Showing posts with label anterior cingulate cortex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anterior cingulate cortex. Show all posts

Anxiety My Old Friend - Will I Let It Kill Me?

Anxiety and stress are not the same thing.

Stress is a physiological experience in the face of a change in the internal or external system. It has its plusses and minuses. A little bit of stress over something you can do something about [I need to make that doctor's appointment] provides motivation to get it done and satisfaction (a nice hit of dopamine) once you do it.

via GIPHY

On the other hand, chronic stress that cannot be resolved [I never knew when he would explode] exhausts every resource the body has to maintain homeostasis/balance. And that's not good.

Anxiety describes the negative thoughts and feelings that accompany stress.

via GIPHY

It's not the only feeling that could accompany stress. When faced with changes like a new job, a challenging ski slope, or a date with the person of your dreams, you might also feel excitement.

via GIPHY

Or maybe not. "Good" change and "bad" change are labels we apply from our own perspective. As far as the body goes, they don't really figure in. The physiological response is the same.

Consider a winding mountain road in a snowstorm. Some people default to excitement. [That would be Colorado-raised me.] Some people default to anxiety. [That would be my California-born wife.] The people who can't help but default to it have an anxiety disorder. These are my people.

Anxiety Defined

Anxiety is the intense, excessive, persistent worry, fear, or dread about everyday situations, present, future, and imagined future. It's a normal enough experience. It becomes a disorder when "intense" tilts over into "excessive" to the point of interfering with daily activities.

Insert side comment here: People who have a mental illness, whether social anxiety disorder, depression, or schizophrenia, are not a different kind of people. Almost every symptom of a mental illness is a "normal" experience - shared by people who do not have a mental illness. These experiences do not need to be diagnosed or treated, until they pile up and become so intrusive that they become unmanageable, until they interfere with daily activities.

The physical manifestations of anxiety include fast heart rate, heavy breathing, sweating, and fatigue. How do we get from a thought to a heart rate? The brain - that's how.

Anxiety in the brain


Anxiety involves an interaction of three different parts of the brain in particular.

It begins when the amygdala senses a threat. The job of the amygdala is to leap into action at the sign of a threat. The amygdala initiates a sequence that releases adrenaline and cortisol to gear the body up to address the threat. As with the body's response to other stress, these hormones cause the faster heart rate and heavy breathing. Blood flow increases to the limbs to prepare it for action, and away from the digestive system - when your life is in danger, lunch can wait.

The prefrontal cortex, the "thinking" part of the brain, provides information and interpretation that mitigate or support the threat. [That's a garter snake, not a rattler. It's harmless.]

The anterior cingulate cortex sorts through the sense of threat and the additional information to find patterns and determine whether the current situation is a big deal or not. It tells the amygdala whether to calm down or GET MORE EXCITED!

The difference between anxiety and anxiety disorder

When there is a threat, the amygdala goes into action. When the threat goes away, what is supposed to happen is that the amygdala and all its downstream partners stand down. The body returns to its pre-threat state.

When the threat is chronic or, even worse, unpredictable, then these systems do not stand down. They just keep pumping out that cortisol.

In the brain, the amygdala increases in size.

Under constant assault from cortisol, the hippocampus (memory and emotion) and prefrontal cortex shrink. The hippocampus gets stuck on negative memories and emotions. [I call this the little time machine inside my brain. It plays the worst of my past on an unending loop.]

The connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex that could moderate the fear goes down.

In other words, the brain changes. It changes in a way that reinforces the the problematic pattern, raising the risk for depression and dementia. Yuk!

Everybody gets anxious is not a helpful thing to say to a person with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Panic Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or Social Anxiety Disorder. These are real things. They have tipped past the experiences of everybody. And a warm bath or deep breathing do not fix them.

Healing the problematic pattern may take many forms: distancing from the chronic stressors, medication, a variety of modalities in psychotherapy, even therapy dogs.

At ProzacMonologues.com I like to focus on what is happening inside the brain, to help me remember that my issues are not mere thoughts. They are experienced in my body. Here's an article with much more detail about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerve systems and how they function.

A physical therapist friend, encouraging me to take a leave of absence to deal with my tattered brain, once told me, It's just like a broken bone. It takes time to heal.

I do wish it healed as easily as that broken foot is healing. But these issues do respond to treatment. If your anxiety interferes with your life, you don't have to suffer alone!


photo by author
Red Green Show meme from imgur on Pinterest

A Few More Holiday Survival Tips for Loonies

I know, I know.  This post is late in coming.  People have been googling prozac and holidays and bipolar and holidays for weeks.  Good for you.  You are following your therapists' advice to reduce your anxiety by thinking through your triggers and how you will handle them.

Most of what follows was first posted on November 20, 2010.  In light of recent developments in Loony Land (referring to them this time, not us) I added a section on prejudice.  Think of it as tweaking the traditional Thanksgiving fare with this year's rage for bacon and Brussels sprouts.

So here we go:


Ah, the holidays!  Time when far flung family members travel home and grow close around the turkey table.  Time to renew friendships in a round of parties and frivolity.  Time to go crazy?

The Brain on Tetris

What happened to that hour?  That other hour?  The one after that?  Where did they go?

