The Heroin Epidemic. Part 1 What It Does to Our Brains

Heroin and opioids. They're a scourge in our schools, among our youth. Learn more from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

https://teens.drugabuse.gov/drug-facts/heroin


Then buy our book, Healing the Brain. Thank you!

CTE and real cost of football on Super Bowl Sunday

It's the biggest sports day of the year, Super Bowl Sunday, a festival of football. But a sport so celebrated is taking a toll on our youth and adults. Our book, Healing the Brain, gives a in-depth view of the science of concussions and CTE.

From KCCI.com

Another Iowa family is donating their son's brain in the name of CTE research, but they are doing so at the request of their son. Zac Easter's devotion to football started in third grade, one of those kids in the middle of the action hitting and getting hit.

"He's a young man who loved the sport, who like any other athlete didn't want to take himself out of a game -- unless somebody made him," said Brenda Easter, Zac's mother.

Zac played 10 years until he was forced to stop in the middle of his senior year at Indianola.
"He had three confirmed concussions and he had to quit," said Myles Easter, Zac's father.

During his final game, Zac was not backing down from an Ankeny lineman towering over him.
"I knew that last one was not good, at Ankeny, I could just see the look," said Myles Easter.
Zac's father was Indianola's defensive coach.

"I knew he was done. I knew that was it for football," said Myles Easer.

"'I'm good,' those were the words, 'I'm good to go,'," said Sue Wilson, Indianola athletic trainer of her conversation with Zac.

Wilson was on the sidelines in 2009 for each of Zac's concussions.

"Back then, they could return to the field 24 hours later -- sometimes they were back sooner than an ankle sprain," said Wilson.

In the fall of 2014, Zac complained of severe headaches, problems with balance and with his vision. His family remembers him commenting about memory loss problems -- having a hard time remembering things and some slurred speech.

It was a Des Moines doctor who first mentioned CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
"I remember looking at Zac and said 'What exactly is CTE' and he goes, 'It's like brain dementia mom,'," said Brenda Easter.

Several professional football players were among the first diagnosed with CTE after they died and the issue is the subject of the Hollywood movie "Concussion."

"I was in denial, you know we're tough guys in this family. We'll get through this you know heal up over time is what I thought," said Myles Easter.

Of course, mom went looking for help in research, and she discovered what her son already understood.

"He just looked at me and said mom, 'There's no hope for me. There are no treatment programs. I know more than most of the medical professionals I've talked to and there's no hope,'" said Brenda Easter.

Zac moved back home last fall as his condition got worse.

The family said it was very difficult to see a strong young man -- very intelligent -- really go downhill so quickly.

Zac knew CTE could only be diagnosed by direct tissue examination of the brain, after death.
"And he said to me, 'Mom, I want my brain donated to science,' and I said, 'Nope, someday Zac we'll do that but I don't think you're done with it yet so let me find the right help for us -- don't give up on me," said Brenda Easter.

Just after midnight on Dec. 19, Zac drove to Lake Ahquabi and shot himself. He left a note in his car apologizing to the first responders and called the sheriff's dispatch to tell them where he was.
"They heard the gunshot go off on the phone," said Myles Easter.

"We drove out there as fast as we could, and it was too late," said Brenda Easter.

Zac took care not to damage his brain preserving it for research. He left two notebooks in the family room including a journal that documented his daily battle with whatever had taken over his body, his thoughts and his life.

Mike Hadden is a professor in sports sciences at Simpson and just finished a sabbatical studying CTE.

"Through his journaling, we have so much material and information from this that it's almost as if, I mean, it's a firsthand experience and so we can tell that story," said Hadden.

Zac writes in detail about each concussion and other blows to the head his parents and coaches didn't know about.

"His buddies had to carry him off the field because he could hardly walk, he was that dazed but he wasn't going to tell anybody and his buddies were buddies so they didn't either," said Brenda Easter.
Concussion protocol has changed dramatically since Zac played his last game at Indianola six years ago. Wilson said these days any symptom, even a headache means the player is done for the game and won't come back until doctors clear them.

"I feel a little responsible because he was in our care. As an athletic trainer, our ultimate goal is to keep kids safe. That's why you go into athletic training," said Wilson.

