Such a fun weekend at an eclectic brain spa: 🧠the BrainMind Symposium at Stanford.
I’ll share some of the highlights in my crude screen shots. Overall, it felt like we are in the midst of an interdisciplinary Renaissance, from novel measurement and imaging techniques to machine learning and bold new experiments in animal and humans.
We learned how super-absorbent diaper gel polymers can make a brain expand for easier imaging, and how it can be optically read and modified. At least five speakers referenced an explosion of interest in the rapid-acting drug ketamine (for depression and OCD) and a surprising finding that it operates through the opioid receptors.
We learned how vasopressin might treat autism and how girls of depressed mothers have radically different brain development and telomere length.
“While the male and female brain differ in development, the male and femaleness of the brain is regional.” — Manpreet Singh
Notes from Day 1: SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2018
New Conceptual Frameworks in Mental Health – Amit Etkin
I had lunch with him a well. He gets much more data from the EEG than the fMRI. We are generally poor at describing our mental state. Our friends generally do a better job on identifying if we are depressed.
10:00 am — Tools for Analyzing and Repairing the Brain – Ed Boyden
MIT’s Ed Boyden has the largest brain lab in the world, with 150 people.
Expansion microscopy is the opposite of normal microscopy. Instead of zooming in on the brain, you make the brain bigger with a polymer expansion similar to the gel found in super-absorbent diapers. https://youtu.be/jLvynWieWk8
Color coded with a virus payload for seeing different cells, a “brainbow”
http://expansionmicroscopy.org
Optogenetics, with light-activated ion channels: https://youtu.be/evisCB6mwt0
Can trigger brain activity at a targeted deep area with a pair of acoustic waves at close frequencies, like 2.00 and 2.01 Hz.
Digital Phenotyping – Tom Insel
He can deduce your mental state from social networks based on how you type and click (patterns in timing) not the content of what you type (less privacy concerns). Signals from the phone predict how the mood will be for the day. He can even see the effects of ketamine, a rapid-acting anti-depressant.
We can move from subjective, episodic, burdensome, clinic-based measurements to objective, continuous, passive in-situ measurements. 7cups is using it for alcoholic treatment.
11:00 am — The Supercharged Brain, Mental Health and Aging – Ruth O’Hara
The normal aging brain shrinks by 15% (Alzheimer’s another 10%). Depression shrinks the hippocampus, and that impairs memory.
Physical exercise and targeted cognitive training can improve your brain.
Very excited to grow neurons in a dish from skin stem cells. Easier to do with young people than the aged.
Envisioning the Brain Mind Clinical Lab of the Future – Leanne Williams
Imaging brain activity in cognitive dysfunction. Many different mental states we call depression, and they respond to treatments differently.
For example, sub-type 1 is characterized by Default Mode Network. If it becomes too connected, too much internal reflection, ruminations, worry, waking up early in morning, and unable to stop thoughts about terrible things might happen.
New Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health & Wellness.
Novel Platforms for Novel Treatments in Neuroscience – Rob Malenka
25% of the world will develop a serious brain malfunction in their lifetime.
If your brain is not functioning, you are not yourself. With addiction and OCD, you have no control over your behavior.
Anhedonia is a common symptom in depression, Parkinson’s and schizophrenia.
With all of the academic hysteria about ketamine, we still don’t know how it works, and it was discovered accidentally.
“An example”: we can make a mouse happy or unhappy.
Fireside Chat with Reid Hoffman – Reid Hoffman and Michael McCullough
In blitzscaling, you prioritize speed over efficiency in an uncertain world.
He also rekindled his AI interest 5-6 years ago.
2:00 pm — Revolutionizing Medical Imaging and Brain-Computer Communication with Consumer Electronics – Mary Lou Jepsen
If you spend 10-100 hours in an fMRI, we can read your thoughts. 2/3 of humanity lacks access to medical imaging. She wants to reduce the cost 200x and fit it into a ski cap.
Tumor has 5x the blood of normal tissue. And Blood is relatively opaque (versus flesh). Bones are white, and near IR passes through. We can image to 2 microns, the diameter of the smallest neuron. Use laser and sound wave that shifts the wavelength ever so slightly.
TED Talk just came out: https://www.ted.com/talks/mary_lou_jepsen_how_we_can_use_light_to_see_deep_inside_our_bodies_and_brains?language=en
3:10 pm — Shining a Light on the Treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease – Li-Huei Tsai
40 Hz flickering LED light induces gamma oscillations in the brain. After 1 hr of exposure, she saw a 50% reduction in amyloid plaques in a Alzheimer’s rat model.
The microglia (the brain’s immune cells) undergo dramatic transformation in their morphology and become much more efficient at picking up toxins like beta-amyloid.
To Sleep or Not to Sleep: How the Brain Decides to Wake Us Up – Luis de Lecea
Sleep decreases as we age and with Alzheimers (it’s the main reason AD patients get institutionalized).
How does the brain control sleep? The hypothalamus is only 3% of the volume of the brain but controls sleep, appetite and circadian rhythms.
Parabiosis – would the blood of the young mouse rejuvenate the old? The opposite occurred. Molecules in the old brain were toxic in the younger brain.
Quieting the Obsessive Mind: Ketamine and Other Rapid-Acting Therapeutics – Carolyn Rodriguez
In OCD, a thought continuously invades or intrudes in our mind. 2% lifetime prevalence. Half of cases start by age 19.
Only FDA-approved medication: SSRI’s like Prozac take 2-3 months, and fail half the time.
Ketamine is a glutamate-receptor-blocker which increases GABA in the pre-frontal cortex. But if you take naltrexone, which blocks opioid receptors, then ketamine loses its effect. This was a surprising result; there is some connection to the opioids.
Ketamine rapidly and dramatically lowers OCD, with effects lasting days post-treatment.
ADD: Karen Parker and Antonio Hardy on Autism
Why so few diagnostics and therapies in autism? The biology is poorly understood.
With early detection, you can gain 15 IQ points and lower the cost of care by 7%.
She studies monkeys on the anti-social extreme. Behaviors are similar to autism. Vasopressin helps. Perhaps vasopressin signaling is impaired in autism. When given to human childen, social behavior improves.
Accelerating Discovery to Promote Healthy Brain Outcomes Starting from Birth – Ian Gotlib
Adolescence is a period of suicide risk, and it’s getting worse. The CDC recently came to Palo Alto to look at what’s going on in this suicide cluster.
The biggest risk factor are 1) family history 2) being female
There are 200 million depressed mothers with daughters who have not become depressed yet. She studied those daughters. They have a big change from other similar aged girls. Smaller hippocampus. Shorter telomeres already by age 12. When they check in 10 years later, 60% of those girls became depressed.
By age 9-14, it might be too late already. So, they did infant studies and of the pregnant mothers (measuring continuous cortical level from hair samples during pregnancy). And they gathered a lot of passive data. The infant’s brain volume correlates with number of words heard in utero. And they were disturbed to see the strong correlation with income level.
Prenatal stress lowers hippocampal volume and amygdala connectivity.
Manpreet Singh
Brain is the most genetically determined organ in the body.
While the male and female brain differ in development, the male and femaleness of the brain is regional.
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