If Adam & Eve only knew: According to Medical News Today, a new study from the Brain & Spine Institute reported in PLOS Biology explores the ability to delay immediate reward for future benefit. Understanding how this works can be a tremendous aid from improving fitness to reducing obesity to achieving goals.

From Medical News Today:

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How our brain resists temptation in preference of 'future rewards'

Sunday 27 October 2013 - 12am PST

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When on a strict diet, it can be very hard to resist a bar of chocolate if it is right under your nose. Are you likely to eat it there and then? Or wait until the end of the week to intensify the satisfying experience? Whatever your answer, researchers now say they can explain the difference in people's ability to resist temptation.
 
According to researchers from the Brain and Spine Institute in Paris, activity in the hippocampus of the brain - an area of the brain involved in forming, storing and organizing memories - is crucial in making the decision to delay rewards.

Previous studies have analyzed human's temporal choices, with researchers conducting brain scans while participants are asked to make monetary choices, such as $10 now or $11 tomorrow.

"However, these paradigms miss an essential feature of the inter-temporal conflicts we have to face in everyday life," says Dr. Mathias Pessiglione of the Brain and Spine Institute and leader of the study.
"[...] immediate rewards can be perceived through our senses, whereas future rewards must be represented in our imagination."

To reach their findings, published in the journal PLOS Biology, the researchers conducted a series of experiments on volunteers using more natural rewards that people come across in everyday life. For example, participants were asked if they would like a beer today, or a bottle of champagne in a week's time.

Imagining future rewards

The participants were presented with choices between immediate rewards that were presented as pictures, or future rewards that were presented as text, meaning participants had to "imagine" the long-term rewards.

The researchers found that the ability to select future rewards was linked to the amount of activity in the hippocampus.

They then conducted the same experiments on a group of patients with hippocampus damage as a result of Alzheimer's disease, alongside patients with behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) as a result of prefrontal cortex degeneration. The prefrontal cortex of the brain is known to implement behavioral control.

Results showed that those with bvFTD demonstrated high impulsiveness in all choices, but those with Alzheimer's disease showed more bias towards immediate rewards when long-term rewards had to be imagined.
 
Dr. Pessiglione says the reason for these results is because the hippocampus plays an important role in imagining future situations by building details that makes long-term rewards appear more attractive.
He adds:

"Indeed, this structure has long been considered as essential for storing past episodes, but scientists have recently discovered that it is also involved in simulating future situations.
The consequence is that patients with hippocampus damage suffer not only from memory deficits, but also from a difficulty in imagining goals that would counter the attraction of immediate rewards and motivate their actions on the long run."

Medical News Today recently reported on a study detailing the potential for mind control after researchers discovered a specific brain activity that is triggered when people use numbers or quantitative terms in everyday conversation.

Written by Honor Whiteman

Copyright: Medical News Today

What's your song? A N.Y. Times article questions if music was initiated to boost physical effort as a new study reports that making music may just work to increase your workout performance.

 

 

Phys Ed October 23, 2013, 12:01 am 52 Comments

How Music Can Boost Our Workouts

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

 

 

 

Mel Curtis/Getty Images

Making music — and not just listening to it — while exercising makes the exercise easier, a remarkable new experiment finds, suggesting that the human love of music may have evolved, in part, to ease physical effort.

Researchers and exercisers have long known, of course, that listening to music alters the experience of exercising. Earlier studies have shown, for instance, that briskly paced music tends to inspire equally briskly paced workouts, and that music also can distract and calm nervous competitors before a race or other high-pressure situation, improving their subsequent performance.

But to date, no one had thought to investigate whether creating — and not merely hearing — music might have an effect on workouts, let alone whether the impact would be qualitatively different than when exercisers passively listen to music pumped through gym speakers or their ear buds.

So, for the new study, which was published online last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and other institutions began by inventing an electronic kit that could be integrated into the internal workings of weight-training machines, transforming them into oversize boom boxes.

Once installed, the kit would produce a range of propulsive, electronic-style music with a variety of sound levels and rhythms, depending on how the machine’s weight bar or other mechanisms were manipulated during workouts.

The researchers installed the kits into three different workout machines, one a stair-stepper, the other two weight machines with bars that could be raised or pulled down to stimulate various muscles.

