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ninjewtsu posted:What is depression's effect on the brain? What's the difference neurologically between a depressed brain and a normal brain? Is it just a deficit of certain chemicals like serotonin, or is there more going on like how adhd is more than just a dopamine malfunction? Oh my this is quite broad, and unlike some of the other conditions in this thread, depression is incredibly well researched. So there's almost too much to say about its effects on the brain. In fact, if you were to name a brain region, it would almost certainly be possible to find at least one paper that links that region to depression or some kind of depression-like syndrome. I guess the lesson of this is that depression really is a brain-wide disorder. I'll pick one area that's received a lot of attention called the hippocampus. The hippocampus is located in the temporal lobe and is usually associated with the formation of long-term memories. However it's an evolutionarily ancient region and it really does all kinds of stuff. One of the things it seems to do is help shut down the stress response. The stress response is your body's way of preparing for some kind of challenging situation. It involves releasing hormones like adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol. All of these help inform the various organs that it's time to shift from relaxation mode to "battle mode", or at least a state of readiness. It's a very useful thing if you need to redirect all your body's resources to escaping or overcoming a challenge (see Why Zebras don't get Ulcers by Sapolsky, mentioned earlier). But in the modern world, we're constantly being challenge by things we can't escape. Because of this, so the theory goes, we're exposed to more cortisol than we ought to be, and this gradually takes a toll on the brain. The hippocampus is both a target of cortisol, and an important part in how it's regulated. When it's damaged, the brain has more difficulty turning down its stress response in a timely fashion. In line with this, a reasonably replicated neuroimaging finding in depressed brains is reduced hippocampal volume. This may involve reductions in neurogenesis, and can potentially be resolved by antidepressant treatment and/or exercise, though this whole area is rather controversial still. In short, yes there's a lot more going on beyond serotonin. In fact one of the main reasons why research has focused on serotonin for so long is simply because the best antidepressants we have happen to work on that system. But these drugs weren't initially designed with that in mind. I think the first tricyclic antidepressants were originally used for tuberculosis or something before people noticed they also helped with mood. This mode of serendipitous discovery also applies to the antipsychotics and many other psychopharmaceuticals. It's also a major basis for critiques of psychiatry as a science.
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Jul 3, 2019 04:51
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What can neuroscience tell me about love and attraction?
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Jul 5, 2019 03:21
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Is BF Skinner still your God?
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Jul 5, 2019 03:57
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What imaging methods does your lab use? Are any specialized just for the type of research/areas of the brain that you study? The ones my class talked about seemed pretty general (optogenetics, electrophysiology, calcium imaging).
Xun fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Jul 5, 2019 |
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Jul 5, 2019 14:32
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Is there such a person that has a normal brain? It seems like to me that everyone has something going on? (mine is ADHD!) Is it just bias, I have adhd so I'm more likely to meet and hang out with others with brain problems or does everyone have something going on?
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Jul 5, 2019 17:35
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ninjewtsu posted:What can neuroscience tell me about love and attraction? From my perspective, a lot of the neuroscience work done in this field involves the hormonal regulation of social bonding. Different species have differing approaches to this. For example, some species are monogamous and form long-lasting pair bonds. The majority, however, do not tend to do this. It turns out that prairie voles are a good model for this dichotomy, because they do form long-lasting pair bonds after mating, and both males and females participate in rearing offspring. The closely related montane vole does not behave this way, and is rather promiscuous. So here you have two very similar species that differ markedly in their mating strategy. It's a perfect situation for studying what underlies pair bonding (which we can extrapolate to love if we dare). The main difference between the two in this context is the presence of oxytocin receptors in certain parts of the brain related to reward. Oxytocin has been majorly over-rated in recent years as a sort of 'hug hormone' due to its role in pair bonding. The various vole studies are pretty solid, but we're a long way off from extrapolating these kinds of studies to humans. Since I can't give an exhaustive answer here, I'll refer you to a great book on the subject. We assigned this book as supplemental reading in a Sex & The Brain class at my old university, and all the students loved it. It's not overly technical, but does a good job of covering the research. https://www.amazon.com/Chemistry-Between-Us-Science-Attraction/dp/1591846617/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+chemistry+between+us
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Jul 6, 2019 01:38
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rainbow kittens posted:Is BF Skinner still your God? Hahaha oh man, this is going to be a very niche answer but I'm glad you asked. After spending more and more time in neuroscience and away from psychology, I started to move past my strict adherence to radial behaviourism. During my undergrad it really felt like this was a totally rational way of looking at the world that could answer almost everything about human and animal behaviour from the simplest reflexes to the broader ills of society. I think it was partly a reaction to what turned out to be a rather limited understanding of cognitive psychology and neuroscience on my part. As a specific example, I really admired Skinner's work on language (Verbal Behavior, as he called it), because it was a brilliant effort to explain human language without ever referencing any internal, non-observable cognitive processes. Just on a purely creative level, I really admire people who try to achieve complex things with a very limited set of tools. Sorta like how hand carving is more impressive than 3D printing I guess. But Chomsky's core critique of this perspective is that the environment is simply not rich enough for human children to learn language entirely this way. Kids can learn several brand new words in a day and integrate them into their vocabulary perfectly, and they can do it only hearing the word a single time. There's really no way this could work with reinforcement-based learning. That suggests that there's some kind of inborn structure in the brain ready to accept and integrate language. I also came to find Skinner's views on applying behaviourism to society creepy and reactionary. I remember reading this book "Nudge", which described all of these tiny little tweaks that could be installed to guide people to better decisions. Things like auto-enrolling people in 401Ks instead of making them opt-in programs, or giving people Amazon gift cards and health insurance discounts if they upload their pedometer and food intake data to the employer (my job does both of these things). This is a sorta Obama-era version of "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" with a much less radical tone, but I remember being deeply unsettled by its implications. Whatever transformative edge this thinking had in Skinner's time, it basically became folded into neoliberalism and now every app, social program, and business is doing something to try to socially engineer our behaviour using very Skinnerian principles (Skinner was correct about this methods, they absolutely do work). Nowadays I regard all of these efforts with skepticism, because they don't address the core failings of our society. Are the failings of the US healthcare system really going to be fixed by 'nudging' people into wearing pedometers? No, the system is inherently flawed and must be replaced with a universal system. Will we suddenly be able to afford homes if we're 'nudged' into responsible saving habits by apps? No, again that just shifts more responsibility onto the individual and papers over the serious flaws in our economy. One area where I feel Skinner was totally correct and yet remains under-appreciated is in machine learning and AI. One of the biggest areas in AI is reinforcement learning, which works in a way that's nearly identical to the operant conditioning Skinner spent his career studying. In fact, I still think this is the only way AI can ever work, because non-random selection of randomly varying behaviour/neural circuitry/genetics is the only way nature can be 'creative'. The fact that AI is able to do so many amazing things using Skinnerian principles is proof that he was right, in my view. It doesn't necessarily mean that this is how humans learn everything though, because we likely have a lot of built-in stuff (i.e. language) that came about in our evolutionary past. However the mechanism of evolution is random variation and non-random selection, and Skinner cleverly analogized learning and evolution, showing that they were both ways that non-creative processes in nature could generate very novel forms without any kind of "guiding intelligence". I still think he's correct about this. ** Speculation warning ** Skinner warned that the technology of behaviour was only going to get more and more powerful, and that we have to ensure that it's used for good. This was very prescient, and I think we're nearing an era where such a technology might overwhelm us. I think that on a large scale, human behaviour is simpler than we think. It's true of every other animal --- you can't predict what an individual will do, but every species has statistical patterns to how they behave and react to things. The basic predictability and malleability of human behaviour on a large scale is a very dangerous weakness we have as a species, and I think it's inevitable that something will someday exploit that. The various algorithms that control the information we're exposed to are just a taste of what's coming. Anyhow, thanks for indulging me, I haven't ranted about BF Skinner in years. I hope you're doing well!
