Brain

Brain Health

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 06:00:00 +0000

Brain Health Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/01/2019 - 00:00

Christie Sounart

Linda Sasser (MA’79; PhD’81) researched memory as a CU doctoral student and built a career as a national speaker helping people improve their brain health and strengthen their memory power. She lives in Peoria, Ariz. Find more brain health information and memory strategies in her book, Brain SENSE: A Guide and Workbook to Keep Your Mind and Memory Sharp.

What did your interest in memory stem from while at CU Boulder?

When I took cognitive psychology with Dr. Lyle Bourne at CU, I became fascinated with memory, since it is something we use and depend on constantly. In addition, I had been a teacher, and realized that in schools we expect students to learn a lot of information but don't always teach them strategies for remembering it! So I decided to do my dissertation research on memory.

When should people be proactive about brain health?

Since the brain is malleable and everything we do affects it, it is never too early to start developing lifestyle practices that enhance brain health. Exercise, which stimulates blood flow, is important because the blood takes oxygen and nutrients to the brain. Nutrition is also important, as there are connections between the gut microbiome and the brain.

How can someone improve memory?

My acronym, PAVE, consists of strategies for improving memory. P stands for "Pay attention," because we need to do that in order to encode information in the brain. We often think we have "forgotten" something, when it is possible that we did not pay sufficient attention to it in the first place to have it enter memory. The A stands for "Associate": We need to think of or form an association or connection between something we are trying to learn and something already in our memory. The V stands for "Visualize," as the brain more easily remembers images than verbal or numerical information. Trying to form a mental picture or image can help you recall something; for example, when you meet someone and hear their name, try to see the name in writing, as if they were wearing a name tag. The E stands for "Elaborate," which means we need to process information to a deeper level in order to remember it better. For example, thinking of associations and images for someone's name, instead of just hearing it once, should improve your chances of recalling it later.

If someone made one change to improve their brain, what would it be?

Exercise. It helps keep our cardiovascular system healthy — poor CV function is correlated with Alzheimer's disease. Exercise also increases blood flow, reduces stress and stimulates the production of BDNF which is believed to promote neurogenesis, the creation of new brain cells.

What’s the biggest detriment to memory?

If there is no cognitive impairment, several factors: Chronic stress, which increases cortisol levels; insufficient or poor quality of sleep; excessive, regular alcohol intake can cause the hippocampus, a structure critical to learning and memory, to shrink.

What’s your favorite brain fact you like to share with people?

Neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections, is an exciting concept because it means that our brain can continue to change, grow and improve throughout our lives if we engage in a brain-healthy lifestyle.

A condensed version of this article appeared in the print issue of the Fall 2019 magazine.

Photos courtesy Linda Sasser

Linda Sasser researched memory as a CU doctoral student and built a career as a national speaker helping people improve their brain health and strengthen their memory power.

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Unlearning Pain

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Sep 2018 19:21:00 +0000

Unlearning Pain Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 09/01/2018 - 13:21

Lisa Marshall

Can chronic pain patients think themselves into wellness? An unprecedented brain imaging study aims to find out.

Cheri Gould doesn’t remember exactly when the pain first began to creep across her shoulders, down her spine and into her back. To this day, she’s not sure what started it.

But she remembers what life was like before.

She played soccer and softball, ran regularly and was full of energy and drive.

“I have never been one to let things stop me,” she said.

But after 12 years, multiple diagnoses and futile tries at everything from physical therapy and Botox injections to opioids, the 48-year-old mom and teacher — like many of the 100 million Americans suffering from chronic pain — has grown weary of the way pain interferes with her life, and desperate for nondrug, nonsurgical treatment options.

“I’ve heard a lot of talk about tapping into the mind-body connection, but I am a science person. I need evidence,” she said, before slipping on some blue scrubs, lying flat on her back inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, and letting a team of neuroscientists peer inside her brain. “That’s why I’m here.”

Study subjects’ brains reacting to a knife scraping a glass bottle.

