If you’re like me and need a visual representation of the brain’s anatomy to understand Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s research better, here are a few good slide shows and videos for your educational pleasure:

How The Brain Works
From the Mayo Clinic. This is a good starter slide show of the brain’s main functions. In eight slides you get a basic outline of the lobes of the brain and their purposes.

Dementia Pictures Slideshow: Disorders of the Brain
From MedicineNet. These 31 slides show what happens to the brain in cortical, subcortical, progressive, primary, and secondary dementias.

Brain Tour
From the Alzheimer’s Association. In 17 slides you will learn about the brain’s basic functions, then how the brain is affected in Alzheimer’s by amyloid beta plaques and tau tangles.

Zoom In and Search for a Cure
From Emergent Universe. This is a fun, artsy, and very interactive show depicting what happens in the brain affected by Alzheimer’s Disease. Among other things, you will discover why ab42 is more toxic than ab40.

Inside the Brain: Unraveling the Mystery of Alzheimer’s Disease
This is a video put out by several government organizations (the NIH, NIA…) showing the pathology of Alzheimer’s in the brain.

The Secret Life of the Brain
From PBS. Here are three interactive shows (requires Shockwave), including, History of the Brain, 3-D Brain Anatomy, Mind Illusions, and Scanning the Brain.

Brain Rules: Sleep
Now that findings show beta amyloid buildup is cleared during sleep, this slide show will be of special interest, as it shows the role of sleep in brain function.

Like the title of this blog says, there are things to be learned from all kinds of dementias. Here is a particularly astounding thing to learn: severe autism does not necessarily mean the sufferer is mentally retarded. This video will shock you into looking beyond the outward appearance of those who cannot communicate and into the soul.
Sometimes I wonder how much like this girl my mother is. How much does she really know about what’s going on around her?

Well, if this isn’t the best gift to buy for someone with early stages Alzheimer’s, I don’t know what is! Probably the one symptom that scares Alzheimer’s victims the most–and turns them into instant hermits–is geographic memory loss. Going out for a walk or a drive and suddenly not knowing where you are or how to get home, BAM! That’s when it’s the end of the world as we know it. So. Along comes a little MP3 player that lets you ask directions and ascertain locations when you’re out and about.
Definitely my pick for the most practical gift you can give yourself or a loved one suffering from Alzheimer’s.
What’s your pick?

More on the brain’s default network:

The default network in the brain is considered a “second brain” because it turns on when the rest of the brain is at rest, and turns off when the rest of the brain is at work. Normally, that is. As people age, the default network is less and less capable of shutting down when the mind is concentrating on some difficult cognitive task as it would do in a younger adult’s brain. Since the default network uses 30% more resources than the rest of the brain, you can see how the resources available for cognitively challenging tasks decreases as we age.

In Alzheimer’s, you get the extreme case of this aging effect: the default network doesn’t shut down at all when it’s supposed to (same as in Schizophrenia–which is probably why they use antipsychotic drugs meant for Schizophrenia in Alzheimer’s patients) until that part of the brain eventually dies.

The default network is not very developed in children. It gets more active as we grow into adulthood. That makes me wonder if language is the software that runs the default network. Think about it: the default network is the part of the brain that sorts, categorizes, and edits/deletes memories, and language is the software that sorts, categorizes, and edits/deletes meaning. With language also comes prejudice, and prejudice does not exist in the very young. Also, in Alzheimer’s the default network eventually atrophies, and language ceases (just further argument that the default network is inextricably tied to language).

All of which brings me to the point of this post. Last week there were articles all over the news saying that having more than one language guards you against the worst of Alzheimer’s. Mom spoke four languages and fell prey to Alzheimer’s in her sixties–with no family history of early Alzheimer’s. Dad spoke three
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e all know, even without reading research papers, that music has emotional benefit: it can excite and calm and induce a wonderfully cathartic weeping session. This applies whether you’re healthy or sick; whether you have Parkinson’s or autism or Alzheimer’s.

But studies have found that music can also be of cognitive benefit: it helps people remember things better.

What exactly does this mean, and what specifically does it mean for an Alzheimer’s patient? Does it mean that if you play the oldies station in the background all the time, your Mom will wake up one day and remember everything again?

Let’s look at the evidence:

First of all, "music" is a pretty general term. Are we talking about singing? Playing a guitar? Listening to Mozart? Listening to Bobby McFerrin’s improvisational jazz? Believe it or not, these are all different things.

