Genetic diversity and intelligence

From a paper in Animal Cognition, we find out that mules are smarter than horses and donkeys.

This raises interesting questions about hybrid vigor and, especially, in humans, if multiracial individuals or people with more diverse genetic ancestry have a higher IQ on average than people from a more uniform ethnic background.

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Caffeine (or why Dr. Drew is full of shit)

LOL at a comment from Dr. Drew:

Is there a culture of restriction at treatment facilities? For example, what is the tolerance for lesser vices like caffeine, or sex?
Sex is a no; relationships are what take people out. Caffeine is not actually a stimulant. It removes a nervous system depressant so the brain can feel stimulated. Addicts will always put things in their mouth. They always try to alter [their perception] automatically — that's their orientation. Of course we want that behavior to stop. However, there's no evidence that caffeine alters their course [of recovery]. We used to say the same thing about nicotine. Now there is evidence that we should be focusing on stopping nicotine early.

Caffeine is a stimulant. You can find a better post explaining why this is so at Chris's website. Refer to this article too.

'Stimulant' by definition means at least removing a nervous system depressant; in addition, the effects of caffeine on the body are well-documented.

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Rotating objects

Via Cognitive Daily, older people are worse at some visuospatial tests than younger people.

Mélanie Joanisse, Sylvain Gagnon, Joshua Kreller, Marie-Claude Charbonneau (2008). Age-related differences in viewer-rotation tasks: Is mental manipulation the key factor? Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 63B (3), 193-200

This is very interesting - not only for the whole neuroscientific aspect, but because I have also tested as having much higher visuospatial abilities than other people my age. The study looked at three different methods of presenting an object to a viewer - updating, ignoring, and imagining. See the Cognitive Daily post for the study methods.

What is cool about this is the fact that some aspects of mentally rotating objects decline in older people but not other methods, which makes me wonder whether these aspects are controlled by different areas of the brain - different parts of the visual cortex or the intraparietal cortices? Do older people lose particular synapses? Does this vary by original visuospatial ability?

Put an fMRI in there - I want to see the activity of the parietal lobe in this study.

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Exercise slows down Alzheimer's syndrome

An article in the journal Neurology says that exercise may prevent your brain from shrinking if you have Alzheimer's.

Why?

Well, exercise has some neuroprotective effects. It increases the flow of blood to the brain and promotes growth factors and neurochemical protectivity. It's not going to hurt your brain.

There is no idea what causes this, but there was four times less brain shrinkage in Alzheimer patients with moderate physical activity than in Alzheimer patients with slight physical activity.

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A short introduction to the neuron

Doing my part to contribute to basic science blog posts on the Web.

This blog is, as stated, mostly a neuroscience blog. In this post, I'll be teaching those of you who don't know, perhaps, a friggin' thing I'm talking about about the basic component of the nervous system.

The neuron is the basic building block of the nervous system. There are several different shapes of neurons, which I'll describe later, but here's a basic neuron:

(Carlson, Niel. A. (1992). Foundations of Physiological Psychology. Needham Heights, Massachusetts: Simon & Schuster. pp. 36)

There are some parts of the neuron that aren't labeled here, including the nodes of Ranvier, but this is a basic neuron. A basic description of the parts -

Dendrites - These receive synaptic signals and contain receptors on them for neurotransmitters.
Soma - The cell body contains the nucleus and all that other cellular shit.
Axon - The tunnel which electric and chemical signals travel down.
Myelin sheath - The insulating cover for the axon. Gets eaten in people with MS.
Nodes of Ranvier - The axon between the myelin sheaths. Electrical signals travel in saltatory ('jumping') motion between the nodes.
Terminal button - These send synaptic signals.

The most important part of a neuron is its cell membrane. This is what receives electrical and chemical signals. Here is a diagram of a neuron membrane:

(http://www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/courses/1010/mangels/neuro/neurosignaling/LipidBilayer.gif)

There are ion pumps in the cell walls. There are three ions which are important to the neuron: sodium, potassium, and calcium. These make your electrical impulses work. Gradients of charge across a cell produce potentials, which are differences in the voltage across a cell membrane and which drive electrical charges, known as action potentials, which do the work of your nervous system. Here is an action potential:

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential)

Action potentials always begin with a stimulus and depolarization - once the voltage across the membrane approaches a threshold (in this case a small negative voltage), the action potential is triggered. Action potentials are an all-or-nothing action, kind of like an orgasm, where the voltage becomes positive then drops down again and undershoots a tad.

