Robert Sapolsky on depression

Wonderful lecture, about 50 minutes, with Robert Sapolsky. Ties stress (glucocorticoids) in with depression.

Speaking of stress...

Found this at Respectful Insolence blog. Pretty clever. It certainly stirred my own noradrenalin pathways, but the dopamine and serotonin (now that I have some of each built back up again) were not far behind.

Take a ride in a Toyota.

Stress

Fabulous set of free access articles with a focus on stress, from Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

Antonio Damasio: This time with feeling

Excellent video, about an hour.

Another anniversary, 10 years ago

Another memory about this time of year which I didn't sift through to, until this morning, is that 10 years ago yesterday, my dad died. He would be 87 now, were he still alive. I must be pretty much over that, because I didn't even consciously remember until now.
These days I live near where he was buried. If it's a nice day I might hike the few miles out along the highway to his spot, and visit, re-member.

Anniversary reactions

So, I thought back to where my life was at a year ago, which in some ways feels like just yesterday; I reminded myself that only a year ago I was dismantling a lifetime, not just a practice from which I have been detached - still responsible for but emotionally detached from - for about 9 months.

I was faced with jettisoning a lot of belongings, books, purging and cleaning and scraping and painting and scouring and selling and usually fell into bed at night exhausted.

I realize that some part of my brain still feels open raw places from having undergone that experience, even while other bits are ecstatic to be back under big bright empty sky. When another stressor comes along, I realize that the reverberation of a year ago is like an echo chamber. I realize that as a brain ripens and ages through a life span the echo chamber doesn't go away, in fact it just gets bigger and bigger as years and anniversary reactions accumulate. If would be lovely if there were a delete key on stress, something easy to simply click and make the anxious stuff disappear. That isn't the case. So I go for long walks instead. It helps.

As I walk I think about how I'm helping my brain produce the millions of different kinds of neurotransmitters it needs to remain healthy and help me, its "I" illusion, to remain calm and content. I think about how lucky I am that I'm on the eve of 60 years old and am in a body, with a brain, and feet, that don't hurt me, that let me walk pretty far (3 or 4 km) without getting the least bit tired or sore. Bored a little, maybe, sometimes, but not in any pain. I think about how nice my nerves feel, sliding around in my body, first one side, then the other, how my spinal cord is slightly rotating within its canal, how blood flow is being engaged to feed it generously through mechanical stimulation. Yeah, mechanical stimulation is a stressor, but it's the right kind of stressor, and I remember that all this slidey motion will spur it to stay juicy and healthy and functional.

As I relax into the rhythm of walking I try out different things to challenge my brain, just a little, try a bit more novelty, explore my body adapting to it. I see how tall I can be as I walk along. I feel the difference between using abs and not using abs while walking. I notice what happens to my breathing. I work with breathing. I place my feet on a narrower trail with out breaking stride. I play with stride length without breaking stride. I experiment with which edge of my feet I'm walking on. I run a little. I play. I stride. On the outside, I am just a woman walking, but on the inside, I'm engaged in a process of discovery and comparison and full body sensing.

I think about how lucky I am to not have to carry a little roof all the time, called an umbrella, shutting out the sky, bumping other umbrellas, being bumped by other umbrellas, or, the alternative, rain on the top of the head - ceaseless remorseless rain. Seventy-five different kinds and sizes of rain.

I note the lack of other people and feel grateful to be in a place where there are no drug dealers being obvious or their customers reeling around or shouting at each other or at nothing at all or thick knots of tourists standing and gawking everywhere or beggars asking me for money or trying to sell me something - people crowding me, people who represent huge obstacles, both physical and psychological, to navigate through and around. I am alone with my own thoughts, and all around is just empty space I can relax into, nobody nearby I have to worry may knock me down and steal my wallet, or knock me down because it's a gang initiation ritual, or knock me down because they are bigger and taller and didn't even know I was there.

I always see a little something I never noticed before, even on familiar routes. I am free to gaze around at sharp contrast of light bouncing off surfaces, at the brightness of snow (well, not lately - it has developed that cavitated, dulldarkgrey look as spring arrives..) at the brightness and blueness of the sky, and think, this is all very good for my brain. I tell myself, it will synchronize and neuroplasticize itself in a positive direction. I tell myself that its emotional buffers will continue to improve every day in direct proportion to increasing clarity of thought and access to cognition and sharpness of logic. I realize these are beliefs, but I also know they are beliefs based on science. Science is my comfort and strength. It always changes but its changes are always for the better, provide ever more solidity.

