Tags
27 Friday Jan 2023
Posted creative arts therapy, Uncategorized
inTags
30 Friday Dec 2022
Posted brain
in19 Wednesday Oct 2022
Substance addiction is a perplexing phenomenon for those who fortunately do not suffer from it. Although it is incredible to believe that people would willfully engage in behaviors that create problems with their lives on so many levels, substance addiction is a reality for millions of people. According to data published by NIDA (National Institutes of Drug Abuse) nearly 20 million Americans have undergone opioid de-addiction therapy in 2010. What makes some people so susceptible to substance abuse while others are able to protect themselves? A study of brain images of heroin addicts, conducted by Gold, Liu and colleagues, shows significant differences in brain activity even in resting state, without heroin use. Functional MRI (fMRI) images from opioid addicted patients were compared with similar images from health people.
Resting state fMRI images of men undergoing opioid substitution therapy showed that areas of the brain engaged in reward perception, motivation, memory and self-control show significantly different activity than comparable regions in healthy individuals. Areas like the orbitofrontal cortex, cingulate gyrus and hippocampus show consistently different resting state activities in heroin-dependent and healthy subjects. The prefrontal cortex of dependent patients was less active than that of healthy patients in the resting state, during de-addiction therapy. However, this area which controls motivation as well as degree of inhibition, was observed to be highly active during periods of opioid use. Other areas of the brain like the hippocampus which regulates memory, also showed activity patterns that were different from those in healthy subjects, in the resting state in addicted individuals. These images shed light on the mechanism of addiction in people and the areas of the brain that are engaged, perhaps constitutively, in sustaining addiction.
Given that study participants were enrolled from de-addiction clinics, episodes of heroin abuse had already taken place in their life. It is unclear whether the same areas of the brain would show similar activity in naive individuals. If this possibility is validated by comparative studies, these fMRI imaging techniques may have tremendous diagnostic potential in identifying people who are at high risk for addiction. One drawback of this investigation is that only male patients were included in this study. Therefore, we do not know whether there are gender-based differences in the resting state brain activity of female opioid addicts.
The study does throw up interesting possibilities. It is possible to enroll naive subjects, possibly teenagers or pre-teens, and obtain baseline brain images before these people have tried out any addictive substance like tobacco, heroin or alcohol. Follow-up studies with the same people can indicate whether experience of addictive substances can change the baseline pattern of activity. This kind of long-term and long-range study may help to identify brain markers for specific addiction disorders. The study also indicates why counseling fails to have an impact on some patients. It is likely that profound changes in resting state brain activity resulting from addiction may override the effects of received and processed advice.
Reference
Zhang Y, Tian J, Yuan K, Liu P, Zhuo L, Qin W, Zhao L, Liu J, von Deneen KM, Klahr NJ, Gold MS, & Liu Y (2011). Distinct resting-state brain activities in heroin-dependent individuals. Brain research, 1402, 46-53 PMID: 21669407
10 Friday Jun 2022
Posted brain
in03 Thursday Dec 2020
Posted brain, drugs, research, Uncategorized
inThe human brain is the most complex organ in the body. This three-pound mass of gray and white matter sits at the center of all human activity—you need it to drive a car, to enjoy a meal, to breathe, to create an artistic masterpiece, and to enjoy everyday activities. In brief, the brain regulates your body’s basic functions; enables you to interpret and respond to everything you experience; and shapes your thoughts, emotions, and behavior.
The brain is made up of many parts that all work together as a team. Different parts of the brain are responsible for coordinating and performing specific functions. Drugs can alter important brain areas that are necessary for life-sustaining functions and can drive the compulsive drug abuse that marks addiction. Brain areas affected by drug abuse include:
How do the parts of the brain communicate?
The brain is a communications center consisting of billions of neurons, or nerve cells. Networks of neurons pass messages back and forth among different structures within the brain, the spinal cord, and nerves in the rest of the body (the peripheral nervous system). These nerve networks coordinate and regulate everything we feel, think, and do.
To send a message, a brain cell (neuron) releases a chemical (neurotransmitter) into the space (synapse) between it and the next cell. The neurotransmitter crosses the synapse and attaches to proteins (receptors) on the receiving brain cell. This causes changes in the receiving cell—the message is delivered.
How do drugs work in the brain?
Drugs are chemicals that affect the brain by tapping into its communication system and interfering with the way neurons normally send, receive, and process information. Some drugs, such as marijuana and heroin, can activate neurons because their chemical structure mimics that of a natural neurotransmitter. This similarity in structure “fools” receptors and allows the drugs to attach onto and activate the neurons. Although these drugs mimic the brain’s own chemicals, they don’t activate neurons in the same way as a natural neurotransmitter, and they lead to abnormal messages being transmitted through the network.
