“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.

It took me a while to really appreciate the venous sinuses. The protocol I was taught was overly complex with lots of difficult handholds – it put me off for years to be honest. Last year I was teaching about the blood flow from the head and I came across a wonderful image in Theime of the jugular veins – the top left image is my attempt to generate a similar view. The image gave me another way into the venous sinuses.

By focusing on differences in flow between the left and right jugular veins, and only really orienting to the sinuses shown above, I found I have much clearer experiences of blood leaving the skull. It is a good orientation and really seems to help people drop into a deep space. I hope it works for you.

Wake Up Call 120114

The scene suddenly looked like the trees didn’t want to let go of the clouds and maybe the clouds didn’t want to move away from the islands, so they morphed to the shape of the island and sat there almost on the treetops as I passed by on the ferry. Clearly the wind wasn’t strong enough to break the linkage nor was the sun’s rays strong enough to disperse the clouds, so there was a balanced membranous tension that was all about water and its property to attract other water molecules, and I realized that the only way I’d worked it out was to shift away from what I was seeing and feel the scenery through my body and its fluids. And now when I consciously dropped into the fluid volume of my body it totally made sense. The depth of the sea and its dynamic connection with me and all water forms around it, and then the clouds felt like they were an extension of my fluid volume, more like whispy organs than separate objects. The trees were like me, no different, structures with water in the them and now I felt the sunshine pouring through the vapour field into me and scintillating my fluids, exciting the water molecules in my body. Then, for a while, I don’t know how long, I lost my sense of separateness and the interactions became so beguiling and the water molecules almost hummed in constant motion and vibration, and from second to second everything was feeling its way with everything else and that is what we call movement but all it seemed like was a shifting of millions of water molecules finding balanced tensions and maintaining it by altering their positions. The surface of the sea was like a cell membrane with water entering and leaving the body of the ocean constantly and the clouds were doing the same in a huge endless field of vapour. And the sea and the clouds were dense versions of the vapour and the trees were taking in and giving out water too and so was my body, it was an exchange constantly taking place between everything and that’s how we relate. We are in constant flux with our environment, each other and water is the currency. We feel through water. We sense through water. I’ve no idea how we do that but it’s extraordinary.

‘The skull of a man who had been kicked by a horse. This caused a swelling which slowly increased in size; his left eyeball and the jawbone were gradually squeezed outwards. Eventually, the swelling started leaking and began to stink. After 21 years of suffering from the swelling, the man died in 1771. He was dissected by Andreas Bonn.’ Text from exhibition: ‘De ontdekking van de mens. Anatomie verbeeld’ Bijzondere Collecties Dec 2011

Above are images of  a skull I saw in an exhibition about representation of the body in Amsterdam at Bijzondere Collecties. You can clearly see how over a period of 21 years the growing swelling caused the bones to grow into a different shape. Bones grow in response to the forces exerted on them – Wolff’s Law.

You would never see a skull like the above in todays world; hopefully modern medicine, and we would say cranial work, would be able to stop the underlying swelling.

In the cranial paradigm the most common conditional forces that distort skulls are due to birth processes and/or head trauma. Unresolved conditional forces from early experiences continue to shape the ongoing dynamic production of bone. The images show that if we change the forces acting on a skull even adult bones will remould themselves.

Human Anatomy, Depicting the Body from the Renaissance to Today – Rifkin, Ackerman, Folkenburg (Thames & Hudson)

One of my favourite books ever. A remarkable collection of anatomy images spanning 500years – basically a history of anatomy and anatomists from Vesalius (1514-1558) arguably the father of anatomy through to Henry Gray (1827-1861) and modern anatomists. It’s also a book about the change in Western culture as anatomy and the study of the body moves from the divine and mystic through to the scientific along with attitudes towards the body and death. An absolute must for all anatomy lovers. Here’s a few images from the book all in the public domain but not easy to get hold of:

The Tell-Tale Brain – VS Ramachandran (Heinemann)

A leader in the neuroscience field and a very charismatic character who has spend his career making huge headway in the understanding of neural communication and consciousness through his study of phantom limbs and neuropathology. He’s not scared to hypothesize and has a good look at the development of language and how introspection evolved. Great sections on empathy and aesthetics. Love the chapter on ‘the neurons that shaped civilization’. Here’s a link to a youtube video of him speaking about this……

http://youtu.be/t0pwKzTRG5E

The Epigenetics Revolution – Nessa Carey (Icon)

