Memory

Genetic imprinting, sleep, and parent-offspring conflict

gettingwell4 5+ stars Premium, Amygdala, Beliefs, Brain development, Cerebrum, Epigenetics, Hypothalamus, Limbic system, Memory, Neurochemicals, Oxytocin , , ,

This 2016 Italian review subject was the interplay of genetic imprinting and sleep regulation:

“Sleep results from the synergism between at least two major processes: a homeostatic regulatory mechanism that depends on the accumulation of the sleep drive during wakefulness, and a circadian self-sustained mechanism that sets the time for sleeping and waking throughout the 24-hour daily cycle.

REM sleep apparently contravenes the restorative aspects of sleep; however, the function of this ‘paradoxical’ state remains unknown. Although REM sleep may serve important functions, a lack of REM sleep has no major consequences for survival in humans; however, severe detrimental effects have been observed in rats.

Opposite imprinting defects at chromosome 15q11–13 are responsible for opposite sleep phenotypes as well as opposite neurodevelopmental abnormalities, namely the Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) and the Angelman syndrome (AS). Whilst the PWS is due to loss of paternal expression of alleles, the AS is due to loss of maternal expression.

Maternal additions or paternal deletions of alleles at chromosome 15q11–13 are characterized by temperature control abnormalities, excessive sleepiness, and specific sleep architecture changes, particularly REM sleep deficits. Conversely, paternal additions or maternal deletions at chromosome 15q11–13 are characterized by reductions in sleep and frequent and prolonged night wakings.

The ‘genomic imprinting hypothesis of sleep’ remains in its infancy, and several aspects require attention and further investigation.”

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006004 “Genomic Imprinting: A New Epigenetic Perspective of Sleep Regulation”

A commenter to the review referenced a 2014 study Troubled sleep: night waking, breastfeeding, and parent–offspring conflict that received several reactions, including one by the same commenter. Here are a few quotes from the study author’s consolidated response:

“‘Troubled sleep’ had two major purposes. The first was to draw attention to the oppositely perturbed sleep of infants with PWS and AS and explore its evolutionary implications. The involvement of imprinted genes suggests that infant sleep has been subject to antagonistic selection on genes of maternal and paternal origin with genes of maternal origin favoring less disrupted sleep.

My second major purpose was a critique of the idea that children would be happier, healthier and better-adjusted if we could only return to natural methods of child care. This way of thinking is often accompanied by a belief that modern practices put children at risk of irrevocable harm.

The truth of such claims is ultimately an empirical question, but the claims are sometimes presented as if they had the imprimatur of evolutionary biology. This appeal to scientific authority often seems to misrepresent what evolutionary theory predicts: that which evolves is not necessarily that which is healthy.

Why should pregnancy not be more efficient and more robust than other physiological systems, rather than less? Crucial checks, balances and feedback controls are lacking in the shared physiology of the maternal–fetal unit.

Infant sleep may similarly lack the exquisite organization of systems without evolutionary conflict. Postnatal development, like prenatal development, is subject to difficulties of evolutionarily credible communication between mothers and offspring.”

The author addressed comments related to attachment theory:

“Infants are classified as having insecure-resistant attachment if they maintain close proximity to their mother after a brief separation while expressing negative emotions and exhibiting contradictory behaviors that seem to both encourage and resist interaction. By contrast, infants are classified as having insecure-avoidant attachment if they do not express negative emotion and avoid contact with their mother after reunion.

Insecure-avoidant and insecure-resistant behaviors might be considered antithetic accommodations of infants to less responsive mothers; the former associated with reduced demands on maternal attention, the latter with increased demands. A parallel pattern is seen in effects on maternal sleep. Insecure-avoidant infants wake their mothers less frequently, and insecure-resistant infants more frequently, than securely attached infants.

Parent–child interactions are transformed once children can speak. Infants with more fragmented sleep at 6 months had less language at 18 and 30 months.

Infants with AS have unconsolidated sleep and never learn to speak. The absence of language in the absence of expression of one or more MEGs [maternally expressed imprinted genes] is compatible with a hypothesis in which earlier development of language reduces infant demands on mothers.”

Regarding cultural differences:

“China, Taiwan and Hong Kong have both high rates of bed-sharing and high rates of problematic sleep compared with western countries. Within this grouping, however, more children sleep in their own room but parents report fewer sleep problems in Hong Kong than in either China or Taiwan.

Clearly, cultural differences are significant, and the causes of this variation should be investigated, but the differences cannot be summarized simply as ‘west is worst’.

