Showing posts with label learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label learning. Show all posts

Getting My Brain Back -- I'm Still Excited by BDNF

Learning has been fundamental to my mental health recovery. It started with this blog itself. I wanted to know What the hell happened to my brain?!!! So I read the research and used ProzacMonologues.com to keep track of my notes.

For a while I added piano to my recovery regimen. Not for music therapy, but for brain development. Okay, I didn't keep at it. I can sort of play Desperado. But it did get me a few more miles down the road.

Lately I am learning a new language. Five minutes a day of Irish on Duolingo -- I don't expect to be fluent any time this decade. I don't need to be fluent. For those five minutes a day, I am building my brain.

Which is always a good thing.

I did a search in my blog for BDNF. And found something I wrote in 2011, right after I wrote that review of Ellen Frank's Treating Bipolar Disorder. Now you, kind reader, have no idea the struggle it took back then to write these paragraphs. I am proud of it both for the accomplishment and for the content itself. I present it to you again:

Getting My Brain Back -- In Praise of BDNF


Making Music to Build Your Brain

Manic episodes burn up brain cells. So do depressive episodes. So do panic attacks. Cortisol run amuck leaves you with potholes in your head. Not to worry -- the brain has a built-in repair system, Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor, BDNF.

They've been trying forever to reverse engineer antidepressants. If they can figure out how they work, they figure they will know what causes depression in the first place. At first they thought it was low serotonin levels, the proverbial "chemical imbalance." A more recent thought is that a low serotonin level is not the cause, after all; it's the effect. Fix the problem farther upstream by stimulating BDNF to repair the brain damage, and the serotonin level sorts itself out.

But the natural thing that gets this hormone humming to patch your potholes is learning! There's this big deal about seniors doing Sudoku to ward off dementia. But it only works until you get good at it. You have to keep doing new stuff that you don't already know how to do.

And what better than learning to play a musical instrument? You have no talent? You tried it as a kid and you were lousy? Hear me out. If you were good at it, it wouldn't build your brain. Seriously, it's like exercise. If you don't feel the struggle, you're not building the muscle. Making music turns out to be a full body/brain workout.


So go get yourself a ukelele! Your brain will be glad you did.
photo of pothole in public doman
photo of road repair taken by US Air Force and in public domain

Stages of Change for Weight Loss Revisited

How embarrassing.  I clicked on the link to an old post which is getting a lot of hits this week.  It's all about how diets don't work.  And I found four ads about weight loss.

Okay, maybe there is helpful information in those ads.  I hope so, because I put ads on my site to give you resources beyond what my poor brain can contrive. But I don't know, because I get paid by how often somebody looks at them, and the contract says I am not allowed to look at them myself.  I am also not allowed to encourage you to look at them.  That's up to you.  Never mind.

Mirror Neurons - They Change Everything

Blow your mind in the seven minutes and forty-four seconds:



You just watched V.S. Ramachandran, Director for the Center of Brain and Cognition at the University of California Sand Diego, cross the mind/brain barrier in his description of mirror neurons.  These neurons, a subset of the command neurons in the frontal cortex, are the neurobiological basis for imitation, culture and empathy.  What we see another do or feel causes mirror neurons in our own brains to fire, so that we understand or feel the same.

This week's blogpost is published late because I kept trying to explain what mirror neurons explain.  They explain everything.

They explain why rich people are not as generous as poor people.  (That may get its own post soon.)  They explain why religious people give more than nonreligious people, more time, more money, more blood.  (My source for that one is sociological, not neurobiological.  So I may not blog it, though mirror neurons would explain it.)  They explain why people who own guns are more afraid than people who do not, and why people who watch tv overestimate the crime rate.  They explain pornography.  They explain Congress.

More on Mood Charts

This is my personalized mood chart.


You can find a larger and clearer image here. It was inspired by the one my mental health insurance provider sent me when I began taking mood stabilizers. Last week I described how their chart works and how people with mood disorders benefit from using any of the great variety out there.

