Our Motto: “All brains, all the time.”
Okay kids, it’s finally the week we’ve all been waiting for, seven days of homage to your favorite organ. Brain Awareness Week (March 16-22) comes but once a year, so let’s celebrate in a proper manner with the First International Spelling Bee, a 24/7 television revival of the Quiz Kids and a special unveiling of the new Thomas Edison statue in Menlo Park, all co-hosted by Mr. Wizard and Bill Nye, the Science Guy. There will also be a sailing regatta in the Hudson River celebrating Albert Einstein’s favorite sport. Albert wasn’t too good at sailing or even keeping his boat (the Tinef—Yiddish for “worthless”) upright, which made things interesting since he never learned to swim a lick. Nonetheless, he persevered, refusing to drown and getting downright grouchy when associates prodded him to sell his boat. “What do they know?” he grumped. “I had a hell of a time convincing them that E=mc2.”
New Hope For The Brain Dead
In the last decade, scientists have successfully grown mini-brains known as organoids from human stem cells that differentiate into neurons and assemble into 3D structures. Currently, brain organoids can only be grown to resemble tiny pieces of brain in early fetal development, according to Dr. Hongjun Song, a professor of neuroscience at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. But the prof avers that could change in the next ten years.
“We could really model not just cell type diversity but the cellular architecture of the brain,” Song says. Mature neurons arrange themselves in layers, columns and intricate circuits in the brain. Currently, organoids only contain immature cells that cannot forage these complex connections, but Song expects the field may overcome this challenge in the coming decade. With miniature models of brain in hand, scientists could help deduce how neurodevelopmental disorders unfold; how neurodegenerative diseases break down brain tissue; and how different peoples’ brains might react to pharmacological treatments.
Eventually, scientists may even be able to grow functional units of neural tissue to replace damaged areas of the brain. “What if you have a functional unit premade that you could click into the damaged brain?” Song posits. “Right now, the work is highly theoretical but I think in the next decade we’ll know if it could work.”
Where does the line begin, Dr. Song? We have no dearth of candidates.
Brain Facts
1. Sixty percent of the human brain is made of fat, more for avid Trumpers. That makes it the fattest organ in the human body. Don’t worry, though, fatty acids are crucial to your brain’s performance. Fuel it properly with healthy, brain-boosting nutrients. And no, nachos is not one of them.
2. Your brain isn’t fully formed until age 25. Well, that explains a lot, like why people get married out of high school, motorcycle across the country on methamphetamines or decide to live in Nebraska.
3. Your brain’s storage capacity is virtually unlimited, so you can stash tons of worthless junk in there, like the starting lineup of the Philadelphia Phillies in 1927, without making a dent. The human brain consists of 86 billion neurons, give or take a billion, and each neuron forms connections to other neurons which could add up to 1 quadrillion connections. You and your big brain don’t even know what a quadrillion is, do you? Well, if anybody asks you, it’s 1000 trillion. But don’t show off.
4. You can actually improve your memory if you eat seafood regularly. The fatty acids therein improve the memory-storing sections of your brain. I personally eat so much seafood I can remember things that didn’t even happen.
5. The spinal cord is the main source of communication between the body and the brain, so think twice about tackling that 275-pound kid in the seventh grade.
6. The brain weighs a mere 3 pounds, about as much as a half-gallon of milk. Men tend to have larger brains than women, which goes to prove once and for all that size isn’t everything.
7. A brain freeze is really a sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia (when people hear this someone always says “What a great name for a band!”). The pain occurs when cold hits the receptors in the outer covering of the brain, called the meninges. The cold creates a dilation and contraction of arteries, causing a rapid-onset headache. Really now---where else can you learn this stuff?
8. Dreams are a combination of imagination, psychological factors and neurological factors. They prove your brain is chugging along even when you are sleeping, albeit in a confusing manner. No one can say why your brain allows someone to steal your car every night.
9. During mummification, those wild and crazy Egyptians would usually remove the brain through the nose. When asked why, they promptly replied, “because it's there.”
Stream of Consciousness
Nearly all colors have a physical wavelength associated with them but the color Magenta does not. Your brain simply processes this color as “not green.”
When you find yourself sleeping in a new environment for the first time, the brain processes danger and remains half-awake.
According to UCLA researchers, humans have been observed to have their first bout with anxiety or depression right after stomach illnesses. Utilizing brain scans, they discovered that patients who ate probiotics had their brains directly affected by the bacteria. All of their research suggests that stomach microbial health has a much greater affect on your brain than once thought.
A man by the name of Bruce Bridgeman spent 67 years without the ability to perceive depth perception, a problem called stereoblindness. After being forced to buy 3D glasses to watch the movie Hugo, his brain clicked in and he was able to experience 3D vision. Meanwhile, another fellow in the UK had chronic hiccups supposedly caused by heartburn for 2.5 years. After a Japanese TV show paid for medical testing, a brain tumor was discovered and removed. The chronic hiccups immediately went away for good.