I go home, look at the pedometer and how many steps I took. I think, OK, I can do better than that. Tomorrow I'll go again. Life is a series of small steps, physical and metaphorical, that accumulate over time, will add up to something, positive or not. Every step should be consciously chosen or result from a habit consciously chosen and feel like the right step to have made, no matter how tiny it may have been. With each step I take, I'm putting distance between myself and what I've left behind; with each step I'm coming closer to whatever it is I want out of life, whoever it is that I am becoming.

Every walk I take is a victory, my pitting of my own life against everything that would do my life harm. I have synchronized myself with me, as best I can, and after, I feel ready to read a paper and make a few slides and write a few thoughts down on a file card. My new life.

I'll deal with that recent workquake in Vancouver as I can, when I can. It's not my life. Not really. Not anymore. I'm not there, not anymore. I'm Here. And this is Now. Things could be much worse.

Upheavalment and unravelment

It's strange how stuff seems to arrive in bunches, after long periods of time of relative smoothness. Like, first Haiti, then Chile, out in the geographic world.

The private world seems like that too, these days. I received news on Sunday that the receptionist (in Vancouver) would be resigning, then the very next day (yesterday) I received word that my locum replacement was resigning as of June. That's pretty much my old life in Vancouver finally down for the count. I shall have to dismantle the practice officially, sign papers etc, I suppose. Kill the legal entity. It's not a rumination I really need right now, yet at the same time some little part inside of me feels slightly more free, so that's good, I guess.

The third thing was that this morning I sat down to work on my presentation for Brazil, and discovered the mouse was dead. Very very dead. At times like this, with three big whammies in a row, it's hard not to feel a tad superstitious about life. Superstitious, as in, "what is this all supposed to mean?" The rational part of my brain says, weird coincidence. We move on. We deal. The emotional part of my brain is reeling around in shock and dismay and wants to clutch at straws - "How do I have to live my life differently to avoid experiencing all this stress?"

Long walks help. I've been out doing that quite a bit these days.

Postscript: I started to get ready to go out to buy a new mouse. The more I thought about it the more I thought I should check to see if the problem was to do with the keyboard, not the mouse. I had a spare (new) keyboard anyway, what could it hurt to test it? I did, and taDAH! the mouse isn't dead - it works fine with the new keyboard. Just a bump, not a huge slam into the boards. All is well. Back to business.

When apprehensiveness is a Virtue (and a Moir)

I seem to be on some sort of roll today, maybe because of that wonderful ice dance last night won by "Canada," a concept momentarily inhabited by the wonderful young ice dance couple, Moir and Virtue, who in their unbelievably fabulous performance managed to successfully downregulate any negative nervousness and upregulate every particle of their well-honed strength and grace to take the gold in a most transcendent manner. I think they managed to navigate "even keel" through several different potential realities, toward victory. I think their sturdy sea-going vessel was "apprehensiveness." Let me explain:

If there was ever a word to describe human primates in general (perhaps me in particular), I think it would be the adjective "apprehensive." It ordinarily conjures up a sense of suspicion, nervousness, or anxiety, which I think is a negative social meaning that has accrued to it because of how extroverted people like to downplay sensible precaution; in fact, there is way deeper meaning to it than that.

"Apprehensive" means many different things: let's take a look:
1. quick to understand
2. mentally upset over possible misfortune or danger or consequences
3. in fear or dread of possible evil or harm
4. anticipating something with anxiety or fear
5. quick to learn, intelligent, capable of grasping with mind or intellect
6. the cognitive condition of one who understands
7. from Lat. (ad, "to"; prehendere, "to seize"), a term applied to a model of consciousness in which nothing is affirmed or denied of the object in question, but the mind is merely aware of ("seizes") it
8. (as verb) to legally seize or arrest

It was wonderful to hear Tessa Virtue thank her physiotherapist during a post-win interview. She's had injuries, for sure.