My son's best friend from childhood, whom I haven't seen in ten years, sent me a message with this link to a BBC story, The Psychology of Tetris.  When he saw it, did he remember that I used to ask my son to hide the Gameboy?

Trip the Light

I have noticed, people who are buying more guns seem to be more scared than the rest of us.  It is about pattern formation, the anterior cingulate cortex.  It can be your friend, or it can be your enemy.  Come on, people.  Have you forgotten Christmas so soon?  We can do better.  Like Matt here --



If all the days that come to pass
Are behind these walls
I'll be left at the end of things
In a world kept small

Travel far from what I know
I'll be swept away
I need to know
I can be lost and not afraid

The Positive Power of Being Strange


It's just too easy [in Iowa] to avoid the weirdos in our life.

First, the TED talk from one of those people who, whenever they have something to say, you want to pay attention to it. I am pleased to call Mike Wagner a friend, so I get regular doses. Here he doesn't use the language, but he's talking about the power of my favorite brain part, the anterior cingulate cortex.

Mike's shingle hangs at White Rabbit Group. The name itself tells you something. He calls it a brand altering experience.



Next, the Prozac Monologues take on the matter, a rerun from September 23, 2011

Differently Abled - More, Please

It's like he is in a world of his own. The first grade teacher, old school, same worksheets for the last thirty years, did not mean it as a complement.

Project Implicit and the State of One's Soul

Remember, Dumbledore said to Harry, It is our choices that show what we truly are.

Project Implicit

So did you do the homework?  Did you try any of the Implicit Association Tests?  Do you still want to read my blog?

This is how they describe what they are doing:

Project Implicit represents a collaborative research effort between researchers at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and University of Washington. While the particular purposes of each study vary considerably, most studies available at Project Implicit examine thoughts and feelings that exist either outside of conscious awareness or outside of conscious control. The primary goals of Project Implicit are to provide a safe, secure, and well-designed virtual environment to investigate psychological issues and, at the same time, provide visitors and participants with an experience that is both educational and engaging.

The variety of topics include attitudes toward age, race, disability, ethnicity, mental illness and others.  The tests are constructed to bypass thought, commitment, decision.  They dive deeper into what is known as the lizard brain, the part that evolved before reason, and that simply reacts, by setting one to tasks that have to be accomplished faster than the thinking part of the brain thinks.

Project Implicit is well aware that we may not like what we find in the lizard brain. I don't care for what I find in mine.  But it is important information, for two reasons.

Trayvon Martin and Soul-Searching - Not Gonna Happen



Two things struck me about this message.

The first was the more widely quoted, If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin.  There is a photoshopped poster circulating on Facebook, Trayvon included in the Obama family photo.  It brought to mind immediately the young men I know who look like Trayvon.  I don't want to write their names, fearing, like O-lan from The Good Earth, that to speak such praise as they deserve would tempt the jealous gods to do them harm.

Their mothers are among my closest friends.  I can hardly speak of Trayvon Martin in their midst.  What it must mean to be the mother of a fine young African American man.

The second was a minor note, a hidden note, one that will be forgotten, was forgotten as soon as it was said, All of us have to do some soul-searching.

We Do Not Search Our Souls

Of all the words that this shooting has birthed, all the pundits and opinions, soul-searching is not among them.

God, Tebow and the Problem of Suffering

You know, they could be right.  Maybe God is responsible for Tim Tebow's astounding success.

First, the one take away from this article:  It's not magic-thinking.  It is pattern-seeking, hard-wired into our brains, one of the things our brains are built to do.

I Am A Professional -- Do Not Try This At Home

A whole world of football fans are suddenly theologians, explaining the ways of God.  And how silly for me to caution non-professionals from this endeavor.  Everybody with a frontal cortex is a theologian.  Our brains are built to ask Why?  Everybody with an anterior cingulate cortex looks for patterns that make sense of the events of the world.  That is what the anterior cingulate cortex does.

How is this for a pattern -- A new quarterback about whose talents many have doubts delivers a win.  Somebody sticks a microphone in his face.  He gives glory to God.  Next week, he wins again.  Again he gives glory to God.  Again he wins.  Again he gives glory to God...

And what is with that 316 yards thing?

If this were a baseball player on a streak, it would be the same socks he wears each game.  It's the God-thing that makes people twitchy.  More than that.  If it were basketball, he'd be crossing himself at the free-throw line, and nobody would miss a beat.  But it's the politics of the God-thing that have raised the stakes.

Suddenly people who should know better are doing bad theology.  And people who do know better let their chains get jerked.  I don't except myself here.  Twice a day I write something snarky on Facebook, and have to delete before I post.  (It's a thing I have about public discourse on Facebook.  I try to save my snarkiness for my blog.)

At Prozac Monologues my readers can expect more than snarkiness.  I have to bend the topic a bit.  So here we go.

God Improves Athletic Performance

Really, I'm serious.

Well, in a particular way.  Anybody else have a hometown team whose weekly police report is longer than its injury report?  And the results -- Hawkeyes went where this year?  The Earwax Bowl?

These days a little clean living gives an incredible advantage in the world of collegiate and professional sports.

