Jayne Jubb

For many of us, living in a COVID-19 world feels as if we have been thrown into an alternative reality. We live day and night inside the same walls. If we venture into town we wear masks, and we get anxious if we pass someone who is not. We have trouble discerning faces. It’s like living in a dream.

COVID-19 has altered our dream worlds, too: how much we dream, how many of our dreams we remember and the nature of our dreams themselves. Early this year, when stay-at-home directives were put in place widely, society quite unexpectedly experienced a dream surge: a global increase in the reporting of vivid, bizarre dreams, many of which are concerned with coronavirus and social distancing. Terms such as coronavirus dreams, lockdown dreams and COVID nightmares emerged on social media. By early April, social and mainstream media outlets had begun broadcasting the message: the world is dreaming about COVID-19.

Although widespread changes in dreaming had been reported in the U.S. following extraordinary events such as the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, a surge of this magnitude had never been documented. This upwelling of dreams is the first to occur globally and the first to happen in the era of social media, which makes dreams readily accessible for immediate study. As a dream “event,” the pandemic is unprecedented.

But what kind of phenomenon is this, exactly? Why was it happening with such vigour? To find out, Deirdre Barrett, an assistant professor at Harvard University and editor in chief of the journal Dreaming, initiated a COVID-19 dreams survey online in the week of March 22. Erin and Grace Gravley, San Francisco Bay Area artists, launched IDreamofCovid.com, a site archiving and illustrating pandemic dreams. The Twitter account @CovidDreams began operation. Kelly Bulkeley, a psychologist of religion and director of the Sleep and Dream Database, followed with a YouGov survey of 2,477 American adults. Postdoctoral research fellow Elizaveta Solomonova, at McGill University, along with Rebecca Robillard of the Royal’s Institute of Mental Health Research in Ottawa and others, launched a survey to which 968 people aged 12 and older responded, almost all in North America. Results of these inquiries, not yet published in journals but available in preliminary form online, document the precipitous surge, the striking variety of dreams and many related mental health effects.

Bulkeley’s three-day poll revealed that in March, 29 percent of Americans recalled more dreams than usual. Solomonova and Robillard found that 37 percent of people had pandemic dreams, many marked by themes of insufficiently completing tasks (such as losing control of a vehicle) and being threatened by others. Many online posts reflect these findings.

More recent studies found qualitative changes in dream emotions and concerns about health. Dream reports from Brazilian adults in social isolation had high proportions of words related to anger, sadness, contamination and cleanliness. Text mining of accounts of 810 Finnish dreams showed that most word clusters were laden with anxiousness; 55 percent were about the pandemic directly (lack of regard for social distancing, elderly people in trouble), and these emotions were more prevalent among people who felt increased stress during the day. A study of 100 nurses conscripted to treat COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, China, revealed that 45 percent experienced nightmares—twice the lifetime rate among Chinese psychiatric outpatients and many times higher than that among the 5 percent of the general population who have nightmare disorder.

It seems clear that some basic biological and social dynamics may have played a role in this unprecedented opening of the dreamtime floodgates. At least three factors may have triggered or sustained the dream surge: disrupted sleep schedules augmenting the amount of REM sleep and therefore dreaming; threats of contagion and social distancing taxing dreaming’s capacity to regulate emotions; and social and mainstream media amplifying the public’s reaction to the surge.

MORE REM SLEEP, MORE DREAMS

One obvious explanation for the surge is that sleep patterns changed abruptly when lockdowns took effect. Early publications demonstrate elevated levels of insomnia in the Chinese population, especially among front-line workers. In contrast, stay-at-home orders, which removed long commutes to work, improved sleep for many people. Chinese respondents reported an average increase of 46 minutes in bed and an extra 34 minutes in total sleep time. Some 54 percent of people in Finland said they slept more after lockdown. Overall, from March 13 to 27, time asleep in the U.S. increased almost 20 percent nationwide, and states with the longest commute times, such as Maryland and New Jersey, showed the largest increases.

Longer slumber leads to more dreams; people in sleep laboratories who are allowed to snooze more than 9.5 hours recall more dreams than when sleeping a typical eight hours. Sleeping longer also proportionally increases rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is when the most vivid and emotional dreams occur.

Relaxed schedules may also have caused dreaming to occur later than usual in the morning, when REM sleep is more prevalent and intense and, thus, dreams are more bizarre. Increased dreaming during late-morning REM intervals results from the convergence of several processes. Sleep itself cycles through deep and light stages about every 90 minutes, but pressure for REM sleep gradually increases as the need for deep, recuperative sleep is progressively satisfied. Meanwhile a circadian process that is tightly linked to our 24-hour core body temperature rhythm gives an abrupt boost to REM sleep propensity late in the sleep period and stays elevated through the morning.

After the pandemic began, many people did sleep longer and later. In China, average weekly bedtime was delayed by 26 minutes but wake-up time by 72 minutes. These values were 41 and 73 minutes in Italy and 30 and 42 minutes among U.S. university students. And without commutes, many people were freer to linger in bed, remembering their dreams. Some early birds may have turned into night owls, who typically have more REM sleep and more frequent nightmares. And as people eliminated whatever sleep debts they may have accrued over days or even weeks of insufficient rest, they were more likely to wake up at night and remember more dreams.

DREAM FUNCTIONS OVERWHELMED

The subject matter of many COVID-19 dreams directly or metaphorically reflects fears about contagion and the challenges of social distancing. Even in normal times, we dream more about novel experiences. For example, people enrolled in programs to rapidly learn French dream more about French. Replaying fragments of experiences is one example of a functional role that researchers widely ascribe to REM sleep and dreaming: it helps us solve problems. Other roles include consolidating the prior day’s events into longer-lasting memories, fitting those events into an ongoing narrative of our lives and helping us regulate emotions.

Researchers have documented countless cases of dreams assisting in creative achievement. Empirical studies also show that REM sleep aids in problem-solving that requires access to wide-ranging memory associations, which may explain why so many dreams in the 2020 surge involve creative or strange attempts to deal with a COVID-19 problem.

Two other widely claimed dream functions are extinguishing fearful memories and simulating social situations. They are related to emotion regulation and help to explain why pandemic threats and social distancing challenges appear so often in surge dreams. Many dreams reported in the media include fearful reactions to infection, finances and social distancing. Threats may take the form of metaphoric imagery such as tsunamis or aliens; zombies are common. Images of insects, spiders and other small creatures are also widely represented.

One way to understand direct and metaphoric imagery is to consider that dreams express an individual’s core concerns, drawing on memories that are similar in emotional tone but different in subject matter. This contextualisation is clear in post-traumatic nightmares, in which a person’s reaction to a trauma, such as terror during an assault, is depicted as terror in the face of a natural disaster such as a tsunami. The late Ernest Hartmann, a Boston-area dream and nightmare research pioneer who studied dreams after the 9/11 attacks, stipulated that such contextualisation best helps people adapt when it weaves together old and new experiences. Successful integration produces a more stable memory system that is resilient to future traumas.

Metaphoric images can be part of a constructive effort to make sense of disruptive events. A related process is the extinguishing of fear by the creation of new “safety memories.” These possibilities, which I and others have investigated, reflect the fact that memories of fearful events are almost never replayed in their entirety during dreaming. Instead elements of a memory appear piecemeal, as if the original memory has been reduced to basic units. These elements recombine with newer memories and cognitions to create contexts in which metaphors and other unusual juxtapositions of imagery seem incongruous or incompatible with waking life—and, more important, are incompatible with feelings of fear. This creative dreaming produces safety imagery that supersedes and inhibits the original fear memory, helping to assuage distress over time.