Gould is among 150 or so chronic back pain patients who made their way to CU Boulder last summer for the largest brain imaging study ever to explore mind-body treatments for chronic pain. The study hinges on a question that spiritual practitioners have been asking for centuries: Can thoughts and emotions have a measurable impact on physical well-being?

CU graduate student Yoni Ashar (PhDNeuro, PhDPsych’18), a former software engineer who made his way to neuroscience via his own spiritual quest, is now asking an even more specific question:

“Can we think ourselves out of chronic pain?”

"The assumption for a long time has been that chronic pain is driven by problems in the body. The neck. The back. The tissue," said Ashar, who is leading the study.

“But there is a paradigm shift underway. People are realizing that for many patients, the brain is at the center. To get at that pain, we have to change the way we think and feel about it.”

Meditating Monks

Eight years ago, Ashar was sitting in a synagogue in Jerusalem watching a slide presentation of red-robed monks having their brains scanned when he realized what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

Bored and unsatisfied, he had quit his job as a computer scientist in Washington, D.C., in his early 20s and moved to Israel to study spirituality.

He considered becoming a rabbi.

But as he heard the presenting neuroscientist explain the clear changes that occurred in monks’ brains as they meditated, something clicked.

“I had zero background in psychology. I had never taken a neuroscience class. But I remember feeling electrified at the thought that you could use scientific tools to study these things I had been reading about in spiritual texts,” he said.

Ashar scoured the internet looking for the world’s leaders in functional MRI research, which maps blood flow in the brain to examine neural activity. He emailed a dozen of them offering to work as a software designer to get his foot in the door.

Tor Wager, director of CU Boulder’s Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab, emailed him back.

Today, Ashar is finishing up dual doctorates in neuroscience and clinical psychology and has shifted his focus from how spiritual practices alter the brain to how thoughts and emotions impact its pain-related regions.

He points to numerous recent studies suggesting that, even in the absence of tissue damage, misfiring neural pathways can cause or perpetuate pain.

“The brain learns to be in pain,” he says. “But can it be unlearned?”

In one famous case study, a construction worker arrived at an emergency room with a 6-inch nail protruding from his boot, the pain so excruciating he had to be sedated. When the boot came off, doctors discovered the nail had passed between his toes, never puncturing him.

Other recent studies have shown that sham surgeries — in which the patient is sedated and a surface-level incision is made — can be as effective for pain relief as real ones.

Another paper, published in 2013, showed that while acute pain from a tissue injury lives in a region of the brain commonly associated with pain (what Ashar calls the “I just stubbed my toe” region), chronic pain resides in a different region — one closely associated with reward and emotion.

That could help explain why some chronic pain sufferers feel their symptoms flare up around a mean boss or an estranged relative, Ashar said.

“Pain is a danger signal that tells you to stop what you are doing so you don’t do more damage. But sometimes these danger signals can be activated even in the absence of injury,” or linger after the injury is gone, said Los Angeles-based pain psychologist Alan Gordon, who is collaborating with Ashar on the study.

Added Ashar: “It’s like a false alarm that is stuck in the ‘on’ position.” That is not to say the pain is “all in your head.”

“There is no such thing as imaginary pain,” Gordon said. “If you feel it, it is real.”

Shutting Off the Alarm

Basic structural MRI image of Yoni K. Ashar

Over the past 10 years, he has worked with hundreds of patients with intractable chronic pain, using mind-body methods to help them shut off the false alarm, after ruling out serious structural causes.

For instance, if someone always experiences pain when they sit, Gordon might ask them to sit slowly, paying close attention “in a detached, curious way” to how this feels physically and the fearful thoughts that come with it, and to evaluate whether those fears are justified.

After a few repetitions, the pain often lessens.

“The goal is to break that learned association — to teach the brain that something they learned to interpret as dangerous is actually safe.”

While he has seen such methods work time and again in his own practice, he realizes that it will take scientific evidence to convince the broader medical community.

That’s where CU Boulder comes in.

