Category Archives: Brains

Pb on the Brain

March 31, 2013 By in Brains, Kids Tags: , , , 2 Comments

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I’ve got lead on my mind. Lead the element, not the verb; the toxic metal that used to grace every gas tank and paint can in this grand country of ours. For the most part we’ve stopped spewing lead into our environment, but the lead of prior generations doesn’t go away. It lingers on the walls and windows of older buildings, on floors as dust, and in the soil. These days it lingers in my thoughts as well.

I started worrying about lead when my daughter became a toddler and began putting everything in her mouth. I fretted more when I learned that lead is far more damaging to young children than was previously thought. Even a tiny amount of it can irreversibly harm a child’s developing brain, leading to lower IQs, attention problems and behavioral disorders. You may never even see the culprit; lead can sit around as microscopic dust, waiting to be inhaled or sucked off of an infant’s fingers.

Public health programs use blood lead levels (BLLs) to evaluate the amount of lead in a child’s system and decide whether to take preventative or medical action. In the 1960s, only BLLs above 60 μg/dL were considered toxic in children. That number has been creeping downward ever since. In 1985 the CDC’s stated blood lead level of concern became 25 μg/dL and in 1991 it went down to 10. But last year the CDC moved the cutoff down to 5 μg/dL and got rid of the term “level of concern.” That’s because scientists now believe that any amount of lead is toxic. In fact, it seems as if lead’s neurotoxic effects are most potent at BLLs below 5 μg/dL. In other words, a disproportionately large amount of the brain damage occurs at the lowest doses. Recent studies have shown subtle intellectual impairments in kids with BLLs as low as 2 μg/dL (which is roughly the mean BLL of American preschoolers today). All great reasons for parents to worry about even tiny exposures to lead, no?

Yes. Absolutely. Parents never want to handicap their children, even if only by an IQ point or two. But here’s what’s crazy: nearly every American in their fifties, forties, or late-thirties today would have clocked in well over the current CDC’s cutoff when they were little. The average BLL of American preschoolers in the late ‘70s was 15 μg/dL – and 88% had BLLs greater than 10 μg/dL.

These stats made me wonder if whole generations of Americans are cognitively and behaviorally impaired from lead poisoning as children. Have we been blaming our intellectually underwhelming workforce on a mismanaged education system, cultural complacency, or the rise of television and video games when we should have been blaming a toxic metal element?

I was sure I wasn’t the first person to wonder about the upshot of poisoning generations of Americans. And lo and behold, a quick Google search led me to this brilliant article on Mother Jones from January. The piece chronicles a rise in urban crime that began in the ‘60s and fell off precipitously in the early-to-mid ‘90s nationwide. The author, Kevin Drum, walks readers through very real evidence that lead fumes from leaded gasoline were a major cause of the rise in crime (and that increased regulation restricting lead in gasoline could be credited for the sudden drop off.)

The idea certainly sounds far-fetched: generations of city-dwellers were more prone to violence as adults because they breathed high levels of lead fumes when they were kids. It doesn’t seem possible. But when you put the pieces together it’s hard to imagine any other outcome. We know that children of the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s had BLLs high enough to cause irreversible IQ deficits and behavioral problems (of which aggression and impulse control are particularly common). Why is it so hard to imagine that more of these children behaved violently when they became adults?

In the end, this terrible human experiment in mass poisoning has left me pondering two particular questions. First, what does it mean for generations of children to be, in a sense, retroactively damaged by lead? At the time, our levels were considered harmless, but now we know better. Does knowing now, at this point, explain anything about recent history and current events? Does it explain the remarkable intransigence of certain politicians or the bellicosity of certain talk show hosts, athletes, or drivers with a road rage problem? Aside from the crime wave, what other sweeping societal trends might be credited to the poisoning of children past? How might history have played out differently if we had all been in our right minds?