Now this is not about Tim Tebow.  I don't know anything about his private life.  I do know a lot of athletes flame out on dissolute living, leaving behind only fumes of what had been promising careers.

I also know that some people find their way back.

The Twelve Steps

  • We admitted we were powerless over [our addiction] - that our lives had become unmanageable.
  • We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
  • We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.

There are more steps.  These are a start, the part that matters to a mental health blog.

However and why ever they do it, and how seriously they need to work on it, a lot of athletes and a lot of the rest of us could improve our lives by acknowledging a Higher Power.  It's a bottom line sanity issue.  People who think they are the center of the universe have their own DSM code.  It's 301.81.  But they aren't in therapy.  Those closest to them are.

No, you don't have to be a Christian, religious, not even spiritual but not religious to work the Steps.  I heard somebody used gravity for his Higher Power.  Like I said -- I am not the center of the universe is a bottom line sanity issue.

Tim Tebow's Higher Power

Again, I know nothing about the man's private life, and less than nothing about his heart.  But to the extent that his publicly professed Christianity conforms to orthodox Christianity, and by that I mean not making it up as we go along, I do believe the claim that his athletic prowess comes from God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth who delights in creation and said of it, It is good.  We have something in common here, Tim Tebow and me.  We each believe that God delights in us.  Well, I am willing to be a little less specific about the details.


If nothing else, think of this also as a comparative claim.  If he thought it was all about him, he would be at greater risk to flame out, and thereby not be able to complete as many passes as he does manage to complete.

Of course, there has to be somebody to catch those passes.  Writing now as a one-time Bronco fan, I wish I heard him say more about his receivers and his left guard.  He might make a better spokesperson for the Lord if it didn't seem like his personal miracle.

Alert: Rocky Shoals Of God-Talk Ahead

So far, I have been in the realm of orthodox theology, not making it up as I go along.

Everybody is a theologian.  The advantage of professional status is that you recognize the potential shipwreck before you get there.


Oops.  Too late.

A status update from a Facebook friend Sunday night: This is what happens when God is in charge!

Pastor Wayne Hanson, Summit Church, Castle Rock Colorado said, It's not luck.  Luck isn't winning 6 games in a row.  It's favor, God's favor... God has blessed his hard work.

So... how about 19 games in a row?  Was that luck?  What happens if the Broncos make it through this weekend and next, and Tim Tebow comes up against Aaron Rodgers, who also happens to be a stand-up kinda guy?  Not to mention one hell of a quarterback.  Will that be about God's favor?

The Problem of Suffering

I think what really drives people nuts, including a lot of Christians of the orthodox/not making it up as we go along variety, is this:

While God was blessing Tim Tebow's hard work on Sunday afternoon, 720 children around the world died of hunger.  270 people committed suicide.  Two of them, by the way, were veterans of the United States Armed Forces.

That was before overtime.  Good thing overtime was short, huh?

So on Monday morning, nearly 1000 mothers were asking, If God could help Tim complete that pass, couldn't he have paid some attention to my child?  Billions still listen for their answer.

This is not a question to be answered blithely.  We have to put football, even America to the side.

See, we have been here before, trying to find the pattern.  That is what our brains do, search for patterns, notice anomalies, then respond to new information.

There is one pattern we really, really want to find, that good is rewarded and evil is punished.  For the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked is doomed.

That's from Psalms.  And to some extent, we do find evidence to confirm the claim.  Usually people who treat their spouses right have happy marriages.  Or at least happier than their marriages would be if they were out running around at night, coming home drunk and violent.

This pattern gives us a way to arrange our own behavior to get outcomes we desire, which is a good thing, and the evolutionary purpose of the development of this capacity.

This is from Psalms, too: I have been young and now I am old, but never have I seen the righteous forsaken, or their children begging for bread.

720 mothers whose children died of hunger while the Broncos pulled out that squeaker against the Steelers would beg to differ.  All you have to do is turn the channel to CNN to find that pattern disrupted.

The Bible Knows Better

Well, if you actually read the whole Book, and read it several times, over different times in your life, so you have a wider experience that helps you catch things you missed the first time round, you discover that the Bible says some other things about the ways of the righteous and the ways of the wicked.  Read Jeremiah.  Read Job.  Read the rest of the Book of Psalms.  Go do relief work in Haiti or Sudan and read them again.

The Bible records how a whole community of faith over centuries has struggled with this issue.  Sometimes the Psalm begins, O LORD, my God, my Savior, by day and night I cry to you.  And at the end, it still says, Darkness is my only companion.

The Psalms of Lament speak the truth of people who do love the LORD, who are faithful.  From Jeremiah thrown down a well to Paul shipwrecked on Malta to Mother Teresa struggling her whole life with severe depression a couple millennia later, faith does not turn out to be bankable.  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  Maybe the Psalms can give voice to your own experience.

Creativity and the Absurd

The ancient Israelites were sure of the pattern, that they held God's favor.  They lived in the Promised Land, after all.  Then something else happened, off pattern.  A new super power came on the scene, destroyed their temple and threw them into exile.  By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered you, O Zion... How can we sing the Lord's song upon an alien soil?