They then recruited a group of 63 healthy men and women and divided them into groups, each of which was assigned to use one of the musically equipped machines during a strenuous though brief six-minute exercise session.

As the volunteers strained, their machines chirped and pinged with a thumping 130 beats per minute, the sound level rising or falling with each individual’s effort and twining with the rhythms created by the other two exercisers. “Participants could express themselves on the machines by, for instance, modulating rhythms and creating melodies,” said Thomas Hans Fritz, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute who led the study.

The groups were, in effect, D.J.’ing their workouts, creating sounds that echoed their physical efforts.
During a separate exercise session, each group used the same machines, but minus the musical add-ons, while elsewhere in the gym, other volunteers sweated at the musically equipped machines, meaning that one group was passively listening to sounds created by another.

Throughout each workout, the researchers monitored the force their volunteers generated while using the machines, as well as whether the weight lifters’ movements tended to stutter or flow and how much oxygen the volunteers consumed, a reliable measure of physical effort. Afterward, the scientists asked the volunteers to rate the tolerability or unpleasantness of the session, on a scale from 1 to 20.

Tabulated afterward, the results showed that most of the volunteers had generated significantly greater muscular force while working at the musically equipped machines than the unmodified ones. They also had used less oxygen to generate that force and reported that their exertions had felt less strenuous. Their movements were also more smooth in general, resulting in a steadier flow of music.

Creating their own rhythms and melodies had lowered the physiological cost of exercise and greatly increased its subjective allure compared with when the exercisers passively listened to virtually the same music, Dr. Fritz said.

A similar dynamic may have motivated early humans to whistle or hum while they hunted or tilled and later to raise their voices in song during barn raisings and other intense physical labor, he said.
But why orchestrating your own soundtrack should have more physical benefit than merely hearing similar music in the background is not altogether clear.

“We think that the observed effects are most probably due to a greater degree of emotional motor control,” when you actively engage in making music, Dr. Fritz said. Emotional motor control, as opposed to the more workaday “deliberate” type that normally guides our muscular movements, he said, operates almost below consciousness. Your body responds to it with little volition and you move, he said, with reduced effort and increased joy. This is “musical ecstasy,” Dr. Fritz said, and it seems to have permeated, to some degree, the gym where the exercisers composed music while sweating.

Unfortunately, the musical kits that Dr. Fritz and his colleagues have developed are not available commercially, although they may be in the future. For now, he said, you may need to content yourself with purposely ignoring the supplied soundtrack at your local gym and instead singing to yourself.

Perhaps harmonize, no matter how tunelessly, with a workout partner. Disdain naysayers and music lovers. You will be, in the felicitous phrasing of Dr. Fritz, “jymming; that’s like jamming, but with a ‘y’ from ‘gym.’”

Ever have muscle soreness after a workout caused a build-up of toxins? Ever wonder how that big muscle between our ears cleans out its toxins after a full day of work? A study reported in the Washington Post tells us how and when that chore is done and gives us another reason to sleep on it.

Health & Science 

 

Brains flush toxic waste in sleep, including Alzheimer’s-linked protein, study of mice finds

 

Lulu Xie - The difference of cerebrospinal fluid influx is seen in the brain of an awake and a sleeping mouse. Fluorescent dye has been injected into the animal to enable viewing of cerebrospinal fluid dynamics in a mouse that is still alive. The red represents the greater flow in a sleeping animal, while the green represents conversely restricted flow in the same awake animal.

By Meeri Kim

 

While we are asleep, our bodies may be resting, but our brains are busy taking out the trash.

A new study has found that the cleanup system in the brain, responsible for flushing out toxic waste products that cells produce with daily use, goes into overdrive in mice that are asleep. The cells even shrink in size to make for easier cleaning of the spaces around them.

Scientists say this nightly self-clean by the brain provides a compelling biological reason for the restorative power of sleep.

“Sleep puts the brain in another state where we clean out all the byproducts of activity during the daytime,” said study author and University of Rochester neurosurgeon Maiken Nedergaard. Those byproducts include beta-amyloid protein, clumps of which form plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.