Finally, I’ve been thinking a lot about the leads and asbestoses and thalidomides of today. Pesticides? Bisphenol A? Flame retardants? What is my daughter licking off of those toys of hers and how is it going to harm her twenty years down the line? This is not just a question for parents. Think crime waves. Think lost productivity and innovation. Today’s children grow up to be tomorrow’s adults. Someday when we are old and convalescing they’ll take the reigns of our society and drive it heaven-knows-where. That makes child health and safety an issue for us all. We may never even know how much we stand to lose.

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Photo credit: Zara Evens

Feeling Invisible Light

February 21, 2013 By in Brains, Minds, Science Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

7401773382_19963f6a8b_cIn my last post, I wrote about whether we can imagine experiencing a sense that we don’t possess (such as a trout’s sense of magnetic fields). Since then a study has come out that adds a new twist to our little thought experiment. And for that we can thank six trailblazing rats in North Carolina.

Like us, rats see only a sliver of the full electromagnetic spectrum. They can perceive red light with wavelengths as long as about 650 nanometers, but radiation with longer wavelengths (known as infrared, or IR, radiation) is invisible to them. Or it was before a group of researchers at Duke began their experiment. They first trained the rats to indicate with a nose poke where they saw a visible light turned on. Then the researchers mounted an IR detector to each rat’s head and surgically implanted tiny electrodes into the part of its brain that processes tactile sensations from its whiskers.

After these sci-fi surgeries, each rat was trained to do the same light detection task again – only this time it had to detect infrared instead of visible light. Whenever the IR detectors on the animal’s head picked up IR radiation, the electrodes stimulated the tactile whisker-responsive area of its brain. So while the rat’s eyes could not detect the IR lights, a part of its brain was still receiving information about them.

Could they do the new task? Not very well at first. But within a month, these adult rats learned to do the IR detection task quite well. They even developed new strategies to accomplish their new task; as these videos show, they learned to sweep their heads back and forth to detect and localize the infrared sources.

Overall, this study shows us that the adult brain is capable of acquiring a new or expanded sense. But it doesn’t tell us how the rats experienced this new sense. Two details from the study suggest that the rats experienced IR radiation as a tactile sensation. First, the post-surgical rats scratched at their faces when first exposed to IR radiation, just as they might if they initially interpreted the IR-related brain activity as something brushing against their whiskers. Second, when the scientists studied the activity of the touch neurons receiving IR-linked stimulation after extensive IR training, they found that the majority responded to both touch and infrared light. At least to some degree, the senses of touch and of infrared vision were integrated within the individual neurons themselves.

In my last post, I found that I was only able to imagine magnetosensation by analogy to my sense of touch. Using some fancy technology, the scientists at Duke were able to turn this exercise in imagination into a reality. The rats were truly able to experience a new sense by piggybacking on an existing sense. The findings demonstrate the remarkable plasticity of the adult brain – a comforting thought as we all barrel toward our later years – but they also provide us with a glimpse of future possibilities. Someday we might be able to follow up on our thought experiment with an actual experiment. With a little brain surgery, we may someday be able to ‘see’ infrared or ultraviolet light. Or we might just hook ourselves up to a magnificent compass and have a taste (or feel or smell or sight or sound) of magnetosensation after all.

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Photo credit: Novartis AG

ResearchBlogging.org

Thomson EE, Carra R, & Nicolelis MA (2013). Perceiving invisible light through a somatosensory cortical prosthesis. Nature communications, 4 PMID: 23403583

Be the Trout

February 10, 2013 By in Brains, Minds, Science Tags: , , , 1 Comment

1448187231_be85e17541_bMost of the time I forget that my mother lacks a sense of smell. It’s only when I complain about something stinky or comment on a delicious smell that I remember she isn’t sharing the experience with me. As I’ve mentioned before, my mother has never had a sense of smell, or at least none that she can ever remember. As a child, I often wondered how she might imagine the sensation of smell. Would she do it by analogy to her other senses? Would she be able to do it at all?

