Meditation May Reduce Heart Disease Risk/ Supercomputing Project Aims to Simulate Human Brain

March 15, 2008

Meditation May Reduce Heart Disease Risk

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/7121

Black adolescents with high normal blood pressure who practice transcendental meditation improve the ability of their blood vessels to relax and may reduce their risk of becoming adults with cardiovascular disease, researchers say. After eight months of meditation, these adolescents experienced a 21 percent increase in the ability of their blood vessels to dilate compared to a 4 percent decrease experienced by their non-meditating peers, says Dr. Vernon A. Barnes, physiologist at the Medical College of Georgia's Georgia Prevention Institute and lead investigator on the study.

"Our blood vessels are not rigid pipes," says Dr. Barnes. "They need to dilate and constrict, according to the needs of the body. If this improvement in the ability to dilate can be replicated in other at-risk groups and cardiovascular disease patients, this could have important implications for inclusion of meditation programs to prevent and treat cardiovascular disease and its clinical consequences.

"We know this type of change is achievable with lipid lowering drugs, but it's remarkable that a meditation program can produce such a change," the researcher says.

In the April 2004 issue of the American Journal of Hypertension, Dr. Barnes and his colleagues reported that 15 minutes of twice-daily transcendental meditation steadily lowered the blood pressure of 156 black, inner-city adolescents and their pressures tended to stay lower.

This new study, being presented during the 63rd Annual Scientific Conference of the American Psychosomatic Society held March 2-5 in Vancouver, focused on 111 of those adolescents, 57 who meditated and 54 controls.

MCG researchers found among the meditators an increased ability of the blood vessel lining, called the endothelium, to relax. "Dysfunction in the ability of the endothelium to dilate is an early event in heart disease, a process that starts at a young age," says Dr. Barnes.

At four months and again at eight months, researchers used echocardiography to measure the diameter of the right brachial artery, the main artery that feeds the arm, before and after a blood pressure cuff was inflated for two minutes. They found essentially no difference in the ability of that vessel to relax after stress in either group at four months. But by eight months, EDAD or endothelial-dependent arterial dilation, was significantly improved in the meditators, says Dr. Barnes, noting that as with all lifestyle changes, the full benefits of meditating may take a while.

"Change can't be expected overnight," he says. "Meditation and other positive lifestyle habits such as exercising and eating right have to become part of your life, like brushing your teeth." Long-term studies are needed to determine the long-term impact of meditation on the risk of heart disease, he says.

Doctors already know that smoking, high blood pressure and cholesterol, and cardiovascular disease are all associated with decreased EDAD. "With the high prevalence of heart disease we have in our country today, this is something that should be considered," he says of meditation, which is inexpensive and has no side effects.

The obesity epidemic in the United States, he says, likely is the primary contributor to the increasing blood pressure rates in children. But obesity appears to be part of an unhealthy cycle where the stresses of everyday life – such as poverty and not feeling safe at home – contribute to bad habits such as overeating and/or eating high-fat comfort foods and not exercising. Stress also may impair sleep, preventing the body -- and blood pressure -- from resting and recovering.

It appears that meditating – allowing the mind to settle to minimal activity for 15 minutes twice daily – may help the meditator and his blood vessels relax in the hectic world around him.

Dr. Frank Treiber, director of MCG's Georgia Prevention Institute, and Dr. Surender Malhotra, cardiology fellow at MCG, are co-authors on the study which is highlighted as one of 10 abstract submissions to the conference viewed as having the highest potential to change clinical practice from the perspective of screening, diagnosis or treatment.

The research was funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

From Medical College of Georgia

Supercomputing Project Aims to Simulate Human Brain

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/angry-people-enjoy-provoking-others-12866.html

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/transcendental-meditation-reduces-the-brains-reaction-to-pain-11239.html

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8794

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Supercomputing Project Aims to Simulate Human Brain

Stefan Lovgrenfor National Geographic News

July 20, 2005

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0720_050720_bluebrain.html

It may be the most complex structure in the universe, a tangled web of more than a hundred billion nerve cells. For centuries, scientists have studied it, yet very little is known about the way the human brain really works. Now powerful new computing technology is enabling scientists to learn more about the brain than ever before.

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At the forefront is a new initiative to create a software replica of the brain's neocortical column, the smallest network of neurons (nerve cells) and an elementary building block of the mammalian brain. The project is seen as a first step toward the long-term goal of creating a 3-D computer simulation of the human brain. "We are not trying to build a copy of the human brain, or some magical artificial intelligence device," said Henry Markram, who heads the Brain Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. His laboratory is collaborating with the computer giant IBM on the project. "This is really a discovering of how the brain works," Markram said. 10,000 Trees More than a hundred billion neurons make up the human brain, and the nerve cells are bunched in neocortical columns. These columns mark a jump in the brain's evolution that occurred 200 million years ago as mammals emerged from reptiles. Since then the columns have multiplied within the mammalian brain to make more powerful minds. In primates, and especially humans, this replication continued at such a rapid pace that the neocortex, the largest and most complex part of the brain, folded in on itself to make space for new columns. This is what gives the human brain its wrinkled shape. The discovery of the neocortical column—which is half a millimeter (about two-hundredths of an inch) in diameter and two millimeters (about eight-hundredths inch) long and contains about 60,000 neurons—earned Torsten Wiesel of Rockefeller University in New York the Nobel Prize in 1981. While scientists are able to make computer simulations of individual neurons, they have not been able to mimic the neocortical column, simply because of its complexity.

Continued on Next Page

Brain remembers familiar faces when choosing potential mate

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8794

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that the human brain favours familiar-looking faces when choosing a potential partner.

The research team found that people find familiar faces more attractive than unfamiliar ones. They also found that the human brain holds separate images of both male and female faces and reacts to them differently depending on how familiar it is with their facial features.

Dr Anthony Little, from the University's School of Biological Sciences, examined whether early visual experience of male and female faces affected later preferences. The research team asked over 200 participants to view a number of human faces that had been digitally manipulated to change their facial characteristics.

Dr Little said: "We found that participants preferred the face that they were most visually familiar with. In one of the tests we showed participants a block of faces with wide-spaced eyes and then asked them to compare these with a face that had narrow-spaced eyes. We found that participants preferred the face with wide-spaced eyes, suggesting that the brain connects familiarity with attraction."

The team also asked participants to judge the same preferred facial features in those of the opposite sex. Participants who were shown male faces with wide-spaced eyes preferred this trait in subsequent male faces but not in female faces.

Dr Little explains: "The research revealed that the sex of the face can be a deciding factor in facial preference. The tests showed for the first time that the brain holds separate visual patterns of male and female faces and responds to them based on their sex as well as their familiarity. We will continue to investigate why this is the case."

"The next step in the research is to find out why the brain makes a link between familiarity and attractiveness. It maybe that visual experience of particular facial features suggests that a person is 'safe' or more 'approachable', both of which are desirable traits."

From University of Liverpool