science and medical journals, and has authored several books on neurorehabilitation. Here, he describes the brain's "trembling web," in which synapses can form stronger connections as a result of repeated and coordinated firing of neurons. Experience, he argues, can literally change brain structure. His two key principles are aptly phrased, "cells that fire together, wire together" and "when cells fire apart, wires depart."

Learning, therefore, sculpts the brain and affects the complexity and number of dendrites on the neurons. Robertson explains how mental imagery can modify the brain, how paying attention to experience is critical for sculpting to occur, and how physical and mental activity can temper the effects of age on the brain.

He also makes a strong case for the role of environment in the development of emotional and intellectual intelligence. Robertson uses analogies liberally and skillfully to illustrate these processes. This very readable title will engage and inform all general readers and is highly recommended for public libraries and undergraduate collections.

Brain Plasticity: How Learning Changes Your Brain

Plas makes it look easy. The New Yorker April 17 1999. Art Spiegelman cover.

by Dr. Pascale Michelon

You may have heard that the brain is plas­tic. As you know the brain is not made of plas­tic. Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity or brain plas­tic­ity refers to the brain’s abil­ity to change through­out life. The brain has the amaz­ing abil­ity to reor­ga­nize itself by form­ing new con­nec­tions between brain cells (neurons).

In addi­tion to genetic fac­tors, the envi­ron­ment in which a per­son lives, as well as the actions of that per­son, play a role in plasticity.

Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity occurs in the brain:

1– At the begin­ning of life: when the imma­ture brain orga­nizes itself.
2– In case of brain injury: to com­pen­sate for lost func­tions or max­i­mize remain­ing functions.
3– Through adult­hood: when­ever some­thing new is learned and memorized

Plas­tic­ity and brain injury

A sur­pris­ing con­se­quence of neu­ro­plas­tic­ity is that the brain activ­ity asso­ci­ated with a given func­tion can move to a dif­fer­ent loca­tion as a con­se­quence of nor­mal expe­ri­ence, brain dam­age or recovery.

In his book “The Brain That Changes Itself: Sto­ries of Per­sonal Tri­umph from the Fron­tiers of Brain Sci­ence, Nor­man Doidge describes numer­ous exam­ples of func­tional shifts.
In one of them, a sur­geon in his 50s suf­fers a stroke. His left arm is par­a­lyzed. Dur­ing his reha­bil­i­ta­tion, his good arm and hand are immo­bi­lized, and he is set to clean­ing tables. The task is at first impos­si­ble. Then slowly the bad arm remem­bers how too move. He learns to write again, to play ten­nis again: the func­tions of the brain areas killed in the stroke have trans­ferred them­selves to healthy regions.

The brain com­pen­sates for dam­age by reor­ga­niz­ing and form­ing new con­nec­tions between intact neu­rons. In order to recon­nect, the neu­rons need to be stim­u­lated through activity.

Plas­tic­ity, learn­ing and memory

For a long time, it was believed that as we aged, the con­nec­tions in the brain became fixed. Research has shown that in fact the brain never stops chang­ing through learn­ing. Plas­tic­ity is the capac­ity of the brain to change with learn­ing. Changes asso­ci­ated with learn­ing occur mostly at the level of the con­nec­tions between neu­rons. New con­nec­tions can form and the inter­nal struc­ture of the exist­ing synapses can change.

Did you know that when you become an expert in a spe­cific domain, the areas in your brain that deal with this type of skill will grow?

For instance, Lon­don taxi dri­vers have a larger hip­pocam­pus (in the pos­te­rior region) than Lon­don bus dri­vers (Maguire, Wool­lett, & Spiers, 2006). Why is that? It is because this region of the hip­pocam­pus is spe­cial­ized in acquir­ing and using com­plex spa­tial infor­ma­tion in order to nav­i­gate effi­ciently. Taxi dri­vers have to nav­i­gate around Lon­don whereas bus dri­vers fol­low a lim­ited set of routes.

Plas­tic­ity can also be observed in the brains of bilin­guals (Mechelli et al., 2004). It looks like learn­ing a sec­ond lan­guage is pos­si­ble through func­tional changes in the brain: the left infe­rior pari­etal cor­tex is larger in bilin­gual brains than in mono­lin­gual brains.

Plas­tic changes also occur in musi­cians brains com­pared to non-musicians. Gaser and Schlaug (2003) com­pared pro­fes­sional musi­cians (who prac­tice at least 1hour per day) to ama­teur musi­cians and non-musicians. They found that gray mat­ter (cor­tex) vol­ume was high­est in pro­fes­sional musi­cians, inter­me­di­ate in ama­teur musi­cians, and low­est in non-musicians in sev­eral brain areas involved in play­ing music: motor regions, ante­rior supe­rior pari­etal areas and infe­rior tem­po­ral areas.

