Brain activity peaks at 39 - downhill after that...

For those of us over 39 years of age, I am not too sure if you want to carry on reading this post after this point… Researchers at UCLA have concluded that neuronal myelination (the formation of myelin sheath around a neuron fostering fast signaling bursts in the brain) peaks at the age of 39 and then goes downhill after that.

The myelination of brain circuits follows an inverted U-shaped trajectory, peaking in middle age. Bartzokis and others have long argued that brain aging may be primarily related to the process of myelin breakdown.

The test they used was a little strange sounding to the layperson, but I guess it makes perfect sense in neuroscience circles...

To test their hypothesis, they used one of the simplest and best understood tests of central nervous system processing speed: how fast an individual can tap their index finger. The results supported what the researcher had suspected, that finger-tapping speed and myelin integrity measurements were correlated and "had lifespan trajectories that were virtually indistinguishable," according to Bartzokis. And yes, they both peaked at 39 years of age and declined with an accelerating trajectory thereafter.

Looks like we have downhill trajectory after 39:

After middle age, we start to lose the battle to repair the myelin in our brain, and our motor and cognitive functions begin a long, slow downhill slide.. Beginning in middle age, the process of age-related myelin breakdown slowly erodes myelin's ability to support the very highest frequency AP bursts. That may well be why, besides achy joints and arthritis, even the fittest athletes retire and all older people move slower than they did when they were younger.

All hope should not be lost though...

Since in healthy individuals brain myelin breakdown begins to occur in middle age, there is a decades-long period during which therapeutic interventions could alter the course of brain aging and possibly delay age-driven degenerative brain disorders such as Alzheimer's

My opinion: Finger tapping and intelligence are two completely different things. While on the one hand, finger tapping denotes physical dexterity and to some extent can be correlated to neuronal firing frequencies, intelligence (as yet qualitatively or quantitatively immeasurable) in many cases is not a measure of physical dexterity, but an amalgam of experience, environment and neuronal activity. This study certainly excludes the first two factors – life experiences and the effects of ones environment… Again, my humble opinion…

Optimism

We know we are plumbing the future when researchers have successfully managed to train a couple of monkeys to feed themselves with a robotic arm. On a serious note, such research bodes well for people with spinal cord injuries who could use similarly designed brain-powered prosthetic limbs to successfully perform simple tasks like feeding themselves.

Nature journal link here.

Who is mooning who? Neural Buddhists and the Dharma Bums

David Brooks of the New York Times wrote a great essay last week about the paradoxical relationship between scientific research (especially in neurology) and its role in bolstering religion. I am sure most have read or heard about the writeup in some form, but just in case…

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development. First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

My only fear is that scientific research in this arena is pliant to construal both ways. Some time back, I had written here about ‘out of body' experiences praising the underlying scientific explanation. However, it is interesting to note that researchers construe the same phenomenon in two radically different ways as seen below.

In the words of a researcher: “There is nothing mystical about these ghostly experiences, said Peter Brugger, a neuroscientist at University Hospital in Zurich, who was not involved in the experiments but is an expert on phantom limbs. The sensation of still feeling a limb that has been amputated, and other mind-bending phenomena. The research shows that the self can be detached from the body and can live a phantom existence on its own, as in an out-of-body experience, or it can be felt outside of personal space, as in a sense of a presence”.

Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.

All said, a great article from David Brooks.

For a more theological discussion on this article, Andrew Sullivan has a great one going.

Nick Walker, Moona Lisa, 200, stencil spray paint and acrylic on canvas, 183X122 cms (source)

Feeling religious? Look within (the neurons)

It looks like the ancient Hindu adage of 'tat twam asi' (roughly translates from Sanskrit to English as ‘you are that’), meaning the key to the collective soul is within an individual - the seat of the almighty might actually reside within the individual - and one only needs to seek it out through sufficient introspection is coming true after all.

Michael Persinger, a neurophysiologist at Canada's Laurentian University in Ontario is trying to prove that the sensation described as "having a religious experience" is merely a side effect of our bicameral brain's feverish activities. About a year back, Simplistic talked about this in relation to Pentecostal adherents speaking in tongues and their altered mental/brain functions as they were going through a religious experience particular to their group. Michael Persinger in his research hopes to take on the neural underpinnings behind an actual manifestation of religious experience one step further...

In an article here, a Wired reporter goes through the motions of being a willing participant of Mr. Persinger's experiments and claims to experience feelings of religiosity himself in response to appropriate prods, pokes and simulation to parts of his brain... That the almighty and feelings thereof might be within us will be a bit hard to take for a lot of us (including me), but it will be interesting to see what comes out of this individuals lab in the coming years.

In his words: The fields are no more intense than what you'd get as by-product from an ordinary blow-dryer, but what's coming is anything but ordinary. My lobes are about to be bathed with precise wavelength patterns that are supposed to affect my mind in a stunning way, artificially inducing the sensation that I am seeing God.
His theory is that the sensation described as "having a religious experience" is merely a side effect of our bicameral brain's feverish activities. Simplified considerably, the idea goes like so: When the right hemisphere of the brain, the seat of emotion, is stimulated in the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, and then the left hemisphere, the seat of language, is called upon to make sense of this nonexistent entity, the mind generates a "sensed presence."

Related links here:
- The God Experiments - More on Michael Persinger's work.
- The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.
- The Apparitions Of The Blessed Holy Virgin Mary To Millions In The Coptic Orthodox Church In Zeitoun, Cairo, Egypt (1968-1970).

Hendrick Goltzius (1558 - 1617), ‘The Judgment of Midas’, Pen and brown ink, red violet, brown and gray watercolor, green tempera, heightened in white tempera; traced with a stylus. Signed and dated 1590. 15” X 26”. Collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library (From the book In August Company, the Collections of the Pierpont Morgan Library).

About the painting: In the center is the victorious Apollo playing a viol. On his rock hewn seat is Tmolus, king of the mountain, whose judgment of the musical contest in favor of Apollo was accepted by all except by King Midas. Standing to the left are Midas, identified by the asses ears bestowed upon him because of his dissension, and Pan or Marsyas. Toward the right of the scene are nine muses and Athena, one of whose attributes, an owl, hovers above her.