Cigna's chart primarily tracks mood. Using theirs, I learned that lamotrigine made a difference to the course of my symptoms. After years of inappropriate prescriptions of antidepressants, I had moved to rapid cycling. No, rapid cycling means several cycles in a year. More like, I was spinning, from the depths of depression to raging agitation within each week, week after week. Lamotrigine did modify that pattern. It stretched the cycles, down from four to two a month. By recording the pattern, eventually I concluded, and I had the evidence to support it to my doctor, that the costs of the medication (dizziness, fourteen hours of sleep and grogginess a day, losing words) outweighed the benefits.

More Than Mood

But Cigna's chart was missing vital information. Mood dysregulation was only part of my experience. It was the agitation, sense of urgency, poor concentration, lack of sleep that put me on the disability roles. And, I began to suspect, these disturbances in energy levels were driving my suicidal thoughts as much as my depression was.

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.

The Garden of Your Mind

Mr. Rogers does with the mind what last week's post with Carl Sagan, Jill Bolte Taylor, et al did with the brain...



NAMI Camino - BDNF Meets 5K

Exercise and learning new things -- two of the most powerful tools in the Recovery Toolbox.  They came together in my NAMI Camino, April 28, 2012.

NAMI Walk/NAMI Camino gave you the set up.  NAMI Johnson County held its annual walk/fund-raiser last week, when I was in Costa Rica.  It would be my fourth and last time participating.  But I would be in Costa Rica!  Inspired by the San Diego Walk in 2010, when a battalion in Iraq ran while San Diego walked, I decided to do Johnson County's Walk long distance -- though I would not be running in full battle armor and in the heat of the day.  My extra effort was confined to carrying a laptop to record the event.

With the following results:


So what follows is a series of installments, stopping at each kilometer marker.  This series shows you what you can do with Photo Booth, Youtube, not much skill, and a willingness to experiment.  Everything is reversed, left and right, which won't confuse you unless you are trying to read t-shirts or street signs.

Preparation/Action - Reprogramming Your Brain for Healthy Eating

Some days Facebook just breaks my heart.

Last week a friend who is trying to change his eating habits because, well frankly, his life depends on it, posted a complaint about his breakfast smoothie.  He gave the recipe, and yes, it was nasty.  So one of his "friends" said she would bring over some donuts.


Another friend posted, I have the best husband! He brought me home an Oreo Blizzard.  Her life doesn't depend on it yet, because she is younger.  But it will.  She is on her way.  SAD, the Standard American Diet is an addiction and addictions are progressive.

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.

Dopamine - Can't Live Without It

Dopamine -- It's what gets the lab rat turn to left at the T, race down the hallway, make a flying leap at an 18" wall, snag the ledge with its little claws, and struggle over to fall to the other side and win those four food pellets.  If you artificially deplete the lab rat's dopamine, it will turn right at the T and settle for the two pellets lying on the floor.

Dopamine -- It's what got you out of bed this morning and to work on time.  Or if your dopamine levels are depleted, you pulled the covers over your head, while your spouse pleaded with you to go back to your therapist.

Dopamine -- It's what got you out of the house early to redeem that two-for-one mocha coupon at your favorite coffee shop on your way to work, and as long as you were there, might as well order that banana chocolate chip muffin.  Bananas are good for you, right?  Or if you just never got into the habit of that particular coffee shop, and it's not on the way to work, and you really like the French Roast you have at home anyway, then your dopamine never got you fired up, and the coupon went to waste.

Changing Food Habits - Contemplation and Preparation

Do you have any idea how complex the neuroscience of your food habits are?  Cinnabon, Chili's, General Mills, et al know way more about your brain than you do.  David Kessler, former FDA Commissioner, pediatrician and Dean of Yale and UC San Francisco Medical Schools, tells the story in The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.

Neuroscientists know how the salt/sugar/fat triple whammy messes with the brain circuitry, taking offline the I have had enough now sensors and replacing them with More, please.  Reward centers, neurotransmitters, HPA axis, limbic system, operant conditioning -- they are messing with you.  Neither your meds nor an aluminum foil hat will protect you.