Finally, Dra­gan­ski and col­leagues (2006) recently showed that exten­sive learn­ing of abstract infor­ma­tion can also trig­ger some plas­tic changes in the brain. They imaged the brains of Ger­man med­ical stu­dents three months before their med­ical exam and right after the exam and com­pared them to brains of stu­dents who were not study­ing for exam at this time. Med­ical stu­dents’ brains showed learning-induced changes in regions of the pari­etal cor­tex as well as in the pos­te­rior hip­pocam­pus. These regions of the brains are known to be involved in mem­ory retrieval and learning.

Q and A about Brain plas­tic­ity

Q: Can hor­mones change my brain?

A: It seems that the brain reacts to its hor­monal milieu with struc­tural mod­i­fi­ca­tions.

Q: Can new neu­rons grow in my brain?

A: Yes in some areas and through­out your life­time.

Q: Where can I find more information?

A: Read The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness: 18 Inter­views with Sci­en­tists, Prac­ti­cal Advice, and Prod­uct Reviews, to Main­tain Your Brain Sharp to pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive and acces­si­ble entry into the research and how to apply it.

"Check out the big brain on Brad." Pulp Fiction, 1994.

A link to the SharpBrains site for those that are interested:

http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2008/02/26/brain-plasticity-how-learning-changes-your-brain/

Pioneers of LTP: Michel Baudry and Gary Lynch Video

Ca²⁺/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) appears to be an important mediator of the early, protein synthesis-independent phase of LTP. Plus, it looks really cool.

In neuroscience, long-term potentiation (LTP) is a long-lasting enhancement in signal transmission between two neurons that results from stimulating them synchronously. It is one of several phenomena underlying synaptic plasticity, the ability of chemical synapses to change their strength. As memories are thought to be encoded by modification of synaptic strength, LTP is widely considered one of the major cellular mechanisms that underlies learning and memory.

LTP was discovered in the rabbit hippocampus by Terje Lømo in 1966 and has remained a popular subject of research since. Many modern LTP studies seek to better understand its basic biology, while others aim to draw a causal link between LTP and behavioral learning. Still others try to develop methods, pharmacologic or otherwise, of enhancing LTP to improve learning and memory. LTP is also a subject of clinical research, for example, in the areas of Alzheimer's disease and addiction medicine.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzrhxYijruE

Rebel Scientist Gary Lynch's Quest for Memory

Thanks to a two-day weekend (somewhat scarce for me), I manged to finish Joseph Ledoux's The Synaptic Self, and also start and finish Terry McDermott's 101 Theory Drive A Neuroscientist's Quest for Memory. I'm feeling pretty darn smart right now.

McDermott's book about neuroscientist's Gary Lynch's decades long research into Long-Term Poteniation. LTP is the strengthening of connections between brain cells that occures when they communicate, making subsequent communication more likely. The book gives the reader an keen appreciation on just how arduous and uncertain biological lab research is. It seems the brain's placiticity allows the growth of new "spines" on the dendrites of neurons, and these changes may be behind how memories are made and stored and even how thought is manufactured.

Lynch's quest is to find the actual structual changes in the celluar circuits that encode memory. Along the way he discovers ampakine, a class of drugs designed to enhance communication between brain cells. If they work as envisioned, the drugs, still in development, would enhance almost all cognitive activities. They may be a new drug to treat memory loss and perhaps even mood disorders.

101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist's Quest for Memory by Terry McDermott 

It's not fiction: Gary Lynch is the real thing, the epitome of the rebel scientist -- malnourished, contentious, inspiring, explosive, remarkably ambitious, consistently brilliant. He is one of the foremost figures of contemporary neuroscience, and his decades-long quest to understand the inner workings of the brain's memory machine has begun to pay off.Award-winning journalist Terry McDermott spent nearly two years observing Lynch at work and now gives us a fascinating and dramatic account of daily life in Lynch's lab-the highs and lows, the drudgery and eureka moments, the agonizing failures. He provides detailed, lucid explanations of the cutting-edge science that enabled Lynch to reveal the inner workings of the molecular machine that manufactures memory. And he explains where Lynch's sights are now set: on drugs that could fix that machine when it breaks, drugs that would enhance brain function during the memory process and that hold out the possibility of cures for a wide range of neurological conditions, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Here is an essential story of science, scientists, and scientific achievement-galvanizing in the telling and thrilling in its far-reaching implications.

Dr. Gary Lynch is one of the most cited neuroscientists in the world and author of more than 550 scientific articles. He is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at Irvine. He is the co-author of Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence.

