Alcohol and the Brain

Most of us have witnessed the outward signs of heavy drinking: the stumbling walk, slurred words and memory lapses. People who have been drinking have trouble with their balance, judgment and coordination. They react slowly to stimuli, which is why drinking before driving is so dangerous. All of these physical signs occur because of the way alcohol affects the brain and central nervous system.

Alcohol affects brain chemistry by altering levels of neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers that transmit the signals throughout the body that control thought processes, behavior and emotion. Neurotransmitters are either excitatory, meaning that they stimulate brain electrical activity, or inhibitory, meaning that they decrease brain electrical activity. Alcohol increases the effects of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA in the brain. GABA causes the sluggish movements and slurred speech that often occur in alcoholics. At the same time, alcohol inhibits the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate. Suppressing this stimulant results in a similar type of physiological slowdown. In addition to increasing the GABA and decreasing the glutamate in the brain, alcohol increases the amount of the chemical dopamine in the brain's reward center, which creates the feeling of pleasure that occurs when someone takes a drink.

Summary of alcohol's effects on the brain - Move your cursor over the colored bar in the lower left-hand corner to see which areas of the brain are affected by increasing BAC.

Alcohol affects the different regions of the brain in different ways:

• Cerebral cortex: In this region, where thought processing and consciousness are centered, alcohol depresses the behavioral inhibitory centers, making the person less inhibited; it slows down the processing of information from the eyes, ears, mouth and other senses; and it inhibits the thought processes, making it difficult to think clearly.
• Cerebellum: Alcohol affects this center of movement and balance, resulting in the staggering, off-balance swagger we associate with the so-called "falling-down drunk."
• Hypothalamus and pituitary: The hypothalamus and pituitary coordinate automatic brain functions and hormone release. Alcohol depresses nerve centers in the hypothalamus that control sexual arousal and performance. Although sexual urge may increase, sexual performance decreases.
• Medulla: This area of the brain handles such automatic functions as breathing, consciousness and body temperature. By acting on the medulla, alcohol induces sleepiness. It can also slow breathing and lower body temperature, which can be life threatening.

In the short term, alcohol can cause blackouts -- short-term memory lapses in which people forget what occurred over entire stretches of time. The long-term effects on the brain can be even more damaging.

consulted: http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/alcoholism4.htm

 

How many neurons make a human brain? Billions fewer than we thought

How many neurons make a human brain? Billions fewer than we thought

A technique that involves turning the brain into 'soup' and counting the nuclei of nerve cells reveals that we're 14bn short

Even the lower estimate of brain neuron numbers puts us head and shoulders above other primates. Photograph: Sprint/Corbis

How many neurons are there in the human brain? It was a question that scientists thought they had nailed – and the answer was 100bn (give or take). If you went looking you would find that figure repeated widely in the neuroscience literature and beyond.

But when a researcher in Brazil called Dr Suzana Herculano-Houzel started digging, she discovered that no one in the field could actually remember where the 100bn figure had come from – let alone how it had been arrived at. So she set about discovering the true figure (HT to the excellent Nature neuroscience podcast NeuroPod).

This involved a remarkable – and to some I suspect unsettling – piece of research. Her team took the brains of four adult men, aged 50, 51, 54 and 71, and turned them into what she describes as "brain soup". All of the men had died of non-neurological diseases and had donated their brains for research.

"It took me a couple of months to make peace with this idea that I was going to take somebody's brain or an animal's brain and turn it into soup," she told Nature. "But the thing is we have been learning so much by this method we've been getting numbers that people had not been able to get … It's really just one more method that's not any worse than just chopping your brain into little pieces."

She told me that so far, she has only looked at four brains, all of them from men.

The method involves dissolving the cell membranes of cells within the brain and creating a homogeneous mixture of the whole lot. You then take a sample of the soup, count the number of cell nuclei belonging to neurons (as opposed to other cells in the brain such as glia) and then scale up to get the overall number. The great advantage of this method is that unlike counting the number of neurons in one part of the brain and then extrapolating from that, it gets over the problem that different brain regions may have more or less densely packed neurons.

So what is the number?

"We found that on average the human brain has 86bn neurons. And not one [of the brains] that we looked at so far has the 100bn. Even though it may sound like a small difference the 14bn neurons amount to pretty much the number of neurons that a baboon brain has or almost half the number of neurons in the gorilla brain. So that's a pretty large difference actually."

This leads to the bigger question of what makes human brains special.

Herculano-Houzel says our brains are rather standard primate models, except for the fact that we have a massive number of brain cells compared to other species. That is energetically very expensive to maintain. She estimates that 20% to 25% of our total energy budget goes on running our brains, a figure which she describes as "extraordinary". How do we manage it?