In Zac's writings, he expresses his desire to tell young athletes it's OK to tell coaches if you're dizzy or have a headache, OK to take yourself off the field wanting to tell everyone that all those concussions changed him that helmets need to be safer that more research needs to be done on CTE.

LEARN MORE ABOUT IT....

Trump: The only thing we have to fear

After shocking executive actions from the White House, fear is gripping the world. The new president Trump has unleashed immigration bans, a plan to build a wall across the Mexican border, plans to cut Obamacare and more. Fear comprises our most primal emotion and we talk about it in our book series, Healing the Brain

(Book excerpt.) New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, Ph.D., and other neuroscientists have begun to examine the way the brain shapes our experience—and our memories—to generate the varied repertoire of human emotions. Specifically, as Dr. LeDoux explains, he chose to begin his inquiry by examining an emotion that is common to all living creatures: fear.

Wikimedia.com

Mice serve researchers well as animal models. These very distant relatives possess well over 90 per cent of the same genes as humans.

Years of research by many workers have given us extensive knowledge of the neural pathways involved in processing acoustic information, which is an excellent starting point for examining the neurological foundations of fear. The natural flow of auditory information—the way you hear music, speech, or anything else—is that the sound comes into the ear, enters the brain, goes up to a region called the auditory midbrain, then to the auditory thalamus, and ultimately to the auditory cortex. Thus, in the auditory pathway, as in other sensory systems, the cortex is the highest level of processing.

So the first question we asked when we began these studies of the fear system was: Does the sound have to go all the way to the auditory cortex in order for the rat to learn that the sound paired with the shock is dangerous? When we made lesions in the auditory cortex, we found that the animal could still make the association between the sound and the shock, and would still react with fear behavior to the sound alone. Since information from all our senses is processed in the cortex—which ultimately allows us to become conscious of seeing the predator or hearing the sound—the fact that the cortex didn’t seem to be necessary to fear conditioning was both intriguing and mystifying. We wanted to understand how something as important as the emotion of fear could be mediated by the brain if it wasn’t going into the cortex, where all the higher processes occur.

Some other area or areas of the brain must receive information from the thalamus and establish memories about experiences that stimulate a fear response.

So we next made lesions in the auditory thalamus and then in the auditory midbrain. The midbrain supplies the major sensory input to the thalamus, which in turn supplies the major sensory input to the cortex. What we found was that lesions in either of these subcortical areas completely eliminated the rat’s susceptibility to fear conditioning. If the lesions were made in an unconditioned rat, the animal could not learn to make the association between sound and shock, and if the lesions were made on a rat that had already been conditioned to fear the sound, it would no longer react to the sound. But if the stimulus didn’t have to reach the cortex, where was it going from the thalamus?

Some other area or areas of the brain must receive information from the thalamus and establish memories about experiences that stimulate a fear response. To find out, we made a tracer injection in the auditory thalamus (the part of the thalamus that processes sounds) and found that some cells in this structure projected axons into the amygdala. This is key, because the amygdala has for many years been known to be important in emotional responses. So it appeared that information went to the amygdala from the thalamus without going to the neocortex. We then did experiments with rats that had amygdala lesions, measuring freezing and blood pressure responses elicited by the sound after conditioning. We found that the amygdala lesion prevented conditioning from taking place. In fact, the responses are very similar to those of unconditioned animals that hear the sound for the first time, without getting the shock. So the amygdala is critical to this pathway.

It receives information about the outside world directly from the thalamus, and immediately sets in motion a variety of bodily responses. We call this thalamo-amygdala pathway the low road because it’s not taking advantage of all of the higher-level information processing that occurs in the neocortex, which also communicates with the amygdala.

GET YOUR COPY HERE.

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6 Books for A Buck to Fight Trump

Project Hope is sponsored by A Thousand Moms, which supports gay youth in foster care. Our campaign is to enlighten politicians, teachers, clergy, parents--any decision maker with facts and compassion about those in our country enduring extreme stress--now more than ever.

Health is controlled in large part by our brain. Think of addiction, immune diseases, birth defects.