Brain Circuits and Addiction

What is the nature of addiction?

Amy Winehouse was a terrific talent and one of the favorite recording artists of all time. She also struggled with substance abuse. To what extent remains largely unknown but her death has fueled debate as to the precise nature of drug addiction and how it should be addressed by society as a whole.

In other words, why do some people behave in the often self-destructive manner in which they do? And why are people addicted to drugs in the first place?  How, if at all, might they be helped?

Now, you might think that this is a spectacularly hard task to delve into the neuroscience of addiction try to shed some light. Surely, drugs of abuse (such as amphetamines, cocaine, opiates, alcohol and nicotine) have a broad range of actions that are wholly dissimilar from each other? Well, that is partly true, but when it comes to their addictive properties, they have more in common than you might think.

What constitutes addiction?

Addiction, as most will know, develops as a result of chronic exposure to a particular substance. People who are addicted to a drug show similar patterns of behaviour. These include:

1. A compulsion to seek the drug

2. An inability to control the amount of drug consumption

3. A negative emotional state when subjected to periods of withdrawal

Neuroscientists have sought to understand the neural mechanisms underlying these behaviours for generations and emerging from these studies is the concept of the ‘reward circuit’ that seems to be involved in the development and maintenance of drug addiction.  In fact, research on the medial forebrain pleasure circuit may be entering a golden age of discovery.

Now, a lot of neuroscience (indeed any science) is about gradually building up a picture from fragments of information. In most cases, that information may not even come from human subjects but from animal models. That means that current ideas regarding drug addiction are far from unequivocal, but from looking at the correlations between how the rodent brain and human brain are altered during the development of drug addiction, we can make careful assumptions about what might be the general rule.
You see, the brain behaves a little bit like a factory, with different departments responsible for producing a certain sort of feeling or behaviour. This means that there are anatomically distinct areas that are concerned with happiness, memory, movement and so on. This is (as ever) an oversimplification, as it is usually the concerted action of several brain regions that lead to emergence of a particular thought or action. However, it is useful to think of the brain in this way, particularly when analysing how brain circuits are altered in drug users.

The reward circuit

The reward circuit consists of several brain regions that are heavily interconnected; each with distinct – but related – functionality. These include the nucleus accumbens (a brain region that is extremely well documented for its involvement in drug addiction), the ventral tegmental area, the amygdala, the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus and the insula, among others.

Dysfunction in each of these areas has been implicated in the onset and maintenance of drug-addiction, each area being responsible for a slightly different facet of the drug-addicted mental state.

The nucleus accumbens: pleasure

Now, the nucleus accumbens is known as the reward center of the brain. Largely because in various different experimental paradigms, subjects that report that they are experiencing reward show increased activity in this area. This can be whilst taking drugs of abuse or simply eating, engaging in sexual activity or indeed anything associated with pleasurable reward.

All drugs of abuse raise the level of a chemical known as dopamine in the nucleus accumbens and it is this elevation in dopamine (initiated in different ways by different drugs) that is responsible for the feeling of euphoria associated with drug intake.

However, persistent activation of the nucleus accumbens leads to the development of drug addiction, primarily due to persistent changes in the level of dopamine, which leads to an alteration in how people respond to otherwise rewarding stimuli. Put simply, after disruption of the dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, people get less satisfied with things that aren’t their drugs of choice. Furthermore, people derive progressively more pleasure from the drug in question, exacerbating the effect.

The amygdala: fear

On the flip side of the coin, the amygdala is a region of the brain situated right next to the nucleus accumbens but is often associated with feelings of fear and anxiety.
As opposed to the positive reinforcement created by the nucleus accumbens, it is during withdrawal that the amygdala seems to have its largest role. Basically, as access to the drug is taken away, stress-related hormones are increased in the amygdala which can lead (at least partially) to the negative feeling associated with withdrawal.

The hippocampus: memory

The hippocampus is an area of the brain that is associated with learning and memory as well as the ability to perform tasks requiring spatial navigation, such as finding your way around a building. It is also important for ‘contextual-conditioning’, meaning that it enables the mind to establish links between an environmental cue (a nightclub, for example) and a memory (such as taking a drug.)

Activation of the hippocampus is implicated in initiating cue-induced drug-seeking behaviour. Indeed, it has been shown that cue-induced craving of drugs (eg. the feeling of needing a drink in a pub or a cigarette with a cup of coffee) is associated with an increase in activity in the hippocampus (as well as the amygdala) in humans, indicating that normal memory function may be being encroached upon by drugs of abuse.

The prefrontal cortex: decision

The prefrontal cortex consists of several subdivisions including the orbitofrontal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These areas have a variety of different functions but are often described as being imperative in carrying out decision-making processes in response to internal/external-cues, a process known as executive function.