The fitness [genetic rather than physical fitness] gain to mothers of an extra child and the benefits for infants of longer IBIs [interbirth intervals] are substantial. These selective forces are unlikely to be orders of magnitude weaker than the advantages of lactase persistence, yet the selective forces associated with dairying have been sufficient to result in adaptive genetic differentiation among populations.

The possibility of gene–culture coevolution should not be discounted for behaviors associated with infant-care practices.”

Regarding a mismatch between modern and ancestral environments:

“I remain skeptical of a tendency to ascribe most modern woes to incongruence between our evolved nature and western cultural practices. We did not evolve to be happy or healthy but to leave genetic descendants, and an undue emphasis on mismatch risks conflating health and fitness.

McKenna [a commenter] writes ‘It isn’t really nice nor maybe even possible to fool mother nature.’ Here I disagree. Our genetic adaptations often try to fool us into doing things that enhance fitness at costs to our happiness.

Our genes do not care about us and we should have no compunction about fooling them to deliver benefits without serving their ends. Contraception, to take one obvious example, allows those who choose childlessness to enjoy the pleasures of sexual activity without the fitness-enhancing risk of conception.

Night waking evolved in environments in which there were strong fitness costs from short IBIs and in which parents lacked artificial means of birth-spacing. If night waking evolved because it prolonged IBIs, then it may no longer serve the ends for which it evolved.

Nevertheless, optimal infant development might continue to depend on frequent night feeds as part of our ingrained evolutionary heritage.

It could also be argued that when night waking is not reinforced by feeding, and infants sleep through the night, then conflict within their genomes subsides. Infants would then gain the benefit of unfragmented sleep without the pleiotropic costs of intragenomic conflict. Plausible arguments could be presented for either hypothesis and a choice between them must await discriminating evidence.”

Commenters on the 2014 study also said:

“[Crespi] The profound implications of Haig’s insights into the roles of evolutionary conflicts in fetal, infant and maternal health are matched only by the remarkable absence of understanding, appreciation or application of such evolutionary principles among the research and clinical medical communities, or the general public.

[Wilkins] A mutation may be selected for its effect on the trait that is the basis of the conflict, but that mutation also likely affects other traits. In general, we expect that these pleiotropic effects to be deleterious: conflict over one trait can actually drive other traits to be less adapted. Natural selection does not necessarily guarantee positive health outcomes.

[McNamara] Assuming that AS/REM is differentially influenced by genes of paternal origin then both REM properties and REM-associated awakenings can be better explained by mechanisms of genomic conflict than by traditional claims that REM functions as an anti-predator ‘sentinel’ for the sleeping organism.

[Hinde] Given this context of simultaneous coordination and conflict between mother and infant, distinguishing honest signals of infant need from self-interested, care-extracting signals poses a challenge.“

The persistence of epigenetic marks in Type 1 diabetes

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Epigenetics, Memory, Stress , ,

This 2016 California human study found:

“A persistency of DNA methylation over time at key genomic loci associated with diabetic complications. Two sets of DNAs collected at least 16–17 years apart from the same participants are used to show the persistency of DNA-me over time.

Twelve annotated differentially methylated loci were common in both WB [whole blood] and Monos [blood monocytes], including thioredoxin-interacting protein (TXNIP), known to be associated with hyperglycemia and related complications.

The top 38 hyperacetylated promoters in cases included 15 genes associated with the nuclear factor kappa-light-chain-enhancer of activated B cells (NF-κB) inflammatory pathway, which is strongly associated with diabetic complications.”

The researchers built on a series of studies that showed how subjects with early intensive interventions didn’t develop further complications, whereas subjects with later intensive interventions:

“Continued to develop complications, such as nephropathy, retinopathy, and macrovascular diseases, at significantly higher rates.

This persistence of benefit from early application of intensive therapy, called ‘metabolic memory,’ is an enigma.”

These researchers needed to also consider a point of Enduring memories? Or continuous toxic stimulation? that:

“The lasting epigenomic effect would not be due to memory, but continuous stimulation by persistent pathogens or persistent components.”

Other studies that involved specific genes of this study include:

http://www.pnas.org/content/113/21/E3002.full “Epigenomic profiling reveals an association between persistence of DNA methylation and metabolic memory in the DCCT/EDIC type 1 diabetes cohort”

Enduring epigenetic memories? Or continuous toxic stimulation?

gettingwell4 5+ stars Premium, Epigenetics, Immune system, Memory

This 2016 French review subject was bacterial infections that produce long-lasting host memories:

“Virulence factors modify the epigenomic landscape through targeting of host signaling cascades, or chromatin complexes directly. Additionally, some bacterial factors have intrinsic catalytic activity enabling them to directly modify chromatin.