Well done, you two. You have made us (Canadians) proud and have entertained us all (wherever we are on the planet) absolutely beautifully and dazzlingly. So pleased you were able to "apprehend" the possibility, "apprehend" each other sufficiently to get the job done, let your combined brains "apprehend" gravity and other physical forces, "apprehend" correct responsiveness in each nanosecond in perfect poise, then "apprehend" the opportunity, and that medal, with all weight of its attached symbolism, graciously smile the whole time, and allow a sense of relief, joy, pride and connectedness to race throughout Canada and likely all round the world. Well done. Well apprehended.

Thank you (as a Canadian) also to the coaches (one from Russia) and the host rink (in the US, I think). It was a great moment to "apprehend" while putting in time in this Big Waiting Room called "life."

Navigating "even keel" between uncertain death and uncertain death, toward certain death

Life, if we are realistic, is just a waiting room in which we amuse ourselves before we can go through a door with a sign on it, upon which is clearly written, DEATH. Lucky for us, the waiting room is huge, big enough to encompass entire oceans, full of brightness, infinite distractions, lots of other people, most of whom are merry, many useful and interesting ways to spend time together or alone.

"Even keel" is a metaphor. It stems from the many centuries, I like to imagine, when humans traveled by ship to visit each others' cultures, trade, conduct war, all those human things. Thinking about "even keel" takes up quite a bit of my personal hard drive. Not only have I learned how to be even keel in my own life (am not finding myself blown sideways by it or capsized as often anymore, that is..), when I am at work I focus on how to help brain parts in another person' nervous system get along better together, or at least I imagine that's what I'm doing. Like an engineer fixing systems in a building, or in a computer. Except, I don't really do anything, I just add bits of provocation and wait for feedback to tell me I'm on the right track. Most of it has to do with waiting for then seizing moments. But I'm geeky enough to want to know everything I can, anyway, about the systems I work with, even though human primate social grooming is really quite instinctive.

"Even keel" applies to nearly everything on any level in human life. I made a little picture (thank you photoshop) out of other little pictures to illustrate the old Greek story about the sea monster and the whirlpool that I first read about in James Willis' excellent essay by the same name. In his essay, the two-headed sea monster represents pseudo- and anti-science, which he does not want to steer too close to in his work as a doctor. The whirlpool represents scientific reductionism, tyranny by protocol. He doesn't want to become sucked into becoming a protocol zombie. Instead he wants to be able to steer his own boat, stay even keel between two extremes, retain his own locus of control within his treatment relationships.

I decided to steal his metaphor, practically intact, for my own work as a human primate social groomer. My sea monster has two heads too - one is anti-science and the other pseudo-science too, although, some days their names change to myofascial release and craniosacral therapy. The whirlpool is orthopaedic manual therapy, which (at least in Canada) is almost a Byzantine religion with its own high priests and devotion toward evidence-based regimented protocols, ostensibly to keep therapists safe from harm or blame, keep them "pure" and untainted, keep the money of society flowing toward our profession. But when I look at OMPT in Canada, I see huge flashes of tooth fairy science as described so succinctly by Harriet Hall. In Beyerstein's excellent essay on pseudoscience (50-page pdf) he stated that in his expert opinion, any "science" which doesn't take neuroscience into account is pretty much, by definition, pseudo. I have never sat in an ortho training workshop in Canada and once heard the slightest whiff of anything to do with neuroscience, not even physical nerves which slide past the beloved joints upon which ortho-lovers are so transfixed. In the workshops I attended they taught that you can actually feel movement in joints and improve movement in joints with fancy pressures at precise angles. From outside the living human body. Maybe this has changed in the last few decades, but judging by the kinds of ortho-esque "studies" I see done... somehow I doubt it.

Anyway, enough rambling on about that. "Even keel" is what each human, regardless of what one ends up doing in the Big Waiting Room called "life" prior to going through the door called DEATH, tries to achieve. We each have a life to navigate and moods to manage. How we each end up doing that and whatever success we manage to demonstrate in the process, has a lot to do with luck and circumstance in terms of genetic makeup plus upbringing, nature/nurture. I found a nice paper today, Psychosocial and Neural Correlates of Resilience, which is open access, at least for now. (Thank you to Integral Options blog.) In it I found:

"In experiments by Meaney and colleagues, the offspring of female rats displaying more nurturing behavior (high licking and grooming compared to low licking and grooming) had less methylation of the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) gene in the hippocampus, resulting in higher GR expression, lower anxiety-related behavior and better HPA axis regulation. In addition, research by Nestler and colleagues has delineated molecular mechanisms underlying resilience to a social defeat stress paradigm in rodents, including the induction of gene expression changes only seen in resilient mice."