It is believed that the activity of the prefrontal cortex is disrupted in subjects who are addicted to drugs. This may go some way to explaining why drug users often make poor decisions regarding drug intake (ie. pursuing a drug whilst fully aware of the negative impact drug intake will have on them and the people around them.)

What goes on in the brain of a drug addict

So…
As complicated as that may have sounded, it represents a gross oversimplification of what actually goes on in the mind of a drug addict. I simply wanted to introduce you to some of the concepts that are emerging as a result of neuroscientific research and give you a flavor of what is to come in future posts. As I move through my journey into drug addiction, I will make constant references to the reward circuit and its components and so an introduction was necessary to familiarise you with the brain’s machinery. -- Dr. Paul

Dr. Paul is a graduate from the University of Bristol and the author of Dr Paul’s Brain Talk, a neuroscience-related magazine. Dr. Paul believes that over the coming decades, neuroscience research will begin to have a greater impact on our lives and he aims to bring the findings of this fascinating field to the general public, in words they can understand.

How to Overcome Self-Defeating Thoughts and Actions




Rebecca Gladding, M.D., is an author of the new book, You Are Not Your Brain, co-written with Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D. Dr. Gladding is a clinical instructor and attending psychiatrist at UCLA who was featured in A&E's critically acclaimed series Obsessed. She is an expert in anxiety, depression, mindfulness and the Four Steps.

 

You Are Not Your Brain

Using the Four Steps to Overcome Negative Thoughts and Unhealthy Actions

Published on June 8, 2011 by Rebecca Gladding, M.D.

When I talk to people about a central idea in our book - that you are not your brain - they tend to respond in one of two ways. The first is with some version of "Of course I am not my brain! That's obvious." The other response often is one of confusion, something along the lines of, "Well, if I am not these thoughts, impulses, urges and actions, who am I? Doesn't my brain define me?"

Interestingly, these responses mirror the current debate raging in the neuroscience community on this very topic. Some scientists believe that there is nothing but the brain - that it controls what we think, who we are, our values and actions. To them, the mind simply does not exist. Rather, it is the brain that changes itself, not us or what we do. The other camp, which my mentor and co-author Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz and I are part of, believe that the mind is intimately connected with, and can exert some pretty powerful effects on, the brain.

In short, we believe that people are so much more than what their brain is trying to tell them they are and that the brain often gets in the way of our true, long-term goals and values in life (i.e., our true self).

While passionate academic disagreement can be quite interesting, and even entertaining at times, it doesn't help us much in our everyday lives. So, do we have the power to influence our brains or not? Obviously, Dr. Schwartz and I believe that we do have the ability to harness the power of focused attention to change our brain in ways that are healthy and beneficial to us. Even more to the point, many of the thoughts, impulses, urges and sensations we experience do not reflect who we are or the life we want to live. These false missives are not true representations of us, but rather are inaccurate, and highly deceptive, brain messages. 

Recognizing this fact, you likely will rapidly begin to see all the places where your brain is less than helpful - where it is working against you and your true goals and values in life. When you think about the brain and how it is structured, it makes sense. The brain's chief job is to keep you alive, so it tends to operate in a survival of the fittest mode. While that's certainly imperative when dealing with life-threatening situations, that approach does not help us much in society or in our relationships. Rather, it often gets us into trouble and cause us to act in ways we later regret.

In short, the brain likely has run your life in a less than optimal way and caused you to experience one or more of the following at some point in your life: anxiety, self-doubt, perfectionism, behaving in ways or engaging in habits that are not good for you (e.g., over-texting, over-analyzing, stress eating, drinking too much and so on), ignoring your true self and/or wholeheartedly believing the stream of negative thoughts coursing through your head.

Accepting that your brain often does not make your long-term goals a priority, the solution becomes clear: you need to learn how to activate your mind so that it can help sculpt your brain to work for, rather than against, you. One great way to learn how to do this is with the Four

Steps.

What are the Four Steps?

Originally developed by Dr. Schwartz to help people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the Four Steps is a powerful, yet easy-to-follow method that teaches you how to enhance your awareness and focus your attention in the ways you want to, while simultaneously changing your brain in positive and healthy ways.

Together, Dr. Schwartz and I have spent the last few years revising and enhancing the Four Steps to ensure that they apply to all kinds of deceptive brain messages and situations in life, not just OCD. Here is a synopsis of each of the steps:

Step 1: Relabel.

Identify the deceptive brain messages (i.e., the unhelpful thoughts, urges, desires and impulses) and the uncomfortable sensations; call them what they really are.

Step 2: Reframe.

