Is Technology Altering Your Brain?

In September results indicating that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light were released, this week the same group has released further data.

The experiment is spread out between CERN near Geneva and a neutrino detector near Rome called OPERA over 700km away. In CERN groups of protons flying around the LHC ring are redirected down an alternative route and crash into a lump of graphite. This produces a variety of particles but includes a large number of particles called mesons, which have a very short lifetime, they fly down a kilometre long tube where some of them decay to form an electron and a neutrino.        

These neutrinos hardly interact with matter, so they easily pass through the 700km of solid rock, and then a tiny proportion of them interact with plates of lead in the OPERA detector inside a mountain in Italy, producing a signal which can be detected.

The experiment was designed to investigate whether neutrinos change over time, and to measure how much slower than the speed of light they travel, which would give information about their mass and behaviour.

The very surprising result was that they appeared to be travelling the distance about 60ns faster than the speed of light, travelling about 2.5 parts in 100 000 faster. This would indicate fundamentally new physics and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and they have had a variety of suggestions from the community on how they could improve their results.

So they have gone away and tried to improve the resolution of their results. They have tried to get a more accurate measurement of the relative positions of the two facilities as the time difference could be explained by an error of position of about 180m. They have also made the bunches of protons that create the neutrinos shorter which makes it easier to measure the exact time they arrive. And seem to give the same result.

This is interesting but there is still a lot of evidence to overcome, for example in 1987 there was a supernova in the large magellanic cloud which produced both light and neutrinos and they both arrived here a few hours apart where as with the difference of speeds they were finding at CERN you would expect a difference of a couple of years. These neutrinos were lower energy than the ones produced in this experiment so it is possible they behave differently, but without independent confirmation I wouldn't start ordering your faster than light spacedrives yet.

Hannah - Well, neuro-enhancing drugs are also called cognitive enhancers or they're known as smart drugs, and they're basically pharmacological substances that are thought to improve certain aspects of cognition and brain function.

The important point about this is that pharmacological influences on cognition are not completely understood and cognition itself is a very complicated and multifaceted aspect of brain function. It encompasses numerous mental functions including attention, executive function, planning, problem solving and inhibition, spatial, verbal learning, and memory.

Cognitive enhancers include, for example, methylphenidate, also known as Ritalin, which is prescribed for the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, also known as ADHD. Ritalin has also been bought over the internet and taken for cognition. It's thought to increase the concentration of neurotransmitters which are chemical messengers in the brain and specifically thought to increase concentration of dopamine and noradrenalin by blocking their reuptake, so that then these neurotransmitters are freely available to land on their receptor and activate the nerve cells then. How exactly this leads to an increase in certain cognitive aspects isn't really known. So, it's a new area really, cognitive enhancers and neuroscientists are trying to understand a bit more about it.

Chris - There was a rather worrying stat wasn't there that I think that Nature, the journal did a survey, and something like one person in five who is an academic said that they had or would definitely take these drugs if they thought it would buy them an extra night's work ahead of an important deadline.

Hannah - Well yes. It seems to be a trend for an increase prevalence. There's an increase number of people that are going on to the internet and buying these cognitive enhancers which is quite a dangerous thing to do really because you don't know what you're buying. It's not a prescribed thing that you're getting from the doctor. You don't know what you're actually going to get. And even more worrying is the fact that there seems to be an increasing number of students that are using these drugs because there's pressure on them to get good grades, and they think that they can use these drugs to increase their attention. Well actually, the adolescent brain and the 20 something year old brain is really plastic and we don't know the effects these cognitive enhancers will have in the long term. And really, if you want to enhance your cognition then why not use the tried and tested method that's exercise and sleep.

Chris - I thought you were going to say coffee.

Hannah - And coffee as well!

Chris - Yes, Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Maths at Oxford was on this program and said, "Mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into mathematical formulae and papers."