Gee, I like to think I'm resilient, even keel, or at least have learned how to be, even though I ended up with a human mother who did not believe much in pleasant licking or grooming. Somehow, even though this happened to be my personal fate, in the big waiting room of life, I was drawn, explicitly and implicitly, to work which is all about (metaphoric) licking and (actual) physical social grooming! The complete and utter simplicity and rightness of it, the naturalness of it to me as a human primate, is the wind that fills my sails, rows my boat, has helped me attain/remain "even keel."

That is pretty much all that is at the core of what I find mysterious in my own life. It's not earth-shaking or dramatic or life-threatening, it's just a story, likely a boring one. But it's my own little one. And I don't mind putting it here, where very few will probably ever find it.

It gives me grief and makes me mad

So.. It's high time, my brain has decided, for a bit of a rant.

My last sporadic post was about thinking I probably had chronic contemplation syndrome, and went sideways into being distracted by the Olympics, etc.

This post is about a few reasons why I seem to have chronic contemplation syndrome.

Lately I stumbled across this blogpost on Twitter: Infant Dies After Craniosacral Therapy: Therapist Gets Off Scot-Free. Something inside me seemed to galvanize just a little - I could feel it. The action I took was to post it to my Facebook page and let it sit there, as testament to wrong thinking, and how important it is for manual therapists to move away from piss-poor treatment concepts onto more science-based ones. Naturally there was a hue and cry and protest from a few who apparently thought I ought not mention such a scandal or whose "belief system" I had besmirched somehow. Was the therapist a PT or not? How is craniosacral therapy different in the Netherlands than in N. America? Surely it must be different, the kind "we" use "here" safer. I steadily asked questions, sent out feelers, got more links, as more information came along from those who speak/understand Dutch and are more familiar with the issue posted on the thread about it at SomaSimple.

How I feel about stuff like this, manual therapy memeplexes which are just plain indefensible or which can do real harm, is no secret - I wrote about it here, and here. What's different is that my life is organized such that I'm in a position to really be outspoken about it on many levels. I have time to write, to think, to organize, to present. I've been invited to speak at two separate venues about research I'm doing, opportunities to refute such ill-formed and misleading treatment concepts. I've worked like a Trojan online and offline to study, think, redesign my own brain, mesh the physicality of human primate social grooming with the neuroscientific and pain science basis, context, in which it all starts to make sense. It's a great opportunity.

But I'm mad at myself. For watching TV, for being disorganized, for not knowing how to find my own files on my own desktop, for having a messy bookmark list, messy messy messy, my life feels like it's still in a mess and like I still don't have a clue how to proceed. When I'm not mad at myself I easily get mad about stuff like what happened that poor Dutch therapist, stuff that happens because of very poor thought processes, because of not thinking something through first, because of adopting memeplexes that some extrovert dreamed up out of thin air then sold in a confident manner to gullible hungry-for-info people in a workshop who trusted whatever he said, applied it, then killed a baby. It makes me scream with anger. All of it. Then I look at myself again, and think, OK, I'm not gullible, I'm careful, I know that a stray thought here or an assumption there can make a big difference downstream, I've always sifted things carefully, always chucked out ideas that don't make legitimate sense without a second thought. But to DO that, to be that careful, takes a lot of inner stillness, which I'm now so good at that it feels like my brain has neuroplasticized itself into quite a rut, and when I add my ordinary introversion to it, it feels like I'll never be able to say what I want the way it needs to be said while at the same time smoothly managing to persuade the entire profession over into thinking about manual therapy in a new way, toward science and away from dangerous baseless mesodermal explanations for things. It's like I feel responsible for changing the world, all by myself, and I know that's a crazy unrealistic thing to be thinking. So I feel like screaming. Which is not a solution, just a feeling, so I rant for awhile instead.

"Chronic contemplation syndrome"

niclucas.com, on "chronic contemplation syndrome."