When faced with the unpredicted, the absurd, the anterior cingulate cortex shifts into high gear.  Its job is to modulate emotional response, to manage the panic.  It does so by reasserting sense.

Sense can be found in two ways.

The first is to revert to the familiar.  When the brain is overwhelmed by stress, it becomes more efficient.  It shuts down brain-derived neurotrophic factor, stops learning and concentrates on what it already knows, or what it is habituated to trust.  It was the forces of evil (gays, the First Amendment...)  We are being tested, we have to believe harder...  People confronted by the absurd sometimes cling to habit, reject the unfamiliar (immigrants, head scarves).  After 9/11 there was a spike in sales of mashed potatoes and mac and cheese.  That is the anterior cingulate cortex at work, modulating emotional response.

The second way is to ramp up the pattern seeking by noticing connections that had been overlooked.

The second way is the way of creativity.  For the Israelites, the Babylonian Exile resulted in an explosion of creativity, poetry, philosophy, history, new forms of worship, the legal code, and the development of a religion that was larger than their prior notions of land=success=God's favor.  They came up with a religion that could handle exile, handle loss.  It could travel and face the future.

Their brains found new patterns.  They recognized a kinship and developed compassion, even obligation toward others who were immigrants or poor or who had lost.

America At A Spiritual Crossroads

I was approached once to be a supply preacher at a Unitarian Universalist Church during an interim.  I realized I had no idea how to do that, how to preach, if not the Gospel.  So perhaps it is inevitable that I fail my nonChristian readers at this point.

But I will do my best.

The 20th century witnessed horrors when people responded to their suffering by pulling away, by blaming others and cutting off connections, dividing nations into smaller and smaller subgroups to despise.  The brain that does that eventually goes senile.

A lot of us have lost a lot since the start of the 21st century.  And the rules have been rewritten, so we can expect more of the same.  This would be a good time to seek deeper than the theological optimism that cheered us when there was still a frontier and we could always walk away from our failures.  This is not the time to place our hopes for spiritual vindication on the thin reed of an untried and immature quarterback and Christian.  Give the kid a break.  And, by the way, give the people who are rooting for him a break, as well.  They are having a hard time, too.

The good news is that there are other patterns to be found.

The brain that remains open to new experiences, that searches for common ground, grows, creates, delights, has fun!  Ditto the nation.  Ditto the world.

Imagine that.  We are hard-wired for compassion.  And for fun.

Go Cheeseheads!

photo of Tin Tebow from tempecarnivore.blogspot.com/2011/12/hate-time-tebow-here-are-10-sports.html
Hawkeye and AA logos in public domain
Creation of Adam by Michelangelo,  1510 in public domain
The Shipwreck by Claude Joseph Vernet, 1772, in public domain
photo of Haiti earthquake victim by Lohan  Abassi, used under the Creative Commons Attribution License  
photo of UA 175 striking World Trade Center in public domain

Narrative and the DSM

My therapist once picked up the DSM and said, This could be called The Book of Behaviors That Make Therapists Nervous.

An apt description.  It is filled with descriptors: adjectives, behaviors, impulses, thoughts, feelings that are all human adjectives, behaviors, impulses, thoughts and feelings.  Almost none of them are strange in and of themselves.  Almost all of them are familiar to all of us.

It's just that at some point, when these descriptors add up, somebody starts to get nervous.

Diagnosis -- Recognizing Deviation From The Norm

Habit and the Stages of Change


I have been writing for several weeks now about this mass of electrical activity inside our brains, dendrites and nerve endings, meeting at synapses, passing their spark from one neuron to the next, creating -- what?  A wink, a whisper, a sensation, the next big brainstorm.

Most of these connections could be called, in the widest sense, habits.  By habits, I mean that pathways get used over and over, form patterns, become familiar, channel us to certain outcomes.  Most bypass the cortex, requiring no decision.  Like breathing, smelling, salivating at the cinnamon.
 
Most of the remainder are still automatic.  But with effort, they can be brought to consciousness where the cortex could interfere, and a decision made.  Like blinking.  Or picking up the cookie.

What if you don't want to pick up the cookie?  Okay, you really do want to pick up the cookie.  What if you want to not pick up the cookie anyway? 

How Do You Change A Habit?


You're gonna take more than one step.

Last week, I put some numbers out there, the Wahls diet.  Nine cups a day of vegetables and fruits.  I broke it down for you: 3 cups leafy greens, 3 cups cruciferous veggies, 3 cups intensely colored.

This food plan helped Dr. Terry Wahls reverse her secondary progressive MS and get up out of her wheelchair.  It could help you reduce your symptoms of heart disease, lung disease, asthma, hypertension, depression, obesity, bipolar disorder, diabetes, Alzheimer's or Parkinson's.

If you have, or are tending toward any of these chronic diseases, you have already heard your doctor/mother/spouse tell you that you need to improve your diet.  Dr. Wahl's book, Minding My Mitochondria tells you just how much and why. 

Nine cups a day of vegetables and fruits:

3 cups leafy greens
3 cups cruciferous veggies
3 cups intensely colored

Stages Of Change 

So there is your canyon.  Here are the steps, more than one.  Several, in fact.  The steps are known as the Stages of Change.