"We can afford such a huge number of neurons. That difference might actually be related to a shift to a cooked food diet and that allows us to have far more calories per day. And with that we can afford a much larger number of neurons that other animals probably could not."

That is a reference to Prof Richard Wrangham's ideas about how the invention of cooking had a crucial impact on human evolution.

There is a beautiful, if slightly grisly, elegance to Herculano-Houzel's method and her work embodies the constantly questioning attitude that is what makes science so powerful. But what I find interesting is how this 100bn neuron myth became lodged in the collective scientific consciousness in the first place, and why it continued to propagate.

Brainless girl meets 10 months

MEETS A BABY 10 MONTHS WITHOUT BRAIN ... AND ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR MOTHER
 

SMALL SAMPLE SAD CRY AND WHEN HER MOM SHE IS NOT NEAR

It's an amazing story ... and we moved the bowels. Marcela de Jesus Galante Ferreira is a Brazilian babe who just turned ten months of life. Born in Patrocinio Paulista, a population of 15,000 people in the state of Sao Paulo (Brazil). Its peculiarity is that it has no brain and yet weighs 11.2 kilos, just over half of his age ... and above all ... that is alive.

Despite its anencephaly, doctors say distinguishes your mother, Cacilda, and cries when he is not in his arms.

"This is an extraordinary case. Normally, babies with anencephaly usually die shortly after birth, but Marcela and has become the baby anencéfala with longer life in the world," said Jose Antonio Retamar, director of Life Foundation .

The Murcia Beani pediatrician explained that, despite the lack of brain, distinguishes the mother baby and cries when it is not in his arms. Marcela's mother is a humble woman, a peasant who has received funding from the municipal government. For now Marcela tube feeds, but sometimes he removed to give soups and mashed.

Marcela is still struggling with all his fuercitas to live and continue to make her mom smile ... and even though we all know that history can not last long ... from here also do strength to live as long as possible and continue crying when she is not in the arms of his mother, and feeling comfortable when cradled.

Brain Cancer

 Watch your brain that your brain take care of you

Anonymous

Cancer of the brain is usually called a brain tumor. There are two main types. A primary brain tumor starts in the brain. A metastatic brain tumor starts somewhere else in the body and moves to the brain. Brain tumors can be benign, with no cancer cells, or malignant, with cancer cells that grow quickly.
Brain tumors can cause many symptoms. Some of the most common are

• Headaches, usually worse in the morning
• Nausea and vomiting
• Changes in your ability to talk, hear, or see
• Problems with balance or walking
• Problems with thinking or memory
• Muscle jerking or twitching
• Numbness or tingling in arms or legs

Doctors diagnose brain tumors by doing a neurologic exam and tests including an MRI, CT scan, and biopsy. People with brain tumors have several treatment options. The options are surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy. Many people get a combination of treatments.

NIH: National Cancer Institute

consulted: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/braincancer.html

10 Incredibly Strange Brain Disorders

 

You're used to relying on your brain. Whatever else happens, your personal lump of gray matter will take in the world, and respond to it in a fluid and predictable way. But actually, whatever your brain does is made up of many successive mental steps — and if just one of those steps fails, you'll find yourself behaving very differently.

Here are 10 weird and highly specific brain conditions, and what they each show us about the human brain.

10. Astasia-Abasia Patients Are Always On the Verge of Falling

Astasia-Abasia is also known as Blocq's Disease, after Paul Blocq, the French doctor who first described it. It's the inability to stand or walk properly, but there's more to it. At first, a person with this condition appears very drunk. Patients lurch when they try to stand or walk. Patients seem dangerous to themselves. They overbalance extravagantly, always catching themselves at the last moment. But that's the condition — they always catch themselves.

People with Blocq's Disease almost never hurt themselves. They only fall when a doctor, a loved one, or a soft place on the ground is available. Often this condition is in response to stress. The most famous case of this happened in the 1960s, when not one but two cadets at West Point came down with the condition, doctors believe as a response to the pressure of training at the prestigious school.

9. Anosognia Patients Are Unable to Recognize Their Own Injuries

Anosognia arises in conjunction with other injuries — generally strokes and blindness. People who have lost the ability to control one half of their body will say that they just don't want to move that part of their body. They'll say that that half of the body is really working normally, after all. When doctors show that it isn't working, they'll say that the body parts that the doctors are pointing to belong to someone else, or even that they have three hands, arms, or legs, and are moving the ones that the doctors don't see. There was even a case of a woman who had gone almost completely blind but insisted that she could see normally - cobbling together a 'vision' of what was happening around her from glimpses on the undamaged parts of her eyes, from memories, and from any sounds that she could hear around her.

