(Editor’s note: below you have the final part of the 6-part Stress and the Brain series. If you are join­ing the series now, you can read the pre­vi­ous parts via the links below.)

Stayin’ Alive

TO FIGHT, FLEE, OR FREEZE — THAT IS THE QUESTION

With a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy of stress, the LD — ADHD — stress con­nec­tion becomes clear.  Stu­dents with learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties or ADHD, con­fronted with the stress cre­ated by expo­sure to tasks that are in real­ity or in their per­cep­tion too dif­fi­cult (and thus threat­en­ing), exhibit the pro­tec­tive behav­ior of any organ­ism under extreme stress:  They fight, they flee, or they freeze. When these kids don’t under­stand why they can’t do what other kids can do (mas­ter the stres­sor), and they can’t see any way to get out of a sit­u­a­tion that won’t go away, they begin to shut down. Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s note: below you have part 5 of the 6-part The Neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy of Stress series. If you are join­ing the series now, you can read the pre­vi­ous part Here.)

Stayin’ Alive

The Human Brain Likes to Be in Balance

For­tu­nately, the brain has some built — in safety sys­tems. Too much cor­ti­sol in the blood sig­nals the brain and adrenal glands to decrease cor­ti­sol pro­duc­tion. And under nor­mal con­di­tions, when the stress is over­come or brought under con­trol (by fight­ing, flee­ing, or turn­ing into an immo­bile statue, or by mas­ter­ing the threat), the hypo­thal­a­mus starts send­ing out the orders to stand down. Stop pro­duc­ing cor­ti­sol!  Event over!  Under con­tin­u­ous stress, how­ever, this feed­back sys­tem breaks down. The hypo­thal­a­mus keeps read­ing the stress as a threat, furtively send­ing mes­sages to the pitu­itary gland, which screams out to the adrenal glands to keep pump­ing out cor­ti­sol, which at this point begins to be neu­ro­toxic — poi­son to the brain. Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s note: below you have part 4 of the 6-part The Neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy of Stress series. If you are join­ing the series now, you can read the pre­vi­ous part Here.)

Stayin’  Alive

THE STRESS RESPONSE EXPLAINED

Stress was put on the map, so to speak, by a Hun­gar­ian — born Cana­dian endocri­nol­o­gist named Hans Hugo Bruno Selye (ZEL — yeh) in 1950, when he pre­sented his research on rats at the annual con­ven­tion of the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion. To explain the impact of stress, Selye pro­posed some­thing he called the Gen­eral Adap­ta­tion Syn­drome (GAS), which he said had three com­po­nents. Accord­ing to Selye, when an organ­ism expe­ri­ences some novel or threat­en­ing stim­u­lus it responds with an alarm reac­tion. This is fol­lowed by what Selye referred to as the recov­ery or resis­tance stage, a period of time dur­ing which the brain repairs itself and stores the energy it will need to deal with the next stress­ful event.

Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s note: below you have part 3 of the 6-part The Neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy of Stress series. If you are join­ing the series now, you can read the pre­vi­ous part Here.)

Stayin’ Alive

Under­stand­ing the Human Brain and How It Responds to Stress

The Lit­tle Brain Down Under

The tour con­tin­ues … Sit­ting under the occip­i­tal and tem­po­ral lobes of the brain is the cere­bel­lum. It’s about the size of a child’s fist. Because it looks like a sep­a­rate brain­like struc­ture attached to the under­side of the cor­tex, the cere­bel­lum is some­times referred to as the “ lit­tle brain. ” It’s con­nected to the brain stem, which in turn con­nects the brain to the spinal cord. The cere­bel­lum used to be rel­e­gated to the very sim­ple role of help­ing us main­tain bal­ance when we walk or run, but mod­ern neu­ro­science has found that the cere­bel­lum plays a much larger and more impor­tant role than that. Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s note:  below you have part 2 of the 6-part The Neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy of Stress series. If you are join­ing the series now, you can read the pre­vi­ous part Here.)