Staying up all night could prevent the brain from getting rid of these toxins as efficiently, and explain why sleep deprivation has such strong and immediate consequences. Too little sleep causes mental fog, crankiness, and increased risks of migraine and seizure. Rats deprived of all sleep die within weeks.

Although as essential and universal to the animal kingdom as air and water, sleep is a riddle that has baffled scientists and philosophers for centuries. Drifting off into a reduced consciousness seems evolutionarily foolish, particularly for those creatures in danger of getting eaten or attacked.

One line of thinking was that sleep helps animals to conserve energy by forcing a period of rest. But this theory seems unlikely since the sleeping brain uses up almost as much energy as the awake brain, Nedergaard said.

Another puzzle involves why different animals require different amounts of sleep per night. For instance, cats sleep more than 12 hours a day, while elephants need only about three hours. Based on this newfound purpose of sleep, neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel speculates in a commentary that the varying sleep needs across species might be related to brain size. Larger brains should have a relatively larger volume of space between cells, and may need less time to clean since they have more room for waste to accumulate throughout the day.

Sleep does play a key role in memory formation — mentally going through the events of the day and stamping certain memories into the brain. But sleeping for eight hours or more just to consolidate memories seems excessive, Nedergaard said, especially for an animal such as a mouse.

Last year, Nedergaard and her colleagues discovered a network that drains waste from the brain, which they dubbed the glymphatic system. It works by circulating cerebrospinal fluid throughout the brain tissue and flushing any resulting waste into the bloodstream, which then carries it to the liver for detoxification.

She then became curious about how the glymphatic system behaves during the sleep-wake cycle.
An imaging technique called two-photon microscopy enabled the scientists to watch the movement of cerebrospinal fluid through a live mouse brain in real time. After soothing the creature until it was sound asleep, study author Lulu Xie tagged the fluid with a special fluorescent dye.

“During sleep, the cerebrospinal fluid flushed through the brain very quickly and broadly,” said Rochester neuropharmacologist Xie. As another experiment revealed, sleep causes the space between cells to increase by 60 percent, allowing the flow to increase.

Xie then gently touched the mouse’s tail until it woke up from its nap, and she again injected it with dye. This time, with the mouse awake, flow in the brain was greatly constrained.

“Brain cells shrink when we sleep, allowing fluid to enter and flush out the brain,” Nedergaard said. “It’s like opening and closing a faucet.”

They also found that the harmful beta-amyloid protein clears out of the brain twice as fast in a sleeping rodent as in an up-and-about one. The study was published in the journal Science on Thursday.

New York University cell biologist and Alzheimer’s specialist Ralph A. Nixon, who was not involved in the study, said the findings could be of great interest to the Alzheimer’s research community. For instance, the overproduction of beta-amyloid could be linked to the development of the disease, but he said these new findings hint that the lack of clearing it out might be the bigger problem.

Other neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, are also associated with a backup of too much cell waste in the brain. “Clearance mechanisms may be very relevant to keeping these proteins at a level that isn’t disease-causing,” Nixon said.

An MRI diagnostic test for glymphatic clearance is in the works by Nedergaard and her colleagues. She also believes that a drug could be developed to force a cleanup if necessary, perhaps by mimicking the sleep-wake cycle.


Meeri Kim is a freelance science journalist based in Philadelphia.

No longer taken just to combat the side-effects of being on antibiotic drugs, probiotics are a supplement that offers many other positive benefits including the improvement of digestion and immune function. This Washington Post article explores that and more.

The Washington Post -

Wellness:

Probiotics’ benefits go beyond digestion

 
By Gabriella Boston, Published: October 15 

 

We hear about them everywhere — how they clear up everything from a bloated gut to a depressed mind. How they boost the immune system and improve skin health. How they delay allergies in children and prevent urinary tract infections in women. The list is truly impressive. But what are probiotics? And do they deserve all the attention and accolades?

“Probiotics can impact just about everything in the body,” says Meagan McCusker, a University of Connecticut dermatologist who uses probiotics to treat a wide variety of conditions including acne and psoriasis. “They really can’t and shouldn’t be overlooked when it comes to overall health maintenance.”

So what, exactly, are they?