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Jul 6, 2019 02:26
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I have 2 questions (cuz I'm greedy!!!!) 1) Has the concept of epigenetics been used to defend/excuse criminal behavior in a courtroom setting yet? E.g. could you make the argument that a person might be genetically incapable of "civilized" behavior due to altered gene expression from something like extreme abuse or neglect at a very young age to the point where they might actually be genetically different from a child raised by an attentive, loving parent? If it hasn't been used, do you personally believe that could be the case for some violent criminals? 2) I find the concept of mirror neurons really fascinating, and I had this personal theory (though I'm sure it's out there in a thesis or paper somewhere) that they explain why people are so unnerved when they see "unnatural" bodily movements they haven't seen before. E.g. something like Linda Blair from the Exorcist doing her spider walk or, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1J3NLNWAPU Does that theory make sense from a neuroscience perspective? That if we've never, in our entire lives seen a person do a certain kind of movement before, we find it shocking, unnerving, or even repulsive because our mirror neurons have gotten so used to seeing a range of standard, everyday movements? (e.g. walking, running, eating, sitting)
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Jul 6, 2019 03:55
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Xun posted:What imaging methods does your lab use? Are any specialized just for the type of research/areas of the brain that you study? The ones my class talked about seemed pretty general (optogenetics, electrophysiology, calcium imaging). Right now I work in an epigenetics lab, so we don't really do any imaging at all apart from some in-situ hybridization and confocal microscopy. My primary method for studying the brain is to microdissect the region of interest, use FACS to separate neurons from non-neurons (i.e. glia), and send the DNA and RNA for sequencing. This doesn't really take a lot of work, it's just a matter of raising the mice to the right age, subjecting them to whatever experimental manipulation is called for, and then collecting the tissue. The main way I spend time now is in analyzing the sequencing data. Whole-genome bisulfite sequencing data in particular is quite interesting, and it's an ongoing challenge to figure out how to best use it. My field more broadly uses these methods a lot. Optogenetics and in-vivo Ca2+ imaging work best on smaller brain regions with lots of neurochemically distinct cell types that have very clear behavioural or physiological outputs. The hypothalamus fits these criteria exactly, and aside from addiction/reward related work, I'd say my field is on the cutting edge of optogenetics and in-vivo microscopy. It's something I would like to learn some day, but it's also very labour intensive and extremely time consuming. I really enjoy the small amount of lab effort it takes to generate massive quantities of data in neuroepigenetics.
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Jul 6, 2019 04:25
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BoneMonkey posted:Is there such a person that has a normal brain? It seems like to me that everyone has something going on? (mine is ADHD!) Is it just bias, I have adhd so I'm more likely to meet and hang out with others with brain problems or does everyone have something going on? I don't think there's really a such thing as a normal brain. There are certainly abnormal brains characterized by gross pathologies, or by behavioural/cognitive problems that are truly debilitating. But the vast majority of traits don't have a defined 'normal', just a statistical average in a given population. People even argue, convincingly I think, that some conditions that are disorders in 2019 may have actually been assets to an extent for our ancestors. I do think that there is much more room in modern society for different 'versions' of the brain to develop. Thanks to the internet, everyone has much more opportunity to pursue their own interests according to whatever the unique characteristics of their brain dictate. This allows for a lot more variety to develop, and culture as a whole is much more complicated than ever before. This is just speculation on my part, but I think the upshot of this is that it's much harder for the pressures of the world to shoehorn growing brains into normalcy. If you have anything pushing you in a slightly unique way, you can probably find a way to run with it and grow in that direction. So no, I don't think it's meaningful to talk about or try to define a 'normal' brain. There are statistical averages for every measurable parameter, but the odds of each individual being average on all of those parameters are extremely low. And the parameters are defined by the culture -- some cultural moments shrink the distributions and restrict variation, others give allow for lots of variation. All this being said, I have no clue if the apparent rise in people with named mental illnesses is due to increased awareness of the diagnoses, or if it's because something really is changing with our brains. All the evidence points to the former, as our genetics can't possible have changed meaningfully in such a short time.
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Jul 6, 2019 05:03
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I figured it would be an environmentally cause rather than genetic, late stage captialism, climate change, we have all been drinking lead or some poo poo. It just feels like everyone has massive anxiety now but that might just be bias on my part as maybe only people with anxiety are needy enough to put up with my annoying ADHD rear end.