Dave - Essentially, if you take all of Einstein's equations - the first thing it says is that to go at the speed of light, you need an infinite amount of energy which kind of means if you go any faster than the speed of light, if you get out of the speed of light, you need, in fact, energy and all the equations explode, and everything breaks. But if you put the numbers where you're going faster than the speed of light in there, you sort of get some results which seem a bit more meaningful. It gives the appearance that light - that time appears to be going backwards for you if you are travelling faster than light. And it essentially makes the direction which you're travelling in seem to look a bit - mathematically - it look more like a time axis and certain time look more like a normal axis. So, it's possible that space and time gets really confused for you if you're going faster than the speed of light. But fundamentally, what I've said at the beginning was that all of our maths, our physics, breaks if you can go faster than the speed of light which means we don't really know until we can actually test it, and we get a better theory.

Chris - Dr. Denis Burdakov is a Neuroscientist and he's been looking at how the brain ensures that we eat a balanced diet.  Denis, welcome.

Denis -   Hello.

Chris -   First of all, why is it important that the brain can register what we're eating?

Denis -   I think it's important for two reasons.  The first of those is that in order to respond to energy deficiencies, sort of to a fall of nutrients in our blood, we need to change our behaviour, we need to change eating behaviour, we need to find food and so on, or stop eating if we are getting too many nutrients. Behaviour is controlled by the brain so that's why it's important for the brain itself to sense the nutrients in the body.

Chris -   But also, not just pile in tons of glucose and nothing else.  In some way, the brain knows what particular micronutrients. Because if you study an animal in its natural environment, it tends to eat a diet that's right for it, arguing there's something behavioural about searching out the right foods that are right for that animal's metabolism.

Denis -   That's correct and it's been quite mysterious how the brain does this because most studies looked at effects of glucose on special brain cells which regulate alertness and food seeking.  Things like how protein components and fat is sensed have been much more elusive in mechanistic terms.

Chris -   So how did you set about trying to answer that then, to work out what the brain is doing to register when I go for dinner, what micronutrients I've consumed?

Denis -   So we were originally motivated by the recent findings that our diet and our sleep patterns are so closely related.  You can kind of mess up your sleep by eating a high fat diet and on the other hand, if you mess up your sleep, if you have a jet lag and so on, you can over consume food and develop obesity and diabetes.  And we're actually working on brain cells that regulate both wakefulness and feeding: they simulate wakefulness and they drive feeding, and we were putting different nutrients on these cells to see whether these cells themselves as well as controlling behaviour can actually measure what nutrient levels we get in the body.

Chris -   In other words, you'd squirt some glucose onto them, some sugar, they might change their activity, but then you could also ask, "Well what happens if I give them a dose of the amino acids, the building blocks of protein for example?"

Denis -   Exactly.  So we started with sugar about 5 years ago and we found out that amazingly, if you increase the concentration of sugar around these brain cells called orexin neurons, then the cells fall silent and they don't emit these impulses anymore, that they drive wakefulness and food seeking.  So more recently, sort of this year, we asked, what about other components of meals?  We don't just eat glucose.  There is always some protein around.  So we mixed together an amino acid mixture based on the egg white composition.  So these proteins in egg white get digested to a certain combination of amino acids, and it's known at what concentrations these amino acids reach the brain.  So we mixed this together and we put them on those wakefulness promoting orexin neurons, and we expected the cells to fall silent because glucose silences them.  But actually, we found that these egg white-like amino acids stimulate these wakefulness promoting neurons.

Chris -   So in other words, they are registering some of the micronutrients that we're eating.  So there are specific cells that are specifically sensitive to some of the things that are coming into the body.

Denis -   Absolutely.  So in the brain region called the hypothalamus, there are several populations of cells that can sense nutrients selectively but the new thing that we found is that all nutrients don't do the same things.  Some nutrients can upregulate the activity of these brain cells which stimulate food seeking behaviour, other nutrients can shut them down and we think we now are looking at this population of cells that control the balance between different nutrients in the diet.