Change your perception of the importance of the deceptive brain messages; say why these thoughts, urges, and impulses keep bother you (it's not me, it's just the brain).

Step 3: Refocus.

Direct your attention toward an activity or mental process that is wholesome and productive - even while the false and deceptive urges, thoughts, impulses, and sensations are still present and bothering you.

Step 4: Revalue.

Clearly see the thoughts, urges, and impulses for what they are: sensations caused by deceptive brain messages that are not true and that have little to no value.

How could you use the Four Steps if you check your email every 5 minutes when you are at home on the weekend (and it is not necessary to check at all)?

Step 1: Relabel - say what is happening, "Oh, I am having the urge to check email again."

Step 2: Reframe - remind yourself why this is bothering you. Say, "I am having the urge to check email again because it gives me a rush when there's something in the inbox...it feels good. Checking my messages also decreases my anxiety that I might be missing out on something." Remind yourself that you are not your brain and you do not have to respond to every impulse your brain generates.

Step 3: Refocus - go for a walk, call a friend, play a game. Do something that will interest you and is fun. It's the weekend after all.

Step 4: Revalue - recognize that this urge to check email is nothing more than the feeling of a deceptive brain message. It is not something that needs to be taken seriously or paid attention to. In fact, giving into this urge just makes the underlying brain circuitry stronger. The more you check, the more frequent and intense the urges will become. So, dismiss this deceptive brain message and go do something healthy and productive instead.

The key to the Four Steps is practice. You literally need to keep using the Four Steps over and over. By becoming more aware of what is happening and learning how to Refocus your attention in healthier and productive ways whenever a deceptive brain message strikes, you teach your brain new, beneficial responses. With time, you will learn how to place your attention where you want it to go, not where your brain is beckoning you to follow.

Connectome: A New Way To Think About What Makes You You

Surfing the web is a fine way to augment what I've already read. Here's another Connectome web article. I'm all for Sebastian Seung's vision. It makes perfect sense to me.


March 22, 2012

by Maria Popova

“You are more than your genes. You are your connectome.”

The nature vs. nurture debate pitted the hard and social sciences against each other for decades, if not centuries, stirred by a central concern with consciousness, what it means to be human, what makes a person, and, perhaps most interestingly to us egocentric beings, what constitutes character and personality. In Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, MIT Professor of Computational Neuroscience Sebastian Seung proposes a new model for understanding the totality of selfhood, one based the emerging science of connectomics — a kind of neuroscience of the future that seeks to map and understand the brain much like genomics has mapped the genome.

A “connectome” denotes the sum total of connections between the neurons in a nervous system and, like “genome,” implies completeness. It’s a complex fingerprint of identity, revealing the differences between brains and, inversely, the specificity of our own uniqueness. Seung proposes a simple theory: We are different because our connectomes differ from one another. With that lens, he argues, any kind of personality change — from educating yourself to developing better habits — is a matter of rewiring your connectome.

That capacity is precisely what makes the connectome intriguing and infinitely promising — unlike the genome, which is fixed from the moment of conception, the connetome changes throughout life. Seung explains:

Neuroscientists have already identified the basic kinds of change. Neurons adjust, or “reweight,” their connections by strengthening or weakening them. Neurons reconnect by creating and eliminating synapses, and they rewire by growing and retracting branches. Finally, entirely new neurons are created and existing ones eliminated through regeneration.We don’t know exactly how life events — your parents’ divorce, your fabulous year abroad — change your connectome. But there is good evidence that all four R’s — reweighting, reconnection, rewiring, and regeneration — are affected by your experiences. At the same time, the four R’s are also guided by genes. Minds are indeed influenced by genes, especially when the brain is ‘wiring’ itself up during infancy and childhood.*

[…]
The connectome theory of mental differences is compatible with the genetic theory, but it is far richer and more complex because it includes the effects of living in the world. The connectome theory is also less deterministic. There is reason to believe that we shape our own connectomes by the actions we take, even by the things we think. Brain wiring may make us who we are, but we play an important role in wiring up our brains.”

Harnessing the power of those four R’s, Seung believes, is the most important goal of neuroscience — but, given your connectome is 100 billion times larger than your genome and has a million times more connections than your genome has letters, it’s a daunting task. Still, new technologies and new directions of scientific curiosity are bringing us closer to understanding this microcosm of meticulously structured chaos.

Map of the C. elegans nervous system, or 'connectome,' borrowing from the language of genomics
DNA is a long chain-like molecule composed of nucleotides connoted by the letters A, C, G, and T, and your genome is the entire sequence of nucleotides in your DNA. Similarly, your connectome is the totality of connections between the neurons in your nervous system.