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Jul 7, 2019 07:38
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Can you explain Essential Tremors and is there anything that can be done to limit/end them? I have recently turned 50 and have noticed that when I hold a pencil, or anything similar, in my left hand like a cigarette it shakes and I can't really control it... and no I do not smoke! No injuries or anything to left hand and I don't have the issue in my right hand (right hand dominant) or anywhere else. I am in really good shape physically and have had no neurological/muscular issues before. My father, who is in his late 70's, has mild Parkinson's shakes. Very interesting discussion and responses. TY!
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Jul 7, 2019 14:16
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Whistling rear end in a top hat posted:I have 2 questions (cuz I'm greedy!!!!) 1) So far as I know the actual science of epigenetics has not been used in a legal setting yet. The concept of early-life trauma certainly has been brought up quite a lot, but never with epigenetic measures to back it up. I don't see us getting there anytime soon. While I don't doubt that early-life trauma leaves some kind of epigenetic imprint that we can measure, I don't have a huge amount of faith in most of the data that's been collected so far. Studies that attempt to answer this fall into the category of 'epigenome-wide association study' (EWAS) and use a similar design to genome-wide association studies (GWAS) that look for links between genetic variation and disease risk. We're now realizing that many of our findings from earlier GWAS studies are probably not real, as when those studies are repeated on larger populations, many of the genetic associations disappear. EWAS studies are generally much smaller than GWAS studies, and look at a tiny subset of the genomic locations where DNA methylation can vary. What changes they do find are very small, and often limited to just one or two genomic locations with no obvious link to phenotype. Moreover, these tests are all done in peripheral tissues like blood and buccal cells, or in tissue like foreskin that's rich in DNA but not particularly useful for anything once it's cut off. There is no single epigenome common to all cells. Every cell type has unique epigenetic characteristics that help it regulate its unique gene expression. So measuring DNA methylation in blood doesn't tell you anything about DNA methylation in the brain. And DNA methylation in the brain varies between the different types of neurons and glia, as well as between different brain regions. The kind of epigenetic mark left by early-life trauma is probably something in the brain that's impossible to measure in living humans. For this reason, I don't see epigenetics being useful in court cases any time soon. An exception might be when trying to strengthen cases of large-scale group trauma or toxin exposure where the epigenome of a large number of people may be altered. There you could potentially identify changes in the exposed population that strengthens your case that a life-altering trauma befell them. But I wouldn't want to rest the case entirely on that. 2) This is an interesting idea! I'm not sure if aberrant biological motion has been studied in the context of horror films, but people have looked into it for understanding the 'uncanny valley' and why certain forms of near-lifelike movement seem to creep us out. This seems to have more to do with a perceptual disconnect between appearance and motion pattern, and this is manifested in differences in activation in the 'action perception system', a cortical network comprising temporal, parietal, and frontal regions. I would imagine a similar phenomenon is at work when we're awed or horrified by unusual or non-lifelike kinds of movement. In some cases, this probably activates some kind of inborn defensive reaction we have toward avoiding disease or infection. It's probably a phenomenon that's deeply wired into our brains, and similarly deeply embedded in our culture. Demons and evil spirits have been described in similar terms, and that's probably why aberrant movements are such a common device in horror. Definitely worth studying in more depth though. I should also mention that both mirror neurons and the uncanny valley are not settled science. Mirror neurons have mostly only been measured in monkeys since the recording process is very invasive, and for them the 'mirror' interpretation is just one way of explaining how those cells behave. Humans have homologous brain regions, but recording mirror neurons directly is rare. Mirror neuron-centric theories of autism have lately fallen out of favour, even though they tell a compelling story.
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Jul 7, 2019 20:58
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BoneMonkey posted:I figured it would be an environmentally cause rather than genetic, late stage captialism, climate change, we have all been drinking lead or some poo poo. One of the things that annoys me most about research is that nobody is willing to name capitalism as an enemy. We constantly talk about 'the modern world', and the various forms of alienation, privation, and inequality that it creates, but we act as though it's a force of nature to be adapted to, not something we could potentially turn around. Neoliberalism is deeply woven into how neuroscientists conceive of problems, and limits their horizons for imagining solutions. As a concrete example, in my world of epigenetics people study famine exposure and how that has life-long impacts on metabolism and health. The researchers studying this act as though famines are like random lightening strikes that can't be predicted or controlled, as opposed to obvious failures of the capitalist food system to meet people's needs in the interest of protecting profits. There's plenty of food in the world, famines are a problem of resource distribution that we could certainly fix. Anyhow I don't want to get too political, but I do get frustrated by the utter passivity with which we experts accept the world when it's clear that it's doing damage to our mental and physical health on a massive scale.
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Jul 7, 2019 21:12
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Ivoryman posted:Can you explain Essential Tremors and is there anything that can be done to limit/end them? I have recently turned 50 and have noticed that when I hold a pencil, or anything similar, in my left hand like a cigarette it shakes and I can't really control it... and no I do not smoke! No injuries or anything to left hand and I don't have the issue in my right hand (right hand dominant) or anywhere else. I am in really good shape physically and have had no neurological/muscular issues before. My father, who is in his late 70's, has mild Parkinson's shakes. It's important that I emphasize that I'm not a clinician, and so I won't be providing any medical advice. I think the best thing you can do is bring this up with a doctor. The reason I'm opening with this is because essential tremor is almost always characterized by bilateral tremors (i.e. in both arms). Unilateral tremors are possible, but quite rare (around 4 to 10%) in people with essential tremor. So it's important for your peace of mind to have this looked at. As far as I can tell, there's no definitive checklist to distinguish ET from other more serious movement disorders like Parkinson's, but there are clusters of symptoms that neurologists can use to narrow things down. As far as essential tremor goes, neurologists are not certain of the cause but it seems to involve neural circuits linking the cerebellum to the cortex. The cerebellum is a large structure in the brainstem with a number of movement-related roles. It communicates with higher brain regions to help smooth out movements, sequence complex series of smaller actions, and synchronize signals going to muscles. There is some evidence that people with essential tremor have damage to the cerebellum, and also impaired communication between it and the rest of the brain. There are a number of treatments that can help mitigate symptoms of essential tremor. Beta blockers like propanalol and anticonvulsants like primidone are the common first-line treatments and they work quite nicely. There are a number of other similar drugs that can also be tried. As a last resort there are forms of deep brain stimulation that involve carefully positioned neural implants, but these are only a last resort in cases where symptoms become impossible to live with. The only home remedy I've seen is alcohol --- most ET patients report reduced symptoms when they're drinking, though I highly recommend not pursuing this as a therapeutic option. I hope that's informative. Again, there are first-line treatments for whatever your condition is, but you'll need a proper diagnosis before you can get access to them. So I'll stress again that the best thing for you to do is bring your symptoms to a doctor. This also applies to anyone else reading this thread with questions about neurological problems.