Buy a e-version of our books and share them. Or take a look then buy the printed book on Amazon and give it to someone you think should be informed.

6 brain books for a buck

Our well-received series on the brain is now available as e-books (like Kindle). For only a $1.00 donation to www.AThousandMoms.org

Each book is 172-192 pages, illustrated with an informative glossary. AND, each book is written at a layman's level for easy understanding. Inquire about our 60-minute documentary.

Thank you!

Donate and click the book to download the e-pub.

Healing the Brain: Stress, Trauma and LGBT/Q Youth

Healing the Brain: Stress, Trauma and Development

     

Healing the Brain: Alcohol and Drugs

Healing the Brain: Domestic Violence and TBI

Understanding  the Brain: Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders

Healing the Brain: Memory

     For only a $1.00 donation to www.AThousandMoms.org    Thank you!

In pregnancy, not one drink is safe

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders describes the large number of developmental disabilities accountable to drinking alcohol while pregnant. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is the largest single, preventable cause of developmental disabilities. In our latest Healing the Brain book, we focus on this huge problem for children--a life-long matter--and for parents and for the foster care system, where many of these children come to live.

From the book:
Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs) are serious, lifelong birth defects and developmental disabilities caused by prenatal alcohol exposure. They are 100% preventable. Still, a surprisingly large number of children are born with FASDs each year. FASDs are a public health problem we must face. The U.S. Surgeon General has stated clearly that no amount of alcohol consumption can be considered safe for a pregnant woman and that alcohol can damage a fetus at any stage of pregnancy (Office of the Surgeon General, 2005). Yet, recent U.S. surveys reveal that approximately 12% of pregnant women still drink alcohol (CDC, 2004; SAMHSA, 2007). This means 1 in 8 fetuses are exposed to alcohol and placed at risk for FASDs. Maternal alcohol use is a growing worldwide phenomenon. It affects children and families of all ethnicities in all societies. Important international collaborative research is beginning to describe the alarming scope of this problem. While community and professional awareness of FASDs have increased, expanded awareness and informed action are sorely needed. 

FASDs are considered both medical conditions and developmental disabilities. 

FASDs cause a range of lasting medical and developmental problems and result in economic losses of billions of dollars. FASDs can also mean long-standing suffering for families. FASDs are considered both medical conditions and developmental disabilities. They include a wide range of conditions, from subtle neurodevelopmental impairments to the full fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS).  Individuals with FASDs can have physical, mental, behavioral, and/or learning disabilities with possible lifelong implications. Research shows that individuals with FASDs often have significant, long-term deficits in functional life skills.

These deficits lead to problems with day-to-day functioning as well as health care, including birth defects and increased risk for injury, unintended pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases. FASDs can also be associated with mental health difficulties, disrupted school and  job experiences, trouble with the law, difficulties with independent living, substance abuse, problems with parenting, and more (Bertrand et al., 2004; Streissguth et al., 2004). The median adjusted annual cost of fetal alcohol syndrome has been estimated at $3.6 billion, but the costs associated with the entire fetal alcohol spectrum are surely much higher.

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The Man Who Couldn’t Remember

Our new release, Healing the Brain: Memory gives readers insight into the memory systems in our brain. They make us who we are:

This is the power of memory: a system that captures pictures, smells, sounds, events, directions--endless amounts of information every day--and then seconds or decades later calls it up for us. Memories--what we've learned and what we've done--in a large sense make us who we are. To appreciate this, think if your ability to form any new memories were suddenly cut off.

Who would you be? By studying people who've lost their memories, scientists have learned enormous amounts about how learning and memory work in healthy brains. And what they used to think was relatively straightforward they've since found is fascinatingly complex, thanks in large part to one man.

Nova/PBS

The man known as H.M. made perhaps the most important contribution to the study of memory after an operation left him unable to form new long-term memories.

In 1953, radical, experimental brain surgery was used on a patient with severe epilepsy. The operation on "H.M." worked, but left him with almost no long-term memory. His case has helped scientists understand much more about the brain. For decades, the Connecticut native, known only by his initials, H.M., was the most famous patient in the study of memory and the human brain. He was a research participant for 53 years, first at the Hartford Hospital with William Beecher Scoville and Brenda Milner, then at the Montreal Neurological Institute, and after 1964 at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital. At H.M.’s death in 2008, his full name was revealed: Henry Gustav Molaison.

