Check the first two or three minutes of this spinal cord operation. Before the dura is opened you can see the csf  (and cord?) moving through the membrane (around 0.30 plus). When the dura and then arachnoid is opened the flow of csf is clearly visible (around 2.10 to 3.00 plus)

This is a view of the exposed thoracic spinal cord with an abnormal vessel. As the surgeon cuts the abnormal vessel, you can see the pulsing of csf around the cord.

(Thanks to Ciara Dhiomasaigh, biodynamic craniosacral therapist in Galway, for the latter video)

A revolution in brain science has led to the discovery of new ways to stop persistent pain.

Ken Ng was 12 when he had his left leg amputated below the knee to stop the spread of bone cancer. It was the start of a long journey of pain. Phantom sensations from his amputated limb haunted him as a teenager, including stabbing sensations and a vice-like constriction around his stump. It got worse when he moved to Wellington to begin studying for his law degree. By 2009, the sensations flooding in from his absent limb were consuming him. 

Each day he downed a succession of prescription painkillers – codeine, tramadol, Neurofen and Voltaren. “I couldn’t really study any more, I couldn’t sit my exams. It made me introverted, I didn’t want anything to do with people. I wasn’t eating, I stopped going to lectures and the tramadol was making me hallucinate.” Ng sought help from his GP, who referred him to Capital & Coast District Health Board’s pain clinic. Luckily for Ng, the clinic had just begun to offer a simple but revolutionary new therapy, which recognises that some types of chronic pain are caused not by tissue damage but by changes in the wiring of the brain. Ng started his treatment with two weeks of computer exercises looking at pictures of right and left legs, and then began mirror therapy.

Ng’s occupational therapist, Maria Polaczuk, seated him with a large mirror positioned upright between his legs so it reflected his whole right leg. “All I could see was two bare normal legs. I massaged my right foot with my hands, manipulated it up and down. I was getting a sense of what a foot felt like.” As he looked at this reflected whole leg in the mirror, where usually he would see an amputated limb, something strange started to happen. “The tingling painful sensation in my stump started to fade and become less prominent.”

After two weeks of mirror exercises, four times a day, the phantom pain disappeared altogether. Now 22, Ng has been able to stop taking painkillers. He has had one brief attack of phantom pain, after a period of stress, but apart from that he experiences only the more routine discomfort of pressure on his stump from his prosthesis. Mirror therapy is one byproduct of a great leap forward in science’s understanding of pain and how it is manufactured in the human brain.

A decade and a half of brain imaging has found that although tissue damage is very important in determining pain, it is not the only ingredient. When you injure part of your body, an alarm goes off in the central nervous system in the spinal cord and brain. The brain constructs the pain experience by assessing not just the injury but also thoughts, feelings, context, beliefs, expectations, past experiences and genetics. Any of these factors can turn the volume up or down on pain. These other factors can also influence whether the brain’s pain system becomes stuck on high alert in the long term, even when an initial injury has subsided. Some 700,000 New Zealanders, or one in six, suffer from chronic pain. This is pain that has lasted for three months or more; arthritis and back pain are two common types.

Click here for more:

http://www.listener.co.nz/lifestyle/health/no-pain-big-gain/

Let your mind settle for a minute by closing your eyes and letting your breathing slow. Come into body awareness and be in sensation. Notice your midline structures and the neural tone within them. That’s the activity of your neurons as they impulse. Know that there is an endless hum of activity here – day and night – streaming through your body. Most of the impulses are in the brain from neuron to neuron. Wait and listen to the synaptic melody that interplays through trillions of pathways and your mind will start to reveal how complex it truly is and how mobile. Feel into its 3D nature. The potential of the our central nervous system is almost limitless. Even though we live our lives in a groove our neural nature is able to offer much more remarkable abilities than getting up in the morning and running through the same events each day – it can open up to the stream of life by a mirrored relationship to the stars around us. It’s nature is to be complex and flexible. Your mind is galactic in its capacity, not just a small lump of material in your head but through its matrices of connections you are a galaxy.

Now that you’ve become open to the pathways in your brain, be interested in the space between them and the space of your neural matrix. That’s the space in your brain, just like the space out there in the cosmos. It’s what the stars move in. It’s what your mind operates in. Look at the pictures below and let the images filter into your system.

A study of 10 social groups of macaque females showed that the activity level of an individual’s immune genes was an accurate predictor of her social rank.

“A study of rhesus macaque monkeys may have solved a long-standing puzzle on a link between social rank and health.