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Jul 7, 2019 22:20
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Thanks for all your responses! Do you need to know a lot about programming for epigenetics? I've heard there's a lot of people working on algorithms in the genetics field, do neuroscience labs partner up with computer science ones to get those done? I'm doing a small project for a neuroscience lab now but it seems like it'd be pretty hard not being a member of the lab. Also does your lab have any weird rituals/superstitions when doing experiments? My girlfriend complains about some methods being really annoying and her lab doing weird poo poo about it. Which might have been about epigenetics now that I think about it 
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Jul 8, 2019 09:33
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This might be a bad question, but in your opinion what is a thought? Also I have this (probably terrible) theory that consciousness is a reaction to decisions we make. Like the part of our brain that works out if the decision was good for us or not. But isn't actually involved in making present decisions but helps establish what decisions we will make in the future. How wrong am I? Edit: also I love this thread.
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Jul 8, 2019 12:29
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BoneMonkey posted:This might be a bad question, but in your opinion what is a thought? Actually for another of my neuroscience classes the required reading was about this and I found it pretty interesting! Its Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene. The author does a cool overview of research in consciousness and talks about his research. Obviously it's biased towards his theory of what consciousness is but I thought he explained stuff pretty clearly and scientifically without getting into weird philosophical stuff. I thought it was a lot of fun!
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Jul 8, 2019 15:03
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funny song about politics posted:Hahaha oh man, this is going to be a very niche answer but I'm glad you asked. That was a lot to digest. I found operant conditioning very helpful in my last job. Someone having a bad day? I'd offer to make them a hot beverage or just straight up plunk one in front of them. Even if they were the shittiest person in the world. When things came to a head last fall and I was having poo poo day after poo poo day, the shittiest coworker brought me a tea. Without prompting. It works. When I left for a better workplace, I had multiple coworkers note that they would miss my tea-making. I was definitely doing it with the end goal of subliminally training people to take note of their environment and make an effort to be kind. It's not a terrible idea to have people auto-enroll in pension plans and 401ks and the like. I have co-workers who have never bothered to enroll in our company pension plan, and they are losing out on a ridiculous amount of retirement money. Even after you tell them about it...  Some people just need the world to look after them.Things have never been better. Have fun with brains 
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Jul 8, 2019 16:38
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funny song about politics posted:It's important that I emphasize that I'm not a clinician, and so I won't be providing any medical advice. I think the best thing you can do is bring this up with a doctor... Already have an appointment scheduled and added some new questions about this to my list. Thanks for the response and the excellent information! Cheers
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Jul 9, 2019 12:06
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Xun posted:Thanks for all your responses! Do you need to know a lot about programming for epigenetics? I've heard there's a lot of people working on algorithms in the genetics field, do neuroscience labs partner up with computer science ones to get those done? I'm doing a small project for a neuroscience lab now but it seems like it'd be pretty hard not being a member of the lab. Since starting my epigenetics postdoc I've been learning and using R almost exclusively. It's able to do pretty much everything I need for normal statistics and bioinformatics, and I would describe my use of it as 'programming-adjacent'. I do all my analysis using custom made scripts, but I don't really see it as equivalent to people who write programs or packages from scratch using other languages. I wasn't totally new to coding when I started this, but to the extent to which large-scale data analysis in R is programming, my programming ability has improved immensely. Other postdocs in my lab are working on lower-level packages in Python for handling raw data, but they come from a computer science background, not a psychology background like me. I don't know anyone who uses "real" languages like C or anything like that. Computational power is so excessive these days that nobody cares about hypothetical efficiency gains from writing in a lower level language. Bioinformatics is a big bottleneck for labs these days, because most of the PIs and workers are from a biological background. Good data scientists can likely enjoy higher pay and better job security somewhere in the private sector, so there's always more data than data scientists. We've taken to hiring computer science undergraduates to fill in the gap and they often do a very good job. The two technicians in my lab are these middle-aged Russian ladies and they have an unbelievable number of superstitions regarding experimental protocols. Most of them are more annoying than funny however, for example they insist that heating block needs to warm up for at least 24h before it can be used. In reality, it heats up within 20 minutes or so. The result is that they freak out whenever anyone's turned it off and act like it's costing them an entire day of work for it to heat back up.
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Jul 10, 2019 04:54
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BoneMonkey posted:This might be a bad question, but in your opinion what is a thought? Hmm it's been a while since I've dipped into neurophilosophy so all I can do here is speculate. I suspect that a thought is probably not so different from a behaviour. Behaviours are when the output of the brain is directed towards the skeletal muscles, smooth muscles, and anything else in the periphery. Thoughts are when the output of the brain is directed right back into the brain without passing through the body first. This is a pretty old fashioned way of looking at it (if you read an earlier post of mine, you'll see that I was a big BF Skinner head in my earlier days), but I still think it works pretty well. The brain is massively inter-connected, and just about every connection between any two regions is bi-directional, allowing the brain to respond to its own ongoing activity. This is similar to Douglas Hofstadter's perspective that consciousness is a sort of 'strange loop' that arises from the densely layered interconnectivity of the brain. This perspective seems to square with the basic neuroanatomy of the brain, and you can check out his book "I am a strange loop" for a very lucid account of the idea. The idea you mentioned is something my old professor called "Stalinist free will", which is to say that you do something and then later on your consciousness re-writes history to give you credit for deciding to take that action. Since you have no other information available other than what your consciousness tells you, the illusion of free will persists.