Chris -   If you look at amino acids, because they come in two flavours don't they?  They come in the kinds that we can make in the body.  They also come in the other flavour, the kind we can't make in the body, and we have to eat.  And if you become deficient in those, you have metabolic problems.  So are these cells differentially sensitive to those different flavours, for want of a better word, of amino acids?

Denis -   They seem to be extremely differential to the two groups of amino acids.  So the essential amino acids, the amino acids you cannot make and you need to consume, these cells effectively do not see, but the non-essential amino acids are potent stimuli of these cells that drive feeding.  So we think - the point of this is that if you consume a meal which is unbalanced then it has too many amino acids that you can make in the body and you don't really need, these cells will make you keep eating until you find and consume essential amino acids thereby providing the body what it really needs.

Chris -   Does this shed any light on the claim that if you want to not end up hungry again by 11 o'clock in the morning, eat a big fried breakfast that has got loads of protein in it.  You know, the bacon and the eggs actually help to stave off hunger for longer.  Does it help us to understand why that might be true?

Denis -   Well actually, it's almost the opposite for what you'd expect.  You think if you eat a lot of proteins, especially proteins which are non-essential amino acids, you would actually - you might get hungrier quicker, but you also feel more alert.  So, these cells will make you more alert, possibly more efficient at work if you eat a protein rich breakfast.  Another thing these cells do apart from driving feeding, they actually tell the body to burn calories through thermogenesis and so on.  So the net effect on calories is actually negative.  So they tell you to burn more calories than the calories you consume.  So these cells will kind of - they might make you hungry, but they will make you more alert and they would actually keep your body weight down overall.

Chris -   so to finish off Denis, if we could target these neurons then in people who have a tendency to overeat, we can make them burn more energy but maybe also, eat less in the first place so their weight would come down for two reasons.

Denis -   Well, absolutely.  That's the exciting thing.  Possibly, we could find a dietary combination of nutrients which can tune the cells and control body weight as well as alertness, and that's what we're working on right now.

Chris -   Super!  We'll leave it there for a second.  That's Denis Burdakov.  He's from Cambridge University.  He published the work he's just been talking to about in the journal Neuron this week. 

Chris - I went looking at this because I think it's an interesting question, and I went to several sources...

One of them was the book I wrote in Australia, and it's called "Stripping Down Science". It was out last year and I wrote a chapter in there called "Sugar and Spice, and All Things Nice... and E.coli". And the first line is "If girls are made of sugar and spice, and all things nice, then why are their hands covered in E. Coli?"

This is actually a report from a lady called Val Curtis from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on the global hand washing day project she ran. This was back in 2008. They sent students who were doing a Masters with them to prowl up and down the lines of queuing commuters at train stations and public transport places all over Britain on this one day, and they swabbed 400 sets of hands. And they wanted to see what they could grow. Now I just quote from the book because I could never remember all this in one go. So I'll just read you what I wrote: "Over 400 commuters consented to have their hands swabbed down to see what was lurking on them. The samples went to the microbiology laboratory for culture and identification. Nearly 30% of them tested positive for the presence of faecal bacteria, including Enterococci and E.coli to common gut bugs. Yuck!" And then I say, "It actually stratified by what job you did. So manual workers tested positive 10% of the time, they were the best. And professionals, like you and me, they came up red handed in about a quarter of cases..." and I say here, "The real Typhoid Mary's, with a whopping 40% contamination rate, turned out to be - do you know what? Either of you? What job?

Hannah - You're going to say scientists aren't you?

Chris - No, "administrators". How's that for justice? Anyway, also there's a geography here. If you go further up north in Britain, you're more likely to have these bugs on your hands than people in London, and the worst of all, the worst people are bus travellers apparently. "So, it's approximately one quarter of rail commuters were found to be carrying more than just their luggage", I said in that book.

Anyway, so that proves that people, just by going about their daily business, are covered in muck of a faecal variety. Now these bugs are not necessarily nasty in a sense that they won't give you very bad dose of gut rock, but they are a sign of bad hygiene being practiced, right, that's the first point.