“Tor and his team are among the most respected groups of scientists in the world when it comes to fMRI studies,” he said. “We are really excited to be working with a group with so much credibility.”

Your Brain on Pain

On a recent July day, Gould was lying on her back inside a tube-shaped $2 million MRI machine at the Intermountain Neuroimaging Consortium facility on the Boulder campus clicking a button near her right hand to rank her pain as researchers remotely applied pressure, first to her lower back, then to her thumb.

Three-dimensional images of her brain appeared on the screen before them, providing detailed baseline information about which regions light up during pain, and by how much.

Over the course of the study, she and the other participants would be assigned to one of three treatment groups exploring noninvasive, nondrug approaches to treating pain.

A month later, they would have their brains scanned again.

Ultimately, the researchers hope the project will accomplish two goals: First, they hope to develop a brain marker, or signature, which doctors can use to assess a patient’s pain. (State-of-the-art measurement today, believe it or not, involves asking patients to rank their pain from 1 to 10 or choose from a series of sad-to-happy faces.)

Second, they hope to use the brain scans to assess scientifically just how effective psychological treatments are, and precisely how they work.

Published results are months away. But in the end, the research could change lives.

Said Ashar, “We think this study stands to make a large impact on the field and on the treatment of chronic pain in general.”

Comment? Email editor@colorado.edu.

Photos by Yoni Asher

Can chronic pain patients think themselves into wellness? An unprecedented brain imaging study aims to find out.

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Mysteries of the Teenage Brain

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 19:44:00 +0000

Mysteries of the Teenage Brain Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/01/2017 - 13:44

Lisa Marshall

Teenagers and young adults think and act differently from grownups. CU scientist Marie Banich is helping us see why.

Marie Banich vividly remembers the day she first saw a human brain up close.

It was a Friday morning in 1983. She was standing in a frigid basement morgue, one of two graduate students among a group of University of Chicago medical students. The air was thick with the odor of formaldehyde. Her instructor was headed straight for her with a pale, lesion-riddled slice of gray matter from a cadaver cupped in his hands: "What do you think this person died from?" he asked, pushing the specimen closer.

"And then the world started to go dark," said Banich, who raced to a nearby sink.

She was mortified, but returned for the following week’s brain cutting lesson, lured by pure fascination with the then-little-understood 3-pound organ.

In adolescence, the human brain is still a work in progress."

She wanted to know more: What made her mom a leftie? Why was her dad so good at building things? And what was going on inside her own brain to enable her to, in her early 20s, grasp things she couldn’t as a teen?

"I was fascinated early on with this idea that variations in the structure and function of the brain actually shape the way we experience our world," she said recently over coffee at a North Boulder café.

Now a professor at CU, Banich literally wrote the book on cognitive neuroscience: The fourth edition of her 1997 textbook Cognitive Neuroscience comes out later this year. And, as a pioneer in the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain imaging in adolescents, she’s helped shed light on why teenagers and young adults think — and act — differently from adults. This year, she and other CU researchers joined a landmark multi-center study that will follow 10,000 children from age nine for 10 years to explore precisely how their brain changes and what factors shape the change.

"Over the years, we’ve learned that adolescence is an incredibly important time for brain development, when the brain is particularly malleable and receptive to its environment," said Banich, of CU Boulder's Institute of Cognitive Science and Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. "But we only have broad brush strokes. We need a clearer picture."

Mapping the Teen Brain

Early brain research focused on diseased or injured brains. Neuroscientists would pore over the brain of someone who had died with cognitive deficits, looking for lesions as clues to which regions controlled what functions.

“If you look at the systems that allow you to control and coordinate your behavior — what some might refer to as your free will — that is all still developing.”

The 1990s advent of fMRI, which measures blood flow as a proxy for brain activity, allowed researchers to study healthy, living subjects and look beyond structure to see how the brain functioned. And because fMRI was painless, it could be used on minors.

Banich was hired at CU in 2000 in part because of her expertise in fMRI techniques, then relatively new. She worked with colleagues at CU Anschutz to get a neuroimaging program off the ground.