In a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team also showed that the monkey’s immunity changed when social rank was altered.

The work suggests that status drives immune health, rather than vice-versa.

A great many studies have shown associations in both humans and non-human primates between social environment and biological markers of health.

In previous studies of rhesus macaques, the so-called dominance rank has been correlated to levels of the stress-linked glucocorticoid hormones, sex hormones, the brain chemicals serotonin and dopamine, and white blood cell counts.

But one unanswered question concerns cause and effect: does a compromised immunity or imbalance of some chemical cause a particular social rank, or does taking on a particular social rank set the immune system and neural dials?

Jenny Tung, now at Duke University, and colleagues addressed this question by carefully assigning social rank to 10 groups of rhesus macaques, each containing five females.

This can be done by altering the order in which females are introduced into the group; the later she arrives, the lower her social rank.

The level of the blood’s immunity seem to respond to changes in social rank

The team then measured the levels of a broad class of immune cells, peripheral blood mononuclear cells, in the bloodstream.

They found that on the basis of those levels of circulating immune cells alone, they could predict an individual female’s social rank with 80% accuracy.

Further studies that investigated the degree to which hundreds of immunity-related genes were “switched on” also showed increased immune activity in higher-ranking females.

What is more, the team found that as rank shifted among seven of the females, the data corresponding to gene activity was again enough to guess an individual’s new rank with an accuracy of 85%.

“The current results support the idea that changes in gene regulation help to explain links between the social environment and physiology, potentially supplying an important piece to the puzzle of how social effects ‘get under the skin’,” the team wrote.

Though the findings might seem to suggest that low social rank, or a decrease in social rank, can lead to reduced immune health, the team said it was “encouraging” that the effects can be counteracted by a change in the social environment.

“Our results motivate efforts to develop a nuanced understanding of social effects on gene regulation,” they wrote, “with the aim of both exploring its evolutionary and ecological consequences and addressing its effects on human health.”

For more info go to:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17663133

The process of gastrulation in the third week after conception converts ectoderm to mesoderm so the embryonic disk becomes triple layered and the first midline emerges from mesoderm – the primal midline. However the process of initiation starts with the primitive streak emerging on the ectoderm layer. The area of the mesoderm at the top of the notochord is the cardiogenic area out of which emerges the heart. A similar process takes place in the ectoderm layer as the neural tube develops and the growth of the brain at the top of the tube to produce a unique moment in development at enfoldment when the heart and brain are right next to each other then as the face develops there’s a pulling apart.

Actually there’s so much similarity between heart and brain even though they become quite different structures with different functions – at their core they both retain the original chambers of life: four ventricles. This is a remarkable body reflection and as your skills deepen you will notice how similar the potency is in both sets of chambers, one set is full of CSF (blood serum) the other full of blood. At one point the heart is at the top of the notochord just like the brain is at the top of the neural tube, then as the heart folds into its place at the front of the body, the notochord moves between the heart and the brain and ends up moving through what will become the cranial base as the heart descends down the length of the developing spine to the the centre of the thorax.

The endoderm, gut tube and umbilicus are quite different in their development. The gut is design to be in relationship with the outside world and the heart/brain the internal world. After all the gut takes in food, it creates the lungs which take in air. Both ends are open to the world and there’s a development of the umbilicus which is entwined with the gut development and is part of an internal/external relationship. In fact, it’s our first relationship into the external world of the placenta, the uterus and mother/other. Consequently the potency of the gut and umbilicus is quite different to the heart and brain. The gut, the umbilicus and the amniotic space are all connected. This means that the space around us is an interesting mix of yok sac/gut/umbilicus and neural tube/amniotic sac with potency from the primal midline flowing into the space and constantly potentising it.

‘Pain is 100% all the time produced by the brain’

After 3 to 6 months tissue damage will be repaired – chronic pain is from the brain

‘You can retrain the brain’

A BCST practitioner touches the client’s body with a highly developed felt sense of their own system and a honed ability to listen through touch that creates a phenomenal space which is both stimulatory, reflective and therapeutic. There’s a remarkable ability we all have that can only be tapped in relationship with another, it’s the ability to creatively reorganize our structure. The body can morph and adjust from within itself, through its own body intelligence. All it needs is the right environment which is supplied by the practitioner’s touch and presence. It’s a knowing presence that appreciates the body and can listen to the shape of things. When touch is able to open up to health and deeply acknowledge the overwhelming strength and order in our bodies then there is a revolution that produces new forms. Tissues and structures automatically shift and adjust in a sequence and order that is emerging from within the body system not from outside. The therapist is like an advocate of the client’s physiology and that empowers the body to drop into its deeper mechanisms of renewal that have their basis in how the body was formed during embryonic and fetal development. These forces often lie dormant in the background only to be catalysed into action through the right touch.