Virus, fungi, and parasites also induce similar processes.

Epigenomic changes are not the only possible marks contributing to epigenetic memory. Every inducible change that is not rapidly reversed has the potential to maintain a lasting effect.

Most studies in this field have been performed in vitro with fully terminally differentiated cells such as epithelial cells. Since in such cell types cell fate is already established and a short lifespan often occurs in vivo, this raises the question of whether such memory would be relevant for these cells. The same can be applied to differentiated innate immune cells, which also have a short lifetime.

Looking at the response of undifferentiated cells such as stem cells appears much more appropriate to further explore the concept of innate immune memory.

figureFINAL

The lasting potential of chromatin marks depends not only on the kinetics of the epigenome, but also on the stimulus itself. For example, in contrast to LPS [lipopolysaccharide, the major constituent of the cell wall of Gram-negative bacteria], which is rapidly cleared from the organism, BCG and the anthrax toxin may persist in the host organism.

The lasting epigenomic effect would not be due to memory, but continuous stimulation by persistent pathogens or persistent components.”

The last point emphasized the principle that damaging sources should be addressed. Enduring epigenetic effects may be symptoms rather than causes when toxic conditions persist.

Therapies that attempt to reverse epigenetic changes may not be effective when these changes aren’t the only factors.

https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(16)30148-2 “A Lasting Impression: Epigenetic Memory of Bacterial Infections?”

Epigenetic remodeling creates immune system memory

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Epigenetics, Immune system, Memory , ,

This 2016 German review subject was memory characteristics of immune cells:

“Innate immune memory has likely evolved as an ancient mechanism to protect against pathogens. However, dysregulated processes of immunological imprinting mediated by trained innate immunity may also be detrimental under certain conditions.

Evidence is rapidly accumulating that innate immune cells can adopt a persistent pro-inflammatory phenotype after brief exposure to a variety of stimuli, a phenomenon that has been termed ‘trained innate immunity.’ The epigenome of myeloid (progenitor) cells is presumably modified for prolonged periods of time, which, in turn, could evoke a condition of continuous immune cell over-activation.”

These reviewers focused on an example of atherosclerosis, although other examples were discussed of epigenetic remodeling to acquire immune memory:

“In the last ten years, several novel non-traditional risk factors for atherosclerosis have been identified that are all associated with activation of the immune system. These include chronic inflammatory diseases such as:

  • Rheumatoid arthritis,
  • Gout,
  • Psoriatic arthritis, and
  • Ankylosing spondylitis,

as well as infections with bacteria or viruses.”

Innate immune memory

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1044532316300185 “Long-term activation of the innate immune system in atherosclerosis”

Diets were discussed, mainly regarding their various negative effects. I was interested to see a study that referenced a common dietary supplement:

“Pathway analysis of promoters that were potentiated by β-glucan identified several innate immune and signaling pathways upregulated in trained cells that are responsible for induction of trained immunity.”

Other curated research into epigenetic remodeling of immune system memory includes:

The inevitable effects of avoidable wars

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Epigenetics, Memory, Stress

“It was like Tom had tried to return home,” says Jacky Sweetnam. “But he didn’t quite make it.”

http://news.nationalpost.com/features/the-ghosts-of-vietnam-the-last-days-of-a-decorated-canadian-vet “The Ghosts of Vietnam”

In memoriam to my father who died twenty years ago last week. World War II ruined his life with undiagnosed PTSD, some of the effects of which affected his children.

His brother – my uncle – was a Navy hospital corpsman during the slaughter at Iwo Jima, and was even more afflicted.

Neither of them were ever treated.

A one-sided review of stress

gettingwell4 0-1 star Wasted resources, Amygdala, Brain development, Cerebrum, Cortisol, Dopamine, Epigenetics, Glutamate, Hippocampus, Hypothalamus, Limbic system, Memory, Neurochemicals, Oxytocin, Primal Therapy, Serotonin, Stress, Vasopressin , , , , ,

The subject of this 2016 Italian/New York review was the stress response:

“The stress response, involving the activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical [HPA] axis and the consequent release of corticosteroid hormones, is indeed aimed at promoting metabolic, functional, and behavioral adaptations. However, behavioral stress is also associated with fast and long-lasting neurochemical, structural, and behavioral changes, leading to long-term remodeling of glutamate transmission, and increased susceptibility to neuropsychiatric disorders.