At the time, scientists thought the teen brain had fully developed because it was about the same weight and shape as an adult brain. But Banich’s work has shown otherwise.

"If you look at basic cognitive abilities, they are pretty mature by age 16," she said. "But if you look at the systems that allow you to control and coordinate your behavior — what some might refer to as your free will — that is all still developing."

The frontal lobes, which serve an executive function, and the white matter, which helps different regions talk to each other, continue to refine well into early adulthood, for example.

Meanwhile, the unfinished teen brain interacts with the world uniquely.

In a series of studies in the early 2000s funded by the MacArthur Foundation, Banich and colleagues showed that teens lack a mature ability to conceptualize the future, have less self-control, are less organized in their decision making, are more vulnerable to peer pressure — and are much more sensitive to reward than to punishment. By the early-to-mid 20s, these traits tend to fade.

Said Banich, "In adolescence, the carrot is huge and the stick is practically invisible."

Work by her and others helped influence the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 decision to abolish the death penalty for juveniles and 2010 decision to eliminate, for them, most life sentences without parole.

Banich’s early writings also inspired a new generation of neuroscientists.

"She was a role model," said UC Berkeley psychology professor Silvia Bunge, who read Banich’s early work as a graduate student and recently discussed a new Banich paper with her students. "She was part of the first generation of researchers doing brain imaging research to study human cognition, and she has moved mountains to advance this field."

Pruning the Gray Matter

At a time when teens are biologically hardwired for risky behavior, their brains may also be especially sensitive to the consequences of it.

As Banich explains it, the teen brain is like a bush that’s leafing out in springtime, then selectively pruning itself to suit its environment. Exposure to drugs or trauma, for example, may stunt that natural development.

In one 2016 study of 466 adults who had used marijuana, Banich found that the earlier they started, the less developed their white matter, which plays a key role in helping different parts of the brain communicate. Those subjects reporting early or frequent drug use also showed alterations in the shape of certain brain regions — one associated with reward, another with memory.

Just what this means for behavior or cognition is still to be determined, but Banich said it suggests that "if you start early and use marijuana a lot, there are likely to be lasting effects on the brain."

In contrast, the experience of exercise or intellectual stimulation might fuel positive brain development, she believes.

A self-described nerd who grew up feeling out of place in a "stereotypical New Jersey town where the guys wanted to be football players and the girls wanted to be cheerleaders," Banich credits her parents for encouraging her to travel and to go to college.

"Looking back on it I think I was fortunate to end up in a really beautiful environment for my brain in my late teens and early 20s — it was the right stimulus at the right time."

Future Frontiers

In 2012, Banich founded the Intermountain Neuroimaging Consortium at CU Boulder, bringing together neuroscientists from across the region to study everything from addiction to pain to learning and memory. They all rely on fMRI as a tool. Instead of examining one slice of brain at a time, they can measure 40 slices, each divided into a 64 by 64 grid, every half second for a half hour during one scan of a healthy human.

Currently, the center is one of 21 test sites nationwide for the federally supported Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. It has already begun testing teenagers.

Banich, who serves as co-principal investigator with CU professor John Hewitt, director of the Institute for Behavioral Genetics, hopes the study will fill in some of the many remaining gaps in our understanding of the teenage brain. Is there a phase when the brain is most sensitive to the effects of drugs? Of excess screen time? How great a role does genetics play?

In her rare spare time, Banich travels — sightseeing in Italy, hiking in Sedona — to "press the reset button" on a brain she knows is prone to obsessing about work.

She also cares for her mother, who recently had a stroke, and pursues other projects aimed at divining the neurological underpinnings of addiction, which afflicted one close family member, and mental illness, which drove another to suicide.

"All of these life experiences have really humbled me and made me realize the limits to what I know about the brain," she said. "There’s still so much work to be done."

Illustration by Dan Page; Photo courtesy Marie Banich

Teenagers and young adults think and act differently from grownups. CU scientist Marie Banich is helping us see why.

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