When health is sought for, traumatic patterns, pain and suffering can all be smoothly synthesized into a new order as the body dissolves into a deep fluid state that underlies the physical. This is a medium for the nervous system to regulate, muscles to relax and organs to transpose to a new chemistry. In the shifts and adjustments there is greater freedom of movement both at the micro and the gross levels.

The body holds huge possibilities for recovery and regeneration and joints that are painful and distorted can become at ease and mobile. The body can glide and re-posture as the BCST practitioner facilitates a relational field to the inherent life forces that are present in the body. Latent patterns of emotion and mental states emerge and resolve with the physiological changes to produce reorganization that is systemic. When change takes place across the whole body system there is deep integration and long term resolution is possible.

The practitioner’s orientation and understanding of the relational field has changed significantly over the past 10 years, and changed beyond measure over the last 20 years. The initial models of cranial osteopathy were grounded in a format-based approach – the application of a hold or technique. This progressed to a more ‘non doing’ approach i.e. being more receptive to a client’s system and listening. So what makes a BCST session these days different?

Whilst we have all claimed to be receptive in our attention, BCST goes a step further. Instead of gently peering into our clients systems and following patterns that arise, it asks to wait with a soft presence. Allowing time for the organic process of the relational field to be established and then letting the body talk and being skilled at listening. From this place we can behold the emergence of a liveliness that bubbles up from the fluid medium the body is soaked in. This allows the client’s system to bring to the surface the change it wants to make in this fluid-tissue relationship. This can reshape the physical body and renovate the fluid electrochemical pathways at the deepest, most profound level.

The practitioner is being receptive to the unfolding narrative of the body system and may find themselves using words that sound more like an artist’s description of texture or a wine taster’s description of bouquet. We have become a league of watchers and feelers that are sampling, co-experiencing, and truly touching the client’s body. We are no longer bringing an agenda. This therapy has become less intentional yet more deeply interactive. We feel how the body wants to reveal itself. We are not insisting on how we perceive it could or should be according to its shape, structure, form, function or dynamic. We are in fact in a deeper relationship than ever before but it’s reflective of a more primordial one. It has with it the hope of meeting the deepest inner nature of a client whereby the neutrality, recognition and acknowledgement of another person’s reality is absolute, non-judgemental and profoundly trusting in their ability to heal. There’s no room for headiness or intellectual ideas of how things should be but rather an innate urge to feel the real as it’s presented.

As I write this I realize even more deeply that what we are doing is taking body therapy to a whole new way of relating which has more in common with new physics and a deep philosophy of life than a bodywork. Touch is the domain of many a bodywork but sensing another’s system through a bigger sensory field that is our connective tissue body and utilizing all our receptors to offer a satellite dish to our clients, is a depth of listening that I believe surmounts many therapeutic processes out there. We are being fully receptive to the client’s body, without strain, we wait and allow whatever needs to rise to the surface to emerge, and let the mind still, dropping wholly into our fluid connective tissue potency system. This is a much more sophisticated mechanism of interaction and it seems to me there is little room for a ‘state of balance’ as it was once understood.

Perhaps it is better understood when we look at the nature of embryology. Embryologists refer to patterning as a definition of early organizing of embryonic polarity that includes the formation of the notochord and gastrulation leading to the foundation of a midline and all three germ cells necessary for construction of the body systems. All of this begins in the first week after conception as embryonic cells start exploring movement in 3-D, defining front – back relationships, side to side and left right. The first totipotent cells produced by the first cell dividing start to exhibit these properties.

As cell division establishes over the first few days the new cells start to experience space differently as the cell population increases. The mass of cells transforms to produce a first body called the blastocyst, which is a structure with an internal fluid space and a cell membrane. Cells go on responding to the environmental conditions within the mother as well as following an inherent blueprint pattern within them and position themselves around each other by oscillating and rotating using fluid fluctuations to feel their way into an established order. These are all expressions of patterning that carry on throughout the formation of the midlines as well as the body’s organs and limbs. The whole embryonic formation is a process of cell patterning.