The Stages of Change model appears all over the place lately.  This article from the journal American Family Physician uses the Stages to help physicians help their patients, something more effective than Just do it.  A Youtube search yields results for addiction recovery counselors, life coach trainers, weight loss clinics.


Different sites number the stages differently.  Some say Precontemplation is Stage 0.  Some give Relapse its own number.  Some add Transcendence, whatever that is -- said the priest who gets cynical when quasi-religious language gets used for the purposes of self-improvement.  Whatever we are supposed to transcend, evidently it is not our desire to improve ourselves. -- But I digress.


I like this site, which is the source of the graphic above, even if the author does use that word Transcendence that made me twitchy there for a minute before I got back on track.  It works through the stages from the perspective of the person who is making the change, not the person who wants somebody else to change. 


Crossing Canyons/Building Bridges In My Brain 


Dr. Wahls calls it a diet.  I don't diet.  Who wants to DIE-t?   Each chocolate chip cookie left on the plate represents a little death.  A diet is a temporary interruption.  When it ends, you go back to your life.  But there is nothing temporary about the nutritional needs of my mitochondria, without whom there would be no life.


I'm into changing my brain.  In that mass of electrical wiring, some potentially healthy pathways are blocked by the detritus of dead dendrites.  Other destructive pathways are carved into canyons of well-worn automatic responses. 


Changing my brain will take time.  It is taking decades.  It will take at least another blogpost. 


And The Word Became Flesh 


Question: What do the Stages of Change have to do with Prozac Monologues? 


Answer: Words.  The Stages of Change use language to shape the brain.


Language is one kind of pathway from neuron to neuron.  It connects electrical impulses from the autonomic systems, the olfactory nerve, the amygdala, through the hippocampus (memory and emotion) and the anterior cingulate cortex (pattern seeking) and into the frontal cortex (conscious thought).

Language is how all this electrical activity gets turned into meaning.  It is where the brain and the mind become one. 

The Stages of Change include a process of changing our patterned thinking about food.  And thinking is how we move from one stage to the next. 

Dr. Wahls' writes about synergy, how exercise and diet work together to heal her myelin and reduce the symptoms of her MS.  I'm thinking the same process works for changing habits, particularly food habits.  Each new behavior reinforces the preceding thought that moved you to the new stage.  That repeated behavior patterns the thought that will move you to the next stage. 

Meanwhile, what you are eating while you are trying to make any change matters.  Your mitochondria need the right materials to build the dendrites that form the new pathways.  Like lunch for the road crew.

So don't try to skip stages.  And don't skip broccoli.

One of these days I will write my own food autobiography, my trip through these stages.

photo of Women Working at a Bell Telephone Switchboard from the National Archives and Records Administration and in the public domain
photos of Hatherton Canal in Staffordshire by Roger Kidd, Coal Creek Falls by Walter Siegmund, Glen Canyon by Sascha BrückJeff Kubina used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Stages of Change graphic was created by Todd Atkins, who placed it in the public domain

Nonsense and the Anterior Cingulate Cortex -- Redux


This traffic monitor should read YOUR SPEED 60 MPH.  But I couldn't find that image.  I suppose creating it would not be a good idea.  So this image will have to do.

If you are traveling too fast when you hit the pothole, you break your suspension.

So I am taking a break while we try to balance the GAMA and glutamate in my synapses.  Here is a slightly modified rerun of an oldie but a goodie.  I think it addresses the current phenomena of the Tea Party, the growing rigidity of those whom it threatens, and the retreat of the rest into reality tv.  If I didn't make so many connections like that, my brain wouldn't hurt so much.  Then again, Prozac Monologues wouldn't exist.

Nonsense and the Anterior Cingulate Cortex -- November 7, 2009 

John McNamany put the thought into my head, the New York Times tickled my fancy and a blog new to me gave me the art work.

Function of the Anterior Cingulate Cortex

Finally, it's Anterior Cingulate Cortex Week!  This lovely portion of the brain is found in the limbic system, located just above the center, about where Iowa would be and extending into western Pennsylvania, if you flip the image so that it faces right, as I did here.  Like a true Midwesterner, the ACC modulates emotional response.  A hard-working manager, the ACC handles motivation to solve problems and anticipation of tasks and rewards.  It also monitors for conflict, things that don't make sense.  The brain is unhappy when it cannot detect a pattern.  Confronted with anomaly, the ACC goes to work.

The Absurd Stimulates Pattern Finding Behavior

"Researchers have long known that people cling to personal biases when confronted with death... In a series of new papers, Dr. Travis Proulx of University of California Santa Barbara and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.

"When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one." [Benedict Carey, New York Times, October 5, 2009]

To test whether confronting the absurd leads to pattern-searching behavior, they had twenty college students read Kafka, The Country Doctor, a story that is urgent, vivid and nonsensical.  Does anybody who is not in college ever read Kafka?  Anyway, after reading the story, they were given a task, to study strings of letters that did not form words.  They were then shown a longer list, and asked to find the strings they had seen before.  The letters did have patterns, very subtle patterns.  And the students who had read Kafka did better at this task than another twenty who had not been exposed to the absurd, 30% better.  With a Kafka-stimulated ACC, they were primed to find the patterns.