I'm guilty of this. Or else, my brain is still in recovery from being in the dark for decades, living in rainy Vancouver. While watching the Vancouver Olympic torch run/celebrations on TV yesterday, I kept seeing the pouring rain and thinking, so glad I don't live there anymore. Nice job, though, extroverts. It was a very nice series of moments all strung together serially through TV time, like a string of happy pearls.

So sorry about the luge guy. And the perpetual rain. And that one chunk of cauldron that got stuck/wouldn't lift up. The rest was GREAT! The infinite boundless free-wheeling bright feeling of the prairie vignette was on the mark. Loved the First Nation dancing and diversity. Loved the edgy punky fiddler/dancers, so different from Don Messer days of my childhood. Loved the poet from the North West Territories, riotous colors of fall, whales swimming across the floor, the lit maple leaf motif toward the finale. Loved that you included sonorous Donald Sutherland (who voiced-over in many of the Olympic ads) in the ceremony, one of my all-time favorite actors. Loved that the announcer didn't notice that the torch carried by Wayne Gretzky was smoothly traded at least twice on the way to the outdoor cauldron, causing him to wonder aloud why the Gretzky torch was so long-lasting compared to the normal torches...

But I digress. Back to chronic contemplation syndrome... and for now, chronically contemplating... Having a name for it will help my brain work on a way to overcome it. Just a teeny shift - that might be all it takes, to change the course, the outcome, the direction of accumulation of small efforts over time that amount to a life lived more rather than less successfully. Thank you for that, Nic Lucas.

Letter to another Un-happy INtrovert

This excerpt is from a letter written by me, several months back. It has been edited slightly to protect the recipient's identity.

"I think, like the skin horse, we just get more real over time. It's inevitable. We probably get finally as real as can be, one second before our lights go out forever. That would be the last joke life has on us: Haha, guess what, all those little things you thought were so important and fought so hard to swim upstream for, they are nada.

So, you're an Unhappy INtrovert. Doesn't surprise me (the Unhappy part) - the world, the social world, the everyday interaction of the human primate troop, is made by EXtroverted people and reflects their sunny ways, so it becomes the measure against which we non-happies automatically fail. Which I guess is good.. what a rained-on parade introverts would make if we were in charge of setting the overall tone of life. So, us introverts or unhappies or whatever we are have to do double duty figuring out what is, what we are, how to relate to a rear-view mirror image of ourselves while we learn to drive ourselves forward. It seems like a lot more work, so it's kind of a good thing there are endless combinations and permutations available for neuroplastic social adaptation. It has taken me two-thirds of a life time to become even remotely even-keel, let alone consider myself capable of making any kind of contribution beyond one-on-one. What a long process.

I do envy social effortlessness as displayed by extroverts/apparent "Happies". They seem to have so many fewer issues. Maybe they are less transparent to themselves or just fake it better or maybe they feel better just being around someone/anyone else to the point where they placebo themselves automatically, a brain mechanism that others of us (like introverts) must construct consciously instead. It isn't like they aren't smart or don't think, because they do. And they have sadnesses, which they mostly hide, which I used to think meant they were superficial. I misjudged their consideration for the feelings of others in the human primate troop, and their apparent jolliness in being connected and chatting and social, as outright behavioural lying. I didn't realize it was brain food for them, that they absolutely depend on it, crave it every day. Since I've aged, I'm a lot more nuanced about how I judge others' social motivations. We are all total liers, because of how troop-y we are as human primates. No one knows which side is up, because of all those built-in perceptual biases that fool us continually. We are all here, doing the best we can to get along and help each other. Stepping away from troop situations which become, or that we finally realize are, uncomfortable or incongruous with our centroversion.

I decided long ago to hitch my wagon to science, learned to aim for mere "contentment" in life. For me "contentment" is practically synonymous with "containment," in every aspect of life but writing, over which I have temporal and environmental control, i.e., feel safe. Safe enough at least. Steam valve writing."

Exactly backwards

I had a chance last weekend to travel to Saskatoon and visit the PT school there for a few days, talk with a few of the profs, plan a tentative future. My (not very) lofty goal is to somehow gain permission to dissect, photograph and map out, in broad visual terms, the extensive forest of rami that project out to skin from the numerous cutaneous nerves that run along parallel to and beneath skin - even if I have to suck it up and do a Master's. My friend Angela, who characterizes herself as an obstacle remover, has been extraordinarily kind and generous with her time and hospitality toward me. She and I have completed a research project together, yet to be written up.