By way of the National Institutes of Health: “Probiotics are live microorganisms that are similar to beneficial microorganisms found in the human gut. They are also called ‘friendly bacteria’ or ‘good bacteria.’ ”
 
The idea is that the “friendly bacteria” will help fight the good fight along with gut-dwelling bacteria to scare off pathogens, improve immune function and aid digestion, among other things, McCusker says.

“In some patients I have seen rapid improvement of digestive distress like gas and bloating after they have started taking probiotics,” says local nutritionist Jared Rice, who started taking the supplement for his own health maintenance seven or eight years ago.

“I can definitely say that it’s been a very positive experience for me since I started taking probiotics. And I have never experienced any downsides,” he says.

It was around that time, in 2006, that Dannon introduced its Activia yogurt with live cultures to the U.S. market. That’s when many Americans picked up on probiotics, says Mary Ellen Sanders, executive director of the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics.

“We’ve been tracking this topic for more than 20 years, and it really was doing nothing until Activia. And now it’s super hot,” Sanders says.

How to use probiotics
 
Probiotics come in many forms, and they don’t need to be delivered through yogurt — particularly important for the dairy-intolerant. Probiotics can be found as fresh, refrigerated supplements at some health food stores, as well as dried and preserved.

For health maintenance, McCusker says, try starting with no more than 5 billion units of active probiotic cultures — preferably a mix of cultures that include strains of Lactobacillius and Bifidobacterium .

Ebeth Johnson, a D.C. nutritionist and chef, says to look for the following foods to provide that probiotic benefit: unpasteurized miso, live cultured pickles, tempeh, unsweetened kefir and yogurt, as well as kombucha teas.

“Blue algae is also a great source of probiotics,” Johnson says. “Get them at your local health food store and blend them into your morning fruit and greens smoothie.”

Rice cautions that, when buying probiotic food products, you should check nutrition labels, just as you would with any food, to be sure they are healthful beyond their probiotic content and don’t have too much sugar or fat.

On the other hand, if you take probiotics as a supplement, don’t look at that as a silver bullet, because benefits will be experienced only if the probiotic is combined with a healthful diet on the whole, he says. “You can’t continue to eat fast food and pop some probiotic supplements and expect a great outcome.”

In fact, the probiotics thrive best when prebiotics are present. Prebiotics, which are found in such foods as whole grains, bananas and onions, are nondigestible carbohydrates that create a probiotic-friendly gut environment.

The appropriate probiotic dosage, according to McCusker, is about 5 billion units for daily health maintenance and 15 billion-20 billion when you are treating a specific condition. (Note: The Food and Drug Administration has not approved any health claims for probiotics.)

Before you get to the higher dosages, Rice says, you should talk with a nutritionist or doctor with particular expertise in the area of probiotics about side effects, though they are rare.

So, is this all a fad that will disappear once the next nutrition celebrity makes a splash?
Sanders doesn’t think so.

“Unlike multivitamins, for example, many people who take probiotics actually feel much better,” she says, adding that’s enough of a reason for many to keep taking them.

Rice says he’s excited about the therapeutic possibilities for probiotics in the future as nutritionists and doctors get a better handle on targeting certain conditions with certain strains and combinations of probiotics.

“It’s an evolving topic. But I can see how probiotics at some point will be used more like a prescription,” he says. “I don’t think the concept of bacterial balance will fade. I think it will grow.”

While we often think of exercising in terms of maximizing our muscles, we might also begin thinking about exercising our minds as a means of maximizing our creativity, cognition, and memory. This is what made Albert Einstein the genius he was, according to a Chicago Tribune story.

Einstein's brain a wonder of connectedness

Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein had a brain that was not only bigger in many regions, but better connected than the brains of most people, a new study has found. (The Magnes Press)

By Melissa Healy  

6:59 p.m. CDT, October 10, 2013

Albert Einstein had a colossal corpus callosum. And when it comes to this particular piece of neural real estate, it's pretty clear that size matters.

Chances are, that brawny bundle of white matter cleaving the Swiss physicist's brain from front to back is part of what made his mind so phenomenally creative. The corpus callosum carries electrical signals between the brain's right hemisphere and its left. Stretching nearly the full length of the brain from behind the forehead to the nape of the neck, the corpus callosum is the dense network of neural fibers that make brain regions with very different functions work together.

