Another reason this is problematic is that most other amino acids can beat tryptophan in the competition for the limited-capacity transport system past the blood-brain barrier. Raising serotonin requires both a good source of tryptophan and a lack of other amino acids. A strong insulin response helps too. This makes carbohydrates ideal, but turkey much less so.
Regarding the "Thanksgiving nap" factoid... do you usually see the folks who ate ham strapping on their rollerblades half an hour later?
The experiment is silly. The test didn't feed people any non-glucose foods, so the control section was invalid.
No, you're silly. I quote:
the study found that memory was significantly improved in 20 healthy elderly people 15 minutes after they ate mashed potatoes or barley, compared with a placebo drink containing no calories.
That last sounds like a control to me (I wish they said whether it was caloric or artificially sweetened). Nor does the fact that the glucose drink didn't help as much mean that glucose isn't the active component. Some of the body's glucose responses rely on its ability to recognize the glucose. Familiar taste can trigger a response immediately, but blood sugar doesn't actually begin to increase until some time after consumption. Thus, "stealth" glucose might have a longer latency.
I agree with you about the need for non-carbohydrate experimental conditions, though.
I don't know if it will be as simple as extracting an active component. As the article comments, the key might be nothing more than glucose. From an evolutionary standpoint, that makes sense: if you find something tasty (i.e., nutritive, at least in the pre-M&M epoch), your memory ought to work hard to encode where/how you found it. There's a similar mechanism by which giving subjects stimulants after a lecture increases their recall later on - evidently the brain receives the exciting/reinforcing jolt, and assumes that whatever just happened must have been important. The researchers tried to rule this out by using barley, which has a low GI (a measure of how much/quickly blood sugar rises after consumption) in addition to mashed potatoes, which have a GI higher than pure sugar. However, they failed to account for nonchemical effects of food, based on expectation or taste stimulation. An example of this is the cephalic phase response, in which the smell or taste of sweet food can cause a rise in blood insulin, even when the esophagus is redirected so that no rise in blood sugar ever occurs (the same thing can happen with artificial sweeteners). This might account for the poor performance of the glucose drink. High-concentration sugar water tastes pretty horrible (that's what the other 80% of the ingredients in Coke are for), and if the body hasn't been trained to recognize things that taste like that as food, it will be delayed in its efforts to treat it that way.
If the active component is glucose, that still doesn't answer much. It could be that the brain just kicks itself into high gear temporarily, as I suggested above. This wouldn't do much for permanent memory improvement, as such effects tend to habituate if overused (the fact that the tests were done after a fast probably made it especially strong). A more intriguing possibility is that there's a reason only those with poor or degraded memories showed improvement, other than a ceiling effect (i.e., those with good memories were already as good as they could get). Neurological glucose hypometabolism has been implicated in several forms of memory loss, including Alzheimer's. Low levels have even been detected in apparently normal individuals who are genetically at risk for Alzheimer's. If something is impairing the brain's access to sugar or erroneously forcing it into "starvation mode," a big hit of glucose might jolt it back up to normal levels. In that case, it might be beneficial to have subjects eat more, smaller meals to ensure a more constant level of blood sugar (or they could just mainline glucose before exams). One way to test this hypothesis would be to feed subjects isocaloric protein- or fat- based foods like meat and cheese; they create some (though lesser) insulin response, but provide nothing that the glucose-loving brain can use as fuel.
The other major thing carbohydrates (and the associated insulin boost) do is raise brain levels of tryptophan, the precursor to serotonin. Mmmmm, serotonin...
There was also a Justice League two-parter guest-starring D----l (I know that's not his name, but we have to protect those who haven't read all of Sandman yet) and written by Grant Morrison. Unfortunately, it was pretty far towards the "stale urine" end of his immensely wide bell curve. You missed nothing.
Your complaint brings to mind an idea I've been playing with for a while - the Postmodern DNS. Why, I ask, should everyone agree on where a given URL points? And why should the person who sets up a site get to decide what you want to call it? If you want the book company for the online universe, the thing to ask for is "book.com" or "books.com". It's unreasonable that you should end up with Barnes&Noble, when what you really wanted was clearly amazon.com or fatbrain.com . Why not have multiple maps for domain names, each resolving onto its own menu of intelligently edited sites? This sounds an awful lot like a portal (or, god help us, AoL), but bear in mind that it would be:
customizable (although I suppose that could be done locally too) transparent optional (after all, what are IP addresses for?)