Other drugs, such as amphetamine or cocaine, can cause the neurons to release abnormally large amounts of natural neurotransmitters or prevent the normal recycling of these brain chemicals. This disruption produces a greatly amplified message, ultimately disrupting communication channels.
How do drugs work in the brain to produce pleasure?
Most drugs of abuse directly or indirectly target the brain’s reward system by flooding the circuit with dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter present in regions of the brain that regulate movement, emotion, motivation, and feelings of pleasure. When activated at normal levels, this system rewards our natural behaviors. Overstimulating the system with drugs, however, produces euphoric effects, which strongly reinforce the behavior of drug use—teaching the user to repeat it.
Most drugs of abuse target the brain’s reward system by flooding it with dopamine.
How does stimulation of the brain’s pleasure circuit teach us to keep taking drugs?
Our brains are wired to ensure that we will repeat life-sustaining activities by associating those activities with pleasure or reward. Whenever this reward circuit is activated, the brain notes that something important is happening that needs to be remembered, and teaches us to do it again and again without thinking about it. Because drugs of abuse stimulate the same circuit, we learn to abuse drugs in the same way.
Why are drugs more addictive than natural rewards?
When some drugs of abuse are taken, they can release 2 to 10 times the amount of dopamine that natural rewards such as eating and sex do.15 In some cases, this occurs almost immediately (as when drugs are smoked or injected), and the effects can last much longer than those produced by natural rewards. The resulting effects on the brain’s pleasure circuit dwarf those produced by naturally rewarding behaviors.16,17The effect of such a powerful reward strongly motivates people to take drugs again and again. This is why scientists sometimes say that drug abuse is something we learn to do very, very well.
Long-term drug abuse impairs brain functioning.
What happens to your brain if you keep taking drugs?
For the brain, the difference between normal rewards and drug rewards can be described as the difference between someone whispering into your ear and someone shouting into a microphone. Just as we turn down the volume on a radio that is too loud, the brain adjusts to the overwhelming surges in dopamine (and other neurotransmitters) by producing less dopamine or by reducing the number of receptors that can receive signals. As a result, dopamine’s impact on the reward circuit of the brain of someone who abuses drugs can become abnormally low, and that person’s ability to experience anypleasure is reduced.
This is why a person who abuses drugs eventually feels flat, lifeless, and depressed, and is unable to enjoy things that were previously pleasurable. Now, the person needs to keep taking drugs again and again just to try and bring his or her dopamine function back up to normal—which only makes the problem worse, like a vicious cycle. Also, the person will often need to take larger amounts of the drug to produce the familiar dopamine high—an effect known as tolerance.
Decreased Dopamine Transporters in a Methamphetamine Abuser18
How does long-term drug taking affect brain circuits?
We know that the same sort of mechanisms involved in the development of tolerance can eventually lead to profound changes in neurons and brain circuits, with the potential to severely compromise the long-term health of the brain. For example, glutamate is another neurotransmitter that influences the reward circuit and the ability to learn. When the optimal concentration of glutamate is altered by drug abuse, the brain attempts to compensate for this change, which can cause impairment in cognitive function. Similarly, long-term drug abuse can trigger adaptations in habit or non-conscious memory systems. Conditioning is one example of this type of learning, in which cues in a person’s daily routine or environment become associated with the drug experience and can trigger uncontrollable cravings whenever the person is exposed to these cues, even if the drug itself is not available. This learned “reflex” is extremely durable and can affect a person who once used drugs even after many years of abstinence.
What other brain changes occur with abuse?
Chronic exposure to drugs of abuse disrupts the way critical brain structures interact to control and inhibit behaviors related to drug use. Just as continued abuse may lead to tolerance or the need for higher drug dosages to produce an effect, it may also lead to addiction, which can drive a user to seek out and take drugs compulsively. Drug addiction erodes a person’s self-control and ability to make sound decisions, while producing intense impulses to take drugs.
25 Tuesday Aug 2020
Posted brain, Creative Therapy Tools, drugs
inTags
The human brain is the most complex organ in the body. This three-pound mass of gray and white matter sits at the center of all human activity—you need it to drive a car, to enjoy a meal, to breathe, to create an artistic masterpiece, and to enjoy everyday activities. In brief, the brain regulates your body’s basic functions; enables you to interpret and respond to everything you experience; and shapes your thoughts, emotions, and behavior.