Of note, early-life events, both in utero and during the early postnatal life, trigger reprogramming of the stress response, which is often associated with loss of stress resilience and ensuing neurobehavioral (mal)adaptations.”

The reviewers’ intentional dismissal of the role of GABA in favor of the role of glutamate was a key point:

“The changes in neuronal excitability and synaptic plasticity induced by stress are the result of an imbalance of excitatory (glutamatergic) and inhibitory (GABAergic) transmission, leading to long-lasting (mal)adaptive functional modifications. Although both glutamate and GABA transmission are critically associated with stress-induced alteration of neuronal excitability, the present review will focus on the modulation of glutamate release and transmission induced by stress and glucocorticoids.”

No particular reason was given for this bias. I inferred from the review’s final sentence that the review’s sponsors and funding prompted this decision:

“In-depth studies of changes in glutamate transmission and dendrite remodeling induced by stress in early and late life will help to elucidate the biological underpinnings of the (mal)adaptive strategies the brain adopts to cope with environmental challenges in one’s life.”

The bias led to ignoring evidence for areas the reviewers posed as needing further research. An example of relevant research the reviewers failed to consider was the 2015 Northwestern University study I curated in A study that provided evidence for basic principles of Primal Therapy that found:

“In response to traumatic stress, some individuals, instead of activating the glutamate system to store memories, activate the extra-synaptic GABA system and form inaccessible traumatic memories.”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4812483/ “Stress Response and Perinatal Reprogramming: Unraveling (Mal)adaptive Strategies”

Observing pain in others had long-lasting brain effects

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Anterior cingulate cortex, Brain hemispheres, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Memory, Neurochemicals, Oxytocin, Stress , ,

This 2016 Israeli human study used whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) to study pain perception in military veterans:

“Our findings demonstrate alterations in pain perception following extreme pain exposure, chart the sequence from automatic to evaluative pain processing, and emphasize the importance of considering past experiences in studying the neural response to others’ states.

Differences in brain activation to ‘pain’ and ‘no pain’ in the PCC [posterior cingulate cortex] emerged only among controls. This suggests that prior exposure to extreme pain alters the typical brain response to pain by blurring the distinction between painful and otherwise identical but nonpainful stimuli, and that this blurring of the ‘pain effect’ stems from increased responses to ‘no pain’ rather than from attenuated response to pain.”

Limitations included:

  • “The pain-exposed participants showed posttraumatic symptoms, which may also be related to the observed alterations in the brain response to pain.
  • We did not include pain threshold measurements. However, the participants’ sensitivity to experienced pain may have had an effect on the processing of observed pain.
  • The regions of interest for the examination of pain processing in the pain-exposed group were defined on the basis of the results identified in the control group.
  • We did not detect pain-related activations in additional regions typically associated with pain perception, such as the anterior insula and ACC. This may be related to differences between the MEG and fMRI neuroimaging approaches.”

The subjects self-administered oxytocin or placebo per the study’s design. However:

“We chose to focus on the placebo condition and to test group differences at baseline only, in light of the recent criticism on underpowered oxytocin administration studies, and thus all following analyses are reported for the placebo condition.”

A few questions:

  1. If observing others’ pain caused “increased responses to ‘no pain’,” wouldn’t the same effect or more be expected from experiencing one’s own pain?
  2. If there’s evidence for item 1, then why aren’t “increased responses to ‘no pain'” of affected people overtly evident in everyday life?
  3. If item 2 is often observed, then what are the neurobiological consequences for affected people’s suppression of “increased responses to ‘no pain’?”
  4. Along with the effects of item 3, what may be behavioral, emotional, and other evidence of this suppressed pain effect?
  5. What would it take for affected people to regain a normal processing of others’ “‘pain’ and ‘no pain’?”

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299546838_Prior_exposure_to_extreme_pain_alters_neural_response_to_pain_in_others “Prior exposure to extreme pain alters neural response to pain in others” Thanks to one of the authors, Ruth Feldman, for providing the full study

What is epigenetic inheritance?

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Epigenetics, Memory, Stress ,

This 2016 review by Eric Nestler, a well-known and well-funded researcher, entitled Transgenerational Epigenetic Contributions to Stress Responses: Fact or Fiction? concluded:

“Further work is needed to understand whether and to what extent true epigenetic inheritance of stress vulnerability adds to the well-established and powerful influence of genetics and environmental exposures in determining an individual’s susceptibility versus resilience to stress throughout life.