More information clicking here

The Adult Brain

"It is very difficult to know what happens in the brain of a child, but it is impossible to know what will happen in the."Georges  Bernano

We find información about the adult brain. What you have to do is read this little information found in this link:  

http://www.ohsu.edu/xd/health/services/brain/in-community/brain-awareness/brain-health/adult-brain.cfm  for after to answer a crossword.

This is the crossword: file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Carlos/Mis%20documentos/Blog_cruci/palabras%20brain%20human.html

TEN TIPS FOR MAINTAINING A HEALTHY BRAIN FROM 1 TO 100

TEN TIPS FOR MAINTAINING A HEALTHY BRAIN FROM 1 TO 100 

Tip 1: Don't smoke. 

Smoking represents a major risk factor for cancer, heart disease and stroke. These leading causes of death represent an ongoing concern for all Americans. Nonsmokers might consider taking an empathetic approach to smokers who are trying to quit, and parents might use a "tough love" approach with their children to make sure they don't even start.

Tip 2: Follow your physician's advice. 

Your relationship with your physician is critical to your health. Remember, though, that as a consumer of health services your doctor is your employee, so establish a good working relationship based on the understanding that you are the boss of your body. We must develop a proactive attitude toward maintaining our health and take responsibility to change those aspects of our lifestyles that are minimizing our longevity potential. Our physicians can help guide this process. 

Tip 3: Exercise regularly. 

Exercise and physical activity continue to emerge as primary components of a healthy lifestyle at any age. Aerobic exercise, weight training and recreation are critical not just to our cardiovascular health but to our brain health, as well. Every time our heart beats, 25 percent of its output goes to our brains-quite a large market share! Clearly, maintaining efficient blood flow to our brains through regular exercise promotes health. If you don't exercise regularly, start by walking around the block tonight and build from there. 

Tip 4: Reduce the overall calories you consume daily. 

We Americans tend not to underconsume anything-including food. Yet the leading factor for longevity in animals is caloric restriction. This finding has yet to be demonstrated in humans. However, provided you get your daily nutritional needs from the USDA'S food pyramid, you should pay close attention to how much you eat. Follow the advice two physicians gave me: N ever go to bed stuffed, and eat only 80 percent of what you intend to consume at every meal. 

Tip 5: Socialize and have fun. 

We Americans specialize in stress, with little understanding of how to have fun. We need more time to socialize, celebrate and laugh! Some of us have walls around us that keep other people away. As humans, though, we need to be engaged and to be social. Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, once stated that every time "we lose an elder from our village, we lose a library." If we begin to think of everyone as a library, it becomes clear that we can learn from others. 

Tip 6: Develop your spirituality. 

Evidence continues to emerge that prayer is a health-promoting behavior and that attendance at formalized places of worship may have more significance to our health than we understand. Meditation, yoga, relaxation procedures and prayer have neurophysiological bases. They help to alter our existing homeostasis for the better. Praying or meditating daily can help us combat the stresses of life and focus on the challenges ahead. 

Tip 7: Engage in mentally stimulating activities. 

"Mental stimulation" refers to the ways our brains respond to stimuli in the environment. Novel and complex stimuli are health-promoting for the brain. New learning translates to neurophysiological growth and to mental stimulation in the same way that aerobics translates to cardiovascular health. We can benefit from being challenged, from learning information and skills that we do not yet understand, and from engaging in pursuits that are initially hard for us! 

Tip 8: Maintain your role and sense of purpose. 

Retirement as it is presently envisioned in this country is not good for the human brain, which benefits from environments rich in novel and complex stimuli. Retirement by definition reinforces disengagement and passivity. Our nation might consider prioritizing social engagement across the lifespan-from a brain-health perspective. Although it is important to allow elders to choose more passive lifestyles, many may benefit from an understanding of the importance of actively participating in society and finding personally relevant roles and senses of purpose. 

Tip 9: Seek financial stability. 

Research clearly demonstrates that having some money late in life correlates with better health. Therefore, a practical tip for maintaining lifelong health is to hire a financial planner and begin a savings plan that will provide some money late in life. Financial planners do not consider themselves to be health promoters, but they are. We are never too young or too old to begin saving, and the less money we make the faster we need to get started! 

Tip 10: Engage family and friends. 

Developing and maintaining a social network of relationships is important from a health perspective. Our friends and family help us stay active and involved in the fabric of society. They can provide us with emotional support and can nurture trust. Our roles in life, from child to parent to grandparent, exist within the family; they provide much health and human enrichment across the lifespan. And intimacy, broadly defined, is itself a health-promoting behavior at any age.

Consulted: http://www.paulnussbaum.com/tentips.html