The brain is made up of many parts that all work together as a team. Different parts of the brain are responsible for coordinating and performing specific functions. Drugs can alter important brain areas that are necessary for life-sustaining functions and can drive the compulsive drug abuse that marks addiction. Brain areas affected by drug abuse include:
How do the parts of the brain communicate?
The brain is a communications center consisting of billions of neurons, or nerve cells. Networks of neurons pass messages back and forth among different structures within the brain, the spinal cord, and nerves in the rest of the body (the peripheral nervous system). These nerve networks coordinate and regulate everything we feel, think, and do.
To send a message, a brain cell (neuron) releases a chemical (neurotransmitter) into the space (synapse) between it and the next cell. The neurotransmitter crosses the synapse and attaches to proteins (receptors) on the receiving brain cell. This causes changes in the receiving cell—the message is delivered.
How do drugs work in the brain?
Drugs are chemicals that affect the brain by tapping into its communication system and interfering with the way neurons normally send, receive, and process information. Some drugs, such as marijuana and heroin, can activate neurons because their chemical structure mimics that of a natural neurotransmitter. This similarity in structure “fools” receptors and allows the drugs to attach onto and activate the neurons. Although these drugs mimic the brain’s own chemicals, they don’t activate neurons in the same way as a natural neurotransmitter, and they lead to abnormal messages being transmitted through the network.
Other drugs, such as amphetamine or cocaine, can cause the neurons to release abnormally large amounts of natural neurotransmitters or prevent the normal recycling of these brain chemicals. This disruption produces a greatly amplified message, ultimately disrupting communication channels.
How do drugs work in the brain to produce pleasure?
Most drugs of abuse directly or indirectly target the brain’s reward system by flooding the circuit with dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter present in regions of the brain that regulate movement, emotion, motivation, and feelings of pleasure. When activated at normal levels, this system rewards our natural behaviors. Overstimulating the system with drugs, however, produces euphoric effects, which strongly reinforce the behavior of drug use—teaching the user to repeat it.
Most drugs of abuse target the brain’s reward system by flooding it with dopamine.
How does stimulation of the brain’s pleasure circuit teach us to keep taking drugs?
Our brains are wired to ensure that we will repeat life-sustaining activities by associating those activities with pleasure or reward. Whenever this reward circuit is activated, the brain notes that something important is happening that needs to be remembered, and teaches us to do it again and again without thinking about it. Because drugs of abuse stimulate the same circuit, we learn to abuse drugs in the same way.
Why are drugs more addictive than natural rewards?
When some drugs of abuse are taken, they can release 2 to 10 times the amount of dopamine that natural rewards such as eating and sex do.15 In some cases, this occurs almost immediately (as when drugs are smoked or injected), and the effects can last much longer than those produced by natural rewards. The resulting effects on the brain’s pleasure circuit dwarf those produced by naturally rewarding behaviors.16,17The effect of such a powerful reward strongly motivates people to take drugs again and again. This is why scientists sometimes say that drug abuse is something we learn to do very, very well.
Long-term drug abuse impairs brain functioning.
What happens to your brain if you keep taking drugs?
For the brain, the difference between normal rewards and drug rewards can be described as the difference between someone whispering into your ear and someone shouting into a microphone. Just as we turn down the volume on a radio that is too loud, the brain adjusts to the overwhelming surges in dopamine (and other neurotransmitters) by producing less dopamine or by reducing the number of receptors that can receive signals. As a result, dopamine’s impact on the reward circuit of the brain of someone who abuses drugs can become abnormally low, and that person’s ability to experience anypleasure is reduced.
This is why a person who abuses drugs eventually feels flat, lifeless, and depressed, and is unable to enjoy things that were previously pleasurable. Now, the person needs to keep taking drugs again and again just to try and bring his or her dopamine function back up to normal—which only makes the problem worse, like a vicious cycle. Also, the person will often need to take larger amounts of the drug to produce the familiar dopamine high—an effect known as tolerance.
Decreased Dopamine Transporters in a Methamphetamine Abuser18
How does long-term drug taking affect brain circuits?
We know that the same sort of mechanisms involved in the development of tolerance can eventually lead to profound changes in neurons and brain circuits, with the potential to severely compromise the long-term health of the brain. For example, glutamate is another neurotransmitter that influences the reward circuit and the ability to learn. When the optimal concentration of glutamate is altered by drug abuse, the brain attempts to compensate for this change, which can cause impairment in cognitive function. Similarly, long-term drug abuse can trigger adaptations in habit or non-conscious memory systems. Conditioning is one example of this type of learning, in which cues in a person’s daily routine or environment become associated with the drug experience and can trigger uncontrollable cravings whenever the person is exposed to these cues, even if the drug itself is not available. This learned “reflex” is extremely durable and can affect a person who once used drugs even after many years of abstinence.