I wonder if that explains the college student's propensity to read Kafka in the first place.  Not to mention all those posters by Salvador Dali on dorm room walls.  The college student is at a crossroads, and has to puzzle through the animal tracks of his/her life, to discern the pattern, the call, the next direction.  These representations of the absurd stimulate the part of the brain needed at this developmental moment, just as caffeine stimulates the system before the exam.

I graduated from college at loose ends, with the Episcopal Church still discerning the patterns that would allow for the ordination of women.  That was a few years off, and I wasn't ready to commit to a vocation that might not be received.  But I didn't read Kafka.  Instead, I decided to read everything that Kurt Vonnegut had written up to that point, a modern day Kafka.  Kafka-lite, if you will.  Today, as I fill out disability applications, I am again at a crossroads, and again instinctively, am drawn to Vonnegut, whose body of work has grown since 1975.  Evidently I am stimulating my ACC and boosting my pattern/meaning/coherence finding abilities, priming myself to discern my next direction.

Patterns and the fMRI

Oh boy, I found another fMRI experiment!  There is a study in the Journal of Pain (what a title!) that discovered, when people were prompted by pain-related words to remember painful autobiographical episodes, the fMRI machines showed that it was -- you guessed it?! -- the anterior cingulate cortex that lit up.

Dialectical Thinking -- On Not Blowing Out Your ACC

This person loved me; this same person abused me -- two memories in conflict, absurd.  Put them together, they cause pain. They call it dialectical thinking when you hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in the same head at the same time.  But dialectical thinking is a highly developed skill.  Before anybody ever suggested to me that I could employ it to reduce my pain, I spent (and still do spend) enormous amounts of energy trying to make sense of events that were absurd.

Some of us had Kafka-esque childhoods.  I wonder, does the ACC become quiet if we engage in dialectical thinking?  I wonder, does it blow a fuse if we don't?

If you are searching for Christmas gift ideas for the Prozac Monologues blogger, an fMRI machine would certainly be well received. 

photo of traffic sign by Richard Drdul, Creative Commons  

image of brain from NIMH 

Obama inauguration photo taken by
 Petty Officer 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley, USN 
and in the public domain 

Prozac Monologues at the Movies

Oh, boy!  Butter up the popcorn, slip in a dvd, relax.  This is one very safe and friendly way to spend time with people during the holiday season, and my final installment of this year's Prozac Monologues holiday survival series.  I want my doc and everybody else to notice the implication, that I will survive to do another series next year.

Well chosen movies can fill time, avoid awkward conversation, provide common ground and keep you in the present, always a good thing for the mentally interesting.  Here are my selection criteria for holiday diversion movie viewing:

Movies For Fun

Tips for Surviving the Holidays: the Prozac Monologues Version

Ah, the holidays!  Time when far flung family members travel home and grow close around the Christmas tree.  Time to renew friendships in a round of parties and frivolity.  Time to go crazy?

There are stresses this time of year.  Routines are disrupted. People stay in crowded quarters. Those who have reason to avoid each other are thrown together. Negotiations between exes require professional mediation. Alcohol is consumed in greater quantities. Expectations for love and good cheer are bound for disappointment. Loonies and normies alike need to tend to their mental health.

So Prozac Monologues continues your handy holiday guide, with an assist from NAMI's Peer to Peer class and the University of Iowa Adult Behavioral Health department, covering the basics, planning ahead, mindfulness and quick getaways. 

The Basics:


Keep to your routine as much as possible. If you can't eat like you do at home, get at least one nutritious meal every day. If your family of origin was a little whacked, and your root chakra could use some assist, concentrate on protein (meat, fish, tofu, beans), root vegetables (carrots, beets, onions) and red stuff (beets, strawberries, cranberries, cherries -- jello does not count.) Don't go to parties without some protein already on board. At the buffet table, carrots. Skip the dip, limit your lipids. You will sleep better for it.

Remember Lloyd Bridges in Airplane? The holidays are not a good time to stop sipping, smoking, snorting, sniffing... You get the idea. On the other hand, ultimately substance abuse is more a hazard than a help in negotiating tricky family dynamics. So keep it under control.

Sleep -- not so easy if you get the couch in the family room. Borrow somebody's bed for a nap. If you anticipate a problem, I'm all for an occasional pharmaceutical assist, as an alternative to the straight jacket, which is where you may be headed if you don't get good sleep. This is true for everybody, essential for people with bipolar.

Safety -- no, you do not have to hang around anybody who is abusive. If that is an issue, have your escape plan ready, your keys and your credit card in your pocket, your alternative crash pad arranged.

Oh, and water -- with all your meds, you are probably supposed to push water, as it is. Even more so in the dry winter air. Even more so when dehydration can be mistaken for hunger, leading to more cookie consumption, requiring more water. Especially even more so with greater alcohol consumption. Be kind to your liver. Drink water. 

Planning Ahead:


Many a family feud could be short circuited with some conversation ahead of the storm. Which chores does the host want or expect help with? Which chores does the guest want to volunteer to do? In any relationship, 50/50 does not work. You have to give at least 60%.