If you wanted to subscribe to the Politically Correct DNS, you could have a system that would be pre-configured to map www.nigger.com to the NAACP (or to a page with a stern chiding from the sysadmin). If you wanted to subscribe to the Pat Buchanan DNS, you could have nigger.com map to www.kkk.com - for that matter, you could have NAACP.org map there! I see no real downside to giving people options regarding domain name resolution. Squatters would be disenfranchised. Disinformation sites (like ritalin.com, which until recently was a heavily disguised sales pitch for some naturopathic ADD remedy) would be weeded out automatically. And while I'm sure companies would bribe some systems for the choice names, once one provider became too commercialized, people could switch. If you started to doubt the purity of your provider's intentions, you could always configure your browser to query several DNSs at once, and see all the possible resolutions for a name.
(i wonder which will be more fun, the philosophical flames or the technological infeasibility flames...)
In fact, given what we're learning about the effects of de-stressing in protecting the brain from excitotoxicity, infection, and cortisol overload, I wouldn't be surprised if moderate marijuana use turned out to be a statistical marker for better brain function.
It's true that we don't need all our neurons - right now. Parkinson's disease strikes when the ability of striatal dopaminergic cells to stimulate higher motor areas is diminished. If these cells didn't have high redundancy, we'd all start trembling, freezing, and doing the Tussin' Shuffle at age three or four, as minor trauma, sub-clinical infections, and random fatal mutations took their constant toll on the neuronal population. It's not as if there is a specific tract of "walking cells" (at least not at this level), and when they happen to get whacked, you lose the ability to walk. Rather, you need a certain number of cells to walk, perhaps 20% of the total, and when they're gone then trouble sets in. This is significant because even if the complex interconnections of neocortical cells (and the mental skills, higher thought, and memory they provide) can't be restored, just regrowing a hodge-podge jumble of dopaminergic cells would be valuable indeed. I don't know if many of these cells atrophy in the specific manner of Alzheimer's-stricken cells, admittedly.
The NGF angle of this treatment is also intriguing, because one of the problems we have with regrowing cells is getting them to send axons to the right places. NGF seems to direct their growth in just the desired fashion, and in fact I recall hearing about a successful rat-spine regeneration experiment along these lines - but they needed to supply constant microinjections of NGF, which would be undesirable for human use. If we could stimulate cells in the targeted area to produce this "beacon" on their own, then this technique could be integrated with others to provide genuine cell neogenesis. There's still some uncertainty as to exactly where the cells will go, but that's far from unacceptable, considering that this could be used to rehabilitate people with no visceral feedback at all. Finding out that you have to defecate by a tingling in your left arm is preferable to finding out from a colostomy bag, or from a bad smell.
Let's calm down here... I see a lot of people who seem to think that the only reason for this kind of research is either to trivialize the plight of the severely mentally ill, or to exaggerate the differences of every nonconformist until we can medicate them into a quivering load of docile, conformist pulp. But the basic issue isn't who to give what label, but the origins and mechanisms of both ordinary and abnormal behavior.
One of the great discoveries of modern psychology is that "healthy" and "pathological" behavior can fit on the same continuum. Someone who's afraid of dogs isn't necessarily diseased in a deep and pervasive fashion; zhe's showing an unsually maladaptive manifestation of normal learning principles. Similarly, we now recognize that schizophrenia (one of the most alien and easily "other-able" conditions) can show up in mild forms like schizotypal personality disorder, and even very faintly in people who are totally normal.
Autism is a very severe developmental disorder, differentiating sufferers from normals from a very early age and continuing throughout life. If it turns out that autistic behavior also occurs on a continuum, that would be a real bombshell: it would provide a new way of categorizing and studying "antisocial" behavior, and it would suggest new methods for socializing and teaching even the most autistic children.
The amazing abilities of rare autistic savants are well-known. If these turn out to share mechanisms with extraordinary abilities in significantly less disabled individuals, that could teach us a lot about helping both types of people to cultivate them, and about how thought works in general.
Yeah, maybe the angle of "explaining" geekiness is being overplayed - but there is solid, useful science here, even if the media ignore it.