Blacking out from drinking is actually caused by the effect of alcohol on the hippocampus, the part of your brain responsible for memory. You’re not physically forgetting anything, your brain just becomes incapable of storing and recording new memories.
We cry when we are very happy because our hypothalamus can’t distinguish the difference between strong happiness and strong sadness. We get chills when we listen to music as a result of our brain releasing dopamine. When a song moves you, the anticipation from a peak moment in the song triggers this release.
Solitary confinement can actually cause extreme neurological damage to human brains, so much so that it can be seen on EEG scans. The brains of solitary prisoners have the same indicators as people who have had traumatic injuries.
Alzheimer’s disease is caused by a resistance to insulin in the brain, causing many to refer to it as Type 3 Diabetes.
The world’s fastest computer requires 24 million Watts of power to operate, but our brains only require 20 Watts and operate 100,000 times faster.
Exercise slows our brains’ cognitive decline and increased physical activity over a period of time can slow our brain’s aging by 10 years.
Certain languages do not have terms for Left, Right, Front or Back, instead using the terms North, South, East and West. People raised in these languages have been found to always know what direction they are oriented to, resulting in a type of compass brain.
73% of your brain is mere water, which means that if you get dehydrated by more than 2% you can suffer from a loss in attention, cognitive skills and memory.
Babies’ brains grow rapidly. A 2-year-old baby will have an 80% fully grown brain, which is why paying close attention to your child’s development in early years is so impactful to his or her ability as an adult.
Humans experience 700,000 thoughts each day. For the average person, 699,800 of them are dumb. Brains could use a hall monitor.
The Smartest Man
In an era where ignorance is celebrated and intellectuals are suspect, we’re not sure the latest model brains are evolving in a desirable direction. Consider the rise of rap music, the Trump electorate, the popularity of soccer, the success of Duck Dynasty. Next thing you know, they’ll be building the Metropolitan Museum of Stupid Stuff on 5th Avenue. Maybe people were much smarter in the old days (the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, the JFK electorate, daytime baseball, Hill Street Blues) and we’re suffering through an ongoing cataclysmic regression which will lead to a rebirth of Prohibition, pet rocks and Lawrence Welk.
The smartest man of all time might have been born in Boston (of course) in 1898. William James Sidis made the headlines back in those days as a child prodigy with a nonpareil intellect. His IQ was estimated to be 50 to 100 points higher than that of Albert Einstein. He could read The New York Times before he was 2. At age 6, his language repertoire included English, Latin, French, German, Russian, Hebrew, Turkish and Armenian. At age 11, he entered Harvard University as one of the youngest students in the school’s history. Sidis seemed headed for extraordinary things but for one nagging issue. He despised scrutiny. And as an adult, he did whatever was necessary to fade into the background. Sidis biographer Amy Wallace contended “He became a household name at an early age and he hated it.”
Sidis was actually accepted at Harvard at 9, but the university thought it better he wait a couple of years. Even then, college life was miserable and he became a laughing stock---out of his element, without friends, teased incessantly. After a brief stint as a mathematics professor after graduation, Sidis went into hiding, moving from city to city and job to job, often using an alias. During that period, he wrote a number of books, including a 1200-page history of the United States. Even then, he used at least eight pseudonyms. “We will probably never know how many books he published under false names,” says Wallace.
William James Sidis successfully lived out of the limelight until 1937, when the New Yorker magazine sent a female reporter to befriend him and gather information for an article on what had happened to the boy wonder. Sidis thought the eventual article “made him sound crazy.” To the surprise of everyone including the New Yorker, he came out of hiding, sued the magazine for libel and won. Shortly afterward, in 1944, he died from a brain hemorrhage at 46. Biographer Wallace contends that despite his early travails, Sidis led a happy adult life.
“People who knew him well adored him,” she says. “He went from being a completely traumatized young boy to a happy adult. It’s too bad so few experienced his company.”
Lucy In The Sky With Overstimulation
“Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars. Let me see what Spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.”---Bart Howard
Ever take a particularly strong tab of acid and wind up floating through the universe on the Cosmic Streamliner, a train to nowhere, a train to everywhere, a scheduleless glider with nonstop Moody Blues concoctions pulsating through your head, a perfect place to do the locomotive or melt into a puddle of butter, your choice. Timothy Leary would “take you up, he’ll bring you down, he’ll plant your feet back firmly on the ground,” which is fine if he’s your guide instead of, say, Lucifer or Genghis Kahn, who had other ideas. Ever wonder what would happen if you took ten times the usual dose? How about ten times ten?
Welcome to the world of The Overusers, a pair of select pioneers who must of necessity go nameless,alas, rather than being properly installed into the Hall of Fame’s Corridor of Excess.