There's an equation which relates the charge in a cell given the concentrations of ions, which is called the Nernst equation (which relates to a lot of other cells, but is used in neurons) and something one of my professors called the Extremely Important Equation.

The Nernst equation:

where E = equilibrium potential, RT/F = 59.1 mV, z = the number of electrons transferred, and the words in brackets should be self-explanatory.

The Extremely Important Equation, which I think is called the Goldman equation:


where Em = equilibrium potential of the membrane, E(ion) = equilibrium potential of an ion, P(ion) = the permeability of the ion in arbitrary units, usually siemens for conductance, and Ptot = the total permeability of all permeant ions.

And here's some basic physics equations:
V=RI
Q=CV

Here's some different types of neurons, categorized by function:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron#Classes

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It really drives you insa-a-a-a-ane

Hernandez-Gonzalez M, Guevara MA, Agmo A (2008). Motivational influences on the degree and direction of sexual attraction. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1129: 61–87

Motivation can be defined as a class of central nervous processes determining the likelihood of display of a behavior and the intensity of the behavior if displayed. All behavior is, according to this definition, caused and controlled by motivation. Although the concept of motivation eventually could be replaced by an entirely mechanistic explanation of the causes of behavior, in terms of neural events, such explanations would be overly complex for everyday use. This is particularly the case with regard to the momentaneous fluctuations in the intensity of a behavior, like those occurring during copulation in rats. Thus, the concept of motivation will remain useful even when mechanistic explanations become available. Even though the propensity to perform sexual responses is determined by sexual motivation, another element is required for the execution of such responses. This other element is an appropriate stimulus, a sexual incentive. For a male rat, an appropriate incentive could be a sexually receptive female. For a human, it could be a mental representation of a sexual partner. The incentive activates approach behaviors, and the intensity of these behaviors will be determined by motivation and by the quality of the incentive stimulus, its attractivity. Much work has been done with the purpose of identifying the nature of the incentive stimulus or stimuli emitted by rats and other mammals. While visual stimuli seem to be of limited importance, auditory and particularly olfactory stimuli have been found to have incentive properties. Soluble chemicals may be important for some aspects of copulation, but copulatory motor patterns are basically under the control of tactile stimuli. The processing of sexual incentives in the rat brain has been studied with electroencephalographic techniques, and data show that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) participates in the identification of sexual incentives. Furthermore, there are important differences between the medial and orbital frontal cortices. The medial PFC, as well as the ventral tegmental area, also seem to participate in the generation of pelvic thrusting.

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How antidepressants work

What you thought about depression is about to be up-ended.

Recent studies from Yale and Princeton and a university in Italy suggest that depression is a mild neurodegenerative disease. Instead of simply disturbing your brain's neurochemistry, depression destroys neurons. (This is bad for the 10% of people in the United States who are depressed.)

Antidepressants work depending on each individual's neurochemistry, but they supposedly perform another function: they prevent neurons from dying. My question is - how do the neurons die? What biochemical trigger makes them die? If we dissected the brains of a happy rat and a depressed rat, what would we find? Loss of neurons has been already found in the hippocampus - so maybe SSRIs help protect the hippocampus.

The gamut of drugs for already-identified neurodegenerative diseases is acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, NMDA receptor inhibitors, L-dopa (dopamine), dopa decarboxylase inhibitors, dopamine agonists, MAO-B inhibitors, MAOIs, and other drugs. MAO inhibitors are a class of antidepressant reserved for those cases that cannot be treated with other antidepressants, and antidepressants and antipsychotics are used to decrease symptoms of depression and psychosis in people with neurodegenerative diseases.

Depression is a disorder which contains some wacky brain chemistry, which would no doubt kill a few neurons. The neurotransmitters affected in depression are serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine (the catecholamines), and possibly GABA and glutamate. A lot of brains also secrete excess amounts of MAO-As, where the MAOIs come into play.

As we further understand the processes of neuronal death in depression, treatment will advance. Some treatments for more advanced neurodegenerative disease might, in small doses, cure depression.

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Japanese neuroanatomical drawings

Via Neurophilosophy, the Kaibo Zonshinzu, a set of medical illustrations from the 1800s.

An exposure of the meninges and their vasculature.