I returned to these musings from a different perspective recently when I read a scientific paper about trout. Trout, along with other migratory species from salmon to sea turtles and certain types of birds, enjoy a sense that we lack: magnetosensation. These animals perceive magnetic fields (including that of the Earth) and can use this information to orient themselves and navigate. The study’s authors found magnetic cells inside the noses of trout, each with tiny iron-containing crystals attached to their cell membranes. Thus, when a trout changed direction relative to the Earth’s magnetic field, these miniature magnets would presumably tug on the cell’s membrane in a way that the cell could detect and signal to other parts of the trout’s nervous system. The evolution of these wonderful little biological compasses may have been necessary for migrating animals to evolve on our planet and happily roam, return, and repeat.

So today I put myself in my mother’s shoes (or nose) and tried to imagine a sense I didn’t have. What would it be like to feel magnetic fields? I tried to embrace the role and be the trout. I closed my eyes and imagined my little trout self swimming around within a magnetic field that changed as I moved. How would that feel for the trout? My imaginative efforts were rewarded with a strong percept – flashes of tingling across the surface of my skin that mirrored my changes in direction. In essence, I could only imagine magnetosensation by analogy to somatosensation, the sense of touch. And this is almost certainly not what magnetosensation feels like to a trout. Not only do they already have a sense of touch akin to our own, but they also detect magnetic fields with their snout rather than their whole body.

It makes sense that I imagined a foreign sensation by analogy to one I know. Each of our senses has dedicated processing areas in the brain. Without a brain area developed for magnetosensation, it may not be possible to do any better than imagine it by way of the senses our brain can process. Or maybe it’s possible for people with more imaginative imaginations than my own. If you give it a try, please let me know what you come up with! And the next time you find yourself staring down a trout, tilapia, tuna, or salmon on your plate, spare a moment to appreciate that it has experienced a realm of sensations beyond your imagination. And then – bon appétit!

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Photo credit: sharkbait

ResearchBlogging.org

Eder SHK, Cadiou H, Muhamad A, McNaughton PA, Kirschvink JL, & Winklhofer M (2012). Magnetic characterization of isolated candidate vertebrate magnetoreceptor cells PNAS DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1205653109

At the Gates of Sleep

November 18, 2012 By in Brains, Kids, Sleep Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

497736998_45c09a136e_oNow that my daughter is about to reach her first birthday, I’m in the mood to reflect on the year that just passed. Unfortunately, my recollections of it are a little fuzzy, probably because I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve enjoyed a good night’s sleep over the past year. Some people have babies who regularly sleep through the night and I am happy for them. Truly, I am. But clearly I was not meant to be in their ranks.

Still, the never-ending parade of nighttime awakenings has taught me something about my own brain. It is precisely tuned to hear my baby. Although I sleep blithely through my husband’s thunderous snoring and the loud buzz of his alarm clock – multiple times a day, thanks to the snooze button – I awaken at the faintest sound of my daughter’s sighs, coos, or grumbles. When she cries, I am immediately awake while my husband sleeps on beside me, undisturbed.

People are generally able to sleep through minor sounds and sensations thanks to a subcortical structure in the brain called the thalamus. This structure receives incoming signals from our senses and relays them to cortical areas devoted to processing sensory information like sounds or tactile sensations. When we’re awake, the thalamus faithfully relays nearly every sensory signal on to the cortex. But when we’re asleep, neurons in the thalamus participate in strong, synchronized waves of activity that squelch incoming signals. As a result, about 70% of these signals never make it to the cortex. This process, known as sensory-gating, is how we manage to sleep through the roar of rainstorms or the brush of the sheets against our skin each time we turn in bed. It is also how we sleep through our husband’s room-rattling snores.

Yet some sensory information does get through to the rest of the brain during sleep. These signals do get processed and can even wake us up if they are either intense (like a loud noise) or personally relevant. A clever study illustrated the importance of personal relevance by exposing sleeping subjects to a loud presentation (via tape recorder) of their own name spoken aloud. The scientists played the recording either normally or backwards and found that subjects awoke in less than half the time when they heard their names presented in the recognizable form.