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Jul 10, 2019 05:23
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What is the neuroscience of addiction? Seems like a topic that would have a lot of research. I'm wondering more about addiction to habits or non-addictive substances, like alcohol addiction or Gamer Addiction, but some info on how, like, nicotine affects the brain would be pretty cool too
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Jul 12, 2019 00:57
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Any comments on hearing voices or multiple personalities? I once read that they could be described as thoughts that miss a certain "flag" that makes it our own or somesuch. It is also interesting how they can be accepted as normal until you are being told this is a sign of a terrible mental illness. But this might be more of a psychological topic than a neuroscientific one, I guess. Anyway, great thread! e: Oh, and the latest I have read is that schizophrenia is somewhat of an inflammation of the brain. Is that true? Thank you.
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Jul 12, 2019 08:40
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ninjewtsu posted:What is the neuroscience of addiction? Seems like a topic that would have a lot of research. I'm wondering more about addiction to habits or non-addictive substances, like alcohol addiction or Gamer Addiction, but some info on how, like, nicotine affects the brain would be pretty cool too Addiction is indeed a very well-studied area. I've spent a fair bit of time in this thread talking about dopamine, because it's basically involved in everything. However the research area that's really on the forefront of understanding how this system works is still addiction. Recall that the dopamine system is involved in things like the sensation of reward, as well as the prediction of future reward. This is quite a blanket statement, and you'll certainly find disagreement and exceptions in the addiction literature, but as a general rule addicting drugs cause a release of dopamine in the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system. This isn't to say that it's the only thing they do - each drug acts on the brain in a unique way to produce its specific brand of psychoactive effect - but it seems to be a unifying principle in how drugs become addictive. This is true of everything from cocaine to alcohol to even nicotine, though again each drug achieves this in a chemically distinct way. The question of gaming and/or internet addiction is interesting. From what I can tell, the psychiatric community is still divided on whether it can be considered a distinct disorder, or if it's a manifestation of some other already-defined psychiatric conditions. The ICD-11 (International Classification of Diseases from the WHO) recognizes "gaming disorder", but I don't think the DSM does yet. Anyhow, there is some preliminary evidence that individuals with internet addiction have lower levels of dopamine receptors in a part of their brain called the striatum. The striatum is a key target for dopamine signalling, and having fewer of the receptors might indicate a general 'reward insensitivity' that drives individuals to seek higher levels of stimulation. Similar findings are seen in people who are addicted to other things as well, though the question of cause vs. effect is always a concern here. You also see higher levels of brain activation in response to gaming-related stimuli in individuals diagnosed with gaming disorder. I think the unifying factor here is that anything we do that's rewarding at some level has the potential to lead to addiction. As simplistic as it is, it's really quite astonishing how dopamine seems to be involved in all of these phenomena. The fact that lots of different forms of addiction, chemical or otherwise, have a similar neural substrate (at least in terms of the brain regions involved) suggests that they are all manifestations of the same basic process.
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Jul 16, 2019 01:33
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lllllllllllllllllll posted:Any comments on hearing voices or multiple personalities? I once read that they could be described as thoughts that miss a certain "flag" that makes it our own or somesuch. It is also interesting how they can be accepted as normal until you are being told this is a sign of a terrible mental illness. But this might be more of a psychological topic than a neuroscientific one, I guess. Anyway, great thread! There are quite a lot of theories on hearing voices. A fairly old fashioned but interesting theory that dates back to a book in the 70s is called 'bicameralism'. It was coined by a psychologist named Julian Jaynes, and the basic argument he made was that up until a few thousand years ago, our minds operated like a bicameral legislature. That is, there were two separate agencies in the mind, one which issued commands and the other which listened. He based this on the fact that in ancient texts like the Old Testament and the Iliad, there was no mention of any cognitive or introspective processes. People acted because they heard voices from 'the gods' or their ancestors, or some other outside entity. Somehow this changed in our history, perhaps because our brains developed a more efficient way of operating, or because communication between the two hemispheres improved somehow. It's worth noting that the voices people hear in schizophrenia are often command hallucinations which give them directions, or also a type of hallucination that's more of a running commentary on what the individual is doing, and those are the kinds of voices ancient people would have attributed to the gods. This is an interesting theory, but it's not a particularly popular one among scientists these days. Still there might be a nugget of truth in the idea that auditory hallucinations involve a breakdown in inter-hemispheric communication. The brain is made of two nearly symmetrical halves. In simpler animals, there's really not much difference between the left and right hemispheres. In humans, however, there are definite instances of lateralization. This is when a particular function is located just on one side of the brain. The classic example is language function, which for most people is concentrated on the left side. The two halves of the cerebral cortex are connected by a structure called the corpus callosum. There is some evidence that individuals who experience auditory hallucinations have problems in the communication between the left and right cortices. You actually see a lot of auditory-related deficits in individuals with auditory hallucinations, including tone matching, perceiving non-verbal elements of speech (emotion, attitude, etc.,). There are also deficits in the size and structure of the auditory cortex, particularly on the left hand side. So if I had to guess and integrate these findings, it seems like there's a breakdown in interpreting sounds/speech, and also in interpreting its origins. Individuals may wind up hearing themselves think (or the other half of their brain) and believe the voice is coming from outside. This is a very patched together theory though, as I said bicameralism is not the dominant theory in psychiatry. It's a neat idea though. And yes schizophrenia has a very strong inflammatory component. It's not so much that individuals with schizophrenia have chronically inflamed brains, but there's a very strong link between perinatal infection and later schizophrenia. There's also an emerging role for a type of brain cell called microglia. Microglia are basically immune cells that live in the brain. We used to think they were just there as resident immune cells, but we now know they play a role in pruning synapses during development. The brain starts with many more synapses than it really needs, and as you grow, synapses that are not useful are gradually pruned away. In other words, the brain naturally starts with 'extra' and development is a process of refinement. There's evidence that microglia are over-active in pruning synapses during adolescence in individuals with schizophrenia. This may be why the onset of the disorder is usually around late adolescence. Sorry for the slow replies everyone, I've been very busy at work and I don't like responding until I have something interesting to say!