Let's calm down here... I see a lot of people who seem to think that the only reason for this kind of research is either to trivialize the plight of the severely mentally ill, or to exaggerate the differences of every nonconformist until we can medicate them into a quivering load of docile, conformist pulp. But the basic issue isn't who to give what label, but the origins and mechanisms of both ordinary and abnormal behavior.
One of the great discoveries of modern psychology is that "healthy" and "pathological" behavior can fit on the same continuum. Someone who's afraid of dogs isn't necessarily diseased in a deep and pervasive fashion; zhe's showing an unsually maladaptive manifestation of normal learning principles. Similarly, we now recognize that schizophrenia (one of the most alien and easily "other-able" conditions) can show up in mild forms like schizotypal personality disorder, and even very faintly in people who are totally normal.
Autism is a very severe developmental disorder, differentiating sufferers from normals from a very early age and continuing throughout life. If it turns out that autistic behavior also occurs on a continuum, that would be a real bombshell: it would provide a new way of categorizing and studying "antisocial" behavior, and it would suggest new methods for socializing and teaching even the most autistic children.
The amazing abilities of rare autistic savants are well-known. If these turn out to share mechanisms with extraordinary abilities in significantly less disabled individuals, that could teach us a lot about helping both types of people to cultivate them, and about how thought works in general.
Yeah, maybe the angle of "explaining" geekiness is being overplayed - but there is solid, useful science here, even if the media ignore it.
Let's calm down here... I see a lot of people who seem to think that the only reason for this kind of research is to either diminish the severity of people with severely disabling mental disorders, or to come up with an excuse to medicate anyone who's different into a quivering, conformist pulp. But the basic issue isn't who to give what label, but the origins and mechanisms of both ordinary and abnormal behavior.
One of the great discoveries of modern psychology is that "healthy" and "pathological" behavior can fit on the same continuum. Someone who's afraid of dogs isn't necessarily diseased in a deep and pervasive fashion; zhe's showing an unsually maladaptive manifestation of normal learning principles. Similarly, we now recognize that schizophrenia (one of the most alien and easily "other-able" conditions) can show up in mild forms like schizotypal personality disorder, and even very faintly in people who are totally normal.
Autism is a very severe developmental disorder, differentiating sufferers from normals from a very early age and continuing throughout life. If it turns out that autistic behavior also occurs on a continuum, that would be a real bombshell: it would provide a new way of categorizing and studying "antisocial" behavior, and it would suggest new methods for socializing and teaching even the most autistic children.
The amazing abilities of rare autistic savants are well-known. If these turn out to share mechanisms with extraordinary abilities in significantly less disabled individuals, that could teach us a lot about helping both types of people to cultivate them, and about how thought works in general.
Yeah, maybe the angle of "explaining" geekiness is being overplayed - but there is solid, useful science here, even if the media ignore it.
Let's calm down here... I see a lot of people who seem to think that the only reason for this kind of research is to either diminish the severity of people with severely disabling mental disorders, or to come up with an excuse to medicate anyone who's different into a quivering, conformist pulp. But the basic issue isn't who to give what label, but the origins and mechanisms of both ordinary and abnormal behavior. One of the great discoveries of modern psychology is that "healthy" and "pathological" behavior can fit on the same continuum. Someone who's afraid of dogs isn't necessarily diseased in a deep and pervasive fashion; zhe's showing an unsually maladaptive manifestation of normal learning principles. Similarly, we now recognize that schizophrenia (one of the most alien and easily "other-able" conditions) can show up in mild forms like schizotypal personality disorder, and even very faintly in people who are totally normal. Autism is a very severe developmental disorder, differentiating sufferers from normals from a very early age and continuing throughout life. If it turns out that autistic behavior also occurs on a continuum, that would be a real bombshell: it would provide a new way of categorizing and studying "antisocial" behavior, and it would suggest new methods for socializing and teaching even the most autistic children. The amazing abilities of rare autistic savants are well-known. If these turn out to share mechanisms with extraordinary abilities in significantly less disabled individuals, that could teach us a lot about helping both types of people to cultivate them, and about how thought works in general. Yeah, maybe the angle of "explaining" geekiness is being overplayed - but there is solid, useful science here, even if the media ignore it. - laborit
Slashdot Mirror
Another reason this is problematic is that most other amino acids can beat tryptophan in the competition for the limited-capacity transport system past the blood-brain barrier. Raising serotonin requires both a good source of tryptophan and a lack of other amino acids. A strong insulin response helps too. This makes carbohydrates ideal, but turkey much less so.