There aren’t too many books around on this fascinating subject especially ones that are accessible and easy to fathom. The author elegantly and scientifically explains what epigenetics means and its implications for understanding health and the body. There’s some quite full on biochemistry in some sections but worth persisting to get a good handle on the science. Here’s a wonderful excerpt:

An abusive or neglectful environment when young is clearly a major risk factor for the development of later neuropychiatric disorders. We are so aware of this as a society that sometimes we almost forget to question why this should be the case. It just seems self-evident. But it’s not. Why should events that lasted for two years, for example, still have adverse consequences for that individual several decades later?

One explanation that is often given is that the chidren are ‘pyschologically damaged’ by their early experiences. Whilst true, this isn’t that helpful a statement. The reason why it’s not helpful is that the phrase ‘psychologically damaged’ sin’t really an explanation at all – it’s a description. It sounds qutie convincing but on certain levels it doesn’t really tell us anything.

Any scientist addressing this problem will want to take this description and probe it at another level. What are the molecular events that underlie this psychological damage? What happens in the brains of the abused or neglected children, that leaves them so prone to mental health problems as adults?

There is sometimes resistance to this approach from other disciplines, which work within different conceptual frameworks. This seems rather puzzling. If we don’t accept there is a molecular basis to a biological effect, what are we left with? A religious person may prefer to invoke the soul, just as a Freudian therapist may invoke the psyche. Both of these refer to a theoretical construct that has no defined physical basis. Moving into such a model system, where it is impossible to develop the testable hypotheses that are the cornerstones of scientific enquiry, is deeply unattractive to most scientists. We can probe for a mechanism that has a physical foundation, rather than defaulting to a scenario in which there is something which is assumed, somehow, to be a part of us, without having any physical evidence……..

The human brain possesses sufficient flexibility to generate different adult outcomes in response to similar childhood experiences. Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells. Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections – that’s a quadrillion. It’s hard to imagine this so let’s visualize each connection as a disc that’s 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion disks on top of each other and they will reach to the sun and back, three times over.

Thats a lot of connections, so it’s perfectly possible to imagine that our brains have a lot of flexibility. But the connections are not random. There are networks of cells within the giant grid which are more likely to link to each other than to anywhere else. it’s this combination of huge flexibility, but constrained within certain groupings, that is compatible with a system that is mechanistic but not entirely deterministic.

The Hidden Reality – Brian Greene (Alfred A. Knopf)

Amazing physicist with an ability to convey maths and physics in a very clear and exciting way. He’s deeply interested in the string theory and the idea of multi-dimensions and multi-universes. Whether you agree with it or not, it’s definitely a useful mind expanding process. He explains it really well on the embedded video:

http://youtu.be/YtdE662eY_M

The Higgs boson is a “fundamental” particle; one of the basic building blocks of the Universe. It is also the last missing piece in the leading theory of particle physics – known as the Standard Model – which describes how particles and forces interact.

The Higgs explains why other particles have mass. As the Universe cooled after the Big Bang, an invisible force known as the Higgs field formed together with its associated boson particle.

It is this field (and not the boson) that imparts mass to the fundamental particles that make up atoms. Without it, these particles would zip through the cosmos at the speed of light.

If our ideas about the Higgs boson turn out to be correct, then everything we see is a kind of window dressing based on an underlying fabric of reality in which we shouldn’t exist. The particles that make us up – which bind together to form protons, neutrons, nuclei and ultimately atoms – have mass. Without the Higgs, these particles would be massless, like photons.

As successful as the Standard Model has been, it still doesn’t encompass gravity. Nor does it provide a reason for why there was an excess of matter over anti-matter after the Big Bang, allowing the Universe to come into being. And the theory accounts for the behaviour of just 4% of the Universe – its normal matter. The rest, in the form of dark matter and dark energy, remains to be explained.

Quantum foam, also referred to as spacetime foam, is a concept in quantum mechanics, devised by John Wheeler in 1955. The foam is supposed to be the foundations of the fabric of the universe[1].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(length)