This mechanism can break down after severe trauma, however. When this happens, nightmares arise in which the fearful memory is replayed realistically; the creative recombining of memory elements is thwarted. The pandemic’s ultimate impact on a person’s dreams will vary with whether or how severely they are traumatised and how resilient they are.

A second class of theories—also still speculative—may explain social distancing themes, which permeated IDreamofCovid.com reports. Emotions in these dreams range from surprise to discomfort to stress to nightmarish horror. Tweets located by the @CovidDreams account illustrate how incompatible dream scenarios are with social distancing—so incompatible that they often trigger a rare moment of self-awareness and awakening: “We were celebrating something by having a party. And I woke myself up because something wasn’t right because we’re social distancing and not supposed to be having parties.”

These theories focus on dreaming’s social simulation function. The view that dreaming is a neural simulation of reality, analogous to virtual reality, is now widely accepted, and the notion that the simulation of social life is an essential biological function is emerging. In 2000 Anne Germain, now CEO of sleep medicine start-up Noctem proposed that images of characters interacting with the self in dreams could be basic to how dreaming evolved, reflecting attachment relationships essential to the survival of prehistoric groups. The strong interpersonal bonds reiterated during dreaming contribute to stronger group structures that help to organise defenses against predators and cooperation in problem-solving. Such dreams would still have adaptive value today because family and group cohesion remain essential to health and survival. It may be the case that an individual’s concerns about other people are fine-tuned while they are in the simulated presence of those people. Important social relationships and conflicts are portrayed realistically during dreaming.

Other investigators, such as cognitive neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo of the University of Turku in Finland, have since proposed additional social functions for dreaming: facilitating social perception (who is around me?), social mind reading (what are they thinking?) and the practice of social bonding skills. Another theory advanced by psychology professor Mark Blagrove of Swansea University in Wales further postulates that by sharing dreams, people enhance empathy toward others. The range of dream functions is likely to keep expanding as we learn more about the brain circuits underlying social cognition and the roles REM sleep plays in memory for emotional stimuli, human faces and reactions to social exclusion. Because social distancing is, in effect, an experiment in social isolation at a level never before seen—and is likely antagonistic to human evolution—a clash with deep-rooted dream mechanisms should be evident on a massive scale. And because social distancing disrupts normal relationships so profoundly—causing many of us to spend excessive time with some people and no time with others—social simulations in dreams may play a crucial role in helping families, groups, even societies deal with sudden, widespread social adaptation.

THE ECHO CHAMBER OF SOCIAL MEDIA

There is one basic question about pandemic dreams that need to be nailed down: whether the dream surge was amplified by the media. It is quite possible that early posts of a few dreams were circulated widely online, feeding a pandemic-dreams narrative that went viral, influencing people to recall their dreams, notice COVID themes and share them. This narrative may have even induced people to dream more about the pandemic.

Evidence suggests that mainstream media reporting probably did not trigger the surge but may have amplified its scope, at least temporarily. The Bulkeley and Solomonova-Robillard polls corroborated a clear groundswell in dream tweeting during March, before the first media stories about such dreams appeared; indeed, the earliest stories cited various tweet threads as sources of their reporting.

Once stories emerged, additional surges in dream reporting through early April were detected by @CovidDreams and IDreamofCovid.com. The format of most early stories almost guaranteed amplification: they typically described some salient dream themes observed in a survey and provided a link directing readers to participate in the same survey. In addition, 56 percent of articles during the first week of stories featured interviews with the same Harvard dream scientist, which may have influenced readers to dream about the themes repeated by her in various interviews.

The surge began to decline steadily in late April, as did the number of mainstream media articles, suggesting that any echo-chamber effect had run its course. The final nature of the surge remains to be seen. Until COVID-19 vaccines or treatments are distributed and with waves of future infections possible, threats of disease and social distancing are likely to persist. Might the pandemic have produced a lasting increase in humanity’s recall of dreams? Could pandemic concerns become permanently woven into dream content? And if so, will such alterations help or hinder people’s long-term adjustments to our postpandemic futures?

Therapists may need to step in to help certain people. The survey information considered in this article does not delve into nightmares in detail. But some health care workers who saw relentless suffering are now themselves suffering with recurrent nightmares. And some patients who endured the ICU for days or weeks suffered from horrific nightmares during that time, which may in part have been the result of medications and sleep deprivation induced by around-the-clock hospital procedures and interminable monitor noises and alarms. These survivors will need expert help to regain normal sleep. Thankfully, there are specialised techniques that are highly effective.

People who are not traumatised but still a little freaked out about their COVID dreams also have options. New technologies such as targeted memory reactivation are providing individuals with more control over their dream narratives. For example, learning how to practice lucid dreaming—becoming aware that you are now dreaming—aided by targeted memory reactivation or other methods could help transform worrisome pandemic dreams into more pleasant, maybe even useful, dreams. Simply observing and reporting pandemic dreams seems to positively impact mental health, as Natália Mota of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Natal, Brazil, found in her studies.

Short of therapy, we can give ourselves permission to ease up and to enjoy banking those surplus hours of sleep. Dreams can be vexing, but they are also impressionable, malleable and at times inspirational.

The human brain is hardwired to map our surroundings. This trait is called spatial memory—our ability to remember certain locations and where objects are in relation to one another. New findings published this month in Scientific Reports suggest that one major feature of our spatial recall is efficiently locating high-calorie, energy-rich food. The study’s authors believe human spatial memory ensured that our hunter-gatherer ancestors could prioritise the location of reliable nutrition, giving them an evolutionary leg up.

In the study, researchers at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands observed 512 participants follow a fixed path through a room where either eight food samples or eight food-scented cotton pads were placed in different locations. When they arrived at a sample, the participants would taste the food or smell the cotton and rate how much they liked it. Four of the food samples were high-calorie, including brownies and potato chips, and the other four, including cherry tomatoes and apples, were low in calories—’diet foods’, you might call them.

After the taste test, the participants were asked to identify the location of each sample on a map of the room. They were nearly 30 percent more accurate at mapping the high-calorie samples versus the low-calorie ones, regardless of how much they liked those foods or odours. They were also 243 percent more accurate when presented with actual foods, as opposed to the food scents.

The main takeaway message from this study is that human minds seem to be designed for efficiently locating high-calorie foods in our environment. Lead author in this study Rachelle de Vries, feels her team’s findings support the idea that locating valuable caloric resources was an important and regularly occurring problem for early humans weathering the climate shifts of the Pleistocene epoch. Those with a better memory for where and when high-calorie food resources would be available were likely to have a survival—or fitness—advantage. Memory evolved so that we can remember things that aid our survival or reproduction—hence, it’s probably not surprising that we remember fitness-relevant information particularly well. And that includes high caloric content.

We tend to think of primates such as ourselves as having lost the acute sense of smell seen in many other mammals in favour of sharp eyesight. And to a large degree, we humans have developed that way. But the new findings support the notion that our sniffer is not altogether terrible: These results suggest that human minds continue to house a system optimised for ‘energy‐efficient foraging’ within erratic food habitats of the past. And it highlights the often underestimated capabilities of the human sense of smell.