When the corpus callosum works well, the human brain is a marvel of social, spatial and verbal reasoning. When it malfunctions, as it appears to do in autism, fetal alcohol syndrome and certain genetic disorders, as well as after traumatic brain injury, the effect on cognition can be disastrous.

According to a letter to the editor published Thursday in the journal Brain, Einstein's corpus callosum at the time of his death was a veritable superhighway of connectivity, "thicker in the vast majority of subregions" than the corpus collosi of 15 elderly healthy males and thicker at five key crossings than those of 52 young, healthy males who served as a comparison group.

Upon Einstein's death of an aortic aneurysm at age 76, his heirs approved the removal of his brain. A trove of histological slides were made, documenting minute slices of the theoretical physicist's brain. While some of those are housed at Princeton University, where Einstein spent his final years, and at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington D.C., many have been lost or stolen.
Without a full picture of Einstein's brain, the basis of the theoretical physicist's genius eludes scientists.

But photographs of Einstein's postmortem brain unexpectedly came to light recently, giving neuroscientists a glimpse of the genius that lay within. Last November, the journal Brain published a remarkably detailed look at the surface of Einstein's brain. The latest analysis is based on several of these photographs, which showed the separated right and left hemispheres of Einstein's post-mortem brain. Those revealed the corpus callosum with great resolution and accuracy, and allowed the current analysis.

The authors of the study -- physicists from East China Normal University in Shanghai and Florida State University anthropologist Dean Falk -- were particularly impressed by the relative brawn of Einstein's corpus callosum at the splenium -- a region of the corpus callosum that facilitates communication among the parietal, temporal and occipital lobes and between those regions and the brain's intellectual command center, the prefrontal cortex. The parietal and occipital lobes, in particular, are key to imagining and manipulating visuospatial information and images and to conducting mathematical operations.

Earlier studies of Einstein's brain have found some regions, notably Einstein's parietal lobes, were just plain bigger than those of normal people. But the authors write, "our findings suggest that Einstein's extraordinary cognition was related not only to his unique cortical structure and cytoarchitectonics, but also involved enhanced communications routes between at least some parts of his two cerebral hemispheres."

Peter U. Tse, a Dartmouth College neuroscientist who recently explored the underpinnings of artistic, scientific and mathematical creativity, said the study's findings underscore that the ways in which we use our brains, and the consistency with which we do so, may matter more as we age. Tse noted that, while Einstein's brain was much better connected than those of similarly-aged men, it was not quite as strikingly more connected than those of healthy young controls.

That might reflect the fact that Einstein continued to exercise his brain strenuously, forestalling much of the atrophy that comes with age.

"It might just be that Einstein's brain was more like a young person's brain in that sense," said Tse. "A recent article has shown that the brain is like a muscle in the sense that neural circuits that are used often tend to change in their organization." That, in turn, may lead to increases, or at least changes, in connective tissues such as the corpus callosum, he added.

"We should therefore not conclude that Einstein's genius was caused by some part of his brain being slightly larger than average. It might be that his brain was slightly larger in these areas because he exercised these regions more than the average person."

While doctors of chiropractic have been telling patients this for over 100 years, it's nice to see that a presentation at NASS this year concluded that back pain may be caused by obesity leading to mechanical dysfunction and an inflammatory response.

Exercise Eases Low Back Pain

Published: Oct 10, 2013

By John Fauber, Reporter, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today

NEW ORLEANS -- The more obese a person is, the more likely the risk of low back pain, but it's possible to reduce the odds by engaging in a moderate amount of exercise, according to research presented here.

The paper, presented Thursday at the North American Spine Society's annual meeting, is the latest to link weight and exercise to one of the most common conditions afflicting Americans and one of the first large studies to use an objective measure to study back pain: accelerometers that track a person's daily exercise levels.

Researchers Matthew Smuck, MD, of Stanford University Medical Center, and colleagues analyzed data on 6,796 participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

They found that in people who were normal weight, defined as a body mass index of 20 to 25, the risk of low back pain was 2.9%. (A 5' 10" person who weighs 174 lbs has a BMI of 25.)