The Stages of Change and Weight Loss



Continuing the thread from last week, the average person in the US dies sooner than the average person in forty-nine other nations of the world.  Our higher death rates are linked to our astounding rates of overweight and obesity.  People with severe mental illness die even earlier, 15-25 years earlier.  We have the same life span as the people of Sudan.  The same things kill us as kill everybody else, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer.  They just kill us sooner, because even more of us are overweight and obese.

Side bar: I have growing difficulty using the term mental illness, because I think the term leads to an artificial bifurcation of mental and physical illness.  The weight issue is a case in point.  Most psychiatrists accept the biological model of mental illness, that our diseases are brain diseases.  Nevertheless, most consider the physical aspects as outside their purview.  As a consequence, the part of our disease that is going to kill us does not get treatment.

Weight issues are a case in point.  Psychiatrists hand us prescriptions for medications that cause ballooning weight gain and off the chart cholesterol levels along with the pro forma reminder that we won't gain weight if we don't eat more than we expend in energy.  So all we have to do is eat less and exercise more.

This kind of help doesn't help anybody, regardless of mental status.  Here, as in any other aspect of our recovery, we are on our own.

Weight Loss Programs - Hah!

The temptation is to buy the promises of the commercials that flood the airwaves each New Year.  Here is the deal.  These promises are less verifiable than the ethically-compromised promises of your medications.  But what studies that have been done indicate a relapse rate of at least 50% weight regained within a year or two.

Bottom line, diets don't work.  You have to change your life.  And to change your life, you have to change your brain.

Luckily, you can change your brain.  You just have to understand how.  You have to take the time that it takes.  But you can change your brain.

++++++++++++++++

From Thursday, June 30, 2011 and edited a bit: 

Habit and the Stages of Change



I have been writing for several weeks now [June, 2010] 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 frontal cortex, requiring no thought.  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 frontal cortex could interfere, and a decision made.  Like blinking.  Or picking up the cookie somebody brought to the meeting.

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.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Back to New Year's, 2012 

Pre-Contemplation 

The good news is, you have already moved past Stage One, Pre-Contemplation.  I presume you have moved past Stage One.  Pre-Contemplation is when you don't really think you have a problem. And why would you still be reading this post if it wasn't your problem?  So you have already made progress! 

Contemplation 

But don't try to jump that canyon.  Don't go from I have a problem to New Year's Resolution: no more cookies.  It is January 3rd, and that resolution is probably already in the toilet.  We are not talking about the New Year here.  We are talking about your life.

One step at a time.  Make a list.  Make it as long as you can.  Why do you want to change?  What difference would this change make in your life?  Go deep here.  Screw those little graphics with the magically shrinking ladies that show up in your Facebook sidebar.  What is at stake for you?  This is no longer a game.

Read that list every day.  That will help the re-patterning process.

That is enough for this week.  You have homework to do.  I have my life to get back to.

Happy New Year!  Happy Long Life!


No New Year's Resolutions - Change Your Life December 29, 2011 -- Overweight is a major health issue, the largest contributing factor to early death for people who have mental illness.
My Food Autobiography and the Stages of Change March 8, 2012 -- Pre-contemplation and contemplation.
Changing Food Habits -- Contemplation and Preparation March 15, 2012 -- Reviews The End of Overeating by David Kessler and introduces the brain science of the sugar/salt/fat trifecta.
Dopamine -- Can't Live Without It March 23, 2012 -- The brain science behind habit formation and an experiment to try.
Relapse/Maintenance -- Stages of Change May 24, 2012 -- Review and finishing up the series.



photo of salmon in Ketchikan Creek by Wknight94 and used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License 
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

Getting My Brain Back -- In Praise of BDNF


Here is the star of Getting My Brain Back, the Neuron. I've got lots of neurons. So do you. They are our friends and we need to take care of them, so they take care of us. BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor will help us do that. How BDNF is giving me my brain back is our story for the day.  But first...

Preface

Did you notice? I wrote a book report in April. If you are a regular reader, I guess that is obvious. Let me try again.

I read a book. Not just the one by Agatha Christie. Maybe you still don't get it. Never mind. Here is the story.

Introducing Neuron, The Brain Cell

 

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