One drawback of our spatial skills, as they relate to sustenance, is our modern taste for junk food. With a life span of not much more than 30—as was the case for humans until relatively recently—chronic diseases such as diabetes were not a concern for our ancestors. If you came across a rich grove of fruit trees, you consumed all the sugar you could to help ensure your survival. Now our taste for sweets and fats contributes to a global obesity epidemic and has us reaching for sugar over broccoli. In a way, our minds (and bodies) may be mismatched to our current food-rich circumstances. It seems that we’re more likely to remember sweet things, which was a real plus for most of our evolutionary history. But this is problematic in today’s world….when we’re still walking around with ‘Stone Age brains’. Whoops.

References

Rachelle de Vries et al.

Human spatial memory implicitly prioritizes high-calorie foods

Scientific Reports, volume 10, article number: 15174 (2020)

Do you know how powerful kindness and human contact is?

As a neuroscientist, I’ve done research into neurobiology behind placebo effect, and in particular the healing power in the human relationship with your doctor or therapist. It’s this human contact that has the potential to trigger pathways in our brain that can naturally unleash an internal pharmacy, the pathways of which are mimicked by our normal pharmaceutical drugs externally. It is heady stuff. As a baker it is handy to know that kindness really can work wonders….. Let’s look at how that happens.

Vagus nerve

At the top of the spinal column there is a bundle of nerves called the vagus nerve. It activates different organs in the body, for example, the heart, lungs, liver and digestive organs. When activated, it is likely to produce that warm glowing feeling in your chest which you probably recognise from when somebody has done something unexpectedly (nice) for you. There are people who have naturally high vagus nerve activation in a resting state. These people are more likely to generally feel emotions that promote compassion, gratitude, love, happiness and feelings of caretaking. Children with high resting state activation are more cooperative and likely to give. Neuroscientist Stephen Porges has called it the nerve of compassion and has spent years researching into it. It is thought to stimulate certain muscles in the vocal chamber – enabling (compassionate) communication  – and it is closely connected to receptor networks for triggering the release of oxytocin.

Oxytocin: the molecule of kindness

Oxytocin is an important neurotransmitter and hormone that fosters the ‘tend and befriend’ response that has completely the opposite effect to the adrenaline flight, fight or freeze responses. It is the hormone that gets released by a mother at birth to ensure that she bonds with her new-born baby.

Oxytocin has also been called the molecule of kindness, which is of interest to us here. It floods into our bodies when we hug (remember those….?!), are kind, are loving, when we touch someone warmly, are grateful and feel inspired. It is responsible for speeding up wound healing, reducing blood pressure, softening our arteries, reducing inflammation, stimulating the growth of new blood vessels and turning on muscle regeneration. What this basically means is that kindness, a hug, warm touch, gratitude and inspiration through connection with others ends up reducing inflammation in the body, and will keep you healthier and able to live longer. It is through this kind and caring connection to others that we take ourselves out of social isolation and become ‘socially interconnected’, as the scientists call it. And social interconnectedness is a better predictor of heart health than either smoking or cholesterol!

Prosocial behaviour

This is geek speak for doing something kind for another person. And scientists are starting to get enthusiastic about it. There is now mounting evidence that what makes people really happy is doing something for another. It increases a person’s positive emotions and decreases their negative emotions, resulting in them flourishing psychologically (yes, that’s a scientific term). In the Western world, we are so often encouraged to focus on ourselves in order to feel better. This latest stream of research shows that doing something for someone else is a much better way to boost your mood and well-being.

Recently, the use of positive thinking, positive emotions and positive behaviour (in the form of gratitude, acts of kindness and optimism) has been found to significantly improve both positive emotions and well-being in a group of patients with clinically impairing anxiety or depression. Those techniques also reduced their negative emotions too, and these effects lasted over the six-month follow-up period too. Loosely translated, that means that teaching severely depressed and frightened people tools for being more positive has a much larger and longer lasting effect than focussing on the negative aspects of their illness and life, which was the ‘normal’ way to treat these debilitating sicknesses. Kindness, gratitude and optimism turn out to be healers in the true sense of the word.

This prosocial behaviour boosts happiness too. When you commit an act of kindness, it benefits not only the recipient of your action, but it bounces back on you too. It creates something called the ‘helper’s high’. This causes a whoosh of the helper’s own natural pain killers (called endogenous endorphins) into their brain, making them feel ‘pain-free’ and high, in a good way. In addition, if you feel at the end of the work day that your efforts made a positive difference in other people’s lives, then you go to bed feeling positive. You go to bed happy. This has even been extended to research on spending: those spending money on others (instead of themselves) experienced greater happiness. Spread the happiness and kindness! Which leads me perfectly onto….

Kindness contagion

Kindness is contagious.

Research has shown that when you are kind to another, people can imitate not only the details of how you were kind but the underlying spirit and intention. In the pre-Corona time, if you ordered a bag of biscuits from us, and during our chat whilst you paid for your bakes, you opened the bag and offered one to another of the customers you would be doing something potentially ‘contagious’. The man who took your biscuit, might later that night offer his dinner guests one of the biscuits he’d bought (imitating ‘detail’) but he could equally (the underlying spirit) give his guest one of the two sourdough loaves he’d also picked up. [Of course, with Corona ‘contagious’ has now taken on a different charge, but hopefully you’ll understand what I’m getting at here].

Kindness can then ‘cascade’ taking on new forms (evolving) along the way as it spreads. Each time it touches a new person they are then open to spread it in the same spirit and possibly in a different way. In the example of our neighbour, he might, later in the week, help an old lady pick up her shopping as it toppled off the back of her bike outside the supermarket. That act of kindness then ‘touches’ her…So being kind to others, and having a spirit of generosity, becomes great fun and deeply rewarding. In such a way you start to plant seeds of kindness in others that can unexpectedly sprout later. Who would have thought that baking and sharing it with your neighbours could have so many facets and depths?

But there is more.

As it turned out, baking the old-fashioned way using our hands is actually good for keeping us healthy and warding off depression.

Handmade – using your hands keeps you healthy

We do just about everything in our Bakery by hand. We do have a mixer that occasionally gets used for beating kilos of butter and sugar together for cakes, or whipping up large volumes of cream or egg whites. However, all our bread is handmade. This is not only because of principle – I wanted our breads to be in contact with caring human hands rather than soulless machines – but also because of a practicality. We simply do not have the space for a large dough mixer in our kitchen, in the cupboard under the stairs or in the shed at the bottom of the garden.

Hands are big in the brain

From an evolutionary perspective, our hands appear to be so important that they take up a large chunk of the ‘motor cortex’ of the brain (see diagram). The cortex is the crinkly surface of our brain that makes human brains much bigger than that of other mammals or animals, and which has developed so that we are able to carry out more functions as well as thinking, reasoning and planning. Part of this crinkly cortex is called the motor cortex and it coordinates movements. Our hands are so important that moving them activates a much bigger area in your motor cortex than much larger parts of your body, such as the back or even legs. Your thumb alone takes up more space in the cortex than your entire back!

Nature is very clever. To keep our cave-dwelling ancestors from turning into cave potatoes, it cleverly programmed our brains to derive deep pleasure and satisfaction when our physical efforts produce something tangible, visible and most especially, meaningful. This type of deep pleasure and satisfaction through action is called ‘effort-driven rewards’.