According to a study reported by Time Magazine,("Music on the Brain")

Different networks of neurons are activated [in the brain], depending on whether a person is listening to music or playing an instrument, and whether or not the music involves lyrics.

In another study, quoted in Neuroscience for Kids,

researchers have recorded neuronal activity from the temporal lobe of patients undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy. During this study, awake patients heard either a song by Mozart, a folk song or the theme from "Miami Vice". These different kinds of music had different effects on the neurons in the temporal lobe.

Also, from Time'“Music on the Brain”

Experimental Audiology in Germany has shown that intensive practice of an instrument leads to discernible enlargement of parts of the cerebral cortex, the layer of gray matter most closely associated with higher brain function.

As you can see, different music affects different parts of the normal brain in different ways.

People are always studying the music-brain connection, trying to understand the mystery of it. There was a particular study done in 1993 that tried to see if music affected memory. The researchers used a song by Mozart for their experiment, and their results seemed to show that this composer’s music improved test-taking. This became widely known as The Mozart Effect, and people started playing Mozart to their unborn babies thinking it would give them a head start in learning.

Though later studies failed to duplicate the Mozart Effect (perhaps the only real effect is that Mozart helps relax the body right before a test), that original research sparked further research into music-as-memory-aid. A recent study, for example, found that Alzheimer’s patients can remember new information if it is sung to them much better than if it is spoken (as opposed to healthy people who can remember it equally well when sung as opposed to spoken).

We also know without reading studies that music helps trigger old memories. For example, when I hear the song "Dust in the Wind," I am immediately transported back to our family van as we drove across the country in 1977. I remember my oldest sister introducing this song to me, and how it resonated with the angst of my teenage years, etc. A whole cascade of memories brought on by a single song.

In a study reported by the Telegraph in 2009, researchers found that this recall effect is due to the fact that music is processed in the same area of the brain that forms vivid memories. They furthermore found that such memories appear to be immune to the ravages of Alzheimer’s. And this could lead to a unique kind of therapy:

Because memory for autobiographically important music seems to be spared in people with Alzheimer’s disease, …making a "soundtrack of someone’s life" before their mind is too damaged, and playing it back to them could help form a resistance to the disease.

Love the idea! Plus I have a variation on this idea from watching this next video of Bobby McFerrin (at a conference called "Notes and Neurons"), and from observing Mom as I play the piano. First, here’s Bobby:

What Bobby is doing here is getting the mind to go in a familiar direction (the pentatonic scale), then leaving an auditory blank and letting the mind fill it in. I mean, aside from jumping around, that's what he's doing. He’s giving the mind a puzzle to solve. He’s making the mind work. And working the mind is better than not working the mind if you want to keep it.

The next part of my idea came from playing the piano for Mom and watching her reaction. You should know Mom hasn’t spoken but a few words in a couple years, and she no longer sings intelligible tunes. You should also know that I don't play the piano. I used to when I was seven, but now my playing is reduced to guessing the notes with my right hand. I can play fast enough for the tune to be recognizable. Barely. Fortunately for Mom, the tune is always a hymn—something she is very familiar with. Unfortunately for Mom, I mangle the tune. And that's where the puzzle comes in.

See, when my finger's can't find the right note, Mom gets exasperated and sings it out loud to help me find the dang thing. I'm even wondering if this puzzle-solving exercise is a factor in Mom's recent awakening.

So here is my variation on the soundtrack idea. Try this exercise (for an Alzheimer’s patient) with the following video clip:

Play it once. It will probably be familiar to the listener already, but there are enough repetitions in this piece that parts of it will quickly become familiar if they aren’t already. Play the video again, but pause the video every so often. There are a ton of repeated theme snippets. Pause before a theme is repeated and see if the listener is prompted to supply the missing piece. If they do, you've got a good puzzle to use.

Then, if you do this with that "Life Playlist", you should be able to double the benefit in fighting that Alzheimer’s monster.