The first of these was a 46-year-old woman who snorted 550 times the normal recreational use of LSD and not only survived but lost most of the foot pain she’d suffered since her twenties. The second was a 15-year-old girl with bipolar disorder who overdosed on 10 times the normal dose, an experience she said resulted in massive improvement in her mental health.
Their experiences were detailed in case reports published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs earlier this year, along with that of a third woman who accidentally overdosed on LSD during the second week of her pregnancy. She ultimately gave birth to a healthy son, now 18, who has not showed any impaired development. “The cases of these women don’t really show any absolute benefits of LSD,” said Professor Davit Nutt, director of the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit in the Division of Brain Sciences at Imperial College, London. “What they do show is that in some people exceptionally high doses don’t lead to enduring harm and may even do some good.”
The older woman, known as CB, had contracted Lyme Disease in her early 20s, which damaged her feet and ankles and left her in significant pain. In September of 2015, she took 55 milligrams of what she believed was cocaine but was actually pure LSD in powder form. The woman blacked out and vomited frequently for 12 hours but reported feeling “pleasantly high” for the 12 hours following. Vomiting continued but lessened. According to a roommate, she sat mostly still in a chair, either with her eyes open or rolled back, occasionally speaking random words. Ten hours later, she was able to hold a conversation and “seemed coherent.”
Her foot pain was gone the next day and she stopped using the morphine which controlled her pain for five days. When the pain returned, she was able to control it with a lower dose of morphine and a microdose of LSD every three days. After more than two years, she stopped using both morphine and LSD and reported no withdrawal symptoms.
The 15-year-old, who overdosed on 10 times the normal LSD dose at a Summer Solstice party, experienced a dramatic change in her mental health. The subject had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 15, after suffering from depression and hallucinations from age 12, which occasionally put her in the hospital, once after she bit her mother.
Her overdose occurred when a supplier of liquid LSD made a decimal-place error when preparing individual hits diluted in glasses of water, making them 1000-mcg per glass instead of 100 mcg. The girl, known as AV, drank one glass of water and leftover drops from two others.
Partygoers said she behaved erratically for the next 6.5 hours, followed by what looked like a seizure which left her lying in a fetal position with her arms and fists clenched tightly. An ambulance was called but by the time the paramedics arrived 10 minutes later she was alert and oriented. When her father visited at the hospital the next day, AV told him “it’s over.” She clarified that she meant her bipolar illness was cured and she felt able to experience life with a normal brain. She was free of all mental illness symptoms for 13 years until she gave birth and experienced postpartum depression.
In the third case, the 26-year-old woman called NM drank half a glass of the LSD-laced water and subsequently discovered she was pregnant. The authors of the study said the overdose “did not negatively affect the course of the pregnancy, nor did it have any other obvious negative developmental effects on the offspring.”
All good news, right? Makes a body think about marching right down to one’s dealer for a bracing dose of the stuff, who knows what wonders may be in store? Give us a ring when you finish up and let us know how everything worked out. No, unfortunately we do not accept collect calls.
Brain-Eating Amoeba Alert
If anyone out there is worried about brain-eating zombies, and we know you are, you’ll be equally bumfuzzled by the Naegleria fowleri amoeba, which prefers to dine on human cerebellums for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Oh, the little one-cell buggers seem harmless enough, waltzing around in a carefree manner under the microscope, tripping the light fantastic, doing their little maypole dances, until. Into the room struts a brazen group of taunting bacteria and POW!---the previously innocuous amoebas turn into a Navy Seal outfit, engulfing the terrified bacteria and slowly ripping them to pieces with a bevy of digestive enzymes.
So who cares about bacteria, right? Trouble is, the digestive power of the amoebas is the stuff of nightmares when it shows up in the human brain. Though incidences of attacks are rare, they are also extremely deadly. Since 1962 when researchers started keeping records, only FOUR people have survived the infection and they were probably goobers who took boatloads of LSD, which makes amoebas woozy and gives them trouble finding their way around.
N. fowleri lives in warm bodies of fresh water where it dines on bacteria in the sediment. Ergo, most infections in the U.S. occur in the southern states, especially Texas and Florida, during the summer. Oh-oh. When the sediment of a lake is disrupted, amoeba get stirred into the water. Swimmers can then inhale the parasite nasally. From there, the amoeba invades the olfactory nerves and migrates to the brain, where it causes a dangerous condition called primary amoebic meningoencephalitis. Which, translated to English, means “Turn out the lights, the party’s over.”
There is only one thing a person can do if he suspects he has inhaled a batch of naegleria fowleri. Immediately rush into your house, find your LSD stash and scarf down all the tabs you can force down your gullet. Granted, you’ll think you’re the King of Siam for a couple of days and you’ll probably drive your car around the block at 25 miles an hour a few times, but it beats the alternative. After that, your brain will need a rest, so watch a few episodes of Uncle Buck or Homeboys from Outer Space on television. You’ll be good as new before you know it. Or you’ll be dead and glad of it. Either way works for us.
That’s all, folks….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