Effort-driven rewards

Effort-driven rewards turn out to be a handy (no pun intended) evolutionary tool. Not only did they motivate early humans to keep on doing physical activities in order to feed, protect themselves and have children, but they also coupled intricate movements with complex thought processes. They had to be able to plan how they were going to catch the wildebeest, coordinate with other hunters, then be able to stalk it, communicate with each other and finally kill the animal. There would also be the excitement of tracking the animal, the anticipation of the kill (and the food) and then the sense of achievement when they had succeeded. After that it would need to be cleaned, skinned, divided up and cooked. This is a much different – a fuller body and brain – sense of achievement than hopping into the car and heading out to pick up a McDonald’s beef burger or a chunk of meat from the supermarket.

Depressing realisation: If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it

In researching into evolutionary triggers for depression, neuroscientist Kelly Lambert noticed that some of the symptoms of depression are connected to areas of the brain associated with those qualities. For example, loss of pleasure (nucleus accumbens), slower motor abilities (striatum) and difficulty concentrating (prefrontal cortex).

These three brain regions also happen to be the network necessary for effort-driven rewards. It is as if evolution has wired us to derive pleasure and satisfaction from using large areas of our brains through our hands. The more the effort-driven rewards circuit is kept activated, the greater the sense of well-being. You literally buzz. All the regions are networking together. When the buzzing is heightened, the brain cells in those areas are turned on and secrete neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin, which are involved in generating positive emotions. That makes the whole activity motivating, and makes you eager to do it again soon so that you can keep on feeling good. Furthermore, neural connections are strengthened – or as neuroscientists say ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’ – and with this type of meaningful activity new brain cells are then produced. This last factor is believed to be an important aspect of recovering from depression.

The old adage ‘if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it’ appears to be applicable here. Depression levels have risen at the same time that technology has helped us save time. Today we are more knowledge workers than physical labourers. By using our hands and physical bodies in meaningful activities less than we have evolved to be able to, we are buzzing less than we could. This decreased brain activation could lead over time to us becoming more susceptible to depression. Interestingly, reported depression in the Amish community is far lower than it is in the rest of the United States. Could this be because the Amish do so much with their hands? There are undoubtedly other factors also at play here – such as their strong religious community bond – but it is worth considering that the physical old-fashioned work makes them more resilient to depression. Have we lost something vital to our mental health and well-being when we stopped baking bread and pulling up the potatoes, and relegated our hand activities to messaging on our mobiles? Food for thought, I hope.

So let me now do a quick change and put my baker’s cap on and roll up my sleeves because we are going to start baking.  If you’re curious to try out a couple of recipes from BAK! then click on the links. They are in Dutch but with the help of google translate or deepl.com then you’ll manage. They’re not difficult – honestly!

Are you ready to rise to the occasion? I know, I know, my puns are terrible!

BuiksloterBakery brioche (so much easy than you realise)

Irish soda bread with cranberries

Supersonic turbo flapjacks (gluten-, sugar- and lactose-free)

With many thanks to Karakter Uitgevers for permission to share these, here are three recipes from BAK! for you to enjoy making, baking and eating.

One of my favourite things of saying to clients during sessions is ‘If you are not you, who will be?’

Often we struggle with allowing ourselves to be ourselves. Does that sound silly? It should be the easiest most natural thing to do. Be yourself. But it isn’t :=(

There have been studies on the ‘meaning in life’ in which researchers asked students to write about their ‘true self’ and about ‘who you believe you really are.’

Another group of students was asked to write about their “everyday self” as defined by how they actually behave in their daily life. And a third group of students was asked to write about the campus bookshop. After the writing task, the students were then asked to rate their meaning in life.

Schlegel’s empirical research backs up what existentialist philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and great humanistic psychologists like Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow proposed decades ago: There is inherent value in being able to live authentically and express oneself. It makes our lives feel truly worth living.

This theoretical insight is backed up by recent research within self-determination theory. This has argued forcefully that autonomy is a fundamental human need. The satisfaction of this vitally important for our psychological growth, integrity and well-being. Just as our body needs food and water for its wellness and health, our mind needs a few basic psychosocial experiences for its wellness and health—and among these needs autonomy stands tall. As self-determination theory is currently the most studied theory of motivation within psychology, there are literally hundreds of studies demonstrating the importance of autonomy for human well-being in various areas of life ranging from educational outcomes and work engagement to sport performance and dental hygiene. Yep, the health of your teeth can depend on how meaningful your life is to you.

Given that the need for autonomy is built into the human motivational system, it is no wonder we find something inherently worthy and fulfilling in being able to live authentically. Basic psychological needs provide a robust foundation for where to find meaning in life. And what applies to whole lives is true also for individual tasks. Hong Zhang from Nanjing University demonstrated that how much autonomy people perceive in trying to achieve goals is connected to how meaningful they experienced the goal to be. It’s logical then that having autonomy at work is one of the key qualities that makes work meaningful.

In order to live a meaningful life, then, make sure you are in touch with yourself—that you are living a life endorsed by yourself, not a life aiming at pleasing others. If you don’t follow your own values and dreams, you are most probably following values set by others. And there is nothing more disappointing in life than living someone else’s dream. As some Oscar Wilde wrote ‘Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.’

Meaningfulness is about connection. While this means that a major part of the meaningfulness in our lives comes from connecting with others through intimate, caring relationships and through being able to contribute to society and those one cares about, you cannot connect with others unless you are first in contact with yourself. Otherwise it is not you who is connecting to others but just an empty shell. Only by knowing who you are and where you come from, can you start to authentically connect with others.

Autonomy is about being the author of your own life: making conscious choices to live according to your own preferences, engage in activities you find personally interesting and that express who you are, and pursue goals you find worthy. And therein lies a recipe for more meaningful living.

So, can I be a bit bossy and give you some homework? ;=)

Take a moment today to write about your true self and who you believe you really are as a person. Write about what your most important values are, and what you yourself would like to pursue and have in life.

Then start to figure out how could you make that true self more the self that you show in your everyday life and work.

References

Rebecca J. Schiegel et al.

Feeling Like You Know Who You Are: Perceived True Self-Knowledge and Meaning in Life

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 2011, 37(6):745-56

DOI: 10.1177/0146167211400424

Frank Martela

A Wonderful Life: Insights on Finding a Meaningful Existence.

Published by Harper Design, 2020.

Whenever I smell the pages of an old book, I’m immediately time-warped back into my Grandad’s house: encyclopedias, volumes of Readers’ Digest, dictionaries… and thanks to him my enthusiasm to learn and to discover.

And I am not alone! Anecdotally, many of us have had experiences where a certain smell—perhaps chlorine, fresh baked scones, or the salty beach air—floods our brain with memories of a distinct event or location that we associate clearly with certain emotions.

There’ve also been scientific studies using a variety of approaches to back up this anecdotal evidence. One of the first was a study led by Dr. Rachel Herz at Brown University in 2004. Herz and her collaborators found that a group of five women showed more brain activity when smelling a perfume with which they associated a positive memory than when smelling a control perfume they had never before smelled. The brain activity associated with the memorable perfume was also greater than that produced by the visual cue of seeing the bottle of perfume.

More recently, in another study in 2013, the researchers again found greater brain activity associated with olfactory stimuli (like the smell of a rose) than with visual stimuli (like the sight of a rose). Clinical case studies have also linked smells to strong negative emotions, a connection which can play a significant role in contributing to posttraumatic stress disorder.