The cerebral cortex.

The cortex opened exposing the corpus callosum and the cranium.

The cerebellum opened and the ventral view of the cranium, showing cranial vasculature and how the brain is oriented in the cranium .

The ventral view of the brain, showing the brainstem, olfactory bulbs, pons, pineal gland, and medulla.

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Death and the brain

Today I'm going to post about death.

This post is dedicated to my canine buddy whom I knew for thirteen years, Hot Shot (don't laugh; I got the dog when I was seven, and I called him that for thirteen years - I'm 20, and I got him when he was a mere sixteen weeks old - he died at the ripe old age of thirteen, which, if you use the 7 years to one human year rule, is equivalent to a 91-year-old human. He was an elderly ), who I euthanized two days ago after finding he suffered from a tumor on his enlarged heart, a tumor on his testicles, chronic kidney failure , and a stroke. He was beginning to convulse as I held his furry little body while the veterinarian sedated him, and the only indication that he'd died was his stopped heart, his lack of breathing, and some spasms. He died peacefully, and I'm glad he has no more agony, even if he is no longer alive. I feel like shit, as you can guess, and even though I look mildly stoic on the outside, I am grieving for my old very small friend who is, at least, going to do his part for nature after he has croaked by feeding organisms. Eat up, bacteria.

When the brain dies, all electrical activity ceases. Simple.

The problem is, how do you determine the brain has died? The American Academy of Neurologists has a set of criteria for determining brain death.

Brain death is defined by the American Academy of Neurologists as 'the irreversible loss of function of the brain, including the brainstem'. The brainstem is an important part of the definition because it controls your basic bodily functions - breathing and heartbeat.

The criteria are listed thus:

- Directly quoted from the list of criteria, clinical or neuroimaging evidence of an acute CNS catastrophe (which is our term for a critical occurrence in the brain or spinal cord) that is compatible with the clinical diagnosis of brain death
- Exclusion of complicating medical conditions that may lead to a different assessment - rule out various disturbances in the body's chemical milieu
- No poisoning
- Core temperature higher than 90 degrees F (32 degrees C)
- Three cardinal findings: coma/unresponsiveness, absence of brainstem reflexes, and apnea
- Eyes: Unresponsive to bright light, normal to dilated, no oculocephalic reflex if there is no apparent fracture or instability of the cervical spine, no deviation of the eyes in response to ear irrigation
- Facial sensation and motor responses: No corneal reflex, no jaw reflex, no grimacing in response to pressure on sensitive parts of the body
- Pharyngeal reflexes: no response to stimulation with tongue depressor, no cough response to bronchial suctioning
- PCO2 pressure higher than 60 mm Hg

Visual observations that can still be seen in brain death include spontaneous movements of limbs other than pathologic flexion or extension response, respiratory-like movements, sweating, blushing, tachycardia, normal blood pressure without pharmacologic support or sudden increases in blood pressure, absence of diabetes insipidus, deep tendon reflexes, superficial abdominal reflexes, triple flexion response, and the Babinski reflex (quoted almost directly from the criteria).

Tests that can be performed to diagnose brain death include conventional angiography, EEG, transcranial Doppler ultrasonography (except in ten percent of patients, who may not have temporal insonation windows, which are structures in the temporal bone of the cranium allowing sound waves to provide a picture of your brain), small systolic peaks in early systole without diastolic flow or reverberating flow, technetium-99m hexamethylpropyleneamineoxime brain scan, and somatosensory evoked potentials.

These criteria are vital in determining when a patient has died so the family may take them off life support, harvest their organs for donation, and a physician may declare them legally dead. There have been people declared legally dead who are still alive. There is a bunch of hemming and hawing about when death occurs, mostly split along religious/ideological lines (as an atheist, I think when their brain goes, they're effectively dead). Even among physicians, there are variations. - according to 'Greer et al. (2008) Variability of brain death determination guidelines in leading US neurologic institutions. Neurology; 70: 284-289', there is significant variability in 'requirements for performance of the evaluation, prerequisites prior to testing, specifics of the brainstem examination and apnea testing, and what types of ancillary tests could be performed, including what pitfalls or limitations might exist'. Does brain death stop, for that matter, when consciousness stops? Consciousness comes from our frontal lobe; we would have to find a way to judge when those neurons fall silent. (But that gets into a big argument about what consciousness is, and philosophy of mind is, as you know, one of the things I love to hate, as a person in neuroscience who is highly positivist, highly materialist, and absolutely hates dualists. Why the hell are they still debating whether the mind is part of the brain when we've already established it and are doing more research? Let us people in neuroscience do research on the brain; you go sit over there with your Kant, especially you bloody dualist bastards, who can keep your Descartes, the worthless frog)

If the diagnosis of brain death is this shaky, a few limitations might exist in determining it: misinterpretation of tests, unreliable test results, complicating comorbid symptoms, unknown factors in the neurological milieu (likely neurochemical processes), and other bits of human imperception.