Everyone was kind, lent me their ear, but the impression I have come away with is that there is an invisible wall I could sense, that I may never be able to unlock, between what my profession has turned itself into, and what I think it could be.

Take, for example, the nervous system.

I had an opportunity to sit in on a two-hour neuroanatomy lecture, with permission; it occurred to me that these first-year students are getting more information handed to them in one day than I ever did in a year. In the space of two hours, the lecturer covered the embryological origin of the brainstem, its organization, an intro to each of the nuclei within it, all the spinal cord tracts that move rostrally through it and descend through it, the medulla, the cranial nerves and what each does and how each can be affected by traumatic head bangs, the branchial arches and neural crest, and which muscles were formed from which arch, and which cranial nerve was associated with each arch. It's a lot for first-year students, probably.

My question is, Why should they care? How hard would it have been to put an overall frame around that headfacethroatbrain zone, as neurological core sensor, effector, consciousness producer, and (according to some, like Jaak Panksepp, emotion initiator), plus metabolic engine for the entire organism, breathing and swallowing, able to operate bi-directionally?

The prof was kind enough to meet with me for an hour or so following. My impression was that the only real teaching he does regarding the peripheral nervous system is that it is segmented, each spinal nerve innervates all the stuff coming from a particular segment, and that the main important thing about its role in the body is that there are muscle spindles and sympathetics. Other than C fibers and A deltas, the sensory aspect was irrelevant to him, it seemed.

While all that is true, there is so much more to it than that!

But I was reminded yet again, about how physiotherapy, in order to gain permission to evolve as a profession, pretty much focused its awareness of neural matters entirely around motor output, and has been stuck there ever since, child as it is of the greater touch-phobic society into which it is embedded. We are licensed to touch people, but we are not permitted, it would seem, to examine, comprehend, conceptualize or even be taught anything about how our touching might be an interactive source of brain food for the recipient brain. Too .... sexy or something, maybe. Thar be monsters, or something. This potential pitfall could easily be bridged by a single class in transference/counter-transference, a standard issue that must be dealt with up front by the psychoanalytic community. Why let it remain in the subconscious of my whole profession? Why not deal with it up front? A preemptive strike? Forewarned is forearmed.

The profession has structured itself entirely around motor output, and a gaping void exists where understanding of how the brain and PNS reads and responds to kinesthetic input should be. To be fair, it was probably easier in the beginning to follow Cartesian divisions - you bunch of therapists go deal with the mind, and us, we'll stick with the body. Neuroscience has put this idea into total eclipse: there is no separation whatsoever.

Yet, emphasis on the INput side of the nervous system, and learning to understand it, is precisely, according to me, where becoming not just a good therapist, but a great therapist, lies. These are totally uncharted waters for our profession. We could be great therapists if we hadn't got our conceptual trajectory exactly backwards. We have been looking in through the wrong end of the telescope, all along. But we no longer have any excuse for continuing to do that. Not if we look at what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves in a body, and about ourselves treating other embodied people. Other humanantigravitysuits. (We DO have that word "therapist" in our name, not just the word "physical"...)

I'm doing my very best, but may never succeed in making a big enough noise about it to be able to make any difference in the status quo whatsoever. I have to realize this yet not allow it to defeat me.

Oh yeah, he's also an OMPT. Forgot to mention that.

Origin of the brain

Nice video explaining the principles of exaptation.

Taking stock

A convergence of sorts has occurred in the new year: today a friend sent me a link to this excellent essay, written by Frank Wildman, on the sad, rather shabby, rather scientifically disjointed state of PT. He was thinking of U.S. PT, I think, and he had his Feldenkrais goggles firmly duct taped to his head while writing, but I'll forgive him for that, because he makes many many good points. I like the way he compares the state of PT to the state of general science before Darwin came along with the unifying theory of evolution. This essay still seems topical, even though it is 22 years old: Learning: The Missing Link in Physical Therapy.

Lately, a New York Times article by Gina Kolata, Treat Me, But No Tricks Please, provided the reading public with a glimpse into the hall of distorting mirrors that is current, American at least, PT. This story has raised comment on a few PT forums/blogs:
1. NY Times: Physical Therapy Useless?
2. Yes, Gina you can tell if your physical therapist is "voodoo less"

There isn't a whole lot to come back with, though.. Frank is still right, I'm afraid.