So why is this?

The majority of us clearly rely more on a sense of sight than our sense of smell day to day, so what is it about our sense of smell that works to better trigger our memory and our emotions? The link may simply be due to the architectural layout of our brain.

How does our sense of smell work?

The process through which molecules in the air are converted by our brain into what we interpret as smells and the mechanisms our brain uses to categorise and interpret those odours is, as you have probably guessed, a complicated one. In fact, the process is so complicated that the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded in 2004 to the researchers Richard Axel and Linda Buck for their work in decoding it.

When we come into contact with an odour, or molecules from volatile substances drifting through the air, the neurons that make up your olfactory receptor cells send a signal to a part of your brain called the olfactory bulb. Axel and Buck found roughly 1,000 genes played a role in coding for different types of olfactory receptors, each of which focus on a small subset of odours. Thus each receptor is not responsible for understanding all possible smells. Those signals are then passed to what are called microregions within the olfactory bulb where again, different microregions specialise in different odours. The olfactory bulb is then responsible for interpreting those signals into what we perceive as smells.

Your olfactory bulb runs from your nose to the base of your brain and has direct connections to your amygdala (the area of the brain responsible for processing emotion) and to your hippocampus (an area linked to memory and cognition). Neuroscientists have suggested that this close physical connection between the regions of the brain linked to memory, emotion, and our sense of smell may explain why our brain learns to associate smells with certain emotional memories.

So many of these odour-driven memories may further be childhood memories because those years are when we experience most smells for the first time.

However….unfortunately…there is not yet research to suggest that we can tap into the link between scents and memory to help us cram for exams or remember where we put our car keys as adults….Not yet ;=)

References

S. Herz et al. Neuroimaging evidence for the emotional potency of odor-evoked memory. Neuropsychologia 2004, volume 42(3), pages 371-8. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2003.08.009.

Arshamian et al. The functional neuroanatomy of odor evoked autobiographical memories cued by odors and words. Neuropsychologia 2013, volume 51(1), pages 123-31. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.10.023. Epub 2012 Nov 9.

Vermetten and J. D. Bremner. Olfaction as a traumatic reminder in posttraumatic stress disorder: case reports and review. J Clin Psychiatry 2003, volume 64(2), pages 202-7. doi: 10.4088/jcp.v64n0214.

The concert starts…a few bars from your favourite song…and moments later you’re swept up in the music, happily tapping your foot, clapping your hands and swaying along. (Unless it’s a classical music concert in which case you’re probably doing this much more quietly…) You look around. All around, people are doing the same. Many are singing, concert lights flashing to the rhythm, while other fans are clapping in time. Some wave their arms over their head, and others dance in place. The performers and audience seem to be moving as one, synchronised to one another as the light show is to the beat.

A new paper in the journal NeuroImage has shown that this synchrony can be seen in the brain activities of the audience and performer. And the greater the degree of synchrony, the study found, the more the audience enjoys the performance. This result offers insight into the nature of musical exchanges and demonstrates that the musical experience runs deep: we dance and feel the same emotions together, and our neurons fire together as well.

In the study, a violinist performed brief excerpts from a dozen different compositions, which were videotaped and later played back to a listener. Researchers tracked changes in local brain activity by measuring levels of oxygenated blood. (More oxygen suggests greater activity, because the body works to keep active neurons supplied with it.) Musical performances caused increases in oxygenated blood flow to areas of the brain related to understanding patterns, interpersonal intentions and expression.

Data for the musician, collected during a performance, was compared to those for the listener during playback. In all, there were 12 selections of familiar musical works, including “Edelweiss,” Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” “Auld Lang Syne” and Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” The brain activities of 16 listeners were compared to that of a single violinist.

All the musical pieces resulted in synchronisation of brain activity between the musician and listener, but this was especially true of the more popular performances. Interbrain coherence  – the connection between the brains – was insignificant during the early part of each piece and greatest toward its end. The authors explained that the listener required time to initially understand the musical pattern and was later able to enjoy the performance because it matched that person’s expectations.

Synchronous brain activity was localised in the left hemisphere of the brain, to an area known as the temporal-parietal junction (red circle in the picture). This area is important for empathy, the understanding of others’ thoughts and intentions, and verbal working memory used for expressing thought. It may function in the retrieval of sounds and patterns that give rise to musical expectations.

But it is the right brain hemisphere that is most often associated with interpretation of musical melody—in contrast to the left hemisphere, which is specialised for the interpretation of speech. In the right hemisphere, synchronisation was localised to areas involved in recognising musical structure and pattern (the inferior frontal cortex) and interpersonal understanding (the inferior frontal and postcentral cortices). These sites also involve “mirror neurons,” brain cells that are thought to enables a mirroring or internalisation of others’ thoughts and actions.

Mirror neurons both control movement and respond to the sight of it, giving rise to the notion that their activity during passive observation is a silent rehearsal for when they become engaged in active movement. They were once thought to be a biological substrate for mimicry and, more importantly, empathy—the source of our understanding of the actions and intentions of others. Mirror neurons have been implicated (rightly or wrongly) in everything from autism to substance abuse. Nevertheless, nerves that control movement are generally involved in perception as well. And this arrangement is especially true of music, in which physical movement emphasises melodic gesture or follows a rhythmic beat. Indeed, the auditory cortex enlists other regions of the brain that control movement, showing an innate connection between movement and our understanding of music. No wonder you and your fellow concertgoers dance and move to the music. It is your way of comprehending the music and participating in the encounter.

Because music is a group endeavour, it is often used as the context to study coordinated brain function. Synchronised brain responses among music listeners have been measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in some studies, while other researchers have examined the coordinated actions of performers by tracking the electrical activities of their brain using electroencephalography (EEG). Rather than examine the relationship among groups of performers or groups of listeners, the new NeuroImage study examined the relationship between an audience and a performer. And it not only followed the degree of concordance in brain activity among these individuals during a musical encounter but also examined how that concordance was related to musical enjoyment. The brain activity of that person playing air guitar at your concert (oh no – someone realy was watching me!) is closer to that of a true performer than you might have realised.

The various methods used in exploring these relationships have their advantages and shortcomings. For example, the new paper used a technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)—which measures the flow of oxygen-rich blood—and it cannot penetrate the brain to investigate deeper structures as well as fMRI does. The major advantage of fNIRS is that no large, expensive instrument is needed so subjects are comparatively unconstrained when they are tested: it would have been impossible for a violinist to play in an MRI machine.

It is remarkable that the observed degree of synchronisation between the performer and audience was connected to enjoyment of the music. Such pleasure could provide a powerful means by which music promotes positive social behaviour. The pleasantness of music has been attributed to synchronisation of electrical activity in the right hemisphere of the brain. Music commands greater attention when it is pleasant, which could contribute to one’s feeling of being swept away when listening to a favorite piece. While the authors of the NeuroImage paper suggest that the audience’s enjoyment was linked to the music matching pattern expectations, other studies have shown that surprise is associated with the greatest degree of musical pleasure. Remarkably, even sad music can bring great enjoyment. For example, Mimì’s illness and death in the opera La Bohème is filled with tragic sadness, endless regrets and lost opportunities for redemption, but the music ultimately leads the audience to a bittersweet sense of transcendence.

