Neuroscience In The News On July 18

These are articles that I found of interest relating to news about Neuroscience.  In this issue, I have highlighted an article about bullying and neuroscience.

Please check out the article links below and feel free to comment with other information related to these subjects.  I enjoy learning as much as I can about the brain and passing this information on to everyone else that shares these passions.

This is for the week beginning July 18, 2016.

Please come back each week and hopefully I will have some more highlights.  Feel free to share with me ones that you have found and I may highlight those as well.

Feel free to check out the highlighted articles from July 11, 2016

Bullying and Neuroscience

Through research, they are finding that bullying gives the bully a feeling of reward.  The more they bully others, the more reward they get. While there are areas in the brain that deal with such as the lateral habenula and basal forebrain, there is a chemical called GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) that is a primary inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain.  It is responsible for reducing the excitation of surrounding neurons and making them less active. While there is so much more to read on this topic, I hope that this research will help begin to stop bullying.  An estimated 28 percent of kids between 12 and 18 are bullied in school.  This needs to stop and if neuroscience can help solve this horrible plague upon our society, than I am all for it!  You can read more on this topic, Neuroscience of Bullying.   [click to read more]

Loneliness And The Brain

This is definitely something I struggle with in my own life.  Loneliness is not easy to overcome and I've fought it as far back as I can remember.  There are several factors in my own life why loneliness is such an issue for me.

I wish I could remember the name of a film we watched in grade school many years ago.  I don't recall much of it now because I was so young at the time, but I really identified with the kid in the film.  For some reason, the thought I came away from it and remembered was that you could die if you were lonely.  Now, I'm not so sure that was the intent of the film, but it is what my mind remembers.

Growing up in my family, I was often thrown to the side for various reasons.  There is the time that my mom chose my dad over me when he had hepatitis in the hospital and for some reason I was in the hospital being taken care of by nurses.  Also, the times where I got locked in a closet by a babysitter so she didn't have to worry about me.  My brothers also stole the show and caused my parents to spend more time with them, leaving me to fend for myself and figure life out on my own.

The chaos of our house made it difficult to form relationships in the family because if you weren't getting abused, molested, or tortured, you were tip-toeing around on eggshells trying to not be noticed.  In addition, we moved so many times before I graduated from high school that I barely had a best friend for very long.  I was taught to not trust friends because then they might learn the family secrets.

All of these things made loneliness one of my best companions.  Yes, I had my dogs and cats, but they too were killed and removed from me by the monsters in my life.  I had my sheep and hogs in high school, but there would always be some reason that my parents would come up with to get rid of them.

To this day, I struggle with loneliness.  I have very few true friends and one of them that I had known almost the longest passed away from pneumonia.  I'm so afraid that everyone I know will either leave me, find an excuse to avoid me, or will end up dying and not be there for me.  I'm being brutally honest here because this is what I experience.

Reading the article from the work that John Cacioppo is doing on loneliness, was something refreshing for me to read.  I did not realize anyone was even looking at the topic. In his work at the University of Chicago, he looks at what happens to the brain when the social connections are missing.

One of the points that he makes is you can have too many social connections.  If you have too many, it can end up being that many of these connections are not motivated by the right things.  Sometimes fewer connections are better. 

I find it amazing that 25% of Americans according to his book have no confidant at all in their life.  While it is hard to determine how many confidants are ideal, one is better than zero and two is better than one.

Even being a client of a professional therapist is not enough.  It may provide a person that is someone you can confide in, but it is a one-way street.  It doesn't allow you to have that rich reciprocal bond.  It takes a two-way relationship for our connection to be strong and effective.

According to John Cacioppo's research, one in four people regularly feel lonely.  Chronic loneliness increases the odds of an early death by 20%.  Loneliness decreases the effectiveness of sleep.

In the article, Loneliness Is Like An Iceberg, just putting lonely people together does not work because it confuses the idea of loneliness with the fact of being alone.  Just focusing on social skills is not going to do too much because a lonely person is focused on self-preservation.  It is not the answer to just give lonely people support of the people around them because it takes reciprocal connections.

The one treatment that did seem to help was changing how lonely people think about other people.  Helping them to understand what happens when their brain goes into self-preservation mode is an effective way for helping give lonely people a chance at overcoming this struggle.

Too often in our world, we want to run over those that seem weaker or who are more outcast.  Instead of getting to know them and understand what makes them tick, we sentence them to a life of loneliness.  When you combine that with loss and trauma in the life of a lonely person, you're only casting them to the outer darkness of society.

I believe these are important conversations to have because if we want to survive as a species on this planet, we cannot go through life ignoring the people who are lonely.  We need to be a species that you don't house alone, but that you put together for the greater good of society and our planet.

As I stated in the beginning, I still struggle with the issue of loneliness and I feel all alone.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2016 by Don Shetterly

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Research Study of Labyrinths on Psychiatric Patients

The Orlando Regional Healthcare System (MD Anderson Cancer Center) commissioned a study through the Mind Body Spirit Center explored the value of the labyrinth on hospitalized psychiatric patients. I am not able to tell when the study was commissioned but it appears that it was completed around 2000 or 2001.

For the study, a replica of the Chartres Cathedral labyrinth was used at the Orlando Regional South Seminole Hospital. Patient found in the psychiatric observational unit over a two week period were involved in the study. Participants were provided with no explanation of the intervention to detach assumptions or presuppositions from the study. Participants were divided into a study and control group based on their desire to participate and/or physician clearance.

Physiological data was accumulated consisting of heart rate and blood pressure four times a day including immediately before and after the labyrinth experience. In addition a Hope Index was administered three times per day including immediately before and after as well as four hours post intervention.