Stayin’ Alive

Gray Mat­ters

The term gray mat­ter usu­ally evokes an image of the cor­tex, because that ’ s the part most vis­i­ble in pic­tures of the brain.  In fact, gray mat­ter makes up not only the cere­bral cor­tex but also the cen­tral por­tion of the spinal cord and areas called the cere­bel­lar cor­tex and the hip­pocam­pal cor­tex.  This dense tis­sue is packed full of neu­ronal cells, their den­drites (branch­ing, root — like end­ings), axon ter­mi­nals (the other end), and those sticky glial cells I men­tioned ear­lier. The cor­tex is the area of the brain where the actual pro­cess­ing of infor­ma­tion takes place.  Because of its rel­a­tive size and com­plex­ity, it ’ s easy to under­stand why it plays a key role in mem­ory, atten­tion, per­cep­tual aware­ness, thought, lan­guage, and consciousness.

Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s note: We are pleased to bring to Sharp­Brains read­ers a new 6-part series on the Neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy of Stress, excerpted from the recent book Nowhere to Hide: Why Kids with ADHD and LD Hate School and What We Can Do About It, by Sharp­Brains con­trib­u­tor Dr. Jerome Schultz.)

Stayin ’ Alive

Worry is like a rock­ing chair. It gives you some­thing to do, but it gets you nowhere.
— Erma Bombeck

The brain is the con­trol cen­ter for all of our thoughts, actions, atti­tudes, and emo­tions. It ’ s the pilot­house on the river­boat of our lives. It’s Mis­sion Con­trol for all of our fl ights into space or time. It ’ s the air traffic con­troller that helps us nav­i­gate and reroute our paths based on incom­ing and out­go­ing infor­ma­tion and how we’re feel­ing about it at the time. It’s the John Williams of our per­sonal sym­phony. It ’ s the Mother Ship to our Starfleet; it’s . . . (Uh, sorry, I got car­ried away there, but I think you get my point!) Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s note: Path­ways respon­si­ble for higher-order think­ing in the pre­frontal cor­tex (PFC), or exec­u­tive cen­ter of the brain, remain vul­ner­a­ble through­out life—during crit­i­cal early-life devel­op­men­tal win­dows, when the PFC fully matures in the early 20s, and finally from declines asso­ci­ated with old age. At all ages, phys­i­cal activ­ity and PFC-navigated social con­nec­tions are essen­tial com­po­nents to main­tain­ing brain health. The Expe­ri­ence Corps, a community-based social-engagement pro­gram, part­ners seniors with local schools to pro­mote purpose-driven involve­ment. Par­tic­i­pat­ing seniors have exhib­ited imme­di­ate short-term gains in brain regions vul­ner­a­ble to aging, such as the PFC, indi­cat­ing that peo­ple with the most to lose have the most to gain from envi­ron­men­tal enrichment.)

Over the last decade, sci­en­tists made two key dis­cov­er­ies that reframed our under­stand­ing of the adult brain’s poten­tial to ben­e­fit from life­long envi­ron­men­tal enrich­ment. First, they learned that the adult brain remains plas­tic; it can gen­er­ate new neu­rons in response to phys­i­cal activ­ity and new expe­ri­ences. Sec­ond, they con­firmed the impor­tance of social con­nect­ed­ness to late-life cog­ni­tive, psy­cho­log­i­cal, and phys­i­cal health. The inte­gra­tion of these find­ings with our under­stand­ing of indi­vid­u­als’ devel­op­men­tal needs through­out life under­scores the impor­tance of the “social brain.” The pre­frontal cor­tex (PFC) is par­tic­u­larly inte­gral to nav­i­gat­ing com­plex social behav­iors and hier­ar­chies over the life course. Read the rest of this entry »