There is growing evidence for at least some contribution of epigenetic regulation – perhaps achieved by miRNAs – in mediating part of the ability of parental behavioral experience to influence stress vulnerability in their offspring.”

The reviewer applied the terms involved to exclude behavioral inheritance mechanisms. The extent of what is “epigenetic inheritance” seemed to be lost in the process.

For example, his own 2011 research Paternal Transmission of Stressed-Induced Pathologies was cited for evidence that:

“Adult male mice subjected to chronic social defeat stress generate offspring that are more vulnerable to a range of stressful stimuli than the offspring of control mice.”

Yet that finding was dismissed in the review and in that study as behavioral:

“While epigenetic changes in sperm might be a small factor in transgenerational transmission of stress vulnerability, a large portion of the observed transmission may be behavioral.

The fact that most of the transgenerational transmission of stress vulnerability observed in our experiments was not seen with IVF argues against the preponderance of epigenetic mechanisms. Rather, our data would suggest that the bulk of the vulnerabilities are passed on to subsequent generations behaviorally.”

A few questions:

  1. If the experimental subjects had no more control over their behavioral stress-response effects than they had over their DNA methylation, histone modification, or microRNA stress-response effects, then why was such behavior not included in the “epigenetic mechanisms” term?
  2. How do behavioral inheritance mechanisms fall outside the “true epigenetic inheritance” term when behavioral stress-response effects are shown to be reliably transmitted generation after generation?
  3. Wouldn’t the cessation of behavioral inheritance mechanisms confirm their status by falsifiability? This was done with studies such as the 1995 Adoption reverses the long-term impairment in glucocorticoid feedback induced by prenatal stress.

Mechanisms of stress memories in plants

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Epigenetics, Memory, Stress ,

This 2016 Australian review’s subject was plant memory mechanisms:

“Plants are adept at rapidly acclimating to stressful conditions and are able to further fortify their defenses by retaining memories of stress to enable stronger or more rapid responses should an environmental perturbation recur.

The recovery process entails a balancing act between resetting and memory formation. During recovery, RNA metabolism, posttranscriptional gene silencing, and RNA-directed DNA methylation have the potential to play key roles in resetting the epigenome and transcriptome and in altering memory.”

Many of the principles applied to animals, and several animal studies were cited for illustration. Here’s one of the graphics:

F6.large

I disagreed with the Summary statement:

“Memory, in particular epigenetic memory, is likely a relatively rare event.”

The reviewers cited a 2015 Australian study Stress induced gene expression drives transient DNA methylation changes at adjacent repetitive elements which found the opposite conclusion with rice:

“Despite 21 days of starvation, resupplying phosphate for just 1 day reversed expression of 40% of induced genes, further increasing to 80% after 3 days and corresponding with a reestablished internal root phosphate concentration. Interestingly though, 80 genes remained differentially regulated even after 31 days of resupply.”

The cited study’s researchers attributed their epigenetic memory finding to several factors, including their study design:

“The majority of DNA methylation analyses performed in plants to date have focused on Arabidopsis, despite being relatively depleted of TEs [transposable elements] (15–20% of the genome) and being poorly methylated compared to other plant genomes.

To date, only a limited number of studies have comprehensively investigated the involvement of DNA methylation in response to adverse environmental conditions. Several studies have reported that changes in the environment can affect the methylation status of some regions of the genome, using low resolution and non-quantitative techniques. These studies have lacked the resolution to provide the specific context and genomic location of the changes in DNA methylation, thus offering limited insights into the potential role of stress-induced changes in DNA methylation.”

So, the current review judging “memory, in particular epigenetic memory” to be “a relatively rare event” probably had more to do with study designs rather than what actually occurs in nature. See one of the coauthor’s response below.

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/2/e1501340.full “Reconsidering plant memory: Intersections between stress recovery, RNA turnover, and epigenetics”

Beneficial epigenetic effects of mild stress with social support during puberty

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Brain development, Cerebrum, Cortisol, Epigenetics, Hippocampus, Hypothalamus, Limbic system, Memory, Neurochemicals, Serotonin, Stress , , , ,

This 2016 Pennsylvania rodent study found:

“Stress in the context of social support experienced over the pubertal window can promote epigenetic reprogramming in the brain to increase resilience to age-related cognitive decline in females.