In those who were overweight (BMI of 26 to 30), low back pain risk was 5.2%. In the obese, a BMI of 31 to 35, the risk grew to 7.7%. And in the morbidly obese, a BMI of 36 or more, the risk was 11.6%. (A 5' 10" person weighing 251 lbs has a BMI of 36.)

"We showed both increased BMI and inactivity were independent risk of low back pain," said Smuck. "Perhaps the best news out of this study is that big gains can be made by making some incredibly modest changes in activity."

The researchers found different ways to achieve the improvements:

• The typical overweight person increasing their amount of moderate activity such as brisk walking, riding a bike, or general gardening by less than 20 minutes a day can reduce back pain risk by 32%.
• For people with BMIs of 36 or more, the average duration of time spent during a bout of moderate activity was 1.3 minutes. However, by increasing that time by 1 minute, the risk of back pain dropped by 38%.

For years, anecdotal evidence has led spine specialists to tell overweight people to lose weight and exercise; now there is hard data to back up those beliefs, said Michael Reed, a physical therapist and spine specialist with the Hospital for Special Surgery in Jupiter, Fla.

One question the study could not answer, however, is why obesity increases the risk of low back pain.

Two leading theories are that it causes mechanical changes that affect the spine or that it causes metabolic changes that lead to varying levels of hormones and inflammation.

"I suspect it could be a combination of the two," Reed said.

Either way, Reed said, increasing activity, which can be as simple as gardening, heavy house work, or walking around the neighborhood, can help reduce low back pain.

The study was funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics.

Reed reported no relevant conflicts of interest.
Smuck reported consulting arrangements with ArthoCare and EMKinetics.

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A patient recently asked about how he can maintain homeostasis. It was a question more people should ask in that the body's desire to reach such a state of balance plays a big role in their overall health. This article from Livestong reminds me that we can apply the principles of adaptive conditioning as a way to attain homeostasis through diet and physical activity.

Increased Heart Rate During Exercise & Maintaining Homeostasis

  By Verneda Lights

Photo Credit Yagi Studio/Photodisc/Getty Images

People who have sedentary lifestyles have an increased risk of obesity, hypertension and diabetes. These diseases are associated with life-threatening ailments such as stroke, heart attack and kidney failure. Since insulin resistance, hypertension and diabetes are closely related to sedentary lifestyle, the importance of exercise in health maintenance and disease prevention is readily apparent. During exercise, your heart rate increases to maintain a state of balance, known as homeostasis.

Definition of Homeostasis

"Homeostasis" means balance or equilibrium. How your body works to maintain equilibrium is reflected in how your vital signs vary with activity. Heart rate, blood pressure and respiration are lowest during periods of rest and sleep. During exercise, blood pressure, pulse and respiration increase to meet the increased demand for oxygen and nutrients by your musculoskeletal system. The adjustment of vital signs to match your body's level of physical activity is an example of homeostasis in action.

Metabolism

Metabolism is the rate at which cells of your body consume oxygen and nutrition. The increased demand of muscle cells for oxygen and nutrients during exercise is a state of increased metabolism. Homeostasis is maintained when your heart can provide the rate of blood flow necessary to meet your body's increased metabolic demand for oxygen and nutrients.

Homeostasis, Cellular Nutrition and Waste

Exercise increases the production of cellular wastes such as carbon dioxide and lactic acid. Your cardiovascular system maintains homeostasis between the delivery of oxygen and nutrients and the removal of cellular wastes by increasing your heart rate. Your increased heart rate speeds up delivery of oxygen and nutrient rich blood to your musculoskeletal system while increasing the rate at which blood is taken away from tissues and delivered to the lungs to receive oxygen.

Homeostasis and Blood Flow

The total amount of blood in a human body remains the same during exercise. To maintain homeostasis, your body redistributes blood flow. During exercise, blood flow to the nervous system, gastrointestinal tract, kidneys, brain and spleen decreases, while blood flow to the musculoskeletal system increases.

Temperature Homeostasis

Metabolic processes generate heat. The cardiovascular system helps to maintain homeostasis with respect to body temperature. An increased heart rate increases the delivery of blood to your skin. Increased blood flow to your skin and sweating causes dissipation of heat, and body temperature remains within normal limits.

