Brain


Brainstem

An out of focus image of white and colored dots of light. The picture was taken this way, don't blame the out of focus on your brainstem.

Brainstem Basics

Your brainstem is the most basic area of the brain.  The area of the brain that we have in common with almost all other levels of the animal kingdom.  It extends right into the spinal cord.  A lot of other whole body involuntary reflexes come from the spinal cord – that’s another story for another day).

3 main parts

  • Medulla oblongata – rhythm center (heart rate, breathing, swallowing, vomiting and coughing reflex) – they’re all involuntary
  • Pons (not ponds) – the bridge between the cerebellum hemispheres and other brain regions, helps coordinate the right side and left side of your body for complex activities
  • Midbrain – sensory reflexes (also involuntary) – blinking, eye focusing, pupil dilation in response to light, visual and auditory startling reflex that kick-starts the “fight or flight cascade”.

Other eye focusing problems are not rooted in the midbrain. They are more likely rooted in the areas of the brain that control orbital muscles or in the areas that translate what your eyes are seeing, like a “lazy eye” or drifting eye or being cross-eyed.  There are therapies that doctors prescribe to try and strengthen the weak eye.  Blinking is usually a response to eye moisture.

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Blood Brain Barrier [Show Notes]

Basics

The blood brain barrier is the last layer of cells between what’s in your blood and the extracellular fluid around your brain cells.

You’re born with it!  It’s main job is filtration.

2 ways things get through the blood brain barrier:

  • Passive diffusion: small, neutral molecules (water, gases, lipid-soluble)
  • Active transport: glucose, amino acids, drugs (like a revolving door)

Permeability: how easily something can pass through a layer without work

Things that change permeability:

  • Inflammation – stretches layer and makes holes bigger (meningitis, injury)
  • Multiple sclerosis – an auto-immune disease that can degrade the BBB
  • Alzheimer’s – BBB becomes overwhelmed with antibodies and burns out

*Scary Section*

Rabies is a virus that is small and can get through the blood brain barrier but the immune system cells, antibodies from the vaccine, and medicines can’t.
HIV encephalopathy is caused when a mutation of the HIV gets into the brain and use brain cells to replicate (rather than the well-known T-cells of the immune system).  There is also a rare symptom of HIV called HIV-associated dementia.

Callback

microchimerisms – Pregnancy causes the permeability of many areas of the body to change, and this includes the BBB.

Test Yourself

Drugs that have central nervous system effects (good) or side effects (bad) cross the BBB.  See what you know of different medications and what job they’re supposed to do and what negative side effects they cause and see if you can guess if they cross the BBB.

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Male DNA in the Female Brain

*Sorry again for crying baby*

Male DNA In The News

The news reported that scientists had discovered a link between male DNA found in the brain of the women who gave birth to sons.

Microchimerism = DNA fragment of another organism that incorporates into you

This particular microchimerism involves the Y chromosome (because otherwise, you wouldn’t know it was specifically male).

Other documented microchimerism studies have reason to believe they may be beneficial – especially in a process called immuno-surveillance (when the immune system is patrolling around looking for things that don’t belong there).

The blood brain barrier is the last layer of cells between what’s in your blood and your brain cells.  DNA fragments are small and can easily pass through the BBB, especially during pregnancy when membrane permeability (the penetrable-ness) has increased all throughout the body already.

The primary resource written by the scientists that did the study of the female brains states that their findings were pretty much inconclusive – partly due to the small sample size of brains they had available.  And they couldn’t study living people.  They were mostly trying to decide if this male microchimerism had a positive or negative effect on Alzheimer’s risk.  The final conclusion – we dunno.  Another obstacle was that the complete health history of the samples they used was not known.

Other sources have stated hypotheses regarding the number of children a woman has and the risk of early onset Alzheimer’s.

This issue with reporting on studies like these is that Alzheimer’s has so many factors that may increase or decrease risk and science is pretty sure there’s NOT just one thing that will cause or prevent someone from developing this disease.

The only thing they could conclude is that microchimerisms are evolutionarily significant.

Here’s the primary journal article.

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An Accordion in Your Brain

Cerebellum Basics

Your cerebellum is a separate part of your brain that sits under the occipital lobe.  It is responsible for unconscious motor functions, and is organized differently than the cerebrum.  It is packed tightly together in neat folds like an accordion.  And it has 3 lobes:

  • Anterior (in the front) – it keeps the body visually “centered” and on balance, as well as moving the head or body to keep the eyes level with the horizon.  Alcoholism can cause damage to this area that results in a person being sober but still walking “drunk”.
  • Follcular-nodular (in the middle with nodules on it) – responsible for eye movement in response to motion.  It is responsible for correcting balance based on signals from the body rather than the eyes. This is how you know you’re falling over when you have your eyes closed.  Also responsible for muscle tone (aka the passive contraction or “readiness” of a relaxed muscle).
  • Posterior (in the back) – responsible for fine motor coordination and it turns off signals for involuntary movements.