Is there any tradition, activity, food, game that will blow your anterior cingulate cortex if it doesn't happen? Take some responsibility for it. Laugh about it, and let people know. And if it doesn't happen, well, that will give you material for your next therapy appointment. And you already know what your therapist will say, don't you.

How many events are planned? Which ones can you skip? Is there room for negotiation? What would you like to do in a group? When will you want to go off by yourself? When will the one who abused you as a child be around? Where will you be instead? 

What are your needs? What are others' needs? Talk to each other. Listen to each other. Remember, there is no Hallmark Family Christmas, except in Hallmark commercials. These are ads, people. They are not your family, and they are not mine, and they are not anybody else's, either. Give yourself and your family a break. Your relatives, your tree, your cookies and cocoa are infinitely more entertaining, anyway. 

Mindfulness:  


I am here, this is now. That's my chant, accompanied by some deep breathing, calling me out of the unhappy past and the uncertain future. Look up, listen up, and notice. You don't have to participate. Just notice. Concentrate on the senses, smells, touch, hearing, sight, taste.

When things get especially bleak for me, I go outside, regardless of weather, and try to replace the running voices in my head with a minute description of what I see around me. There is a little girl. She has pink leggings on. Her hair is in ponytails on either side of her  head. The woman is pushing the stroller. The tree is a pin oak and still has its leaves. The passing car is a Volvo. We used to have a Volvo. It always... -- no, that's the past. This Volvo is dark green... You get the idea.

When you can't get outside, like during Christmas dinner, become an anthropologist. Like Margaret Mead. Who are these people? What do they think? How do they treat each other? What are their eating habits? What happens after three beers? You are not responsible for any of it. You do not have to stop what you don't like. You don't even have to like or not like. You are simply an observer.

Mindfulness is a practice. Practice is what people do when they want to get better at something. Remember, if you can't pull off mindfulness every time you need it, that's okay. You just need more practice. 

Quick getaways: 


There is one more thing you need, some handy lines to get you out of the inevitable spot. Let's see how many of these you can anticipate.

There you are, being Margaret Mead, mindfulnessing away. And Uncle You Know Who turns to you and says... What will it be this year? Immigrants? Climate change? What he thinks about all this therapy you're doing? He knows your triggers like the back of his hand, because he trips them every year. Well, write this one down on the back of your hand, That's very interesting. I'll have to think about that. That one can get you out of all kinds of arguments. Sometimes it even gets my therapist off my back.

Or there you are, seated next to the cousin you haven't seen since she tried to drown you in the pool when you were kids. Remember, you are here, this is now. Try, Seen any good movies lately? It matters not a whit if that line is a dud, because it sets up your next line, What do you do with your time nowadays?

Then there is the open-ended How about them Hawks? Or Vikings, or whatever. Do a little research ahead of time, so you know a team near the person you are addressing. For the sport challenged, here is a starting point: it's football season. And if that line is a dud, follow with... are you with me yet?  What do you do with your time nowadays?

When you must escape the person or the room, there's: 
  • Excuse me, my drink needs more ice
  • I'm going out for a smoke/some air/to make snow angels
  • and, Do you know where the bathroom is?
And when you have had your limit: I really must go. Thank you so much for the party. Merry Christmas. With a normal host, I mean really normal, not undiagnosed normal, you don't need to explain anything.

If the host is in the undiagnosed category, try: 
  • My puppy/probation officer/Nurse Ratchet is waiting up for me.
  • Or: I'm sorry, suddenly I'm feeling flu-ish. You can play the flu for all it's worth this year. 
  • Or even, Oops, my meds are wearing off. Gotta go!
  • If somebody else in the room should be on meds, a simple I'm outa here will suffice.
Make yourself a crib sheet, and these few lines will help you navigate a wide range of social situations. Do you have anything else you want to recommend to fellow readers? Make a comment!

There is one more strategy, diversion. I will cover diversion, in the form of recommended movies for the holiday season next week.  Put your recommendations (and reasons) in the comments this week.  I am happy for all the help I can get!


Families -- you gotta love 'em. And you can always laugh. It really works better if you do. Happy Holidays!

clipart from Microsoft online
photo credit Edward Lynch
popcorn credt Francesco Marino

Thanksgiving and the Anterior Cingulate Cortex


Did anybody decompensate at your Thanksgiving Day feast, when there were no pearl onions in cream sauce, notwithstanding the fact that nobody has ever eaten a single pearl onion in cream sauce, since Great grandma Libby died forty-five years ago?

Was it you?

I think I figured it out. Unfortunately, this flash of brilliance came to me yesterday morning, in my hypomanic surge that prepared me for my speed pie-making. Not in time for you to prevent the scene by preparing said onions.

Somebody's anterior cingulate cortex blew a fuse.