I expect, as we grow in our knowledge of the healthy living brain, that we can use it to determine when that brain stops being living.

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A rendition of 'Boom De Yada'

In honor of the Discovery Channel's awesome new commercial, I bring you my folksy song dedicated to my field. Because we neuroscience people have a sense of humor.

I love my neurons
And all their dend-r-ites
I love my foramen
I love my astrocytes
I love my whole brain
It's such an awesome organ
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada

I love my dopamine
I love adrenaline
I love my GABA
And seroton-in
I love my whole brain
It helps me think and shit
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada

I love my spinal cord
I love my frontal lobe
I love my thalamus
And my temporal lobe
I love the human brain
It is my favorite thing
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom da yada

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EW SMOKE BREATH

Today's post is about nicotine.

Before I launch into a rather calm treatment of the neuropharmacology of this, let me say that smoking is bad and your nervous system is not to be messed with, because it can have irreversible issues.

Nicotine is a stimulant of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, specifically two kinds of receptor: the ganglion type nicotinic receptor and the CNS type nicotinic receptor. Nicotine interferes with the reception of acetylcholine by nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and can be blocked by curare and hexamethonium. Since it blocks acetylcholine, it produces a high. In the ganglion type nicotinic receptor, it stimulates production of adrenaline, and in the CNS type nicotinic receptor, it stimulates production of dopamine. Therefore, it makes you feel awake and good. This is why people often smoke when stressed - nicotine gives them a jump.

The most little-known side effect of nicotine is the fact that it raises the heart rate (duh - it releases adrenaline into the body) and releases the body's stores of fat into the blood. Nicotine by itself can cause strokes.

Therefore, reducing addiction to nicotine would require simply inhibiting nicotine's ability to attach to the receptors, right? Varenicline (Chantix) is a drug that has been tried, but it causes suicidal thoughts in drug users, probably due to the fact that it prevents acetylcholine from bonding to the receptors. Acetylcholine is important for cognitive function and mood, and inhibiting it would cause symptoms similar to depression. The only way to safely stop nicotine is to quit cigarettes cold turkey.

And nicotine is only one of many drugs that make you feel good when you take them, but do some really stupid shit to your body when you take them - so don't use drugs.

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Gender differences and sexual orientation in the brain

From the Beeb and several other sources comes an article about which I already kind of knew the answer:

Homosexual brains are similar to heterosexual brains of the opposite sex.

The survey was different, though, in that it measured hemisphere volume. Lesbians and heterosexual men had asymmetric hemispheres, while gay men and heterosexual women had symmetric hemispheres.

What this says about people who are bisexual or pansexual or who are transgender or who are intersex, I don't know. Nature, however, is not quite as cut-and-dry as to make a clear-cut dichotomy for sexual orientation and sex, even though individuals on neither end of the dichotomy don't appear often, so this study has some flaws, but that's another post.

Most studies I've seen about this have been mostly about hormones, in which lesbian women have elevated levels of testosterone and gay men have elevated levels of estrogen or where lesbian women have more or less activation in a certain area of their brain or where gay men have more or less activation in a certain area of their brain than heterosexual people of their sex. What we do know is that sexual orientation is biological.

There are also differences in symmetry of synaptic junctions in the amygdala.

What I'd like to see is a study on people who fit neither end of one or both of the continua to see how similar a brain in, say, a bisexual or pansexual person is to heterosexual or homosexual people.

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LOLPLoS

Via A Blog Around the Clock, the LOLPLoS submissionfest.

Science is awesome. Science humor is nearly as awesome.

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Neuroscience and epigenetics

Chris has a new site up at http://uncrediblehallq.net. If you read his site, redirect your links there.

The quality and frequency of my posting has been rather shitty these days, mostly because I have a lot to deal with.