At the heart of Seung’s vision is a new way of thinking about human personality, a fascinating and controversial subject we’ve previously explored. He proposes an apt metaphor, underpinning which is a desire not only to find and understand our connectomes, but also to develop methods for changing and optimizing them:

In the nineteenth century, the American psychologist William James wrote eloquently of the stream of consciousness, the continuous flow of thoughts through the mind. But James failed to note that every stream has a bed. Without this groove in the earth, the water would not know in which direction of the flow. Since the connectome defines the pathways along which neural activity can flow, we might regard it as the streambed of consciousness.

          The metaphor is a powerful one. Over a long period of time, in the same way that the water of the stream slowly shapes the bed, neural activity changes the connectome. The two notions of the self — as both the fast-moving, ever-changing stream, and the more stable but slowly transforming streambed** — are thus inextricably linked. This book is about the self as the streambed, the self in the connectome — the self that has been neglected for too long.”

In elaborating on this dichotomy of the self, Seung echoes Daniel Kahneman’s notion of the experiencing self vs. the remembering self: One self changes rapidly from moment to moment, becoming angry and then cheering up, thinking about the meaning of life and then the household chores, watching the leaves fall outside and then the football game on television. This self is the one intertwined with consciousness. Its protean nature derives from the rapidly changing patterns of neural activity in the brain.

The other self is much more stable. It retains memories from childhood over an entire lifetime. Its nature — what we think of as personality — is largely constant, a fact that comforts family and friends. The properties of this self are expressed while you are conscious, but they continue to exist during unconscious states like sleep. This self, like the connectome, changes only slowly over time. This is the self invoked by the idea that you are your connectome.”

The Compass of Pleasure

This tasty tome is up to bat in my reading circle now. It should tie in nicely with Connectome.

The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good by David J. Linden

From the New York Times bestselling author comes a "hugely entertaining" (NPR.org) look at vice and virtue through cutting-edge science.

As he did in his award-winning book The Accidental Mind, David J. Linden, a highly regarded neuroscientist, professor, and writer, weaves empirical science with entertaining anecdotes to explain how the gamut of behaviors that give us a buzz actually operates. The Compass of Pleasure makes clear why drugs like nicotine and heroin are addictive while LSD is not, how fast food restaurants ensure that diners will eat more, why some people cannot resist the appeal of a new sexual encounter, and much more. Provocative and illuminating, this is a radically new and thorough look at the desires that define us.



A Luther Burger, or doughnut burger (among several naming variations), is a hamburger or cheeseburger with one or more glazed doughnuts in place of the bun. These sandwiches have a disputed origin, and tend to run between approximately 800 and 1,500 calories.

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/23/137348338/compass-of-pleasure-why-some-things-feel-so-good

Q&A with the man who seeks to unlock the secrets of humanity

Mapping the brain could unlock the secrets of human individuality, but with billions of neural networks per cubic millimeter, the task ahead for scientists is immense. One of these scientists is Sebastian Seung, tipped as a rising star of neuroscience. He trained as a physicist at Harvard University, but later joined MIT as professor of computational neuroscience. In his first book, Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, he argues that our individuality lies in our connectome, the complex map of our neurons.

By Ian Sample  /  The Tapei Times Observer Monday, June 18, 2012

 

 

 



Uber brain nerd Sebatian Seung.


Ian Sample: What does a connectome look like?

Sebastian Seung: A connectome is a map of the brain as a network of neurons. If you want a mental picture, think of the flight maps you see in the back of airline magazines, except replace each city with a neuron and each flight by a connection between neurons. Now scale up the map to include 100 billion cities and 10,000 flights per city. That would be your connectome.

Sample: How do you map a connectome?

Seung: One way is to cut really thin slices of brain and image every slice. You then have to identify every neuron and trace its path through the chunk of brain. You need high-resolution images and automated ways to analyze them. I am proposing a long-term goal, to get to a point where we can do an entire human connectome, but that requires decades of exponential innovation. Just by doing small pieces of brain, we will learn a tremendous amount about how the brain works.

Sample: What might it tell us?

Seung: The brain is behind the really big questions we have: Who am I, what is my identity? What is that based on? If memories are encoded in connectomes, your personality might be in your connectome. If that is the case, that is then the basis of your uniqueness as a person. That is why I have this slogan: “You are your connectome.”

When some people think of a wiring diagram for the brain, they imagine an electronic device and a diagram that never changes, but the connectome changes when you have an experience and it is been thought for a while that is how the trace of a past experience is stored in your brain. The hypothesis is that minds differ as connectomes differ.

Sample: How does the brain change?