Whether encountered as a sole listener of a recorded artist or as part of a packed audience before a full orchestra, music is a shared experience that integrates our intellect, emotions and physical movements. We tap to the beat together and sway in unison to a melody. The experience challenges our cognition to recognise patterns and excites us with pleasure when it surprises us. And we can even enjoy its expression of sadness. Music unites these processes within us and among and between audiences and performers.

References

The averaged inter-brain coherence between the audience and a violinist predicts the popularity of violin performance.

Hou et al. NeuroImage, Volume 211, 1 May 2020, 116655.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116655

Listening to Musical Rhythms Recruits Motor Regions of the Brain

Joyce L. Chen et al. Cerebral Cortex, Volume 18, Issue 12, December 2008, pages 2844–2854

https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhn042

Inter-subject synchronization of brain responses during natural music listening

Daniel A. Abrams et al. Eur J Neurosci. Volume 37(9),  May 2013 May, pages 1458–1469.

doi: 10.1111/ejn.12173

Brains “in concert”: Frontal oscillatory alpha rhythms and empathy in professional musicians

Claudio Babiloni et al  NeuroImage, Volume 60, Issue 1, March 2012, pages 105-116.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.12.008

Fronto-temporal theta phase-synchronization underlies music-evoked pleasantness

AlbertoAra and JosepMarco-Pallarés, NeuroImage, Volume 212, 15 May 2020, 116665

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116665

Lost in music: Neural signature of pleasure and its role in modulating attentional resources

Samaneh Nemati et al.  Brain Research, Volume 1711, 15 May 2019, Pages 7-15

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2019.01.011

Uncertainty and Surprise Jointly Predict Musical Pleasure and Amygdala, Hippocampus, and Auditory Cortex Activity

Vincent K M Cheung et al. Curr Biol 2019 Dec 2;29(23):4084-4092

doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.09.067.

It’s Sad but I Like It: The Neural Dissociation Between Musical Emotions and Liking in Experts and Laypersons

Elvira Brattico et al. Front Hum Neurosci 2016 Jan 6;9:676.

doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00676.

An integrative review of the enjoyment of sadness associated with music

Tuomas Eerola et al. Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 25, August 2018, Pages 100-121

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2017.11.016

I’m not talking about the trousers (jeans) you wore in school but can’t fit into anymore. No, skinny g-e-n-e-s genes are factors found in people who are naturally svelte. And researchers have just identified one that appears to tell the body’s adipose tissue to burn more fat.

We all know these people who can eat whatever they want, but never gain any weight. Geneticist, Josef Penninger at the University of British Columbia in Canada wondered if individuals who are effortlessly slim may hold the key to understanding obesity. Scientists interested in learning how we control our weight have traditionally focused on the things that make you fat, like diet or metabolism. But they’ve never really studied why people actually stay trim. Penninger and his team decided to turn the tables and…study the genetics of thinness.

Penninger started out by searching a database – maintained by a genome centre in Estonia – for its most slender registrants. And they weeded out people who were listed as having anorexia or other conditions that alter body fat. Then they looked for genetic markers that track with these Skinny Minnies.

One gene, in particular, caught their eye. ALK – or the gene for anaplastic lymphoma kinase – is a stretch of DNA whose mutant form has been associated with human cancers. But its normal normal function had never been established.

So the scientists made mutant fruit flies, and mutant mice in an attempt to show that the gene associated with thinness in humans makes also flies and mice skinny. And that’s exactly what they found. However, the mutant gene doesn’t cause the animals to eat less.

The researchers found that ALK acts in the brain and allows the body to burn more calories for the same food we eat. The brain literally tells fat cells to burn more of the fat they have stored away.

People, mice, and we (apparently) also flies (yes, honestly), stay skinny. That suggests that this mechanism is evolutionarily conserved from insects to humans. The scientists believe this could open up an entirely new scientific field around thinness.

There are already drugs that inhibit the cancer-causing form of ALK. Which means that ALK is, what scientists call, a druggable target.

So maybe one day we can indeed develop a pill which keeps us thin!

References

Michael Orthofer et al,  Identification of ALK in Thinness. Cell, online 21-05-20

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.04.034

Loneliness hurts!

Did you know that loneliness is so psychologically distressing and physically unhealthy that it increases the likelihood of an earlier death by 26 percent?

The flip side of that is that this feeling may serve a purpose. Psychologists theorise it hurts so much because, like hunger and thirst, loneliness acts as a biological alarm bell. The ache of it drives us to seek out social connection just as hunger pangs urge us to eat. The idea is intuitively satisfying…yet it has long proved difficult to test in humans.

On 26^th March, however, just as the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the world, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology posted a preliminary report on the bioRxiv website (see reference below). It is the first study in humans to show that both loneliness and hunger share signals deep in a part of the brain that governs very basic impulses for reward and motivation. The findings point to one telling conclusion: our need to connect is apparently as fundamental as our need to eat.

The extraordinary scientific timing of the paper’s release just as tens of millions of people were suddenly starved for contact was far from intentional. When they began the work three years ago, neuroscientists Livia Tomova and Rebecca Saxe and their colleagues wanted to demonstrate how loneliness operates in the brain. They were inspired by similar research in animals and the pioneering loneliness studies of the late University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo.

But enforced social isolation is so rare in healthy, nonincarcerated humans that it gave the team pause for thought. They wondered what it would be like in the real world if that ever were to happen…and then why would this ever happen. By the time the researchers came to write their study this year, the unimaginable had become real.

This is a tour de force paper. It suggests that chronic social isolation might be something like long-term undernourishment, producing steady, aversive need that wears away at our well-being. These findings give a name to what countless people are experiencing right now: social craving while staying at home to protect the greater public health.

The paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, describes a carefully designed experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare brain responses to loneliness and hunger. After a baseline brain scan, 40 adult participants underwent a 10-hour session depriving them of food and another 10-hour session denying them social contact. Both session served as a control condition for each other.

The social-isolation condition was challenging to arrange. Some people are lonely in a crowd, while others enjoy solitude. To induce not just objective isolation but subjective feelings of loneliness, the researchers had the participants spend their time from 9 A.M. to 7 P.M. in a sparsely furnished room at the laboratory without phones, laptops or even novels in case fictional characters provided some social sustenance. Puzzles were allowed, as was preapproved nonfiction reading or writing. During the food-deprivation day, the subjects could not to eat or drink anything but water over the same time frame.

Brain scanning immediately followed each deprivation session, yet measuring the relevant brain signals was also challenging. Tomova and Saxe focused on a midbrain region called the substantia nigra, a center of dopamine release involved with motivation and craving. Because an fMRI signal from the substantia nigra is indirect, the researchers designed a cue-induced craving task similar to what is used in addiction research. When drug addicts are shown cues associated with their substance of choice, they show a  strong desire response. It’s long been established that this triggers this dopamine response.

In the scanner, the participants saw images of their preferred forms of social interaction and of their favorite foods, as well as a control image of flowers. The researchers found that this brain area specifically responded to the cues after deprivation but only to cues of what they had been deprived of. The magnitude of the response correlated with the subjects’ self-reports of how hungry or lonely they were, though the feelings of hunger were consistently stronger.