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Jul 17, 2019 04:17
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going back to adhd a bit, one interesting thing that i stumbled upon while googling Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria was the description that it's, essentially, every receptor in the brain being flooded with a single emotion (that of rejection), making it difficult to think at all, or shift focus onto anything else happening (thus making most psychological therapy unhelpful, as you'd be unable to recall whatever advice you were given during an "episode"), and this was described as being similar to what happens in people with bipolar disorder. what was stated as a significant difference in telling the two apart is that adhd people tend to self isolate during episodes of this, while bipolar people tend to lash out at the people around them, though it's certainly not a set in stone thing. my questions then are, 1. is this an accurate description of what's happening during RSD, neurologically speaking? 2. how similar or dissimilar are RSD and Bipolar Disorder, neurologically? is it only a similar effect or is what's happening across the brain similar as well? 3. (maybe answered by 2) why do people with adhd and people who are bipolar respond differently to this? is it a matter of the two disorders typically resulting in two different personalities of people that respond to intense emotion differently, or is there some deeper neurological difference at play?
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Jul 17, 2019 05:10
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ninjewtsu posted:going back to adhd a bit, one interesting thing that i stumbled upon while googling Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria was the description that it's, essentially, every receptor in the brain being flooded with a single emotion (that of rejection), making it difficult to think at all, or shift focus onto anything else happening (thus making most psychological therapy unhelpful, as you'd be unable to recall whatever advice you were given during an "episode"), and this was described as being similar to what happens in people with bipolar disorder. what was stated as a significant difference in telling the two apart is that adhd people tend to self isolate during episodes of this, while bipolar people tend to lash out at the people around them, though it's certainly not a set in stone thing. Hmm I'm not sure if I'd call it an accurate description of what's happening neurologically speaking, but that's mainly because it doesn't seem as though we really know with any certainty what is happening in the brain in rejection sensitivity. A lot of times you'll find that there are way fewer detailed studies of 'specific' disorders like this compared to more general and wider-reaching conditions like bipolar or ADHD. So one study I found looked at brain activation in high rejection sensitivity participants and found that when they were viewing stimuli that was rejection-associated, there was more activation in areas of the brain involved in processing emotional/affective stimuli (posterior cingulate, insula, etc.,). This is all well and good, but it's almost like a brain-centric re-phrasing of peoples' subjective experiences. Of course you're going to have more activation of emotion areas in the brain if you see rejection-associated stimuli, because you already know you have a stronger emotional reaction! It's gonna take a lot more work to push our understanding beyond that kind of simple level. 1) That said, your account is probably accurate in a psychological/analogical way. One of the things psychology has been focusing on lately, though still controversial due to a lot of failed experimental replications, is the idea of cognitive bandwidth. The idea is that the more things you have on your mind, the less overall brainpower you have available to do other things, and this can manifest as a lack of focus or even the appearance of a lower IQ than you'd normally have. Notably, this is true whether your brain's bandwidth is taken up by negative emotions, or worries about money, or hunger, or cravings for a cigarette, or pain (social rejection also activates similar parts of the brain as physical pain). 2) I'm not sure I can answer how similar RSD and bipolar are neurologically speaking. My impression is that we don't know enough about RSD to really make an accurate comparison. 3) ADHD and BPD are quite distinct conditions neurologically speaking, though of course they can have overlapping elements. The specifics of how they interact with RSD is more of a psychological question than a neuroscientific one at this point. I think most people would be surprised how poorly we understand the link between specific psychological phenomena and the brain. Even for very common conditions like depression, we don't have a specific definition of it in terms of the brain. All of the psychological disorders are defined in terms of behaviours, emotions, and other subjective phenomena. Even today, with an unlimited budget, it would be extremely difficult to diagnose a specific, DSM-listed psychological disorder in an individual solely from brain scans, genetic tests, blood tests, etc., I imagine it could be done, but none of these measures are part of the diagnostic process. Indeed, imagine receiving the results of your brain scan showing that according to a detailed analysis of your brain, you have a 99% chance of having depression. That may be true, but none of it matters if you don't actually feel depressed! Not many other disorders are like that (i.e. it doesn't matter how I feel, if I have high blood pressure, I have high blood pressure). So it's still very difficult to give compelling neuroscientific reasons for any kind of specific subjective experience, disordered or otherwise. In fact I think it's good practice to be skeptical of anyone who offers such explanations (even if I've done it here in this thread) because they're always going to be major generalizations and over-simplifications. And of course this is all the worse when you start getting into conditions that are less commonly studied. Sorry I can't give a more specific answer! But I hope I've been able to explain why that is. To everyone: I'm going to be traveling for the next three weeks so I won't be able to reply to this thread. If any more questions pop up during that period, I'll try to get to them as soon as I can after I'm back. Thanks to everyone for their questions!
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Jul 20, 2019 22:14
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funny song about politics posted:Oh and speaking of cat torture, I've always thought that dogs would be a very valuable subject for studying social behaviour and disorders thereof. We've had dogs that seemed as though they were on the autism spectrum. Millennia of selectively breeding the friendliest dogs that have the most human-like behavioural features might mean that we could find some convergent evolution toward human-like structure/function in the social regions of their brains. Also dog breeds clearly have different 'personalities', and so studying how these breed-specific phenotypes manifest in the brain could be an interesting model of human personality and personality genetics. Of course actually studying dogs is unthinkable, I could never go anywhere near that and I'm sure most people would feel the same. We might look at doing fMRI and other kinds of imaging in dogs to make some progress though. Did you hear about this study identifying a link between dog sociability and genetic variation in the region associated with Williams-Beuren Syndrome in humans? If not, you might find it interesting!
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Jul 23, 2019 14:20
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confirmed
saphirecalypso fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 23, 2019 22:36
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How is long-term memory stored, refreshed, and recalled on a chemical level? Do really racist brains respond to hated races as if they were not human? E.g. in facial perception.