Regarding the "Thanksgiving nap" factoid... do you usually see the folks who ate ham strapping on their rollerblades half an hour later?
- Michael Cohn
The experiment is silly. The test didn't feed people any non-glucose foods, so the control section was invalid.
No, you're silly. I quote:
the study found that memory was significantly improved in 20 healthy elderly people 15 minutes after they ate mashed potatoes or barley, compared with a placebo drink containing no calories.
That last sounds like a control to me (I wish they said whether it was caloric or artificially sweetened). Nor does the fact that the glucose drink didn't help as much mean that glucose isn't the active component. Some of the body's glucose responses rely on its ability to recognize the glucose. Familiar taste can trigger a response immediately, but blood sugar doesn't actually begin to increase until some time after consumption. Thus, "stealth" glucose might have a longer latency.
I agree with you about the need for non-carbohydrate experimental conditions, though.
- Michael Cohn
I don't know if it will be as simple as extracting an active component. As the article comments, the key might be nothing more than glucose. From an evolutionary standpoint, that makes sense: if you find something tasty (i.e., nutritive, at least in the pre-M&M epoch), your memory ought to work hard to encode where/how you found it. There's a similar mechanism by which giving subjects stimulants after a lecture increases their recall later on - evidently the brain receives the exciting/reinforcing jolt, and assumes that whatever just happened must have been important.
The researchers tried to rule this out by using barley, which has a low GI (a measure of how much/quickly blood sugar rises after consumption) in addition to mashed potatoes, which have a GI higher than pure sugar. However, they failed to account for nonchemical effects of food, based on expectation or taste stimulation. An example of this is the cephalic phase response, in which the smell or taste of sweet food can cause a rise in blood insulin, even when the esophagus is redirected so that no rise in blood sugar ever occurs (the same thing can happen with artificial sweeteners). This might account for the poor performance of the glucose drink. High-concentration sugar water tastes pretty horrible (that's what the other 80% of the ingredients in Coke are for), and if the body hasn't been trained to recognize things that taste like that as food, it will be delayed in its efforts to treat it that way.
If the active component is glucose, that still doesn't answer much. It could be that the brain just kicks itself into high gear temporarily, as I suggested above. This wouldn't do much for permanent memory improvement, as such effects tend to habituate if overused (the fact that the tests were done after a fast probably made it especially strong). A more intriguing possibility is that there's a reason only those with poor or degraded memories showed improvement, other than a ceiling effect (i.e., those with good memories were already as good as they could get).
Neurological glucose hypometabolism has been implicated in several forms of memory loss, including Alzheimer's. Low levels have even been detected in apparently normal individuals who are genetically at risk for Alzheimer's. If something is impairing the brain's access to sugar or erroneously forcing it into "starvation mode," a big hit of glucose might jolt it back up to normal levels. In that case, it might be beneficial to have subjects eat more, smaller meals to ensure a more constant level of blood sugar (or they could just mainline glucose before exams). One way to test this hypothesis would be to feed subjects isocaloric protein- or fat- based foods like meat and cheese; they create some (though lesser) insulin response, but provide nothing that the glucose-loving brain can use as fuel.
The other major thing carbohydrates (and the associated insulin boost) do is raise brain levels of tryptophan, the precursor to serotonin. Mmmmm, serotonin...
- Michael Cohn
There was also a Justice League two-parter guest-starring D----l (I know that's not his name, but we have to protect those who haven't read all of Sandman yet) and written by Grant Morrison. Unfortunately, it was pretty far towards the "stale urine" end of his immensely wide bell curve. You missed nothing.
Your complaint brings to mind an idea I've been playing with for a while - the Postmodern DNS. Why, I ask, should everyone agree on where a given URL points? And why should the person who sets up a site get to decide what you want to call it?
If you want the book company for the online universe, the thing to ask for is "book.com" or "books.com". It's unreasonable that you should end up with Barnes&Noble, when what you really wanted was clearly amazon.com or fatbrain.com . Why not have multiple maps for domain names, each resolving onto its own menu of intelligently edited sites? This sounds an awful lot like a portal (or, god help us, AoL), but bear in mind that it would be:
customizable (although I suppose that could be done locally too)
transparent
optional (after all, what are IP addresses for?)