Finally, the researchers used machine learning to confirm their findings. A software classifier trained to recognise neural patterns during fasting proved able to recognise similar neural patterns from the social-isolation condition even though it had never “seen” them. This suggests that there seems to be an underlying shared neural signature between the two states. Social contact is a very basic need.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, an obvious next question for the work was whether different forms of social media could satisfy the need for social connection. Saxe and Tomova were never able to get funding for such a study. But it seems likely they will now! Tomova is already working with researchers at the University of Cambridge, where she will move later this year, to see if social media use during the pandemic might be remediating feelings of loneliness.

So if you’re feeling lonely and frustrated, take heart. You’re not alone.

Let’s take this opportunity to recognise the importance of relationships for our health and to practice leveraging technology for social well-being.

And we will get through this – together!

References

Tomova et al. The need to connect: Acute social isolation causes neural craving responses similar to hunger. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.25.006643v2

When the fear of something outside of us (and especially something invisible like a virus) takes hold, there’s a tendency to feel powerless. But that’s exactly the time to take your health back into your own hands.

Here are 10 practical actions you can do keep your immune system and outlook on life up and running.

Follow the guidelines

Most governments are advising us to wash hands thoroughly, keep a distance (1-2 metres) socially and stay home if you’re feeling unwell. In this context ‘unwell’ means headache, fever, sneezing or coughing. Do remember that this time of year Corona isn’t the only virus in village. It could be that you’ve ‘just’ got normal flu or another virus.

Eat well and healthy

Make sure you’re getting plenty of fruit and vegetables since they contain lots of phytonutrients, minerals and vitamins to help keep your natural defence system working optimally. Maybe now is the time to take that cookbook down from the shelf and try out a new recipe or two. Don’t forget garlic, ginger and turmeric in your cooking. (And if you eat enough garlic then people will automatically keep away from you, haha).

Natural supplements

If you want to give your immune system a natural boost then try the following: Vitamin D3 (begin with 25 micrograms per day and build up to 100), Vitamin C minimaal 3000 milligrams per day (if you get diarrhea then use the non-acidic form of Esther-C. Herbs that can help support immune function are astragalus and cordyceps (thank you to colleague Paul Hortsthuis for this information).

Get good quality sleep

Sleep boosts T-cells which help us ward off disease, especially viruses. So if you’re feeling that you need more sleep than normal, trust your body and do it. You’re helping yourself stay healthy.

If you can work from home….

…then do work from home. Not having to get up to commute can have it’s advantages…you can sleep more! (But maybe not if you have children who are also at home….) I’m offering my healing clients the option of working at distance (energy healing can do that!) via phone or Skype so that they don’t have to cancel/reschedule their appointment.

Try to get some fresh air and exercise

I realise that many of you reading this are in countries where there is a clamp down on being outside. But if you can, try to get out of the house. It’s important to your mental and psychological health – a larger space allows your energy field to expand so that you don’t feel as confined. Walking – even just a 20 minute walk round the block – makes dopamine which makes you feel much less stressed. Any form of movement will literally also allow your energy system to flow. If you can’t get out, then try doing some gentle stretches or yoga (YouTube has many freebie videos)  in front of an open window. Fresh air allows more oxygen to get to the brain. Not unimportant.

Meditate

Just spending a few minutes unhooking from the fear and drama that is all around at the moment, and contacting that deeper intelligence inside yourself is a wellness-enhancer. You’ll automatically align with a higher, wiser aspect of yourself and connect to your own self-healing potential. Meditation increases the expression of genes that are help the immune system. It lowers the stress levels in your body which tens to hinder the effectiveness of the immune cells. So if you’re not at work then there’s no time like the present ;=)

Focus on other things

Corona has dominated so much of our lives recently. But try to find other (small) things to occupy your thoughts. Had you realised that today is Saint Patrick’s Day? Or that Friday/Saturday mark the first day of Spring?

Make use of all this extra time / make the best of it

Maybe now is the time to put all this extra time to good use. (That is if you’re not working in hospitals and health care services). Catch up with friends via telephone, Skype, WhatsApp or even writing letters or cards (remember those?) Read a book, take an extra long bath, watch some of that stuff you’ve recorded or downloaded. Maybe you can start to paint/draw again or do something creative that you’ve been putting off. And remember to laugh….laughter is supposedly the best medicine and a dose of the giggles can make you feel so much better.

Practice random acts of kindness

In spite of the fear and concern that is palpable, try doing something for somebody else to brighten their day. Even if it’s just an app to ask how somebody is. Or bake some biscuits and hang some in bags on your neighbours’ door handles…..

Wherever you are in the world as you read this, I hope you stay safe and well!

You’ve probably had a similar experience to this: I’m holding a mixing spoon in my hand and I can feel how soft the butter is, and how crunchy the sugar is through the spoon.

Sensing touch through tools is not a new concept, though it has not been extensively investigated. In the 17th century, philosopher René Descartes discussed the ability of blind people to sense their surroundings through their walking cane. While scientists have researched tool use extensively, they typically focused on how people move the tools. They, for the most part, neglected the sensory aspect of tool use.

In a 2018 Nature study, cognitive neuroscientist Luke Miller and his colleagues at Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University in France reported that humans are actually quite good at pinpointing where an object comes into contact with a handheld tool using touch alone, as if the object were touching their own skin. A tool is not innervated like our skin, so how does our brain know when and where it is touched? Results in a follow-up study, published in December in Current Biology,reveal that the brain regions involved with sensing touch on the body similarly processes it on the tool. It is as if the tool is being treated like a sensory extension of your own body.

In the initial experiment, the researchers asked 16 right-handed subjects to determine where they felt touches on a one-meter-long wooden rod. In a total of 400 trials, each subject compared the locations of two touches made on the rod: If they were felt in different locations, participants did not respond. If they were in the same location, the people in the study tapped a foot pedal to indicate whether the touches were close or far from their hand. Even without any experience with the rod or feedback on their performance, the participants were, on average, 96 percent accurate.

During the experiment, researchers recorded subjects’ cortical brain activity using scalp electrodes and found that the cortex rapidly processed where the tool was touched. In trials in which the rod was touched in the same location twice in a row, there was a marked suppression of neural responses in brain areas previously shown to identify touch on the body, including the primary somatosensory (touch) cortex and the posterior parietal cortex.

There is evidence that when the sensory brain regions are presented with the same stimulus repeatedly, the responses of the underlying neural population gets suppressed. This repetition suppression can be measured and used as a “time stamp” to signify when a stimulus is extracted in the brain.

When the team tested some of the same subjects with touches on their arm instead of the rod, it observed similar repetition suppression in the same brain regions on similar time scales. The somatosensory cortex was suppressed in 52 milliseconds (about one twentieth of a second) after contact on both the rod and the arm. At 80 milliseconds, that activity suppression spread throughout the posterior parietal cortex. These results indicate the neural mechanisms for detecting touch location on tools are remarkably similar to what happens to localise touch on your own body.

Interestingly, after each contact, the rod vibrates for about 100 milliseconds. So by the time the rod has finished vibrating in the hand, you’ve already extracted the location dozens of milliseconds before that. The vibrations on the rod are detected by touch sensors embedded in our skin called Pacinian receptors, which then relays neural signals up to the somatosensory cortex. Computer simulations of Pacinian activity in the hand showed that information about rod contact location could be extracted efficiently within 20 milliseconds.