These findings are actually consistent with previous studies showing that some amount of adversity, or adversity under more favorable circumstances such as social support or a protective gene polymorphism, provides a measure of ‘grit’ in coping with later life challenges.

Our findings provide a unique perspective on this relationship, as they highlight the important link between experience during the pubertal window and cognitive health during aging.”

These researchers made efforts to further investigate causes of unexpected results, such as:

“Peripubertal stress alone did not significantly alter Barnes maze performance in aging compared to aged Controls. Mice that had experienced stress with concurrent social support (CVS + SI) actually performed better than Control aged mice, specifically in learning the reversal task faster.

Peripubertal stress had no effect on corticosterone levels in response to an acute restraint stress or in sensorimotor gating and baseline startle reactivity.”

Their investigations led to epigenetic findings:

“Consistent with our behavioral findings, stress in the context of social interaction resulted in long-term reprogramming of gene expression in the PFC [prefrontal cortex]. While there were no differentially expressed genes between Control and CVS females, there were 88 genes that were significantly different between Control and CVS + SI groups. Of genes that were downregulated, a large portion (23 genes; 35%) were microRNAs.

We found that the PFC transcriptome of CVS + SI aged females was significantly enriched for predicted targets of the 23 microRNAs that were downregulated in the PFC in these mice. This suggests that microRNAs represent a mode of regulation capable of enacting far-reaching programmatic effects, and are a critical epigenetic gene expression regulatory mechanism.”

Applicability to humans was suggested by associations such as:

“A single microRNA can target more than a hundred different mRNA targets, and more than 45,000 conserved microRNA binding sites have been annotated in the 3′ UTR of 60% of human genes.”

A few limitations were noted:

“Given that mice at this age (1 year) are commonly compared to ‘late middle aged’ humans, later aging time points may yield differences in this group. Alternatively, it is possible that there was an effect of peripubertal stress that was not long-lasting due to the mild nature of our chronic stress model.

To include early neglect as a part of the stressor experience, CVS females were weaned one week earlier (PN21) than Control and CVS + SI mice. Addition of stress of this earlier weaning likely poses a significant contribution to programming of the PFC.”

One of the study coauthors was also a coauthor of:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4870871/ “Peripubertal stress with social support promotes resilience in the face of aging”

A review that inadvertently showed how memory paradigms prevented relevant research

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Amygdala, Anterior cingulate cortex, Cerebrum, Epigenetics, Glutamate, Hippocampus, Limbic system, Memory, Neurochemicals, Stress , , , , ,

This 2016 Swiss review of enduring memories demonstrated what happens when scientists’ reputations and paychecks interfered with them recognizing new research and evidence in their area but outside their paradigm: “A framework containing the basic assumptions, ways of thinking, and methodology that are commonly accepted by members of a scientific community.”

A. Most of the cited references were from decades ago that established these paradigms of enduring memories. Fine, but the research these paradigms excluded was also significant.

B. All of the newer references were continuations of established paradigms. For example, a 2014 study led by one of the reviewers found:

“Successful reconsolidation-updating paradigms for recent memories fail to attenuate remote (i.e., month-old) ones.

Recalling remote memories fails to induce histone acetylation-mediated plasticity.”

The researchers elected to pursue a workaround of the memory reconsolidation paradigm when the need for a new paradigm of enduring memories directly confronted them!

C. None of the reviewers’ calls for further investigations challenged existing paradigms. For example, when the reviewers suggested research into epigenetic regulation of enduring memories, they somehow found it best to return to 1984, a time when dedicated epigenetics research had barely begun:

“Whether memories might indeed be ‘coded in particular stretches of chromosomal DNA’ as originally proposed by Crick [in 1984] and if so what the enzymatic machinery behind such changes might be remain unclear. In this regard, cell population-specific studies are highly warranted.”

Two examples of relevant research the review failed to consider:

1. A study that provided evidence for basic principles of Primal Therapy went outside existing paradigms to research state-dependent memories:

“If a traumatic event occurs when these extra-synaptic GABA receptors are activated, the memory of this event cannot be accessed unless these receptors are activated once again.

It’s an entirely different system even at the genetic and molecular level than the one that encodes normal memories.”

What impressed me about that study was the obvious nature of its straightforward experimental methods. Why hadn’t other researchers used the same methods decades ago? Doing so could have resulted in dozens of informative follow-on study variations by now, which is my point in Item A. above.