Then I went on, "If people handling money, we know that microorganisms will transfer easily between those hands that we now know. In 1/3 of cases are covered in stuff and the money". And so then I asked, "Well who's done research on what's on money?" So what I found ranges from 30% of bank notes through to 94% of bank notes are covered in the same sorts of bugs reported in Val Curtis's study that I wrote about. And also, coins are slightly better than notes for obvious reasons. Metals, if they've got iron in them, iron tends to be toxic to some bacteria because it sets up oxidative reactions that breaks down the bugs. Copper also tends to be slightly lower carriage rate; paper money, really nasty, and there's also traces of drugs in there as well.

So the answer is yeah, there's probably all kinds of nastiness all over those bank notes. Eat them at your peril. I mean, the point is being made, right? I find this funny... When you go to restaurants and things, or those fast food outlets, the people are wearing gloves, aren't they? And the idea here is I'll put gloves on because then I'm not touching the food I'm going to hand you. And then you hand them the money. Do they take their glove off? No. do they have someone separate who's collecting the money? They made your sandwich with this lovely gloved hand and when you give the money that they touched with their glove and they use till on everything, and then they go back and make another sandwich. So the bugs are basically going straight on the sandwich. No one has spotted the inconsistency in this!

Dave - How long are the bugs likely to survive on the money?

Chris - Not that long, because it's quite dry and so they do tend to perish quite quickly; but if you're using it merely as a sort of vector where it's on your skin, it goes on the money, it goes on the person's gloves, then on the food then the bug is very happy because it's now on the food. There's lots of Staph going on the food, there's lots of other things like E. coli going on the food. Staph is a bad one because Staphylococcus aureus makes a toxin and that toxin actually is heat stable. So if it gets in the food, the bugs grow and make lots of toxin, it goes in the food, and amplifies up. Then even if you heat the food up to kill the bug, the toxin is still there and you get gut right afterwards. That's bad. So you don't want that. So watch out. If they're wearing gloves and then they take money off you, make sure they change their gloves afterwards...

Chris - Well actually, the bees aren't all genetically identical.

What happens is that a queen bee comes out of the nest when she's young and she releases a pheromone and she attracts something like 16,000 male bees called drones.

Those male bees, about 200 of them, that are lucky enough will mate with her and she will collect millions and millions of sperm.

She then goes back to the nest with the sperm and uses it for the rest of her life, maybe 7 years or more, just to fertilise eggs. So she's got a mixture of sperm from different drones there. That's the first point.

The drones are all themselves haploid, in other words, they only actually have one set of genetic material. So all of their sperm are genetically identical and the effect of this is that the worker bees, which are all female actually, because they're not haploid they're diploid, they actually have both male and female chromosomes in them. And as a result, they are all 75% genetically identical to each other.

So if they actually were to start reproducing, they would produce less genetic diversity in the colony than if the queen reproduces by mating with the drone using the sperm she's got stored.

So it's slightly more subtle than you thought and it does actually work very, very well because the bees are a collective colony, the sisters, because they're also so closely related - these workers. They're actually working towards helping the queen to reproduce because then their own genes are being passed on more efficiently than if they were to actually start mating internally within the colony.

The queen does actually police this. She does actually stop the workers trying to reproduce. But, as the queen gets older, this can occasionally begin to happen. It's a sort of escape.

Dave - Depends exactly what you mean by lightsaber. Producing a kind of beam of light which is coming out of an object which is incredibly powerful and can cut through things, that's not impossible. But we certainly couldn't get anything nearly as powerful as that. We can't get laser that powerful in anything like that size of container, but we can get lasers which will cut through things within the size of a house, but we'll ignore the size issue at the moment. But the problem is making light suddenly stop at the end of the sort of 2-foot length, unless you put a mirror there it just wouldn't and also, light doesn't interact with other light, so you can't have sword fights with them. They would just go straight through each other and not affect each other. You might conceivably be able to make a plasma sabre so you could somehow constrain some very, very hot plasma into a tube magnetically or something conceivably. I think it would be difficult but just about possible, but certainly not with light.