Anyway, here's a real post.

Epigenetics is the ancillary system of your genes which causes them to be expressed in different locations by different stimuli. For example, it is why you are not a blob of uniform cells, but rather a person made of different types of cells which have the exact same genetic information.

There are a few terms in epigenetics you should be familiar with if you want to know anything about it:

- DNA methylation: DNA methylation is the addition of a methyl group to the carbon-5 position of cytosine residues ('residue', in this context, is a fancy word for an individual nucleic acid) that are followed by a guanine (at least, in 99% of cases of methylation ). A methylated cytosine followed by a guanine is called a CpG dinucleotide. The human genome doesn't have a lot, which is due to the deamination of these methyl-cytosine complexes, which are called 5-methylcytosine. This is important in cancer.

- DNA histone: DNA histone is the stuff that makes DNA curl into chromatin - if you didn't have histones, you would almost certainly not be alive, because without histones, DNA is a 1.8-meter long tangled mess of crap. With histones, DNA condenses into 90-millimeter bits of chromatin that are tightly packed in the nucleus, which is more condensed into 90-micrometer chromosomes during mitosis. Different folding of histones would change the folding of DNA.

- Transcription factors: Transcription factors enable the replication and transcribing of DNA into RNA, which is translated into proteins.

- Prions: Prions are proteins gone nuts. They can infect cells and catalytically convert other native state versions of the same protein to the infectious state.

Why is epigenetics so important in neuroscience? Epigenetic abnormalities cause a number of neurological issues, and has been implicated in a number of seemingly non-developmentally-related conditions such as schizophrenia (which is sort of our favorite illness to speculate about the causes of, as it is very poorly understood and very devastating and very interesting in its symptoms.) It is indeed also a factor in neural stem cell developmental issues, and is also implicated in differences in things such as intelligence.

Much research has been devoted to the role of epigenetics in psychiatric disorders. It's going to become much more important in the next few years; I suspect those of my fellow neuroscience people who investigate the psychiatric will do more gene-based research surrounding these things.

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The stupidity of dignity

Via EvolutionBlog, an article on the stupidity of dignity, which is a much-needed topic to discuss.

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Neuroimmunology

I had been mystified by this subfield until now, and it is profoundly relevant to research of neurological disease, both somatic and psychological:

The brain is extremely immune-protected, since there is a blood-brain barrier made by the glia surrounding our neurons (astrocytes). Very few substances get through the blood-brain barrier, and the molecules that get through produce some interesting effects, but viruses and bacteria which enter the nervous system are acted on by molecules which also affect the nervous system - in a sense, these molecules possess a double duty , particularly cytokines and chemokines.

Psychoneuroimmunology, in particular, is very interesting. It focuses on the 'mind-body connection', which is largely a lot of stuff about placebos and nocebos and how attitude affects your immune system and things of such ilk. What I'd like to see psychoneuroimmunologists address is microbes and mental illness.

As stated before, viruses and bacteria can cause mental illness - schizophrenia might be caused by a virus. I know little of how the blood-brain barrier is formed, but presumably, for example, if a pregnant woman has a virus, it might be easier for it to cross the BBB and wreak all sorts of shit.

I am not sure about how encephalitis and other brain-affecting disorders affect the neuroimmune system, but there seems to be a major role filled by cytokine RNA in detecting it. Cytokines, for those of you who don't know what they are, are proteins that are used in cellular signaling. Activation of them can affect sleep and disposition, and their actions are controlled to an extent by psychological triggers. Presumably, this is probably the biological basis of 'laughter is the best medicine' and other sorts of adages which are the same in meaning.

The entire immunological makeup of a person, however, will affect the brain. Human Genome Sciences, for example, is developing a treatment called belimumab, a human monoclonal antibody, for the treatment of lupus. Lupus has neurological symptoms, among them seizures, psychosis, and abnormalities of the CSF. Given the fact that lupus is triggered by environmental factors, belimumab should be effective in minimizing the development of lymphocytes which act against the body; specifically, it inhibits the b-lymphocyte stimulator. Given the interaction of lupus with the nervous system, one can make a few inferences about how this drug might act: the drug will keep B cells from interacting with the cytokines and chemokines in the nervous system, since it will reduce the B cell count, and reduces the amount of harmful B cells in the cerebrospinal fluid (since the CSF acts as immunological protection).