I wonder if the body is dropping back into ‘patterning’ when a ‘state of balance’ is arising – cells and the fluid system connecting back with its original orientations to space or the relational field. Body-shaping continues to occur by physical matter following its inherent blueprint instruction and responding to both these internal cell dynamics as well as outside environmental forces.

So perhaps the movements we feel are the repositioning of cells towards each other and the streaming of fluid reminiscent of fluid exchange in the beginning. These movements feel like a process of contraction and expansion, both of which are part of an embryonic chain of events. In very simple terms, the sequence from conception is: compaction, expansion, midline, polarity, differentiation and growth. Is this what the body continues to do throughout life to reorganize and heal itself? As practitioners, don’t we commonly feel part of the body move into contraction as a prelude to the expansion of tissues and fluids finding a new relationship in a 3-Dimensional space to each other? Just as in the beginning of growth, each tissue becomes clearer in its own function as it simultaneously finds a relationship to the whole.

So, what comes first, the impulse of contraction or the phase of expansion? I think that the expansion phase comes first, from the inside out; the compressive phase occurs as that expansive phase meets the periphery. So, as practitioners, when we are witnessing change in our clients, it can feel more like dropping back into an amorphous state – the fluid field – in order to change through a mechanism the body already knows from its earliest moments. This natural organic process of formation and transformation can be better understood and perceived by the therapist with an awareness of embryonic spaces and potency fields of the body. An automatic shifting occurs within the client’s system driven by these developmental forces. The practitioner needs do nothing other than observe the arising of this mechanism. The more you recognize it as part of the relational field the more the body changes and is informed by this embryonic imperative expressing its original morphology.

Is this what has always laid beneath the ‘state of balance’ and or ‘points of balanced tension’? It’s just taken a true neutral listening from the practitioner and a deeper understanding and perception of the background embryonic organization of the body for these movements of change to truly reveal themselves rather than the body having to conform to a practitioner intention. Let go of the intention to encourage, facilitate or help bring about a state of balance and see what the body does. Meet the body with a touch that is waiting to be surprised, a touch that is not presumptive or held within a framework of action or idea of what the body needs. Have a mind that is embryonic – a mind that is simple and present and naive. There’s no mentation or intellectual framing in this mind. It’s a mind that’s become fluid and potent rather than oriented to neural patterns and form. Find the formless mind. This mind is full of potential and growth that is different to a mind that is highly structured. Allow your mind to be primitive and unassociated and then see how your touch brings about change. That’s when the body allows it’s embryonic state to return. In fact it’s never been otherwise, it’s always been an embryo, just our mind and therefore perception has made it otherwise. Clients can then perceive/ experience their body in its true form – pulsing with creative life and possibility and actively transforming. This is where the breath of life is at its fullest.

Here’s the reference to a great animation that shows the early stages of cell growth, development of an internal space and cleavage of the blastocyst from the zona pellucida, and gives some sense of the way cells shift and change and reposition themselves:

(This is previous blog by Ged Sumner transformed into an article)

“What happens to your brain as it slips into unconsciousness? A new technique allows researchers to view real-time 3-D images of a patient undergoing anesthesia using the drug propofol, and the findings show that consciousness isn’t suddenly switched off, but rather fades as though a dimmer is being dialed down.

The research also suggests that consciousness resides in the connections between multiple parts of the brain, not in any single region. The images show that changes in the anesthetized brain start in the midbrain, where certain receptors for a neurotransmitter called GABA are plentiful.

Drugs like propofol act on these GABA A receptors, mimicking and enhancing the effects of GABA, which inhibits cellular activity. From the midbrain, changes move outward to affect the whole brain; as propofol’s message spreads from region to region, consciousness dissolves.

“Our jaws ricocheted off the ground, and I won’t say the words we used when we first saw the video,” says lead author Dr. Brian Pollard, professor of anesthesia at the University of Manchester, who presented the results at the European Anesthesiology Conference in Amsterdam on Saturday. “We just sat there and stared, dumbfounded and kept repeating it. We’re the first people in the world ever to see the brain becoming unconscious, that’s quite a sobering thought.”

Although anesthesia has been widely used since 1846, when a dentist first demonstrated the effects of ether at Massachusetts General Hospital, until recently very little has been understood about how it works. Even though scientists know that anesthetic drugs like propofol affect GABA in the brain, how that actually eliminates consciousness still remains a mystery.

Pollard explains, however, that propofol alters “the balance between inhibition and excitation in the brain,” shifting the balance of activity toward the inhibitory circuits. At first, this produces a paradoxical result.