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Jul 24, 2019 21:05
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This thread is amazing. Thanks for all of the interesting info so far! I have lots of brain questions. Feel free to only answer the ones you find interesting and ignore anything else. 1. Since you study neuroscience around food, what does it mean that I don't get hungry? I mean, I do feel hungry eventually, but it takes literal days, and if I fall asleep instead of eating at any point, I won't be hungry after I wake up. It's like a reset button. My sense of thirst works fine, but my sense of hunger has always been kind of broken. 2. Do you do any studies about vitamin supplements and brain function? I love seeing different arguments about vitamin supplements because lots of people are adamant that it helps (particularly vitamin D) but there's also a lot of contradictory research. 3. My sister and I have both recently been diagnosed with pituitary microadenomas. Our various doctors say it's ridiculously rare for this to be genetic, but do you know any specific stats about that? Are there other parts of the brain where growths have a statistically higher likelihood of being genetic? Related, what exactly would you expect a growth on the pituitary gland to impact, with respect to brain function? I thought I was pretty asymptomatic (as in, I didn't feel like anything was wrong, but my doctors freaked out about my prolactin level on a blood test), but I feel less anxiety now compared to before and I wonder if that's just a coincidence or if it's a side effect of the dopamine agonist (cabergoline) I was prescribed for the tumor. Frankly I don't understand what I've read about dopamine agonists and I just want an excuse to ask you about it because you seem to explain things very clearly. 4. More on the topic of schizophrenia - how do neuroscientists study that sort of thing? I asked my neurologist about schizophrenia when going through my MRI, because my mom has pretty classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia but won't go to a doctor, and her father was institutionalized late in his life for similar behaviors but with an Alzheimer's diagnosis (which suggests to me that he didn't have Alzheimer's, but rural communities in the 90s probably didn't distinguish). My neurologist said he wouldn't really be able to tell from an MRI whether someone suffered from schizophrenia, and I can't imagine it's easy to get people to sign up for studies because if they're like my mom, they think they're fine and don't want anything to do with any doctors or scientists. And even though I know something is wrong, I'm legally not allowed to make her do anything about it unless she becomes a danger.
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Jul 25, 2019 23:21
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Great thread, thanks for posting it and answering questions My question is in-regards to personality more specifically mbti and Socionics. To me it seems like mbti is pretty trash, its just a test based on 100 year old ideas, and when I was learning about it in undergrad I immediately dismissed it as such, as it seemed like the common thought on it at the time was "pseudoscience" and I didnt really identify with the personality type I was given. But recently I've found myself coming back to it and more specifically the field that has developed in more recent years that goes more in-depth, socionics. Its kind of mind blowing to me because it not only explains a ton about my own personality, but even more about interactions I've had my entire life. Learning about it reminds me when I first discovered Marxism and I kind of thought to myself "this is self evidently true, its just an articulation of the way I've seen the world my whole life" Basically my question comes down to am I just confirmation biasing myself, or is this a field that has any kind of respect in psychology?
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Jul 26, 2019 22:07
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I think something to keep in mind here is that neuroscience is not psychology
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Jul 28, 2019 16:42
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Apologies if it was an off topic question, OP has answered some more 'meta' questions recently and seems to be well versed in psychology overall. I guess from my perspective neuroscience and psychology seem to be intrinsically linked. Psychology stems from neurobiology, right?
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Jul 29, 2019 02:04
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To me the difference is like the difference between trying to understand a computer by studying its software vs poking around the circuits. The software is only possible because of the hardware but the connection not always obvious.
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Jul 29, 2019 02:45
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Decoy Badger posted:How is long-term memory stored, refreshed, and recalled on a chemical level? The basic thinking on long-term memory is that it's "stored" in the connections between neurons (called synapses). Signals pass through our brains by traveling along neurons and across synapses, and the exact path they take likely affects both our visible behaviour and our subjective 'thought' experience. People always want to make computer analogies for this, and in a way they're valid because the way a computer works is by steering electrical signals through a complex network of gates and pathways to convert one form of input into another form of output. I don't think the validity goes much deeper than that, however. The brain is much more analogue than any computer today. A very simple model of this is called "Hebbian learning", named after early neuroscientist Donald Hebb. His concept can be applied to many complex forms of learning, but the simplest model is good old classical (Pavlovian) conditioning. Take a very simple stimulus-response pairing, say pairing the sound of a bell with the delivery of food. The sound activates a particular set of neurons in the auditory and association regions of the brain, and the subsequent presence of food later activates all kinds of other regions involved in the sensory and motor experiences of eating. Since the brain is massively inter-connected, there is almost certainly some route, perhaps direct or perhaps rather circuitous, between neurons involved in both the stimulus and response. This route may be dormant at first, but according to the logic of this model, the route will eventually be activated and strengthened by the repeated coincidence of the bell and food. In time, a formal connection will be established between the two sets of neurons, and when that happens, simply hearing the bell is sufficient to trigger many of the behavioural responses associated with the presence of food. A simple aphorism for this, learned by all intro Psych students is "Neurons that fire together wire together". Hebb's model is very simple, but it's still the basis of how we think the brain learns. The chemistry of this takes place at the level of individual synapses, which through a variety of mechanisms can increase or decrease their 'strength'. A 'weak' synapse may be very unlikely to pass along a signal, and thus take a very strong input (usually some kind of repetitive stimulus) to finally pass along a signal successfully. However just like anything else in the body, repeated use increases strength. As I said, there are a variety of mechanisms that support this phenomenon. These range from physically adding new synapses or removing old ones, to changing the sensitivity to neurotransmitters at the level of the post-synaptic neuron. Increasing the sensitivity of a synapse to a neurotransmitter is called long-term potentiation, and there are a few versions of this. Decreasing the sensitivity is called long-term depression, and again there are a few versions of this. In response to your second question, yes it does seem as though the brains of people who score higher on 'racism' scales respond to faces of other races with more fear and aggression than the brains of non-racists. It's going a bit far to say they respond as though the other faces are non-human, and I think the kind of revulsion experienced by racists is uniquely limited to other humans. Of course it has to be constructed through de-humanization, but it takes some conditioning to override our basic humanity.