Seung: I define the “four Rs” of connectome change as: reweighting, reconnection, rewiring and regeneration. Reweighting is a change in the strength of an existing connection. Reconnection means the creation of an entirely new connection or the elimination of an old one. Rewiring is growth and retraction of branches of neurons. Regeneration is the creation or elimination of entire neurons.

We know these four kinds of change happen. What we do not know is how exactly they are related to learning and memory. We do not know the extent to which they continue in adulthood and old age. Reweighting occurs all your life, that is why you are a lifelong learner. Reconnection was thought to stop at adulthood, but now there is evidence it keeps going. All the debates are over rewiring and regeneration.

Sample: You talk about “connectopathies.”

Seung: This is the theory that certain psychiatric disorders are caused by miswiring of the brain or connectopathies. They are pathological patterns of connections. One of the most puzzling aspects of certain psychiatric disorders is the lack of a clear neuropathology.

If you take the brain of a person who died from Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, it is clear that the neurons are degenerating and dying. We do not have cures, but at least we can see something wrong with the brain. But if you look at someone who had schizophrenia, you cannot see a distinguishing neuropathology. That is why for many years people denied that schizophrenia was a brain disorder. The neurons might be healthy, but maybe they are connected in an abnormal way and we just cannot see it.

Sample: Where do you start?

Seung: The bottleneck becomes analyzing the images. Suppose we can image a cubic millimeter of brain in two weeks. To trace the neurons through those images manually we estimate would take 100,000 years. For 1mm3.

The challenge is to speed up that process. One of the ways is to automate the process, but artificial intelligence (AI) is not perfect. It can speed people up, but it cannot replace them. Even if AI does 99 percent of the work, that would only reduce 100,000 years to 1,000 years.

Sample: So you crowdsource the job.

Seung: My lab is launching a citizen science project, which is trying to recruit volunteers on the Internet to interact with the AI to map out connections. Angry Birds consumes 600 years of human attention a day.

I joke that if we could make mapping the connectome a game that was 1 percent as fun as Angry Birds, we would be done with a cubic millimeter in two days. We need a lot of people to do that cubic millimeter, but our AI is based on machine learning, so the people who interact with it are also teaching it.

The super-popular Angry Birds game.

That is the only way we will ever do a cubic millimeter of brain and scale up to do the entire brain. We need to get on this curve of exponential innovation.

Image from the Human Connectome Project. See link below.

http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/

Of Magic Bullets and the Connectome

An 1822 illustration of Der Freischütz depicting the opening scene with Max and Kilian

I wrapped Sebastian Seung's Connectome yesterday, It's a wonderfully comprehensive, yet easy to grasp tour-de-force dissertation on neuroscience, biology, and more.

His chapter on psychopharmacology, Changing, has several interesting tidbits which I will reprise here.

 I found out the oft-used drug term "magic bullet" comes from a 1940 Warner Bros. film, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, the title perhaps in turn inspired by a plot device in Carl Maria Von Weber's opera Der Freishutz. In this opera Max sells his soul to the devil for seven magic bullets which are guaranteed to hit their mark. Dr. Paul Erlich first imagined, and then discovered chemicals that killed bacteria, but spared other cells, like a magic bullet that flew unerringly to its target. This has been the ideal for medical treatments ever since --  the "magic bullet" that hits its target and avoids "side effects."

Historically, most psychoactive drugs have been discovered by chance, as "side effects" themselves. The first antipsychotic, chlorpromazine (Thorazine), started out as a chemical die for the textile industry. In 1891 Dr. Erlich discovered that some of the chemicals in the same phenothiazine class could be used to treat malaria. After giving the drug to psychiatric patients as a sedative, doctors came to realize that it specifically reduced symptoms of psychosis. By the end of the fifties chlorpromazine had swept through the psychiatric hospitals of the world.

1940 Theatrical Poster

Then iproniazid, originally developed for tuberculosis, was found to have an antidepressant side effect. Imipramine was developed as a "me-too" drug in the footsteps of Thorazine. It failed as an antipsychotic, but seemed to relieve depression. Thus began the use of the tri-cyclic antidepressants.

After these accidental discoveries, attempts were made to develop an actual "rational" drug discovery, based on a modern understanding of biology and neuroscience.

According to well-known theories dating from the sixties, certain disorders are caused by surplus or deficiencies of neurotransmitters levels. So came the development of fluxotine (Prozac) and the other "me-too" SSRIs, said to be the only real psychopharmacolical advances since the "Golden Age" of the fifties.

But there is a problem with the neurotransmitter theory. Fluxotine affects serotonin levels immediately, yet it lifts mood only after several weeks. What could account for this long delay?