This short video, "Myofascia," was constructed by a PT student, determined to be a PT who embraces rationality. It's very succinct and immediately was shared by several Facebookers. Facebook really is a networking site, because through it I met a fellow who wanted to counter the video and share that he is helping to organize an entire conference about fascia. He seems like a very nice guy. We struck up a conversation, shared who we are and what we're about. I won't divulge anything about him, as that would be improper, but I'll put here what I told him about me:

"Your enthusiasm for the topic (fascia) is palpable! [/manual_therapy_joke].

Congratulations on helping organize a conference! That's no small task!

I'm a manual therapist too, born and raised in Canada, of physiotherapy descent. ...

Anyway, I moved (grew up in Sask), now have colder weather but WAY more sun, which at my age I need. My interests include deconstruction of faulty treatment concepts, passion for the neuroanatomy, physiological function, understanding, and care and feeding of the human nervous system, and writing. I helped start the Pain Science Division of the CPA. Currently I am on the exec. and run the coast to coast online directory for PSD members/PTs who want to be in it, and for patients who want to find a pain therapist. In my private PT life I have taken what I know about manual therapy, and what I know about neuroscience, and have called the result, "dermoneuromodulation." It's basically skin stretching but with an entirely neurological treatment construct, no mesodermal derivatives involved whatsoever. I've done a pilot research project on this, along with Angela Busch at U. of S, not yet written up. I've done an initial cutaneous nerve dissection (at UBC), took lots of pictures, wrote it up but have failed to have it accepted so far. I'll be talking about dnm, and about Neuromatrix model of pain, at a congress for manual therapists in Brazil in May. Then (hopefully, don't know yet) in St John's at CPA Congress. My life goal is to help develop vast crowds of rationally thinking, compassionate PTs/manual therapists who care deeply about pain and choose to help their patients overcome it in ways and with treatment constructs that are scientifically bullet-proof. Down with woo, IOW. To help that happen my next ambition is to get ensconced in an anatomy lab somewhere and map out the entire cutaneous nervous system so that therapists of the 21st century can realize and visualize and develop treatment constructs around what they are actually touching, and what's actually responding, in the person/body they are handling. I call this an 'interactor' model rather than an 'operator' model. Many therapists learn to do this, but implicitly rather than explicitly. I want self-aware consciousness AND scientific impeccability AND simultaneous, seamless treatment construct. Not too much to ask, is it?..

I run a page here, Neuroscience and Pain Science for Manual Physical Therapists, if you'd like to check it out some time. I also help admin a skeptical PT site/discussion forum called SomaSimple. You are welcome to come, join, discuss there too! We welcome everyone who wants to learn to think more clearly about what we do or who might have light to shed.

Diane"

Grooming behaviour

Insights into primate social grooming. Yeah. That could be why I was attracted to becoming a manual therapist/HUMAN primate social groomer. I don't like fighting. I'd rather preemptively groom instead. Gives me some sort of illusion of control over a boundary between me and others in my troop who are much bigger/stronger. It makes sense in certain ways, especially if it works. Why it's not considered "smart".. I do not know. I'd call it social intelligence which has been underestimated.

Primates’ Social Intelligence Overestimated: Primates Groom Others If Afraid They'd Lose in a Fight With Them

Getting the shot

Yesterday I got the H1N1 vaccination, previously discussed here. I hadn't had any shots since traveling about 25 years ago, and wasn't really looking forward to the poke, but as it turned out, that part was fine..

I will digress for a moment: health care/medical insurance in this province is completely free. Just get a health care card by showing proof of residence, and voilá, you're in the system. I had to get a health card in order to get a vaccination. I needed to get one anyway, but due to an application which had to be downloaded, printed, filled out and sent in, a broken printer, procrastination about getting a new one hooked up due to a case of acute (but not terminal) technophobia, which came at a time of psychological fray... this process was all delayed for awhile. Suffice it to say that my BC coverage lapsed, and I was actually, officially, uninsured for a few weeks. I won't go into how that felt.. let me just say I was glad when that little Sask card arrived in the mail, early December.

