This interview with Pierre Magistretti from the Brain Mind Institute covers a good deal of interesting ground, from the origins of neuroscience, the discovery of anti-depressants (by accident) and the importance of mental activity and reduced stress to brain health in seniors and infants alike.
Posts Tagged ‘stress’
Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Brain Health
Sunday, January 30th, 2011Coping And Brain Growth
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010
(Not The Actual) Squirrel Monkeys
While we may not particularly like the process, it seems that coping with stress leads to neurogenesis. Professor David Lyons (Stanford) and his team examined the impact of social stress in primates. They found increased brain cell growth in the hippocampus when the animals successfully reorganized their social ties after a separation.
The team tested their premise, that coping tends to counteract the otherwise negative effects of stress, by intermittently separating pairs within a group of adult male squirrel monkeys and allowing new pairs to form.
They found increased hippocampal neurogenesis in the squirrel monkey males. Previous studies with rodents found that hippocampal neurogenesis contributes to spatial learning performance, and Lyons’s team found enhanced spatial learning in the monkeys, too.
The conclusion for us? Therapies designed to promote stress coping potentially have similar effects in humans, particularly those suffering from depression.
Here then we have another reason why Brain Fitness Pro can help alleviate depression.
New Brain Cells, Stress, And Learned Behavior
Thursday, April 1st, 2010
Stressed Out Mouse
A new study by UT Southwestern scientists (Lagace, Donovan, DeCarolis, Farnbauch, Malhotra, Berton, Nestler, Krishnan and Eisch) sheds some light on the connection between stress and neurogenesis.
Eisch and her colleagues performed two experiments related to stress.
1. They exposed mice to a socially stressful experience — confrontation with a more aggressive mouse (the mouse equivalent of a carjacking), then measured the immediate and long term impact on the generation of new brain cells.
2. They irradiated mice to eliminate neurogenesis before exposing the irradiated mice to the same kind of stressful situation.
The scientists made two important findings:
In the first experiment, the stressful situation reduced neurogenesis temporarily (for a few days), and left the mice more likely to be fearful in similar situations.
In the second experiment the irradiated mice showed less fear when exposed to similar stressful situations.
These findings indicate that neurogenesis is key to forming stress memories. This can be a healthy response, educating us on avoidance. (Common sense.) But in cases of inappropriate or chronic stress response, neurogenesis may be overactive.