Tuberculosis antibiotic treating phobias

Jack Dikian

September 2011

A phobia is defined as the unrelenting fear of a situation, activity, or thing that causes one to want to avoid it. Lifetime prevalence of specific phobias appears to be approximately 5%. However, rates vary widely in different countries, from less than 1% in Northern Ireland to approximately 9% in the United States.

Specific phobias have effectively been treated with behavior therapy1 where classical conditioning thinking is that the response of phobic fear is a reflex acquired to non-dangerous stimuli. Therapy sometimes involves setting up phobic treatment involving exposure to the phobic stimulus in a safe and controlled setting. Flooding, physical and imaginative until the fear fades away can also be used.

Pharmacology, including SSRIs, MAOIs, RIMAs, TeCA, Benzodiazepines have been used as treatment options but more recently It has been shown that a combination of acute dosing of d-cycloserine, an old antibiotic medication used for treating tuberculosis, with exposure therapy facilitates the effects of exposure therapy of social phobia.

1. Marks, I. M. (1987). Fears, phobias, and rituals: Panic, anxiety, and their disorders. New York: Oxford University Press.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on...

Jack Dikian

September 2011

We are such stuff 
as dreams are made on

(The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158)

I know that it’s common nowadays for some to make light of Jung and especially Freud for placing emphasis on dreams.

Some, on the other hand will attest that their dreams are even smarter than them. For example, comments such as “I just had a dream in which I could remember lyrics of a song that I could not recall in my waking life”. Or “In my dream I was able to solve a calculus problem and felt I could solve mental arithmetic fluently and with clarity”.

At the recent convention of the American Psychological Association in San Diego, presenters suggested that dreaming may improve memory, enhance creativity, and help us prepare better for future events.A presentation reported based on word tests, suggests that people who take naps in which they dream are notably better at creative problem-solving than those who don’t. A conclusion that dreaming helps us combine ideas in new ways, and see connections between things that might otherwise seem to be unrelated.

A Harvard psychiatrist Daniel Schachter reported that the same areas in the brain that handle memory, such as the hippocampus, show increased activity when subjects are asked to imagine future events.

One of my personal favourites: Jung, C. G. & Jaffe, A. 1962. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. London: Collins. x

Using Diffusion Tensor Imaging to examine structural brain aberrations

Jack Dikian

August 2011

Flipping through a pile of brain scans, a neurologist or psychiatrist would be hard pressed to pick out the one that belonged to a schizophrenic. Although schizophrenics suffer from profound mental problems -- hallucinated conversations and imagined conspiracies are the best known -- their brains look more or less normal.

Whilst earlier Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) hint of slight brain structure anomalies, it is nevertheless difficult to explain how these lead to the symptoms observed in schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.

A variation of MRI called Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is now allowing neurologists to study the connections between different brain areas, and seeing minute structural aberrations.

Using Diffusion Tensor Imaging (see image), for example, memory and cognitive problems associated with schizophrenia are (in some cases) seen to be linked to flaws in nerve fibers near the hippocampus, a brain area crucial for learning and memory. If such diseases are rooted in subtle "wiring" problems involving axons, DTI can be used to look at complex network of nerve fibers connecting different brain areas.

DTI tracks the movement of water molecules in the brain. In most brain tissue, water molecules diffuse in all different directions. But they tend to diffuse along the length of axons, whose coating of white, fatty myelin holds them in. Pictures can be created of axons by analyzing the direction of water diffusion.

Neuroscientists are using DTI to study a host of disorders, including addiction, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, and various neurodegenerative diseases. For instance, DTI studies have shown that chronic alcoholism degrades the white-matter connections in the brain, which may explain the cognitive problems seen in heavy drinkers.

What Others See.

Jack Dikian

July 2011

Here is a quick look at what others (besides us humans) who share our world see.

1. Horses have an amazing range of vision - that is, except for what is right in front of them. They literally can’t spot whatever is between their eyes and therefore directly ahead due to their binocular vision.

2. Many birds can see differently. Pigeons, for example, can see literally millions of different hues and are thought to be among the best at colour detection ability of any animal on earth.

3. Cats and dogs do not have strong vision. They rely on scent and sound primarily as their sensory detection. Cats in particular have weak vision. They are colour blind, and cats more so than dogs.

4. Snakes have two sets of eyes. One set is the normal eyes that you see, and they detect colour quite well. But they also have vision pits that detect heat and “see” living creatures like an infrared detector.