There were a series of vaccination clinics downtown, where I live, but for one reason or another, mostly my own disorganization, I missed them all. On Dec 22 there was one scheduled according to the internet, but when I got to it, it wasn't at the mall a few blocks away - it had been moved to the Public Health office, out of prairie winter walking range, where the Weyburn Mental Hospital used to stand before it was completely razed. (I've always thought it odd to call leveling a building down to the ground "razing" it, but that's a different topic for another day.)

Yesterday the clinic was open for H1N1 vaccination, and my mother agreed to drive me over. It was cold and snowing. The clinic is a few miles away. There are no buses in Weyburn. There are taxis, but because I'm not working for a living right now, I've learned how to be cheap.

It was typical Weyburn, a waiting room full of people, smiling and quietly chatting, a couple bored and antsy young children, only one nurse, I was told, in absolutely no hurry apparently, therefore a long wait. There was a long-ish form with a blank for me to write in my new health card number to complete, only three people ahead of me, but it seemed that each shot took a good 15 minutes. I fumed quietly to myself, thinking of how much of my life was getting sucked away sitting there, how in Vancouver this whole process would have been way more streamlined and way more people would have been processed much more quickly and the receptionist would automatically have filled out the health number to lessen the chance of error. I thought of my mother sitting outside in the cold, in a warm car, but still.. Finally I went out and told her it was going to be at least another 45 minutes. To my surprise, she wasn't fussed at all. I was the one fussed.

When it came my turn, I was given a nod by the receptionist who was wearing a cool, hightech headset thingie, through which she communicated to people not in the room. I walked down a long long hallway as directed, turned right to walk down another hallway, and entered a large room, empty of people except the nurse. What a laid-back place, I fumed silently to myself. The nurse collected my form and asked if I had ever had any reactions to any shots. I told her that the only reaction I'd ever had was a swollen, hot, red upper arm that had lasted a week, from a typhoid shot long ago.

Eventually I got my jab, and realized that the hold-up was that the nurse loved to chitchat with her patients after. I expect that what she was really doing was keeping people talking so she could scan them for reactions or something. There was certainly a great deal more focused attention than I remember from 25 years ago..

The shot itself was swift and relatively painless. Today I have a sore arm, but only at skin level - I can move my arm anyway I like. I feel fine. No Guillain-Barré, so ordinary genes must have made my peripheral nervous system. I have done my part for herd immunity.

Gratitude

Dawkins and Dennett, great conversation. About 50 minutes. How improbable our existence. Where and how we fit. Humanity as the nervous system of the planet. Gratitude for a chance to be here, even for a little while. Unedited.

Discovering Lawrence Krauss

This morning on Facebook I found this less-than-a-minute-long video, posted by DJ Grothe:



Best video of the last week of the first decade of the twenty-first century I have ever encountered.

Nucleus Accumbens

There is not very much written about this particular brain region, nucleus accumbens, in any of the four volumes of the massive Encyclopedia of the Human Brain.

It seems to be a bit of brain involved, importantly, in staving off depression, or as Heller notes, in the PNAS open access paper (6-page pdf), Reduced capacity to sustain positive emotion in major depression reflects diminished maintenance of fronto-striatal brain activation,

"While up-regulating positive affect, depressed individuals failed to sustain nucleus accumbens activity over time compared with controls."

Any structure that can help stave off "Major Depressive Disorder" is one I want to know more about. There was a look taken at "the fronto-striatal network in anhedonia" also.

"These findings support the hypothesis that anhedonia in depressed patients reflects the inability to sustain engagement of structures involved in positive affect and reward."

Also:

"Our study examines the ability of depressed patients to sustain engagement of the NAcc while enhancing positive affect in response to positive images embedded within a stream of stimuli that included both positive and negative images."

Sounds like depressed people can kind of fake it for a little while, but their/our nucleus accumbens tuckers out easily, can't continuously rejoice over life's simple pleasures. From the paper:

"...in everyday life, individuals do not generally encounter uninterrupted positive stimuli. Negative experiences often intermix with positive ones, and the ability of individuals to heighten and maintain positive affect in the face of negative stimuli is vitally important for health and well-being."

Sheesh, you can say that again. Mine feels as though it is perking up fairly well with the help of increased photons in the suprachiasmatic nucleus. Still a fairly long way to go however.