Purkinje cells are the main type of neuron in the cerebellum – SO BEAUTIFUL!!

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Now You See It [Show Notes]

Occipital Lobe Review

A brain lesion is a place in the brain that doesn’t fire when it should or fires sporadically when it shouldn’t.  Occipital lobe lesions can lead to hallucinations that range from amorphous to extremely detailed.

Field blindness: a lesion causes the occipital lobe to not translate the information from one or more spots of the visual map (your whole view).  Blind spots (round) or visual cuts (lines).

Photosensitivity seizures: seizures triggered by visual overstimulation.  Even though stereotypical in different forms of entertainment, these only accounts for about 10% of seizure triggers.  Seizures triggered by visual stimulation can range from mild to severe.

Certain types of blindness can be rooted in translation problems in the brain, rather than reception problems in the eyeball.

Lesions in the occipital-temporal-parietal junction:

  • Color agnosia: can see the colors but can’t recall the names; simplified colors (all greens appear to be the same green)
  • Movement agnosia: think weeping angels (things only move to a new position when you’re not looking at it) or moving items appear blurry
  • Agraphia: unable to communicate in writin

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Eyes In The Back of Your Head [Show Notes]

Occipital Lobe Basics

The occipital lobe sits in the back of your head, it directly connects to your eyes.

2 Streams of messages that your eyes send to your occipital lobe.

  1. Ventral stream – translates “what”
  2. Dorsal stream – translates “where” and “how”

It sends translated information to the necessary part of the brain to respond or react to what you saw.  This is how hand-eye coordination works (not just for athletes).  And, since so much of the information we receive is visual means that the occipital lobe doesn’t do much else.

**The following is complete speculation based on my experiences as a Mom.**

Mom’s get accused of having eyes in the back of their head – but my guess is that mom’s gain a keener sense of spacial awareness regarding the things that are happening around you.  Also, mom’s hearing become much more attuned to specific sounds (aka knowing their baby’s voice from other baby voices) to the point of knowing the difference between the sound of crayons coloring on paper versus crayons coloring on a wall!

If it hasn’t been obvious, let me just say that no part of the brain acts and reacts all by itself.  Many of the complex activities we complete as humans involve many areas of the brain simultaneously or sequentially.

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Art & Vitamins [Show Notes]

Temporal Lobe Problems

Temporal lobe lesions can lead to dyslexia.

Receptive aphasia: can’t receive or translate speech meaning

Word deafness: words are only noise

Temporal lobe lesions can also lead to deafness.  The ears are fine, but the wires that translate input as sound are damaged. (Possibly what happened to Helen Keller).

Callbacks

Meningitis

Brain Bleeds

Big Words

Prospoagnosia = facial blindness

Chuck Close

Clinical apathy: you forget how to feel

Anterograde amnesia: can’t make new memories
Retrograde amnesia: can’t recall past memories
Situational amnesia: self-preservation from trauma

Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome

  • Vitamin B-1 (Thiamine) deficiency
    • alcoholics
    • careless vegetarian/vegan diets
  • Lose ability to walk, talk, and remember

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Seems like only yesterday [Show Notes]

Temporal Lobe Basics

The temporal lobe is located on each side of your head by your ears.  It helps you process auditory input and identify sounds.

There is a special area called Wernicke’s area.  It helps identify the meaning behind speech and vocal tones.  This is different from Broca’s area, which is just able to identify some sounds as being words.

This is where your long-term memory lives, like facts and knowledge (declarative).

Emotionally charged memories are also held in the temporal lobe, but they have a special connection to the amygdala (which is part of the limbic system).  These memories have a high level of detail, and usually can’t be recalled without also recalling the emotion.  They also don’t have a sense of time.

Mind Games

Memories in the temporal lobe can lead to déjà vu.

The temporal lobe allows you to see a simple or incomplete image and fill in all sorts of details, whether it be the details of the image or a long train of connected memories.

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Sugar for Brains [Show Notes]

Sugar Basics

Sugar in your blood = glucose
Your body prefers glucose over any other sugar out there.

-ose = sugar suffix

GlucOSE
FructOSE – fruit sugar
SucrOSE – table sugar
SucralOSE – Splenda

Your body can turn any of these other sugars in to glucose.  It can actually turn other carbohydrates, and even non-sugar molecules into glucose if it really needs to.  This all happens in your liver…

If you were in a long-term starvation or malnutrition situation, your body would circulate non-glucose energy sources to try to get energy, since the process of making glucose can be relatively slow.  This is because your body would prefer to live than die.

Brain Food

The brain is a picky eater, and refuses to utilize non-glucose sources of energy.  This is because your brain works A LOT!  And it doesn’t have time to use inefficient sources of energy.  Therefore, it will hog the glucose from the rest of your body.