Sample size of this study was 73 with 33 being in the control group and 40 in the study group. The patients who participated in walking the labyrinth were found to exhibit a lower pulse rate than those who did not. Regarding the Hope Index, patients who walked the labyrinth were more impacted, either by an increase or decrease than those who who were in the control group. They also found that four ours after walking the labyrinth, both the control group and the study group showed a marked decrease in their Hope Index scores.

According to the research paper published, the pilot study suggests that physiological results of lowered pulse rate that the labyrinth may serve as an effective tool in achieving the relaxation response. In addition, it would appear that this spiritual intervention may strongly impact a patient's sense of hope, stress, loneliness, despair and control (as measured with the Hope Index parameters).

For More Information, contact:
Dr. Beth Boyer Kollas
Director & Research Conductor
Orlando Regional Mind/Body/Spirit Center
1414 Kuhl Avenue
Orlando, FL. 32806

Blog Post & Images (c) 12/5/10 Don Shetterly - use by permission only

Health Care

I continue to be amazed at what our country, society and world views as "health care". If you say "health care", the first thing that comes to the mind of most people is going to a doctor for check ups, tests, medications and procedures. Ok, it might include a few other things to a few other people, but mostly that's what is portrayed in this world.

While there is a need for doctors and medicine and health care as described, that is only half of the picture. I know the medical association, the doctors, the pharmaceutical companies do not want you to think otherwise. For if you do, their corporate profits will go down.

Contrary to what 99% of the population thinks, there are so many other things that one can do to take care of their health. Yet, those things are in the minority and somewhat sampled on an occasional basis. And if you do not agree, just take a moment and look around you to see what the vast majority of people are doing for medical care. That is where the proof is to what I am saying.

In order for us to shift the paradigm that we have all fallen into, we have to examine some basic facts.

• #1 Much of our life experiences including our past, influence our present moments. If we do not deal with the past, it will deal with us. That is a plain, pure and simple and a proveable fact!
• #2 We often ignore the true message of the pain or health condition we are facing because it is easier to pop a pill, than to deal in the nitty gritty stuff of our life. Sometimes pills are needed in certain situations but they should not be the first thing we turn to.
• #3 We often make much more out of the situation then we need to because often (I'm not going to say always or 100% of the time) but often there is some emotional, mental or spiritual side to whatever medical situation we are facing. There is more to the picture than meets the eye.
• #4 We often feel solace and comfort in placing a label on the condition we have. However, the danger in this is that now we live up to that label after we find out all we can about it. We may not realize we do this but often labels we put on ourselves or our conditions hold us back more than they help us.
• #5 The mind is extremely powerful in healing our body if we allow it to do this. The placebo effect is now being found through research to do as much healing in physical ailments as the actual drugs themselves.
• #6 As a culture, we have relied on research to provide us with the answers and solutions that we need to either help treat ourselves or our loved ones. Yet, research is a big business with many dollars being thrown around and in order to evaluate the research, we need to follow the money trail. In following the money trail, analysis of the research results can be evaluated more accurately. Research and statistics do not necessarily mean that the conclusions are 100% accurate.
  
• #7 Fear is one of the most common culprits for making seeing eyes blind and by that, fear rules this world in so many ways and it blinds us to what is really and truly going on. Fear is valid when you are running from the tiger but fear has no place when you are trying to discover the intricacies of your body, the world around you and the universe.
  
• #8 Being with pain is very difficult whether it is your own or someone very close to you. As humans (especially when we have allowed fear to come into our lives), we struggle to be with someone or our self that is in pain. It is a natural part of our biological lives but when it becomes the sole arbitrator of our life or our loved ones, than we have lost site of the possibilities that exist.
  
• #9 Supplements and health drinks and potions and snake oil are widely used in the world by people who believe they will work. Often they cost so much money and while there is much science and research to back up the claims, these products fail to live up to the expectations. Remember the placebo effect? Remember to, that even in these so called "alternative health" means, you need to follow the money trail and evaluate them accordingly. Even with expensive price tags and miraculous claims, these things are not always what they seem to be. Look at them and evaluate them through open eyes that do not close.
  
• #10 Possibilities are endless! Let me repeat that. Possibilities are endless! Be careful, locking yourself into one paradigm thinking that this holds all the answers for you. For when you are thinking this way, you have given up on the possibilities that exist.
  
• #11 The answers we need are within us. In our society we fail to listen to ourselves, our bodies and our thoughts. We fail to connect to that which is within us. Within each one of us is a master healer. When was the last time, you listened to yourself and I mean truly listened to yourself? For when we do not listen to ourselves (to thine own self be true), we give our power up to someone else and we lose so much of the potential that is right within our bodies, our minds and our spirits.
• #12 Consider what is going on in your life the next time you get an ache or a pain or something seems off. Often what is happening in your life will show up in some physical way within your body. Have you ever heard someone say, "my back is killing me" as they over exert themselves without rest, or maybe my "legs are tired/hurt to move" when they are struggling to make a decision of their path in life? Do I need to say any more or is the picture clear?
  

Each one of us needs to evaluate what is best for our lives. If we do not take the time each day to listen to our bodies, to go in and clean out the closets of our lives and to give ourselves rest, than how can we expect to be healthy inhabitants of our own bodies?

Health care is not about procedures and taking pills. Health care is about getting to know your body in every way possible and then listening to your inner self in finding the most potential for your life that you can. There is so much more out there than the advertisements show us each and every day. We've become people with eyes that are closed when we so badly need to open our eyes and claim everything we can.

The potential exists and the possibilities are endless. How much will you close your eyes to? How much will you allow yourself to open your eyes and see?