5. Insects: to the human eye the flower looks solid yellow but insects can aim for the bullseye in the centre

6. Bee: the familiar mop top Dandelion is transformed for the bees

Painful Cringe

Jack Dikian

April 2011

It seems, according to British and German researchers* people vicariously experience embarrassment when observing others' public pratfalls or etiquette violations. Or more simply, the region of the brain that we use to process pain is the same as the one used when we cringe at other people’s embarrassing actions - the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula.

Writing in the journal PLoS ONE, the researchers say watching other people’s embarrassing mishaps triggered the brain regions more usually associated with processing physical pain. It appears we are feeling their ‘social pain’ for them – or empathizing with their misfortune.

One of the researchers said: ‘Worldwide, millions of people gather in groups to watch TV shows such as Pop Idol and America’s Next Top Model and collectively enjoy witnessing plights or mishaps happening to the candidates and perceive “vicarious embarrassment” or “embarrassment by proxy”.

‘The appeal of observing others’ plights exploited via television or internet seems to be present regardless of whether the person in focus realizes the mishap or not.

They go on to write that the activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula positively correlated with individual differences in trait empathy and that the findings establish the empathic process as a fundamental prerequisite for vicarious embarrassment experiences, thus connecting affect and cognition to interpersonal processes.

Apparently the reaction in the brain was more intense for the subjects who described themselves as very empathetic. Also, that the finding suggests there are two forms of empathy. When we see someone who knows they've behaved inappropriately, we co-experience their feelings. If the person doesn't realize what they've done, we react to our evaluation of the situation.

_____________________

* Sören Krach^1,2*, Jan Christopher Cohrs³, Nicole Cruz de Echeverría Loebell⁴, Tilo Kircher¹, Jens Sommer¹, Andreas Jansen¹, Frieder Michel Paulus¹

1 Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany, 2 Department of Neurology, Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany, 3 School of Psychology, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom, 4 Department of Psychology, Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany.

Social Stress, Identify and Brain Response

Jack Dikian

March 2011

Stein, Vidich and White expressed the concern back in the 1960’s that the advent of a mass society would lead to a loss of identity and hence to widespread anxiety or stress. As well as interest in the relationship between stress or anxiety and identity, research in how the brain responds to social stressors is growing.

How brain responds to social stressors is said to influence the body's immune system resulting in a number of illnesses. George Slavich and Shelley Taylor, of the UCLA, have shown, for example, that individuals who exhibit greater neural sensitivity to social rejection also exhibit greater increases in inflammatory activity to social stress. Chronic inflammation increase the risk of a variety of disorders, including asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancer, and depression.

The same team suggests that exposure to large amounts of social stress can make the brain respond by modifying the way the immune system responds to threats. These modifications can open the way for numerous diseases or infections to set in, which is why eliminating social stress should become a priority for most people.

Babies Can Count

Jack Dikian

February 2011

The University of Queensland study found children understood the concept of numbers and counting by the time they were 18 months old, at least six months earlier than previously thought.

Child development and milestone attainment has attracted significant research and the topic of a number of underlying models. More recent theories outline the developmental stages of children and identify the typical ages at which these growth milestones occur.

Freud's theory of psychosexual development is one of the best known, but also one of the most controversial. Freud believed that personality develops through a series of childhood stages during which the pleasure-seeking energies of the id become focused on certain erogenous areas.

The theory, put simply, psychosexual stages are either completed successfully, resulting in a healthy personality or if certain issues are not resolved at the appropriate stage, fixation can occur. A fixation is a persistent focus on an earlier psychosexual stage and until this conflict is resolved, the individual will remain "stuck" in this stage.

Piaget suggested that children learn actively through the play and developed stages of development. Piaget proposed the sensorimotor stage (birth to about age of 2) 
during which, the child learns about herself and his environment through motor and reflex actions. Thought derives from sensation and movement. The child learns that she is separate from her environment and that aspects of the environment — parents or favorite toys, objects — continue to exist even though they may be outside the reach of her senses.

His work on children’s quantitative development provided mathematics educators with crucial insights into how children learn mathematical concepts and ideas. Piaget provided tactual representations of mathematical concepts such as conservation of quantities, one-one correspondence, ordination, cardination, classification, and additive and multiplicative composition of numbers. Here he isn’t testing the child's ability to solve math problems, but her ability to solve spatial relationships that are a precursor to true understanding of mathematical operations.

The University of Queensland study found children understood the concept of numbers and counting by the time they were 18 months old, at least six months earlier than previously thought. The researchers showed simple videos of correct counting and incorrect counting to toddlers aged 15 months and toddlers aged 18 months, monitored their reactions and recorded the length of time the children watched each scenario.

The experiment showed that by the time children were 18 months old, they paid more attention to the correct counting video as opposed to the incorrect one.