Failed Editors

T.S. Eliot, “Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers”.

Doctors learn to control their own brains’ pain responses to better treat patients

I knew this all along. I call it having excellent compartmentalization skills.

Contact: William Harms
w-harms@uchicago.edu
773-702-8356
University of Chicago

Physicians apparently learn to “shut off” the portion of their brain that helps them appreciate the pain their patients experience while treating them and instead activate a portion of the brain connected with controlling emotions, according to new research using brain scans at the University of Chicago.

Because doctors sometimes have to inflict pain on their patients as part of the healing process, they also must develop the ability to not be distracted by the suffering, said Jean Decety, Professor in Psychology and Psychiatry at the University and co-author of “Expertise Modulates the Perception of Pain in Others,” published in the Oct. 9 issue of Current Biology and available Thursday at noon on-line.

“They have learned through their training and practice to keep a detached perspective; without such a mechanism, performing their practice could be overwhelming or distressing, and as a consequence impair their ability to be of assistance for their patients” said Decety, who conducted the study with Yawei Cheng of the Institute of Neuroscience, National Yang-Ming University in Taipei, and colleagues there.

Previous research, including work from Decety’s lab, has shown that the neural circuit that registers pain, is activated if a person sees another person in pain. The response in this circuit, which includes the anterior insula, periaqueducal gray and anterior cigulate cortex, is automatic and may reflect a panic response developed evolutionally as a means of avoiding danger.

The research by Decety and the Taiwanese team shows for the first time that people can learn to control that automatic response.

The team performed its research in Taiwan with two groups of evenly matched men and women with a mean age of 35 and similar socio-economic and educational levels– a group of 14 physicians and 14 people with no experience in acupuncture. They were tested using a functional MRI.

Brain responses were recorded as individuals from the two groups looked at short video-clips in which people were pricked with acupuncture needles in their mouth regions, hands, and feet. They also watched as the patients were touched with Q-tips. The images appeared in random order.

Among the control group, the scan showed that the pain circuit, which comprises somatosensory cortex, anterior insula, periaqueducal gray and anterior cigulate cortex, was activated when members of that group saw someone touch with a needle but not activated when the person was touched with a Q-tip.

Physicians registered no increase in activity in the portion of the brain related to pain, whether they saw an image of someone stuck with a needle or touched with a Q-tip. However, the physicians, unlike the control group, did register an increase in activity in the frontal areas of the brain–the medial and superior prefrontal cortices and the right tempororparietal junction. That is the neural circuit that is related to emotion regulation and cognitive control.

They also asked the two groups to rate the level of pain they felt people were experiencing while being pricked with needles. The control group rated the pain at about 7 points on a 10-point scale, while the physicians said the pain was probably at 3 points on that scale.

Those findings reflected the prediction the scholars had going into the study.

“It would not be adaptive if this automatic sharing mechanism for pain was not modulated by cognitive control. Think, for instance, of the situations that surgeons, dentists, and nurses face in their everyday professional practices. Without some regulatory mechanism, it is very likely that medical practioners would experience personal distress and anxiety that would interfere with their ability to heal,” the researchers write.

For Decety, this new study also casts light on the mechanisms involved in empathy and empathic concern. The former relies on our capacity to share emotions and feelings with others. If there is too much of an overlap between others and self, such an overlap (reflected by similar neural circuits that automatically and unconsciously resonate between self and other) it could lead to personal distress, which is an aversive reaction. Empathic concern necessitates to regulate our implicit sharing mechanism and frees up processing capacity to act for the sake of the other.

Taco Shoppe at Govt. Camp

The excellent 3 feet of new snow that Meadows got was the best. It was like falling through fluffy pillows made of angels and cotton candy. Yeah, it was that good. You could keel over from pleasure if you stopped too long, falling at 45 degrees through a glass of champagne down Mt. Hood and getting stuck if you tried to hit it too slow.

I love – Tacos at the Taco Shoppe – Yeah it’s not really a shop at all, only a window outside the EXIT shop in town but holy-friggin-moley those tacos are so great after a day of skiing. Six bucks will get you A couple of number one (#1) tacos with carnitas, cilantro and corn tortillas will have you drooling. Don’t try and drive and eat, you need two hands for these mini bad boys.  You can rent skis for $20 across the street or crash at the Cascade Ski Club for $22 a night. Bring your sleeping bag b/c it’s old school Swedish/Norwegian bunkhouse style. 