2. A relevant but ignored 2015 French study What can cause memories that are accessible only when returning to the original brain state? which supported state-dependent memories:

“Posttraining/postreactivation treatments induce an internal state, which becomes encoded with the memory, and should be present at the time of testing to ensure a successful retrieval.”

The review also showed the extent to which historical memory paradigms depend on the subjects’ emotional memories. When it comes to human studies, though, designs almost always avoid studying emotional memories.

It’s clearly past time to Advance science by including emotion in research.

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/np/2016/3425908/ “Structural, Synaptic, and Epigenetic Dynamics of Enduring Memories”

Using an epigenetic clock with older adults

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Epigenetics, Memory, Telomeres ,

This 2016 German human study found:

“Epigenetic age acceleration is correlated with clinically relevant aging-related phenotypes through pathways unrelated to cellular senescence as assessed by telomere length.

The current work employed the frailty index, a multi-dimensional approach that combines [34] parameters of multiple physiological systems and functional capacities. The present findings were based on [1,820] study participants aged 50 to 75 years.

Innovative approaches like Mendelian randomization will be needed to elucidate whether epigenetic age acceleration indeed plays a causal role for the development of clinical phenotypes.”

The study had an informative “Age acceleration and telomere length are not correlated” section with references. It was another step toward establishing the Horvath epigenetic clock for widespread usage.

http://clinicalepigeneticsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13148-016-0186-5 “Frailty is associated with the epigenetic clock but not with telomere length in a German cohort”

What’s a good substitute for feeling loved?

gettingwell4 0-1 star Wasted resources, Memory, Primal Therapy , ,

A friend of mine sent a link to this TED talk yesterday. The speaker inspired my friend to change their life along the speaker’s guidelines:

“The very act of doing the thing that scared me undid the fear.

That feeling, you can’t help but strive for greatness at any cost.

The more I work to be successful, the more I need to work.”

I wasn’t similarly inspired.

For one thing, a fear memory isn’t undone by behavior that covers it over and tamps it down. Fear extinction is the learned inhibition of retrieval of previously acquired responses provided evidence for what happens with a fear memory.

What I saw expressed in the TED talk was an exhausting pursuit of substitutes for feeling loved.

This February 18, 2016 blog post by Dr Arthur Janov framed the TED talk in the context that I understood the speaker:

“Most of us thought that once we choose a profession and follow it and succeed at it, becoming an expert and well known, that would be fulfilling. We would feel like a success.

Success is not a feeling, loved is.

Fame is other people’s idea of success; it is in a way their feeling…admiration, humbling, important, etc.

And why does the person, even most accomplished, never feel satisfied nor fulfilled?”

What do you feel is the appropriate context of the TED talk?

What do you think are likely outcomes of a person following the speaker’s guidelines?

What’s the underlying question for every brain study to answer?

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Amygdala, Anterior cingulate cortex, Beliefs, Cerebrum, Cortisol, Dopamine, Epigenetics, Glutamate, Hippocampus, Hypothalamus, Limbic system, Memory, Neurochemicals, Primal Therapy, Serotonin, Stress, Testosterone, Thalamus , , , , , ,

Is the underlying question for every brain study to answer:

  • How do our brains internally represent the external world?

Is it:

  • How did we learn what we know?
  • How do we forget or disregard what we’ve learned?
  • What keeps us from acquiring and learning newer or better information?

How about:

  • What affects how we pay attention to our environments?
  • How do our various biochemical states affect our perceptions, learning, experiences, and behavior?
  • How do these factors in turn affect our biology?

Or maybe:

  • Why do we do what we do?
  • How is our behavior affected by our experiences?
  • How did we become attracted and motivated toward what we like?
  • How do we develop expectations?
  • Why do we avoid certain situations?

Not to lose sight of:

  • How do the contexts affect all of the above?
  • What happens over time to affect all of the above?

This 2015 UCLA paper reviewed the above questions from the perspective of Pavlovian conditioning:

“The common definition of Pavlovian conditioning, that via repeated pairings of a neutral stimulus with a stimulus that elicits a reflex the neutral stimulus acquires the ability to elicit that the reflex, is neither accurate nor reflective of the richness of Pavlovian conditioning. Rather, Pavlovian conditioning is the way we learn about dependent relationships between stimuli.

Pavlovian conditioning is one of the few areas in biology in which there is direct experimental evidence of biological fitness.”

The most important question unanswered by the review was:

  • How can its information be used to help humans?

How can Pavlovian conditioning answer: What can a human do about the thoughts, feelings, behavior, epigenetic effects – the person – the phenotype – that they’ve been shaped into?