According to one speculation, the serotonin boost causes other changes in the brain over the longer term. Perhaps it's these changes that relieve depression, but what exactly could they be? Neuroscientists have looked for effects of fluxotine of the four "Rs" (reconnection, rewiring, regeneration, and reweighting), and found that it increases the creation of new synapses, branches, and neurons in the hippocampus. Moreover as Mr. Seung mentioned in his discussion of rewiring, fluxotine restores ocular dominance plasticity in adults, possibly by stimulating cortical rewiring. This doesn't prove that the drug's antidepressant effects are caused by connectome change, but it has opened the minds of neuroscientists to the idea.

It's time to practice the four Rs -- reconnect, rewire, reweight, and regenerate.

Sporns' 'Networks of the Brain': a roadmap to new research in brain mapping, virtual models

Indiana Univeristy Newsroom, February 2011

Bloomington , Indiana  -- In the emerging discipline of network neuroscience, Indiana University neuroscientist Olaf Sporns is playing a diverse and important role. His book Networks of the Brain, recently published by MIT Press, aims to synthesize the current knowledge and theory pertaining to mapping the brain and presents a fundamental text on this complex subject.

Networks of the Brain focuses on how different parts of the brain are connected to one another and how this network architecture relates to brain function and disease. His book further investigates the anatomy, development and evolution of complex brain networks and provides a roadmap for future research including two projects Sporns himself is currently involved with.

"There's a big movement all across the social and natural sciences to look at things in terms of networks," said Sporns, professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in IU Bloomington's College of Arts and Sciences. "In the neurosciences, increasingly we aren't looking at only one part of the brain, but seeing how the interactions between different parts make them work together."

The human brain contains billions of cells that are connected through numerous pathways and networks that remain to be fully traced and charted. This task of mapping these connections can be likened to cartographers constructing maps of a vast and unknown continent. Identifying the large features like rivers or mountain ranges may not be so difficult, but being able to determine how all these features are geographically related in ever finer detail becomes increasingly more challenging. Investigating the web of connections between the countless areas of the brain would be like mapping the Everglades in the 1700s.

In addition to writing his book, Sporns devotes much of his time to two projects that are naturally linked to the research included in Networks. Both of these projects are collaborations with researchers from other universities. The first of these projects is to develop a "virtual brain," a powerful computational model that can simulate brain function; and the second is called the Human Connectome Project, established to map the human brain's major connections.

"Both of these projects are the first of their kind," said Sporns, a co-investigator in the Human Connectome and virtual brain research projects. "The connectome project is spearheading the mapping of human brain connectivity, and the virtual brain project is about building a computational model of the human brain that may become useful in a clinical setting."

The Virtual Brain project is being funded by the McDonnell Foundation and is led by the University of Toronto, with 11 other sites -- including University College London, Universitee Mediterannee Marseille, UPF Barcelona, University of California, Irvine, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Scientists are aiming to compile all of the information pertaining to brain function and connectivity so that they can design a model of the healthy brain. This would allow researchers to test the effects of neural stimulation or changes in neural connectivity in various neurological scenarios and see how they affect different parts of the brain in a way they never have been able to before.

The Human Connectome Project seeks to discover the neural pathways that underlie brain function. This massive undertaking is being funded by the National Institutes of Health with more than $30 million, and the main partners are Washington University, the University of Minnesota and the University of Oxford. This five-year study, which began last fall, is examining the brains of 1,200 healthy individuals using various types of neuro-imaging to understand the network architecture of connections in the brain. The Human Connectome Project will also look at behavioral and genomic data to determine how they relate to brain connectivity.

"There are many parallels between the Human Connectome and Human Genome projects in that both projects will give us a unique map," Sporns said. "The Connectome project isn't going to solve all of the problems we face in studying the brain but like the Genome project, it is going to provide us with a great new foundation for asking new research questions and for understanding the network basis of neuroscience."

Thus far, neuroscience research utilizing network approaches is producing very promising results. Scientists are acquiring a wealth of new and useful information that is getting them closer to understanding how the brain works, and how disruptions of networks can lead to brain disorders.

"In the next five to 10 years we are going to have a much better and much more refined understanding of brain structure and function," said a confident Sporns. "Network approaches will open up new horizons in neuroscience."

Olaf Sporns.


Olaf Sporns (b. Kiel, West Germany) is Professor and Associate Department Chair at Indiana University.
Dr. Sporns received his degree from Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Tübingen, West Germany before going to New York to study at the Rockefeller University under Gerald Edelman. After receiving his doctorate, he followed Edelman to the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California.

His focus is in the area of computational cognitive neuroscience. His topics of study include functional integration and binding in the cerebral cortex; neural models of perception and action; network structure and dynamics; applications of information theory to the brain; and embodied cognitive science using robotics. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 in the Natural Sciences category.