Wreck on the way back from Mt. Hood Meadows on Saturday

odot employees help car at mt hoododot employees help car at mt hood

 

I got the chance to see some ODOT employees hurry to assist a car that had flipped over on the way back from MT. Hood Meadows this past Saturday. The snow fell heavily on Friday night but most traffic incidents happend Saturday, December 15th, 2007. Everyone got out of the car safely. Good work guys!

Video from Timberline Lodge

The Secret to My Success

Brain ‘irrelevance filter’ found

Memory capacity may be linked to filtering out irrelevant information Scientists believe they have located a new brain area essential for good memory – the “irrelevance filter”. People who are good at remembering things, even with distractions, have more activity in the basal ganglia on brain scans, the Swedish team found. The work in Nature Neuroscience could help explain why some people are better at remembering things than others. Clinically, it could also aid the understanding of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The ability to hold information in the mind so that it is immediately accessible is known as working memory. We use working memory all of the time – for example, when doing a simple maths calculation in our head or recalling a telephone number. There will be many brain regions that filter irrelevant information, so it is too early to tell if these findings will have a bearing on conditions such as ADHD John Duncan Medical Research Council scientist Working memory is important because it gives a mental workspace in which we can hold information whilst mentally engaged in other relevant tasks, which is crucial for learning. Its capacity is limited and seems to vary from person to person. These variations are not just due to having a larger or smaller memory store, but also due to differences in how effectively irrelevant items are kept out of memory, the Karolinksa Institute researchers believe. Distracters Dr Torkel Klingberg and colleague Fiona McNab used a special brain scan called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track what was happening in the brains of 25 healthy volunteers. The volunteers were asked to perform a computer-based task that required them to respond to target visual images, with or without distractions. A noise informed subjects when an upcoming visual display would contain irrelevant distracters along with the targets. When this cue occurred, neural activity increased in the basal ganglia and the prefrontal cortex before the visual display appeared, suggesting the brain was preparing to “filter out” the upcoming distracters. Also, greater activity in a specific part of the basal ganglia – the globus pallidus – correlated with less unnecessary storage in another part of the brain, the posterior parietal cortex, which is sensitive to the amount of information held in memory. The team is currently investigating methods of improving attention and working memory in children with ADHD and monitoring any changes with fMRI. Medical Research Council scientist John Duncan said: “This is very interesting work and gives a window on important parts of the brain. “The basal ganglia are very strong candidates for involvement in brain disorders where people have difficulty with attentional control. “But there will be many brain regions that filter irrelevant information, so it is too early to tell if these findings will have a bearing on conditions such as ADHD.”

fringe militia

Warriors of the fringe in your car affair. Stedfast foes of Christmas lights in cars. 

“Citizens United (CU), and its President David Bossie, have retained counsel to pursue claims against CNN for reporting in a November 28th CNN show called Broken Government — ‘Campaign Killers,’ hosted by Campbell Brown, that David Bossie and CU were part of a ‘fringe militia.’ CU through counsel will seek a formal apology and public retraction of those statements, and for calling Bossie a ‘dirty trickster.’ If no retraction is forthcoming, CU will then bring legal action to hold CNN accountable for these and other misrepresented facts. These baseless allegations were a disservice to CU and its 500,000 members, CNN and its audience, and to general principles of responsible, fact-based journalism.”

Developing…

Slag

slag

730 up, 78 down

1. An individual who cares not for relationships beyond the realm of the sexual, these people sleep with many partners not caring about anything save for the moment of climax. 2. Rubbish that is not worth the time or effort of paying attention to it, but none the less draws one in. Used to describe unpleasent situations. 3. Physical trash, often scrap metals. 4. Drawn from frag, to slag something is to destroy it, used in cases of technological rather then biological items. So your wife’s been a nasty slag all along? I knew she was trouble from the moment I first laid her. Lost your job huh? Damn man, that’s some cold hard slag. Don’t forget to get the slag off the yard, the city is threatening to fine us! Hey, I just got the new Mechwarrior game. Let’s go slag us some newbies.