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Aug 13, 2019 16:28
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Zanthia posted:This thread is amazing. Thanks for all of the interesting info so far! I have lots of brain questions. Feel free to only answer the ones you find interesting and ignore anything else. Thanks! I've enjoyed doing it, sorry I haven't been the fastest at responding. 1) I have no idea why you don't get hungry. Appetite does show inter-individual variation and probably follows a bell curve like everything else. So I guess in some sense it's natural that some people have out of control, ravenous appetites and others have next to no appetite. But there's no established mechanism for it. It could be anything from a genetic or hormonal variation, to an idiosyncratic psychological trait, or anything else in between. In my field, we always frame our work around obesity since that's the major health problem we want to understand. But in a way, people with small appetites, and people who are naturally skinny are much more interesting and unusual than people who are obese. Really it's a wonder we all aren't obese considering our environment and our evolutionary imperative to eat as much as possible. 2) Individual studies on vitamins and nutrients are not necessarily trustworthy on their own. It's better to look at meta-analyses that combine all of the best studies, rate and weight them by their quality and sample size, and look at the overall effect in that context. When you look at good meta-analyses, there's really next to no effect of any particular vitamin or nutrient on anything. Vitamin D and Omega-3 fatty acids have always seemed the most promising to me, but even those don't really hold up under large-scale scrutiny. I actually still take both out of a mix of superstition and the feeling that I should be "doing something", but if you look at the actual data they don't seem to do anything substantial for the brain (provided you eat a healthy mixed diet and aren't otherwise deficient). 3) I do know that pituitary adenomas are quite common, but the exact prevalence is not known with certainty. The prevalence of all pituitary adenomas is somewhere around 15%, which is ridiculously higher. Often times they show up in imaging studies of the brain done for entirely different reasons, and may have been there a person's entire life with no symptoms. Tumours usually form from specific cell types. The brain is a very complex organ, but the basic cell types are similar throughout all of its regions. Neurons or oligodendrocytes in one part of the brain are pretty similar to those in other parts. Common kinds of brain tumours like gliomas can show up anywhere, though I'm sure experienced oncologists will tell you that certain regions are especially likely to develop them (probably for unknown reasons). It's also true that some brain tumours are easier to detect early on because they produce more obvious symptoms. Tumours that obstruct the flow of cerebrospinal fluid can cause all kinds of trouble, as can those than impinge on sensory nerves. One of the hallmarks of a severe pituitary adenoma, for example, is visual field disturbance, because the pituitary gland is right underneath the optic chiasm, a place where the optic nerves cross over on their way into the brain. Pituitary adenomas can either be non-functional or functional. There are 7 different hormones produced by the anterior pituitary, and if your adenoma happens to be made of one of the cell types that produces those hormones, you'll have levels that are too high. Prolactin is normally associated with the production of milk, and normally levels should be quite low. Men with hyperprolactinemia can develop gynecomastia, and women can have reproductive and/or sexual problems, abnormal milk secretion, and irregular periods. In the hypothalamus, dopamine inhibits prolactin production (through a population of cells called the tuberoinfundibular dopamine neurons), so dopamine receptor agonists will do the same thing. This may have the bonus effect of starving the adenoma of the stimulus it needs to grow and prosper, so it may shrink too. Incidentally, people who are on antipsychotic medication often show hyperprolactinemia as a side effect, since the conventional antipsychotic drugs are dopamine receptor antagonists. 4) Neurosciensts are pretty much stuck with studying patients who have been diagnosed with confidence and give consent. This means that people like your mom who may have some elements of psychosis, but perhaps fall short of the threshold for diagnosing schizophrenia, are very under-studied. Just looking at the psychological level, there's reason to think that there's a continuum between low-grade psychosis and full-blown schizophrenia, and the genetics also seem to bear this out. Individuals with a lot of these kinds of people in their family do have a higher risk of schizophrenia, even if their relatives only have low-grade psychosis or maybe just have a tendency toward paranoid or magical thinking.
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Aug 13, 2019 17:05
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A Typical Goon posted:Great thread, thanks for posting it and answering questions I really don't know anything about socionics or how the field is viewed by psychologists, and to be fair I really don't know very much about personality psychology in general, so I can't comment on which, if any, personality classification schemes is 'real' or not. But I will speculate a bit. One thing I've mentioned in this thread is that I think human behaviour is a lot simpler than we believe. This isn't to suggest that the behaviour of any one individual if predictable, or that we as human beings will ever make sense of our own behaviour. Rather I'm suggesting that there probably is some kind of large-scale orderliness and predictability that something could someday understand (most likely a type of AI). Emergent behaviours like flocking/swarming can be generated in simulated entities with just a few simple behavioural rules (see the classic Boids simulation). I think of personality psychology as reaching around in the dark, trying to find and describe all of the different 'knobs' that can be turned in the brain to vary our behavioural parameters. The parameters and their social effects are much more complex and multidimensional, but I think they are in principle knowable. All of the different theories of personality seem to be reaching around and gravitating towards the same basic parameters, some just divide or combine them in different ways. I dunno, this is probably a classic case of me not knowing a field but acting as though I have some kind of great insight into it as an 'outsider'.
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Aug 13, 2019 17:23
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Welcome back OP!  Hope you had a good trip.funny song about politics posted:3) I do know that pituitary adenomas are quite common, but the exact prevalence is not known with certainty. The prevalence of all pituitary adenomas is somewhere around 15%, which is ridiculously higher. Often times they show up in imaging studies of the brain done for entirely different reasons, and may have been there a person's entire life with no symptoms. Tumours usually form from specific cell types. The brain is a very complex organ, but the basic cell types are similar throughout all of its regions. Neurons or oligodendrocytes in one part of the brain are pretty similar to those in other parts. Common kinds of brain tumours like gliomas can show up anywhere, though I'm sure experienced oncologists will tell you that certain regions are especially likely to develop them (probably for unknown reasons). It's also true that some brain tumours are easier to detect early on because they produce more obvious symptoms. Tumours that obstruct the flow of cerebrospinal fluid can cause all kinds of trouble, as can those than impinge on sensory nerves. One of the hallmarks of a severe pituitary adenoma, for example, is visual field disturbance, because the pituitary gland is right underneath the optic chiasm, a place where the optic nerves cross over on their way into the brain. Also, and I realize how stupid this probably sounds to someone who knows anything about the brain, but does that mean my tumor medication also has an antipsychotic effect?  funny song about politics posted:4) Neurosciensts are pretty much stuck with studying patients who have been diagnosed with confidence and give consent. This means that people like your mom who may have some elements of psychosis, but perhaps fall short of the threshold for diagnosing schizophrenia, are very under-studied. Just looking at the psychological level, there's reason to think that there's a continuum between low-grade psychosis and full-blown schizophrenia, and the genetics also seem to bear this out. Individuals with a lot of these kinds of people in their family do have a higher risk of schizophrenia, even if their relatives only have low-grade psychosis or maybe just have a tendency toward paranoid or magical thinking.
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Aug 13, 2019 22:46
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