The cur­rent issue of Cere­brum –a great pub­li­ca­tion of the Dana Foun­da­tion– includes the excel­lent in-depth arti­cle Pro­mot­ing Healthy, Mean­ing­ful Aging Through Social Involve­ment: Build­ing an Expe­ri­ence Corps, writ­ten by researcher Michelle Carlson:

“Over the last decade, sci­en­tists made two key dis­cov­er­ies that reframed our under­stand­ing of the adult brain’s poten­tial to ben­e­fit from life­long envi­ron­men­tal enrich­ment. First, they learned that the adult brain remains plas­tic; it can gen­er­ate new neu­rons in response to phys­i­cal activ­ity and new expe­ri­ences. Sec­ond, they con­firmed the impor­tance of Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: In 1990, Con­gress des­ig­nated the 1990s the “Decade of the Brain.” Pres­i­dent George H. W. Bush pro­claimed, “A new era of dis­cov­ery is dawn­ing in brain research.” Dur­ing the ensu­ing decade, sci­en­tists greatly advanced our under­stand­ing of the brain. The edi­tors of Cere­brum asked the direc­tors of seven brain-related insti­tutes at the National Insti­tutes of Health (NIH) to iden­tify the biggest advances, great­est dis­ap­point­ments, and missed oppor­tu­ni­ties of brain research in the past decade—the decade after the “Decade of the Brain.” They also asked them what looks most promis­ing for the com­ing decade, the 2010s. Experts focused on research that might change how doc­tors diag­nose and treat human brain disorders.)

Neu­ro­science is at a his­toric turn­ing point. Today, a full decade after the “Decade of the Brain,” a con­tin­u­ous stream of advances is shat­ter­ing long-held notions about how the human brain works and what hap­pens when it doesn’t. These advances are also reshap­ing the land­scapes of other fields, from psy­chol­ogy to eco­nom­ics, edu­ca­tion and the law.

Until the Decade of the Brain, sci­en­tists believed that, once devel­op­ment was over, the adult brain under­went very few changes. This per­cep­tion con­tributed to polar­iz­ing per­spec­tives on whether genet­ics or envi­ron­ment deter­mines a person’s tem­pera­ment and per­son­al­ity, apti­tudes, and vul­ner­a­bil­ity to men­tal dis­or­ders. But dur­ing the past two decades, neu­ro­sci­en­tists have steadily built the case that the human brain, even when fully mature, is far more plastic—changing and malleable—than we orig­i­nally thought.1 It turns out that the brain (at all ages) is highly respon­sive to envi­ron­men­tal stim­uli and that con­nec­tions between neu­rons are dynamic and can rapidly change within min­utes of stimulation.

Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity is mod­u­lated in part by Read the rest of this entry »

Spec­tac­u­lar arti­cle by Dr. Denise Park in this month’s Cere­brum:

Work­ing Later in Life May Facil­i­tate Neural Health

- “Carmi Schooler at the National Insti­tutes of Health, using a tech­nique that allowed him to assess causal rela­tion­ships, found that adults who per­formed intel­lec­tu­ally chal­leng­ing jobs across their life span showed more cog­ni­tive flex­i­bil­ity in late adult­hood than those who per­formed less demand­ing jobs.“
– “Per­haps the most com­pelling evi­dence regard­ing the impact of novel expe­ri­ences on brain vol­ume and func­tion comes from a study at the Max Planck Insti­tute in Ger­many. Adults with a mean age of 59 spent three months learn­ing to jug­gle three balls. Although only about half the par­tic­i­pants were able to achieve com­pe­tence in this com­plex skill, those who suc­ceeded had increased vol­ume in a mediotem­po­ral area of the visual cor­tex as well as the nucleus accum­bens and the hip­pocam­pus, sug­gest­ing that sus­tained novel expe­ri­ence can increase the sizes of neural struc­tures. Notably, the changes in the nucleus accum­bens and hip­pocam­pus were Read the rest of this entry »