The horrendous price that H.M. paid for an operation that essentially ended his seizures was a severe case of amnesia--an inability to acquire new memories, to commit to memory even the simplest events of his day or the world around him, and then to effectively retrieve those memories. This unintentional experiment, never repeated, showed that the hippocampus and medial temporal lobes are where the brain converts short-term memory into long-term memory.

       

H.M. could remember everything that happened prior to the operation. He could remember the trauma of his childhood. He could remember going to elementary school, to high school, working in the assembly plant. What he couldn't do was hold on to new information for more than a few minutes.

Trump exploits and benefits from fear, our most powerful emotion

Volumes will be written about how Donald Trump sits in the White House despite low poll numbers, and a historically low popular vote.

One element of power, examined from Machiavelli on down, is the exploitation of fear, or the acquiescence to it. Trump is the new Teflon president, fast outpacing Ronald Reagan. The more he is critiqued for obvious lies, the more support he gains, irregardless of public polls. He sits in the White House despite losing the popular vote in historic proportions.

In our book, Healing the Brain, we look at fear, the most powerful emotion of all mammals. It can be said that Trump took the low road to the White House.

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, in his landmark book The Emotional Brain, looks closely at the irrational mechanisms of the fear response:

Years of research by many workers have given us extensive knowledge of the neural pathways involved in processing acoustic information, which is an excellent starting point for examining the neurological foundations of fear. The natural flow of auditory information—the way you hear music, speech, or anything else—is that the sound comes into the ear, enters the brain, goes up to a region called the auditory midbrain, then to the auditory thalamus, and ultimately to the auditory cortex. Thus, in the auditory pathway, as in other sensory systems, the cortex is the highest level of processing.

So the first question we asked when we began these studies of the fear system was: Does the sound have to go all the way to the auditory cortex in order for the rat to learn that the sound paired with the shock is dangerous? When we made lesions in the auditory cortex, we found that the animal could still make the association between the sound and the shock, and would still react with fear behavior to the sound alone. Since information from all our senses is processed in the cortex—which ultimately allows us to become conscious of seeing the predator or hearing the sound—the fact that the cortex didn’t seem to be necessary to fear conditioning was both intriguing and mystifying. We wanted to understand how something as important as the emotion of fear could be mediated by the brain if it wasn’t going into the cortex, where all the higher processes occur.

Some other area or areas of the brain must receive information from the thalamus and establish memories about experiences that stimulate a fear response.

So we next made lesions in the auditory thalamus and then in the auditory midbrain. The midbrain supplies the major sensory input to the thalamus, which in turn supplies the major sensory input to the cortex. What we found was that lesions in either of these subcortical areas completely eliminated the rat’s susceptibility to fear conditioning. If the lesions were made in an unconditioned rat, the animal could not learn to make the association between sound and shock, and if the lesions were made on a rat that had already been conditioned to fear the sound, it would no longer react to the sound. But if the stimulus didn’t have to reach the cortex, where was it going from the thalamus?

Some other area or areas of the brain must receive information from the thalamus and establish memories about experiences that stimulate a fear response. To find out, we made a tracer injection in the auditory thalamus (the part of the thalamus that processes sounds) and found that some cells in this structure projected axons into the amygdala. This is key, because the amygdala has for many years been known to be important in emotional responses. So it appeared that information went to the amygdala from the thalamus without going to the neocortex. We then did experiments with rats that had amygdala lesions, measuring freezing and blood pressure responses elicited by the sound after conditioning. We found that the amygdala lesion prevented conditioning from taking place. In fact, the responses are very similar to those of unconditioned animals that hear the sound for the first time, without getting the shock. So the amygdala is critical to this pathway.

It receives information about the outside world directly from the thalamus, and immediately sets in motion a variety of bodily responses. We call this thalamo-amygdala pathway the low road because it’s not taking advantage of all of the higher-level information processing that occurs in the neocortex, which also communicates with the amygdala.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE BRAIN AND FEAR IN OUR NEW BOOK