Of course, I don't know for sure. It is one more hypothesis that I would like to test in that Million Dollar fMRI machine that I am not getting for Christmas. But here is the hypothesis:

The bad economy, the fear-mongering health care debate, the single-payer stillbirth, the war in Afghanistan, global warning -- your anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is doing all that it can to calm your amygdala. That is one of its jobs, partnered with the prefrontal cortex, to exercise executive function over your amygdala, which is convinced that you are about to die and is sending out messages to your adrenal gland, telling it non-stop to keep pumping out those glucocorticoids that are destroying your hippocampus, not to mention your heart. The amygdala must be brought under control! So your ACC has plenty of work to do already, and needs for you to help out by deep breathing. And yoga. And crystals.

But it also has another job, which is to detect abnormalities in patterns. You know those games where you are supposed to find five details that differ in two nearly identical pictures? That's a job for the ACC. But what with global warming and all that other stuff (and we still don't have any snow in Iowa the day after Thanksgiving, so my amygdala keeps telling my ACC, "I do so need to worry"), when somebody's ACC detected a variation in the Thanksgiving feast day table, i.e., the missing pearl onions, that was just one thing too many. And it blew a fuse, releasing the amygdala from its cage. And this time, the amygdala did not send out the message to freeze. It came out fighting.

So now you know. Or would know, if somebody who does own an fMRI machine would construct the experiment. Any takers?

Nonsense and the Anterior Cingulate Cortex


John McNamany put the thought into my head, the New York Times tickled my fancy and a blog new to me gave me the illustration.

Finally, it's Anterior Cingulate Cortex Week!  This lovely portion of the brain is found in the limbic system, located just above the center, about where Iowa would be, if you flipped the image so that it faced right, as I did here. Like a true Midwesterner, the ACC modulates emotional response. A hard-working manager, the ACC handles motivation to solve problems and anticipation of tasks and rewards. It also monitors for conflict, things that don't make sense. The brain is unhappy when it cannot detect the pattern. Confronted with anomaly, the ACC goes to work.

"Researchers have long known that people cling to personal biases when confronted with death... In a series of new papers, Dr. Travis Proulx of University of California Santa Barbara and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns. When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one." [Benedict Carey, New York Times, October 5, 2009]

To test whether confronting the absurd leads to pattern-searching behavior, they had twenty college students read Kafka, "The Country Doctor," a story that is urgent, vivid and nonsensical. Does anybody who is not in college ever read Kafka? Anyway, after reading the story, they were given a task, to study strings of letters that did not form words. They were then shown a longer list, and asked to find the strings they had seen before. The letters did have patterns, very subtle patterns.  And the students who had read Kafka did better at this task than another twenty who had not been exposed to the absurd, 30% better. With a Kafka-stimulated ACC, they were primed to find the patterns.

I wonder if that explains the college student's propensity to read Kafka, in the first place. Not to mention all those posters by Salvador Dali on dorm room walls. The college student is at a crossroads, and has to puzzle through the animal tracks of his/her life, to discern the pattern, the call, the next direction. These representations of the absurd stimulate the part of the brain needed at this developmental moment, just as caffeine stimulates the system before the exam.

I graduated from college at loose ends, with the Episcopal Church still discerning the patterns that would allow for the ordination of women. That was a few years off, and I wasn't ready to commit to a vocation that might not be received. But I didn't read Kafka. Instead, I decided to read everything that Kurt Vonnegut had written up to that point, a modern day Kafka, Kafka-lite, if you will. Today, as I am filling out disability applications, I am again at a crossroads, and again, instinctively, I am drawn to Vonnegut, whose body of work has grown since 1975. Evidently I am stimulating my ACC and boosting my pattern/meaning/coherence finding abilities, priming myself to discern my next direction.

Oh boy, I found another fMRI experiment!  There is a study in the Journal of Pain (what a title!) that discovered, when people were prompted by pain-related words to remember painful autobiographical episodes, the fMRI machines showed that it was -- you guessed it?! -- the anterior cingulate cortex that lit up.

"This person loved me; this same person abused me" -- two memories in conflict. Put them together, they cause pain. They call it dialectical thinking if you can hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in the same head at the same time. But dialectical thinking is a highly developed skill. Before anybody ever suggested to me that I could employ it to reduce my pain, I spent (and still do spend) enormous amounts of energy trying to make sense of events that were absurd.

Some of us had Kafka-esque childhoods. I wonder, does the ACC becomes quiet if we engage in dialectical thinking? I wonder. Does it can blow a fuse, if we don't?

If you are searching for Christmas gift ideas for the Prozac Monologues blogger, an fMRI machine would certainly be well received. 

image of brain from NIMH 
artwork found at Glocal Christianity

Mother Amygdala, Have Mercy Upon Us

Once upon a time I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. But I had this idiotic fear of science class -- it was in the water that they gave to girls in the 1950s. So I headed in another direction. Still I am fascinated by the brain, and will keep sharing the stuff that I learn about it. Today's topic is the amygdala.

Ah, the amygdala, the reptilian brain. It is among the oldest parts of the human brain, regulating memory, emotion and fear. The amygdala associates a strong emotional reaction with a piece of information to imprint that information in your memory. You remember best what you associate with strong emotion. If you walk under a tree in the tropics and a poisonous snake falls on top of you, it is highly beneficial from an evolutionary perspective to remember that tree where those poisonous snakes linger. That's when the amygdala is your friend.

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