If you wanted to subscribe to the Politically Correct DNS, you could have a system that would be pre-configured to map www.nigger.com to the NAACP (or to a page with a stern chiding from the sysadmin). If you wanted to subscribe to the Pat Buchanan DNS, you could have nigger.com map to www.kkk.com - for that matter, you could have NAACP.org map there!
I see no real downside to giving people options regarding domain name resolution. Squatters would be disenfranchised. Disinformation sites (like ritalin.com, which until recently was a heavily disguised sales pitch for some naturopathic ADD remedy) would be weeded out automatically. And while I'm sure companies would bribe some systems for the choice names, once one provider became too commercialized, people could switch. If you started to doubt the purity of your provider's intentions, you could always configure your browser to query several DNSs at once, and see all the possible resolutions for a name.
(i wonder which will be more fun, the philosophical flames or the technological infeasibility flames...)
Indeed.
In fact, given what we're learning about the effects of de-stressing in protecting the brain from excitotoxicity, infection, and cortisol overload, I wouldn't be surprised if moderate marijuana use turned out to be a statistical marker for better brain function.
- laborit
It's true that we don't need all our neurons - right now. Parkinson's disease strikes when the ability of striatal dopaminergic cells to stimulate higher motor areas is diminished. If these cells didn't have high redundancy, we'd all start trembling, freezing, and doing the Tussin' Shuffle at age three or four, as minor trauma, sub-clinical infections, and random fatal mutations took their constant toll on the neuronal population. It's not as if there is a specific tract of "walking cells" (at least not at this level), and when they happen to get whacked, you lose the ability to walk. Rather, you need a certain number of cells to walk, perhaps 20% of the total, and when they're gone then trouble sets in.
This is significant because even if the complex interconnections of neocortical cells (and the mental skills, higher thought, and memory they provide) can't be restored, just regrowing a hodge-podge jumble of dopaminergic cells would be valuable indeed. I don't know if many of these cells atrophy in the specific manner of Alzheimer's-stricken cells, admittedly.
The NGF angle of this treatment is also intriguing, because one of the problems we have with regrowing cells is getting them to send axons to the right places. NGF seems to direct their growth in just the desired fashion, and in fact I recall hearing about a successful rat-spine regeneration experiment along these lines - but they needed to supply constant microinjections of NGF, which would be undesirable for human use. If we could stimulate cells in the targeted area to produce this "beacon" on their own, then this technique could be integrated with others to provide genuine cell neogenesis. There's still some uncertainty as to exactly where the cells will go, but that's far from unacceptable, considering that this could be used to rehabilitate people with no visceral feedback at all. Finding out that you have to defecate by a tingling in your left arm is preferable to finding out from a colostomy bag, or from a bad smell.
- laborit
Let's calm down here... I see a lot of people who seem to think that the only reason for this kind of research is either to trivialize the plight of the severely mentally ill, or to exaggerate the differences of every nonconformist until we can medicate them into a quivering load of docile, conformist pulp. But the basic issue isn't who to give what label, but the origins and mechanisms of both ordinary and abnormal behavior.
One of the great discoveries of modern psychology is that "healthy" and "pathological" behavior can fit on the same continuum. Someone who's afraid of dogs isn't necessarily diseased in a deep and pervasive fashion; zhe's showing an unsually maladaptive manifestation of normal learning principles. Similarly, we now recognize that schizophrenia (one of the most alien and easily "other-able" conditions) can show up in mild forms like schizotypal personality disorder, and even very faintly in people who are totally normal.
Autism is a very severe developmental disorder, differentiating sufferers from normals from a very early age and continuing throughout life. If it turns out that autistic behavior also occurs on a continuum, that would be a real bombshell: it would provide a new way of categorizing and studying "antisocial" behavior, and it would suggest new methods for socializing and teaching even the most autistic children.
The amazing abilities of rare autistic savants are well-known. If these turn out to share mechanisms with extraordinary abilities in significantly less disabled individuals, that could teach us a lot about helping both types of people to cultivate them, and about how thought works in general.
Yeah, maybe the angle of "explaining" geekiness is being overplayed - but there is solid, useful science here, even if the media ignore it.