One example of the unanswered question: the review pointed out in a section about fear extinction that this process doesn’t involve unlearning. Fear extinction instead inhibits the symptoms of fear response. The fear memory is still intact, awaiting some other context to be reactivated and expressed.

How can this information be used to help humans?

  • Is inhibiting the symptoms and leaving the fear memory in place costless with humans?
  • Or does this practice have both potential and realized adverse effects?
  • Where’s the human research on methods that may directly address a painful emotional memory?

One relevant hypothesis of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy is that a person continues to be their conditioned self until they address the sources of their pain. A corollary is that efforts to relieve symptoms seldom address causes.

How could it be otherwise? A problem isn’t cured by ameliorating its effects.

http://cshperspectives.cshlp.org/content/8/1/a021717.full “The Origins and Organization of Vertebrate Pavlovian Conditioning”

Use it or lose it: the interplay of new brain cells, age, and activity

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Brain development, Cortisol, Epigenetics, Glutamate, Hippocampus, Hypothalamus, Limbic system, Memory, Neurochemicals, Serotonin, Stress, Telomeres, Testosterone , , , ,

This 2015 German review was of aging and activity in the context of adult neurogenesis:

“Adult neurogenesis might be of profound functional significance because it occurs at a strategic bottleneck location in the hippocampus.

Age-dependent changes essentially reflect a unidirectional development in that everything builds on what has occurred before. In this sense, aging can also be seen as continued or lifelong development. This idea has limitations but is instructive with regard to adult neurogenesis, because adult neurogenesis is neuronal development under the conditions of the adult brain.

The age-related alterations of adult neurogenesis themselves have quantitative and qualitative components. So far, most research has focused on the quantitative aspects. But there can be little doubt that qualitative changes do not simply follow quantitative changes (e.g., in cell or synapse numbers), but emerge on a systems level and above when an organism ages. With respect to adult neurogenesis, only one multilevel experiment including morphology and behavior has been conducted, and, even in that study, only three time points were investigated.

In old age, adult neurogenesis occurs at only a small fraction of the level in early adulthood. The decline does not seem to be ‘regulated’ but rather the by-product of many age-related changes of other sorts.

From a behavioral level down to a synaptic level, activity increases adult neurogenesis. This regulation does not seem to occur in an all-or-nothing fashion but rather influences different stages of neuronal development differently. Both cell proliferation and survival are influenced by or even depend on activity.

The effects of exercise and environmental enrichment are additive, which indicates that increasing the potential for neurogenesis is sufficient to increase the actual use of the recruitable cells in the case of cognitive stimulation. Physical activity would not by itself provide specific hippocampus-relevant stimuli that induce net neurogenesis but be associated with a greater chance to encounter specific relevant stimuli.

Adult hippocampal neurogenesis might contribute to a structural or neural reserve that if appropriately trained early in life might provide a compensatory buffer of brain plasticity in the face of increasing neurodegeneration or nonpathological age-related functional losses. There is still only limited information on the activity-dependent parameters that help to prevent the age-dependent decrease in adult neurogenesis and maintain cellular plasticity.

The big question is what the functional contribution of so few new neurons over so long periods can be. Any comprehensive concept has to bring together the acute functional contributions of newly generated, highly plastic neurons and the more-or-less lasting changes they introduce to the network.”

I’ve quoted quite a lot, but there are more details that await your reading. A few items from the study referenced in the first paragraph above:

“The hippocampus represents a bottleneck in processing..adult hippocampal neurogenesis occurs at exactly the narrowest spot.

We have derived the theory that the function of adult hippocampal neurogenesis is to enable the brain to accommodate continued bouts of novelty..a mechanism for preparing the hippocampus for processing greater levels of complexity.”

The role of the hippocampus in emotion was ignored as it so often is. The way to address many of the gaps mentioned by the author may be to Advance science by including emotion in research.

For example, from the author’s The mystery of humans’ evolved capability for adults to grow new brain cells:

“Adult neurogenesis is already effective early in life, actually very well before true adulthood, and is at very high levels when sexual maturity has been reached. Behavioral advantages associated with adult neurogenesis must be relevant during the reproductive period.”

When human studies are designed to research how “behavioral advantages associated with adult neurogenesis must be relevant” what purpose does it serve to exclude emotional content?

http://cshperspectives.cshlp.org/content/7/11/a018929.full “Activity Dependency and Aging in the Regulation of Adult Neurogenesis”