So did my daughter, in effect, sleep train me by training my brain to recognize her sounds as personally relevant? It’s a plausible explanation, but one that is ultimately lacking. It cannot explain that first night when I slept beside my baby at the hospital nearly one year ago. Although I had labored through the entire night before and had not slept in the ensuing day, I awoke constantly to every little sound my mewing newborn made, not to mention the cries that told me she wanted to nurse. She’d had no time to train me; I had come pre-trained. Just as my breasts were primed to make milk for her, my brain was primed to wake for her. We seemed to be engineered for one other, mother and child, body and brain. And we spent that first long night discovering how clever a designer Nature can be, while my husband slept peacefully on the couch.

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Photo credit: planetchopstick

Tooling Around

September 16, 2012 By in Brains, Kids Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

tools1There was a time when my daughter used her hands exclusively to shovel things into her mouth. Not so anymore. For the last few months, she has been hard at work banging objects together. This simple action is setting the stage for some pretty cool neural development. She is learning to use tools.

Of course it doesn’t look too impressive right now. She might bang a ball with a block and then switch and strike the block with the ball. In one recent playtime she tore a cardboard flap out of her board book and examined it, trying different grips and holding it from different angles as she watched how it cut the air. Then, brandishing her precious flap, she went to work. She wielded it with a scooping motion to lift other flaps in the book, and later, to turn the book pages themselves. After that, she descended on her toy box with the flap. She used it to wipe her blanket, poke her stuffed animal, and finally scrape its face like she was giving it a close shave.

Although my daughter’s fun with flaps may seem aimless, it had an important purpose. Through experimentation and observation, she was learning how two objects can interact and how such interactions are affected by object shape, configuration, and pliability. Such details are so well known to adults that we forget there was anything to learn. But consider how often we use objects against one another. We hammer nails, rake leaves, and staple pages. When using scissors, we must apply different levels of force to cut through paper versus cardboard or fabric. When lifting a pan with a potholder, we must adjust our grip depending on the weight of the pan and whether we are lifting it by the base, side, or handle. We must know the subtle differences between holding a sponge to wash a glass and using a towel to dry it, and we must do each deftly enough that our glassware comes out clean and intact at the end.

There are also countless tools we create on the fly every day. When you use a magazine to nudge your cell phone within reach or flip a light switch with a book because your hands are full, you are devising novel tools to fit your momentary needs. To do this, our brains must store extensive knowledge about the properties of household objects. Through experimentation, like the kind my daughter is doing, we learned to predict how objects will interact and to capitalize on those predictions.

So far I’ve described the value of tools in terms of what they can do: push, pull, gather, polish, lift, etc. But there is another side to tool use that may play a role in my daughter’s little experiments: sensory information gleaned through the tool. As I watched her probe one object with another, I was reminded of research described in Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee’s book The Body Has a Mind of Its Own. The book discussed neurons in the parietal cortex that are tuned to the sight or feel of objects near a particular body part. For example, cells representing your right hand would fire if something touched your right hand, if you saw an object near your right hand, or both. Neuroscientists have discovered that experience using a tool can change the properties of these cells in monkeys (and therefore likely in us as well). They found that if monkeys used a rake to gather goodies otherwise beyond their reach, the parietal neurons that had responded to objects around the hand now fired for items located anywhere along both the hand and the rake it held. In a sense, object manipulation can temporarily extend certain neural body representations to include the tools we wield. The Blakeslees suggest that this may be how a blind person learns to perceive the contour of items encountered at the tip of his cane. In effect, the cane and the hand are one.

For now, our house is filled with smashing, scraping, banging and bending as our baby descends on toys and her parents’ belongings alike. In the midst of such havoc, it’s good to know that the destruction is part of a crucial learning process. And someday, once it slows down, I can buy her a new board book with all the flaps intact.

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Photo credit: zzpza