Your skeletal muscles use glucose to do work.  This is why people with diabetes have to be extra cautious when they exercise.

Extra glucose gets saved for those times when you’re not eating.  It gets put in a really long chain called glycogen.  But getting the glucose back from the glycogen can be relatively slow.

Recovering from an episode of low blood sugar takes time and requires rest (so you’re not burning through the fuel as fast as you replenish it).  But it can also be emotionally stressful because you may be required to eat “unhealthy” amounts of sugary or carb-heavy foods to get back to normal.

Energy Production

Glucose has a very complex metabolism cycle – the Krebs cycle.
One intermediate is glucose-6-phosphate (G6P) – there is a genetic mutation where a protein for this step doesn’t do it’s job very well.  If this step gets delayed or clogged up, then there is a detour metabolism step that leads to triglyceride production, when then leads to fat storage.  *womp womp*  (note: triglycerides are useful in the right amounts for cell repair)  This is also why eating large amounts of sugary plus fatty foods can lead to quick weight gain.

The end result of this cycle is Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP).  It is super energetic when a phosphate piece is removed.  It’s like the body’s dynamite.  This is how a sugar high works – all the sugar leads to all the dynamite exploding at once, but then it takes a while for it to get replenished, and that’s why you crash after a sugar-high.

Low Blood Sugar is Bad

To immediately recover from low blood sugar, you need simple sugar (orange juice, regular soda, sugar-full hard candy, glucose tabs or paste or gel).  To continue to recover, you need carbs plus something that will help it not absorb so fast (i.e. protein, healthy fats).

If you ever look at the underside of your tongue, you can see the blood vessels really clearly because they’re really close to the surface.  So if someone is unconscious due to low blood sugar, you can use a glucose tablet or gel under their tongue and it will absorb into the blood stream.  This is also how you can absorb sugar quickly from sugar-full gum.

Low blood sugar can lead to emotional fluctuations (aka crabby and grouchy) and short-term memory loss (and not just because you passed out).

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Brain Lesions [Show Notes]

Basics

Brain lesion = a group of brain cells that look different from surrounding cells on a brain scan

Dark lesions – an area where the brain cells are missing or an area where signal is not firing (damaged cells)
Light lesions – an area where the signals are firing at the wrong times (like a shorted out wire). Seizure – when the brain fires the electricity at the wrong time.

Lesions around the brain

A lesion in the Parietal lobe could affect how the body translates sensations (i.e. pain).  These lesions are usually caused by injury or stroke.

If there is a lesion in the optical lobe of the brain (the area that “sees” what your eyes are looking at), then the signals from the eyes may not come through, and therefore the parietal cannot help map what you were looking at once it’s not there anymore.

Sensory seizures – feeling things on you or touching you that aren’t really there. (unsure if this is related to the auras that come before migraines).  No medication necessary.

Extinction phenomenon:  thinking that a sensation stopped before it really did.  You body can’t translate two messages of the same type at the same time.  Like when you try to locate the same place on each side of your body (i.e. making pigtails even).

Some Big Words

Dyslexia:  can be related to written language, spoken language, or any other message being translated as language

Dysphasia or Aphasia:  mixed up or missing words

Dyscalculia:  it’s hard to math.  Difficulty estimating distances, spacial mapping, and time passage.  Dana White of A Slob Comes Clean talks about TPAD (Time Passage Awareness Disorder)

Apraxia:  unable plan what you want your body to do in order to make your body do it.  The deeper the path the more “natural”  the action is. Muscle memory is just an extremely well-developed motor path, so that you can even not do that action for a while, and when you do it again, you don’t have to “relearn” it. If this is caused by a stroke, therapy can help try and re-route the information. Apraxia can affect gross motor movements (large movements with your body) – aka global apraxia, or it can affect speech motor planning.

Gerstmann Syndrome: no motor path to write, or math, or to feel and use your fingers as separate digits. Also involves a left-right mix up.  In adults, it’s the results of a stroke.  In kids, they have not a clue. Therapy can help kids get past the motor issues, but not the mathing issues.

Constructional apraxia:  know how blocks should fit together, but the brain can’t make their body build it.
Dressing apraxia: know how clothes should be worn and where it goes, but the brain can’t make the body dress itself.  This shows up in dementia and Alzheimer’s a lot.

Amorphosynthesis – your brain is not aware of some part of your body.  Usually a symptom after as stroke.

Another symptom of a stroke is when a person is unaware of one-half of their visual field.  So they will only write on one half of the paper (the half they can see) or read only one half of the page of a book.

Anosognosia – a person is not aware that they have a disorder, disease, or disability.   This is not just denial.  The area of their brain that would recognize “I’m sick” or “I’m hurt” doesn’t work.

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