The Other Brain: From Dementia to Schizophrenia, How New Discoveries about the Brain Are Revolutionizing Medicine and Science
R. Douglas Fields
Language: English
Pages: 366
ISBN: 2:00246203
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Despite everything that has been written about the brain, a potentially critical part of this vital organ has been overlooked--until now. The Other Brain examines the growing importance of glia, which make up approximately 85 percent of the cells in the brain, and the role they play in how the brain functions, malfunctions, and heals itself.
Long neglected as little more than cerebral packing material, glia (meaning "glue") are now known to regulate the flow of information between neurons and to repair the brain and spinal cord after injury and stroke. But scientists are also discovering that diseased and damaged glia play a significant role in psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression, and in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Diseased glia cause brain cancer and multiple sclerosis and are linked to infectious diseases such as HIV and prion disease (mad cow disease, for example) and to chronic pain. The more we learn about these cells that make up the "other" brain, the more important they seem to be.
Written by a neuroscientist who is a leader in glial research, The Other Brain gives readers a much more complete understanding of how the brain works and an intriguing look at potentially revolutionary developments in brain science and medicine.
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Not affect his intelligence or personality, revealing that the mysterious mechanism of memory is something apart from intellect. HM could learn new things perfectly well, but within a few minutes of entering his conscious mind, new experiences simply vanished. Memories already stored in his brain before the surgery were perfectly intact, but he could no longer make new memories. In December 2008, the world finally learned HM’s name when Henry Gustav Molaison died at the age of eighty-two in.
Participate in mental functions inside our skull? What functions? Reflexes? Thoughts? Dreams? Emotions? Mental health? Memory? To seek answers to these revolutionary questions, scientists needed to learn far more about glia, these nonneuronal cells that constitute the other brain. In increasing numbers, neuroscientists are beginning to expand their investigations beyond neurons to examine more closely what astrocytes, Schwann cells, oligodendrocytes, and microglia do in the nervous system in.
Procedure was abused in the 1950s as a treatment to control difficult patients. It is not necessary to sever the axon cables to perform a prefrontal lobotomy; in fact, the first method developed by Moniz was to inject alcohol into the white matter tracts connecting to the prefrontal lobes. The myelin insulation around these axons is essential for electrical impulses to flow through them, and once alcohol dissolved this insulation communication was effectively blocked. (The alcohol injection.
Unless the drug can be made to pass across the blood-brain barrier. Without this barrier, however, the brain would be wildly destabilized as materials—ions, water, nutrients, antibodies, and all the other substances in the cerebrospinal fluid and bloodstream—fluctuated throughout the day. What makes this barrier between blood and brain? The cells of the capillaries in the brain are unique by being very tightly sealed to one another. Glial cells ensheathing these capillaries support the.
Particular sensory nerve sack has its own sharply defined domain on your body. The neurons sprouting out of each sack between every vertebra survey a narrow band of your skin and muscle, striping your body from head to toe, as though you were banded like a king snake. These stripes of sensation are revealed as a band of insensibility when you injure one of your nerve sacks, or in the case of chronic pain, as a band of intense hypersensitivity and pain. (A compressed nerve sack between vertebrae.