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Auditory processing.

Via Pure Pedantry, an article on the double dissociation of 'what' and 'where' in the auditory cortices of cats.

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Depression and drugs

Apparently, the gub'mint has released a statement that depression and marijuana are not to be mixed, particularly in people between the ages of 12 and 17. Is it based on sound science, though?

While drug use in anyone under the age of 18 is completely idiotic, the report is poorly cited and makes poor logical conclusions:

Millions of American teens* report experiencing weeks of hopelessness and loss of
interest in normal daily activities, and many of these depressed teens are making
the problem worse by using marijuana and other drugs. Some teens use marijuana
to relieve the symptoms of depression (“self-medicate”), wrongly believing it may
alleviate these depressed feelings. In surveys, teens often report using marijuana
and other drugs not only to relieve symptoms of depression, but also to “feel good,”
or “feel better,” to relieve stress, and help them cope.
However, recent studies show that marijuana and depression are a dangerous
combination. In fact, using marijuana can worsen depression and lead to more
serious mental health disorders, such as schizophrenia, anxiety, and even suicide.
Weekly or more frequent use of marijuana doubles a teen’s risk of depression and
anxiety. Depressed teens are more than twice as likely as their peers to abuse or
become dependent on marijuana.
Alarmingly, the majority of teens who report feeling depressed aren’t getting
professional help. They have not seen or spoken to a medical doctor or other
professional about their feelings. For parents, this means they need to pay closer
attention to their teen’s behavior and mood swings, and recognize that marijuana
and other drugs could be playing a dangerous role in their child’s life.

Nowhere in the paper are the citations even mentioned, and to my knowledge, a lot of people use drugs because they're depressed - biochemically, however, THC binds a cannabinoid receptor - CB1 - neuropharmacologists are currently debating the causality of the correlation of psychotic symptoms and THC (for the record, since neuropharmacology is an entirely different field of neuroscience than the field of neuroscience which I am studying, I can only give my personal experience - I have known a few stoners, and to my knowledge, they are not psychotic). The most common hypothesis is the self-medication hypothesis, which attributes the use of marijuana among depressed individuals to substance abuse by many who are mentally ill and who do not have access to the proper treatment. More disturbing is the list of statements made by the DEA without assessment of information:

Executive Summary
Two million teens report feelings of depression and loss of interest in
daily activities during the past year.
Depressed teens are twice as likely as non-depressed teens to use
marijuana and other illicit drugs.
Depressed teens are more than twice as likely as their peers to abuse
or become dependent on marijuana.
Using marijuana can cause depression and other mental illnesses.
Marijuana use can worsen depression and lead to more serious
mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, anxiety, and even suicide.
Teens who smoke marijuana at least once a month are three times
more likely to have suicidal thoughts than non-users.
The percentage of depressed teens is equal to the percentage
of depressed adults, but depressed teens are more likely than
depressed adults to use marijuana and other drugs.
Teen girls who use marijuana daily are more likely than girls who do
not use marijuana to develop depression.

There the feds go again with their causality. I wonder if NIMH and NINDS have started any sort of stink about this - SAMHSA is independent of the NIH, though, which is highly suspect, and their citations don't say anything about causal implication.

Here's the report - though I do not condone or support marijuana use by anyone who is not legally an adult, I think it is fallacious and idiotic to make unsupported statements about a drug .

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Epidemics

The vast majority of people don't know this, but neurology has been known to have its own pandemics to deal with . While the world is on the subject of H5N1, I'll post about some neurological diseases that have developed into epidemics.

-Encephalitis and encephalomyelitis
-Kuru
-Meningitis
-Polio
-Trypanosomiasis

Encephalitis - this is a nasty disease and is an inflammation of the brain. There are two main encephalitides that have developed into epidemics: Japanese encephalitis and La Crosse (yes, Wisconsin has its very own encephalitis!) encephalitis. The main symptoms of encephalitides are sudden fever, headache, vomiting, stiff neck and back, impaired judgment, drowsiness, weak muscles, a clumsy and unsteady gait, and irritability (from NINDS Fact Sheet on meningitis and encephalitis). Epidemics occur in East and Southeast Asia, where 30,000-50,000 cases occur annually. Case fatality is anywhere from 0.3-60%, depending on the population and age.