What other brain changes occur with abuse?
Chronic exposure to drugs of abuse disrupts the way critical brain structures interact to control and inhibit behaviors related to drug use. Just as continued abuse may lead to tolerance or the need for higher drug dosages to produce an effect, it may also lead to addiction, which can drive a user to seek out and take drugs compulsively. Drug addiction erodes a person’s self-control and ability to make sound decisions, while producing intense impulses to take drugs.
23 Thursday Jul 2020
Tags
For those suffering depression or anxiety, using cannabis for relief may not be the long-term answer.
That’s according to new research from a team at Colorado State University seeking scientific clarity on how cannabis — particularly chronic, heavy use — affects neurological activity, including the processing of emotions.
Researchers led by Lucy Troup, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, have published a study in PeerJ describing their findings from an in-depth, questionnaire-based analysis of 178 college-aged, legal users of cannabis. Recreational cannabis became legal in Colorado in 2014. Since then, seven other states have enacted legalization for recreational use, while many others allow medical use.
“One thing we wanted to focus on was the significance of Colorado, the first state to legalize recreational cannabis, and its own unique population and use that occurs here,” Troup said.
Through the study, which was based solely upon self-reported use of the drug, the researchers sought to draw correlations between depressive or anxious symptoms and cannabis consumption.
They found that those respondents categorized with subclinical depression, who reported using the drug to treat their depressive symptoms, scored lower on their anxiety symptoms than on their depressive symptoms – so, they were actually more depressed than they were anxious. The same was true for self-reported anxiety sufferers: they were found to be more anxious than they were depressed. MORE HERE
07 Tuesday Jul 2020
Posted art, Art Therapy, Therapy, Wellness
inHere is an interesting article from the NYT about the brain and art from a professor of brain science at Columbia University.:
…… The portraiture that flourished in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century is a good place to start. Not only does this modernist school hold a prominent place in the history of art, it consists of just three major artists — Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele — which makes it easier to study in depth.
As a group, these artists sought to depict the unconscious, instinctual strivings of the people in their portraits, but each painter developed a distinctive way of using facial expressions and hand and body gestures to
communicate those mental processes.
Their efforts to get at the truth beneath the appearance of an individual both paralleled and were influenced by similar efforts at the time in the fields of biology and psychoanalysis. Thus the portraits of the modernists in the period known as “Vienna 1900” offer a great example of how artistic, psychological and scientific insights can enrich one another.
The idea that truth lies beneath the surface derives from Carl von Rokitansky, a gifted pathologist who was dean of the Vienna School of Medicine in the middle of the 19th century. Baron von Rokitansky compared what his clinician colleague Josef Skoda heard and saw at the bedsides of his patients with autopsy findings after their deaths. This systematic correlation of clinical and pathological findings taught them that only by going deep below the skin could they understand the nature of illness.
I’ve read many a book and chatted with art therapists about the psychological process involved in art and art making and this article comes from a different perspective; brain science.
28 Thursday May 2020
Posted brain, mental health, research
in09 Thursday Apr 2020
Do you know what the attributes of your right and left sides of your brain? Listed below are the common elements of left and right brain hemisphere’s. Plus go here to take the left/right side brain test to see which side may be dominant.
Left Hemisphere – Rational
Responds to verbal instructions
Problem solves by logically and sequentially looking at the parts of things
Looks at differences
Is planned and structured
Prefers established, certain information
Prefers talking and writing
Prefers multiple choice tests
Controls feelings
Prefers ranked authority structures
Right Hemisphere – Intuitive
Responds to demonstrated instructions
Problem solves with hunches, looking for patterns and configurations
Looks at similarities
Is fluid and spontaneous
Prefers elusive, uncertain information
Prefers drawing and manipulating objects
Prefers open ended questions
Free with feelings
Prefers collegial authority structures
It seems that lots of folks have emailed me about all sorts of other left/right side brain tests/quizzes online. Here are the top 2 tests.
Hemispheric Dominance Inventory Test: This test has 18 questions and you choice between 2 answers. I like the questions they seem interesting and thought provoking.
Right Brain vs Left Brain Creativity Test: This test of 54 questions is multiple choice with 4 choices and all of the questions are on one page like the test above. Some repeating of questions, which is fairly standard in personality type tests.