- laborit
Let's calm down here... I see a lot of people who seem to think that the only reason for this kind of research is either to trivialize the plight of the severely mentally ill, or to exaggerate the differences of every nonconformist until we can medicate them into a quivering load of docile, conformist pulp. But the basic issue isn't who to give what label, but the origins and mechanisms of both ordinary and abnormal behavior.
One of the great discoveries of modern psychology is that "healthy" and "pathological" behavior can fit on the same continuum. Someone who's afraid of dogs isn't necessarily diseased in a deep and pervasive fashion; zhe's showing an unsually maladaptive manifestation of normal learning principles. Similarly, we now recognize that schizophrenia (one of the most alien and easily "other-able" conditions) can show up in mild forms like schizotypal personality disorder, and even very faintly in people who are totally normal.
Autism is a very severe developmental disorder, differentiating sufferers from normals from a very early age and continuing throughout life. If it turns out that autistic behavior also occurs on a continuum, that would be a real bombshell: it would provide a new way of categorizing and studying "antisocial" behavior, and it would suggest new methods for socializing and teaching even the most autistic children.
The amazing abilities of rare autistic savants are well-known. If these turn out to share mechanisms with extraordinary abilities in significantly less disabled individuals, that could teach us a lot about helping both types of people to cultivate them, and about how thought works in general.
Yeah, maybe the angle of "explaining" geekiness is being overplayed - but there is solid, useful science here, even if the media ignore it.
- laborit
Let's calm down here... I see a lot of people who seem to think that the only reason for this kind of research is to either diminish the severity of people with severely disabling mental disorders, or to come up with an excuse to medicate anyone who's different into a quivering, conformist pulp. But the basic issue isn't who to give what label, but the origins and mechanisms of both ordinary and abnormal behavior.
One of the great discoveries of modern psychology is that "healthy" and "pathological" behavior can fit on the same continuum. Someone who's afraid of dogs isn't necessarily diseased in a deep and pervasive fashion; zhe's showing an unsually maladaptive manifestation of normal learning principles. Similarly, we now recognize that schizophrenia (one of the most alien and easily "other-able" conditions) can show up in mild forms like schizotypal personality disorder, and even very faintly in people who are totally normal.
Autism is a very severe developmental disorder, differentiating sufferers from normals from a very early age and continuing throughout life. If it turns out that autistic behavior also occurs on a continuum, that would be a real bombshell: it would provide a new way of categorizing and studying "antisocial" behavior, and it would suggest new methods for socializing and teaching even the most autistic children.
The amazing abilities of rare autistic savants are well-known. If these turn out to share mechanisms with extraordinary abilities in significantly less disabled individuals, that could teach us a lot about helping both types of people to cultivate them, and about how thought works in general.
Yeah, maybe the angle of "explaining" geekiness is being overplayed - but there is solid, useful science here, even if the media ignore it.
- laborit
Let's calm down here... I see a lot of people who seem to think that the only reason for this kind of research is to either diminish the severity of people with severely disabling mental disorders, or to come up with an excuse to medicate anyone who's different into a quivering, conformist pulp. But the basic issue isn't who to give what label, but the origins and mechanisms of both ordinary and abnormal behavior. One of the great discoveries of modern psychology is that "healthy" and "pathological" behavior can fit on the same continuum. Someone who's afraid of dogs isn't necessarily diseased in a deep and pervasive fashion; zhe's showing an unsually maladaptive manifestation of normal learning principles. Similarly, we now recognize that schizophrenia (one of the most alien and easily "other-able" conditions) can show up in mild forms like schizotypal personality disorder, and even very faintly in people who are totally normal. Autism is a very severe developmental disorder, differentiating sufferers from normals from a very early age and continuing throughout life. If it turns out that autistic behavior also occurs on a continuum, that would be a real bombshell: it would provide a new way of categorizing and studying "antisocial" behavior, and it would suggest new methods for socializing and teaching even the most autistic children. The amazing abilities of rare autistic savants are well-known. If these turn out to share mechanisms with extraordinary abilities in significantly less disabled individuals, that could teach us a lot about helping both types of people to cultivate them, and about how thought works in general. Yeah, maybe the angle of "explaining" geekiness is being overplayed - but there is solid, useful science here, even if the media ignore it. - laborit