The vibrations on the rod may provide the key information needed for touch localisation. Repeating the same rod experiment, the researchers tested a patient who lost proprioception in her right arm, meaning she could not sense the limb’s location in space. She could still sense superficial touch, however, and she was able to localise where the rod was touched when held in both hands and had similar brain activity as the healthy patients during the task.  That finding suggests quite convincingly that vibration conveyed through the touch, which is spared in the patient, is sufficient for the brain to locate touches on the rod.

Taken together, these results indicate that people could locate touches on a tool quickly and efficiently using the same neural processes for detecting touch on the body. While the scientists emphasize that no one in the studies thought the tool had “become part of their own body,” the work indicates that the subjects experienced sensory embodiment. That means that the brain repurposes strategies for dealing with objects by reusing what it knows about the body.

This comprehensive and thoughtful work could help inform the design of better prostheses because it suggests that insensate objects can become, potentially, ways of detecting information from the world and relaying it toward the somatosensory systems. This isn’t something that people in the world of prosthetics had previously thought about. But maybe this suggests that they should!

References

Luke E. Miller et al. Somatosensory Cortex Efficiently Processes Touch Located Beyond the Body. Current Biology, volume 29, pages 4276–4283, December 16, 2019.

Luke E. Miller et al. Sensing with tools extends somatosensory processing beyond the body. Nature, volume 561, pages 239–242, 2018

People who celebrate Christmas with their in-laws get stressed out. Could that possibly be true?

What started out as a joke between two colleagues from the the Academic Medical Centre and VU University Amsterdam turned into bona fide scientific research published in Human Microbiome Journal. We all probably experience that Christmas can be a stressful, busy time but could the extra contact with your in-laws play such a detrimental role? Scientists word this as ‘increased contact with in-laws during the holiday season is an important environmental factor known to affect both physical and mental health’

It turned out that 24 colleagues were willing to serve as test subjects. There were two groups: colleagues who went to their in-laws and colleagues who did not see their partner’s family. The participants delivered a poo sample before Christmas (23^rd December) and again on 27^th December (the day after Boxing Day).

The result was striking. In people who had been to their in-laws, there was a decrease in all types of the Ruminococcus species of bacteria in the intestines. It is believed that this type of bacteria has protects against depression and psychological stress. The lower levels following the Christmas visit suggest that the bacteria were ‘used up’ in trying to buffer the person against the in-laws.

The researchers end the paper with a sentence that tickled me: A larger randomized controlled study is needed to reproduce these findings before we can recognize in-laws as a potential risk factor for the gut microbiota composition and subsequently health.

Have a wonderful festive season – wherever you decide to celebrate it – and I’ll be back in January to help you get 2020 off to a fulfilling start!

REFERENCES:

Nicolien C. de Clercq et al. The effect of having Christmas dinner with in-laws on gut microbiota composition. Human Microbiome Journal, Volume 13, 100058 (August 2019).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452231719300090

Why sleep has restorative—or damaging—effects on cognition and brain health has been an enduring mystery in biology. Researchers think cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) may flush toxic waste out, “cleaning” the brain and studies have shown that garbage clearance is hugely improved during sleep. They were not sure exactly how all this works, however, or why it should be so enhanced during sleep.

One aspect of sleep that is well understood is how the slow electrical oscillations (or “slow waves”) that characterise deep, non-REM sleep contribute to memory consolidation, the process whereby new memories are transferred into long-term storage. A new study, from a team led by neuroscientist Laura Lewis of Boston University, now gives insight into what drives CSF flow through the brain, suggesting that the same slow waves that coordinate memory consolidation drive oscillations in blood flow and CSF in the brain.

The work has implications for understanding the relations between sleep disturbance and psychiatric and neurodegenerative conditions, and may even point to new approaches to diagnosis and treatment. The study discovered that there are large waves of CSF that appear in the brain only during sleep. This effect is striking, and scientists are also interested in what it means for maintaining brain health, especially in disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.

In the study, published on in Science, the team set out to investigate how the dynamics of CSF flow changes during sleep, and how this might relate to alterations in brain blood flow and electrical activity.

The researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor the brain waves of 13 sleeping healthy adults, while also using a cutting-edge, “accelerated” fMRI technique to capture faster changes than standard fMRI can manage. That allowed for the measurement of both blood-oxygenation changes (which indicate blood flowing to electrically active, oxygen-hungry regions) and CSF flows. The latter was only possible due to a flaw in this method that means any newly arriving fluid (not just oxygenated blood) lights up in the image.  This turned out to be critical, because it turned out that these were coupled to each other in a way that would never have been seen if we blood, CSF and electrical activity weren’t measured simultaneously.

What the team found was that the slow waves seen in non-REM sleep occur in lockstep with changes in both blood flow and CSF. Just because things occur together doesn’t necessarily mean one causes the other, but the team also built a computer model incorporating what we know about the physics linking these processes, which predicted that slow waves would have just these kinds of effects on blood and CSF. What seems to be happening is that as brain activity alters blood flow, this reduces the volume of blood in the brain, and because the brain is a closed vessel, CSF flows in to fill the space. Electrical activity drives blood flow changes, that then drive CSF changes.

The team measured this CSF inflow going into the fourth ventricle, one of four fluid-filled cavities involved in producing CSF (by filtering blood plasma) and circulating it around the brain. As CSF usually flows out of the fourth ventricle, this suggests a “pulsatile” flow, like a wave. This pushes CSF around the ventricles and into spaces between membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord, called the meninges, where it mixes with “interstitial fluid” within the brain to carry away toxic waste products.

As slow waves are important for memory consolidation, this links two disparate functions of sleep. What’s exciting about this is it’s combining features of brain function that people don’t normally think of as connected. It isn’t obvious things had to be this way, but it may represent an example of nature being efficient. It’s a matter of nature not dividing tasks between higher level and lower level, like how you run a company, where you have a boss making decisions and cleaning people coming in. In biology, it’s everybody contributing, as it makes more sense.

The findings have implications for neurodegenerative diseases, which are thought to be caused by build-up of toxic proteins in the brain, such as amyloid-Beta in Alzheimer’s disease. Previous research has shown that amyloid-Beta is cleared more efficiently during sleep, which is often disrupted in patients. Disturbances in slow-wave sleep also often accompany aging, which may be linked to cognitive decline.

We know that people with Alzheimer’s have fewer slow waves, so it could be that they also have fewer CSF waves. These studies have to be carried out in older adults and patient populations, to understand what this might mean for those disorders. Sleep disturbance is also a feature of many psychiatric disorders, from depression to schizophrenia. Different electrical signatures of sleep are disrupted in different psychiatric conditions. So this will be something to watch out for in the coming years.

The team next hope to nail down whether electrical oscillations truly do cause the changes they observed in CSF flow, by experimentally manipulating brain activity. It may ultimately be possible to use electromagnetic stimulation to influence brain waves as a treatment for brain disorders. Researchers have already seen encouraging results of this approach in mice, and these findings may help explain why. Another potential application may come from assessing whether changes in CSF flows can serve as a diagnostic marker for some of these conditions.

It seems like things the brain is doing during sleep are related to each other in surprising ways. Maybe the most important take-home message is that sleep is a serious thing. You need to sleep to keep a healthy brain because it links electrical activity to a practical housekeeping function.

REFERENCES:

Coupled electrophysiological, hemodynamic, and cerebrospinal fluid oscillations in human sleep. Nina E. Fultz et al. Science  01 Nov 2019: Vol. 366, Issue 6465, pp. 628-631.