The Fitness Factor

Overall fitness determines heart rate during exercise. According to Trenton J. Niemi, MS, the range for a normal resting heart rate is 60 to 80 beats per minute. An athlete's resting heart rate can be as low as 28 to 40 beats per minute because his heart is more conditioned and pumps blood more efficiently. People who are sedentary can have a higher resting pulse of 100 beats per minute, because inadequate exercise causes the heart to work less efficiently.

Personal Application

The absence of adequate physical activity can lead to health problems that can cripple and kill. Proper diet and exercise planning with a trusted health care professional can preserve health. Do not initiate a dietary or exercise regimen without first consulting your health care provider.

A Noble laureate speaks out against under-funding the NIH and ruminates about how even the basic sciences will fare in the future. Makes one think: do we have a responsibility to defend the sciences from which we derive a living? Will complacency hurt future funding?

U.S. Nobel laureates worry about future of basic science

Julie Steenhuysen Reuters

7:13 p.m. CDT, October 7, 2013

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The kind of basic science that helped Randy Schekman win the coveted Nobel medicine prize might never have been funded if he had applied today.

Schekman, along with two other U.S.-based winners of the 2013 medicine prize, Thomas Suedhof and James Rothman, slammed recent spending cuts at the National Institutes of Health, the biggest funder of scientific research in the world. The budget curbs were undermining the chances of breakthroughs and the next generation of basic research, they said.

The three scientists, who won the Nobel for research on how cells swap proteins, have all received NIH funding at some time during their careers.

Across-the-board federal budget cuts, known as sequestration, which started in March, required the NIH to cut 5 percent or $1.55 billion of its 2013 budget. The cuts come on top of years of reductions in federal spending on research at the NIH.

The cuts automatically went into effect after the White House and Republican-controlled House of Representatives failed to agree to a deficit reduction blueprint.

The "federal paralysis is frankly imperiling our biomedical enterprise", said Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley.

More than 80 percent of the NIH's budget goes to more than 300,000 research personnel at more than 2,500 universities and research institutions throughout the United States, according to the agency's website.

Schekman's contribution towards the Nobel started with lowly baker's yeast which he used as a simplified model to pick apart the basic genes and molecular pathways cells use to share proteins with other cells.

It is a process that is fundamental not only to yeast but also the human brain, and it could only have been discovered through basic research, the type that illuminates the basic mechanics of nature and forms the foundation for future discoveries.

FROM YEAST, GREAT THINGS

At a press conference in New Haven, Connecticut, Nobel winner Rothman also criticized NIH spending cuts and said he probably would not have started his research had NIH funding not been available.

He said over the past few years, NIH funding, which "has made America the great engine of biomedical discovery" and fueled the U.S. biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, had fallen significantly, when accounting for inflation.

University research made possible by federal grants has long been a major driver of scientific advancement, spurring innovations from cancer treatments to the seeds of technology companies like Google.

The three scientists also expressed concern at the agency's focus on research that can be quickly transferred into medical discoveries rather than "basic science".

In 2011 the NIH set up the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences as a way to speed the translation of medical advances into new therapies for patients.

"Many of my colleagues, particularly young colleagues, feel they have to work on medically relevant things. For example, yeast, which I continue to view as a valuable model organism, is less popular now simply because people feel they can't get NIH funding to work on yeast," said Schekman.

It was not immediately possible to seek reaction from the NIH to the scientists' comments. It is one of the agencies hard hit by a partial U.S. government shutdown over a budget disagreement.

Scarce funds have forced a focus on "translational science" - research that can be quickly "translated" into medical applications.

Suedhof said the public in the United States "justifiably feels so much money has been spent that it's time to actually get something out of it."

But, particularly in brain science, there is still much to learn as has been the experience of many drug companies that have attempted to test treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's.

"In my view, we don't have anything to 'translate' because we just don't understand the fundamental diseases of the brain, like schizophrenia, like autism, like Alzheimer's. It's just as simple as that."

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Additional reporting by Ebong Udoma in New Haven, Connecticut; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

We know a little exercise helps us to think clearly. But if you want to improve your workouts and physical endurance, a new study published and reported in the NY Times says you need to stop thinking so much and avoid that mental fatigue that comes with overworking or over-studying.