Kuru - also known as the zombie disease, due to the fact that it mostly occurred among cannibalistic tribes of Papua New Guinea via eating a dead person's brain. This is a prion disease, and is similar to CJD in that it produces spongiform encephalopathy. Luckily, this disease was wiped out by 1980.

Meningitis - Also a nasty disease and is the inflammation of the meninges, which are the membranes surrounding the brain (arachnoid, dura mater and pia mater; this is one of the two diseases here which every college student is or ought to be vaccinated for. It occurs sometimes in college dormitories, and has many of the same symptoms as encephalitis. Case fatality is low, but it occasionally kills in as little as 48 hours!

Polio - The FDR disease. Most people in the United States are vaccinated against this. Polio, oddly enough, was endemic to Europe for thousands of years until it hopped across the pond, and it preferentially infects motor neurons - which means that when you get it, you may stop breathing and be quite paralyzed. Iron lungs were used quite frequently for this; nowadays, biphasic cuirass ventilation replaces the iron lung in situations where patients cannot breathe (see also Ondine's curse for another interesting and sad condition where people cannot breathe, albeit not autonomically.)

Trypanosomiasis - What we call trypanosomiasis is called by laymen sleeping sickness and Chagas's disease. This disease makes people sleepy and is caused by a small parasite in the saliva of tsetse flies, in the case of sleeping sickness, and mosquitoes, in the case of Chagas's disease. Its symptoms are fever, headaches, and joint pains; in addition, Chagas's disease causes conjunctivitis.

Enjoy wondering how it might be to get one of these little suckers.

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A rant on funding, again

We need a science White House. At this point, I am almost past caring whether it is Democratic (though I would prefer a Democratic White House) or Republican (OH SWEET REASON NO), I just want them to give more money to the NIH and NSF. The Department of Defense doesn't need all the crap it gets. No military in the world is nearly as technologically advanced as ours.

The reason I say this is because there is good research that is getting tossed by the wayside because it doesn't have enough money or there are laboratories that cannot afford to hire an adequate number of researchers.

For example, John McCain showed his ignorance of all but the most obvious research when he made a snide comment about a bear DNA investigation that was part of investigating ecological dynamics in a key species. McCain is a man who has no understanding of science, although we can't fault him more than a reasonable amount because he's not science-educated.

There are plenty of PhDs who are unemployed because of the shortage of fundings. GrrlScientist is an ornithologist who has been unemployed for the past while, for example, and she delivers an interesting and rather exquisite rant on her own unemployment.

This is research not getting done because of governmental ignorance. How much development would we have had if Bush was not in office? Let's think of research topics that might be done if the government gave us more money:

- topics concerning keystone species which are vital to their environment
- research into rare diseases
- more investigation of the neural bases of intelligence
- MORE STEM CELL RESEARCH

There is also a lamentable lack of science education. We American-born scientists (in this number are also counted mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers in addition to biology, chemistry, physics, and medicine) are a small bunch; apparently, we have to import the rest of our colleagues from Asia and Europe because the vast majority of the rest of you can't be arsed to have as motivation for your job anything other than money. I don't give a flying crap how much I earn as long as I'm doing neuroscience; I would live in a space similar to my friend Bill's crusty old attic if I had to (although with sufficient weatherproofing and maybe a space heater).

We would have more American-born scientists if the vast majority of the aforementioned rest of you stopped being greedy and had some discipline and actually knew something about science. (Interestingly, this reminds me of a discussion I had at Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics at UW-Madison, the atheist group that I am a member in, when we were talking about the theists' so-called 'miracles'. None of the theists who were arguing this point - I say this because the only theist who usually sides with us, my friend Rachel the Spinozan panentheist, is as far as I know majoring in science and wasn't really participating in the conversation, and the theists I personally know who are scientists are comparably sane to my fellow scientist atheists - were majors in science, and Chris, Nick, Travis and I, who are all science majors and all atheists - well, Chris is also a philosophy major - were using probably the most substantive arguments which arise mainly from science to argue that the rather fundamentalist theists were full of shit, and our arguments apparently went over their heads - they apparently went over the heads of the other atheists, too.)

And no, we're not going to resort to framing and marketing it like some sort of product. Is the American public really this stupid?

Seriously, if it gets much worse, I WILL bail on the United States after I get my PhD, as one more scientist who takes their talent to where it will be acknowledged. You can say hello to me in Amsterdam.

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