“When inhibition is inhibited, you first move into a stage of excitation or mania,” he says, noting that this usually occurs too quickly to be observed with modern anesthesia. But the brief sense of euphoria that some people experience before losing consciousness from propofol may reflect this loss of inhibition (and may also account for Michael Jackson’s taste for the drug).

Click on the link below to view the animation of the brain:

http://bcove.me/v2bo7o59

“You then begin to inhibit the excitation and the patient becomes more sedated and loses consciousness,” he says. That’s why in the video the brain appears to become more active while unconscious: it’s showing the increased action in inhibitory circuits.

“What we’ve got supports the idea that there are several levels [of consciousness] rather than [an on/off] switch,” he says.

Pollard’s group used a new technology called fEITER, for functional electrical impedance tomography by evoked response. To measure brain activity, the technique uses imperceptible electrical currents produced by electrodes placed on the head. Unlike fMRI, it doesn’t require the patient to be placed inside a magnetic field, which precludes the use of metal devices, so the laptop-size fEITER instrument could be used in an ordinary operating room.

“We can get lot of mileage [from fEITER in research] to separate out anesthesia, sedation and consciousness,” says Pollard. The device could also potentially be used to rapidly determine the site of a stroke or the extent of a brain injury.

“This is a great idea and I think it’s very exciting,” says Dr. Emery Brown, professor of computational neuroscience at MIT, but he cautions that since the research has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, the results must be seen as preliminary. Still, he says that the research may offer “new insight into how anesthesia works.”

Ultimately, fEITER might be used to make sure that patients do not experience any consciousness during surgery. About 1 in 1,000 to 2,000 patients experiences some degree of consciousness under anesthesia, which can obviously be extremely traumatic. However, it’s difficult for doctors to determine when consciousness is occurring, because drugs used in surgery also paralyze the body and affect measures of stress like blood pressure. A better understanding of what consciousness is could help eliminate this possibility.

While Pollard is optimistic about using imaging of anesthesia to understand consciousness itself, Brown is more skeptical. He notes that it’s much easier to break something than it is to build it. In other words, knowing what’s being disconnected during unconsciousness might not illuminate much about what’s happening during consciousness. Either way, a better understanding of the circuits involved in unconsciousness has a lot to offer medicine.”

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/15/real-time-video-first-look-at-a-brain-becoming-unconscious-under-anesthesia/#ixzz1mETLzLJ5

‘Ginsberg (1974) immobilized chicks, and then allowed one group to recover spontaneously, and one to recover, but with prodding and stimuli to terminate the freeze. These groups, along with a third group of chicks that had not been immobilized, were then tested for resiliency to avoid death by drowning. The group that had not been allowed to complete recovery from immobility died first, the group not exposed to immobility next, and the group that had spontaneously recovered from the freeze survived the longest. Clearly the experience of and the spontaneous recovery from freezing carries survival benefits, whereas not being allowed to go through this recovery process seemed to reduce resiliency to life threat.’ Scaer (2001)

This is a very powerful illustration of the innate ability of animals to recover from trauma. Natural/spontaneous recovery actually enhanced the drowning survival rates over the control group. We can transcend trauma and be stronger afterwards, but only if we engage the bodies natural healing mechanisms. Not my favourite philosopher, but Friedrich Nietzsche was right: ‘That which does not kill us makes us stronger.’

The worst option is to interfere and block the natural processes of the body – in this experiment poking and prodding the chicks out of immobility. The chicks were immobilized by holding, the inescapable threat inducing the freeze response.

My experience of TRE (Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises) has shown me that shaking is a natural part of recovery from trauma. Even though it can appear that people are falling apart when shaking, it is better to fall apart briefly, rather than hold on to a life time of chronic tension.

References

Ginsberg, H. (1974). Controlled vs noncontrolled termination of the immobility response in domestic fowl (Gallus gallus): parallels with the learned helplessness phenomenon, as quoted in Seligman, M. (1992) Helplessness: On depression, development and death, New York:W.H. Freeman

Nietzsche quote from http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/f/friedrichn101616.html#ixzz1lKDnjPOs

Scaer R.C., (2001) The Neurophysiology of Dissociation and Chronic Disease. Published in: Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, (2001), 26(1), 73-91

With thanks to Riccardo Cassiani Ingoni for the reference and image – I saw Riccardo talk about the chick experiment at a TRE Level 1 course in London.