 

 

October 2, 2013, 12:01 am

How Intense Study May Harm Our Workouts

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

 

Sam Edwards/Getty Images

 

 

Tire your brain and your body may follow, a remarkable new study of mental fatigue finds. Strenuous mental exertion may lessen endurance and lead to shortened workouts, even if, in strict physiological terms, your body still has plenty of energy reserves.

Scientists have long been intrigued by the idea that physical exertion affects our ability to think, with most studies finding that short bouts of exercise typically improve cognition. Prolonged and exhausting physical exercise, on the other hand, may leave practitioners too worn out to think clearly, at least for a short period of time.

But the inverse possibility — that too much thinking might impair physical performance — has received far less attention. So scientists from the University of Kent in England and the French Institute of Health and Medical Research, known as INSERM, joined forces to investigate the matter.

For a study published online in May in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, they decided to tire volunteers’ brains with a mentally demanding computer word game and see how well their bodies would perform afterward.

Fatigue is a complex, multifaceted condition. Exercise science usually concentrates on bodily fatigue, meaning a reduction in our ability to contract muscles and stay in motion. Run, cycle, lift weights or just stand, and a small army of muscles contract, burning fuel and eventually tiring. This fatigue occurs both within the individual muscles and at the level of the nervous system, a condition known as central fatigue.

Our minds tire, too, although the causes are difficult to pin down. Neurons may run low of fuel, and other processes probably also are involved. But it is clear, as many of us know from personal experience, that concentrating intensively on an intellectually demanding project for hours typically leaves you feeling mentally dull.

To determine the impact that such mental fatigue might have on subsequent exercise, the researchers first asked 10 healthy, active young men to visit an exercise lab on several occasions. During each visit, the men began by having monitors and an electrode attached to one leg and then vigorously contracting their leg muscles, while the electrode zapped a small amount of electricity into the muscles, augmenting their effort so that they reached their maximum contractile force at that moment. Tired muscles would be expected to produce less force and respond more feebly to the electrical zapping, telling scientists to what degree the body has developed both localized and central fatigue.

Then, during one session, the men sat for 90 minutes before a computer screen, intently watching individual letters flash by while they counted every four and punched various keys, depending on how each grouping of the letters was configured. This test is known reliably to induce mental fatigue.

During a separate lab visit, the men watched “Earth,” a serene, calming documentary, for 90 minutes.
After both intellectual activities, the men exercised one of their legs at a specialized one-legged ergometer to the point of muscular exhaustion, while frequently telling the researchers how strenuous the exercise felt.

Then they underwent the test of actual maximum contractile force one more time.

As it turned out, mental fatigue significantly affected the men’s endurance. They tired about 13 percent faster after the computer test than after watching “Earth.” They also reported that the workout felt far more taxing.

But, interestingly, their maximum contractile force was about the same after each session. Their muscles responded just as robustly to orders from the brain and the attached electrode after the draining mental workout as after the quiet session, even though the brain-fogged volunteers felt as if their muscles were much more exhausted.

This finding suggests “that maximal force production is not altered by mental fatigue but endurance performance is altered, and this alteration is closely linked with a higher feeling of perceived exertion,” said Romuald Lepers, a professor at the INSERM research laboratory at the University of Burgundy in France and, with Samuele M. Marcora and Benjamin Pageaux of the University of Kent, co-author of the study.

In simpler terms, exercise simply feels harder when your brain is tired, so you quit earlier, although objectively, your muscles are still somewhat fresh.

This finding has multiple implications for how we combine ratiocination and sweat. It suggests, for instance, that the morning of an important race or challenging training session may not be the ideal time to finish your taxes, since overthinking could lead to underperforming physically.

Inversely, the results also suggest that “training our brain to avoid or limit mental fatigue” could be a hitherto untapped means of improving physical performance, Dr. Lepers said. Training yourself to speed through crossword puzzles, in other words, might improve your workouts, by subtly altering how mind and muscles communicate and making your brain less likely to consider your muscles easily enfeebled.

But that possibility hasn’t been tested, Dr. Lepers said. For now, his study’s most compelling conclusion is that, as he says, “our feelings do not always reflect our physiological state” and our bodies may in many instances be sturdier than own minds realize, an idea worth thinking about.