Related Posts:
Music and Caregiving—Pandora to the Rescue
Alzheimer’s and Music: Stimulating the Brain into Action
Related articles:
Posit Science Blog, Your Brain on Jazz
American Music Conference, Music and the Brain

Last Friday night my niece and I went to a Greg Laswell concert. If you don’t know Greg, his music is a surprising blend of playful folk and serious soul and boisterous rock.
So, the music itself was great. Plus, Greg was a gem of an entertainer, weaving funny little stories throughout his performance, making us laugh and shout out responses. Very audience-attentive.
Which brings me to the point of this post.
See, when Greg first came out on the stage, he sat in front of a rickety old pump organ that was set up next to his keyboard (just two of about sixty eight instruments he played that night). And he told us the story of how he went out to buy a computer that day and ended up buying this antique organ instead. A 1911 organ to be precise.
Now, the whole time he was relating his organ-acquisition saga, I was thinking of Mom, because this was the exact kind of organ that Mom played in church down in Brazil for many years. And I was picturing Sunday afternoons when Mom would fold up the organ (or have one of us kids do it), hoist it into the van and drive it to one of the favelas around town for a Bible club. I pictured snotty little kids running to the van, touching the organ as it was set up, and singing their lungs out at the sound of Mom’s squeaky playing.
At the end of his story, Greg paused, looked at the organ, and said, “I’ll have to name her.”
Well. It didn’t take two seconds for me to think of the perfect name for that organ. So I shouted out “Ruth!”
And it didn’t take Greg two seconds to feel it in his bones that the name fit. He chuckled, muttered something about my timid voice (I thought I’d shouted), and agreed that the organ should be named Ruth.
It made my day. Made my niece’s day, cuz now her Greg Laswell has an organ named after her grandmother (hmm. Is there any good way to reword that sentence?).
But this story means even more to me for the irony in it. You see, Greg sings a lot about trying to forget. Trying to forget a love. Trying to forget the pain of a lost love. And here he is now, lugging around a little pump organ whose namesake–Ruth–wants more than anything else in the world to remember. Too weird. One is cursed by memory, the other by the loss of it.
Anyway. I have to thank Greg for a fun night that will only grow in significance as I retell this story.
And you have to keep an eye out for Greg. In case, you know, he turns out to be somebody. Like Ruth.

In continuation of Alzheimer’s and Glucose Metabolism: The Niacinamide Experiment Part 1

This post is simply me mulling over things I’ve read in light of Mom’s dementia and my own experience with stress and mental short-circuiting, with the conclusion that in some cases of Alzheimer’s, intestinal flora could be greatly to blame. My conclusion also points to the possible way niacinamide could function in correcting one of the malfunctions in the gut-brain axis.

The Gut-Brain Axis

In-depth studies of human intestinal microbes are just now coming into maturity. The Human Microbiome Project is fueled by the increasing belief that the population of bacteria and yeasts that inhabit the human digestive tract is greatly responsible for how the body and mind develop and how they continue to function or malfunction as we tinker with the balance of flora in our gut:

Visionaries are hoping for cures for some forms of obesity and anorexia along with various forms of cancer, asthma, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, lupus, and most of the major psychiatric diseases. In the future, Blaser [of the infectious-disease research lab at New York University] says, pediatricians could help prevent these diseases by infecting babies with a starter kit of friendly bacteria. “Bottom line, humans and our fellow animals have been colonized by microbes for a very long time, going back a billion years. The microbes that we carry have been selected because they are helpful to us. They participate in human physiology. They are a compartment of the body, like the liver or the heart.” (1)

When the BP oil spill happened in the Gulf of Mexico, we were all
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A couple days ago a friend of mine called almost in tears: “I did such-and-such, and I’ve never done such-and-such before. Do I have early-onset Alzheimer’s?”
I laughed. “The thing about Alzheimer’s,” I said, “is that they say not to confuse normal aging with Alzheimer’s, and then they say Alzheimer’s hits long before any recognizable symptoms become evident, so you have to look for signs early on.”
So I want to know: are we to be concerned about Alzheimer’s as soon as we lose our keys for the first time, or should we just laugh it off and look at the bright side of life all through the aging process?
Recently, a new mini-test was developed for the easy detection of Alzheimer’s. It’s called the AD8. This 8-question test is supposed to bring a diagnostic tool into the hands of primary care doctors so that Alzheimer’s can be detected earlier and therefore treated more effectively.
The problem is, there is no effective treatment for Alzheimer’s yet. So what, pray tell, are we doing finding new ways to diagnose this disease when there is no treatment and when the disease itself is not even clearly defined?
When we first brought Dad to live with us, we set him up with a primary care doctor who ran him through the standard Alzheimer’s test: remember these three things; tell me the date; where do you live; what floor are you on; draw a clock that says three thirty; etc. Dad got every single question wrong, and the doctor proclaimed, “You don’t have Alzheimer’s.”
I wanted to laugh. I think it was relief that a doctor would buck the system and refrain from offering perhaps a true but useless diagnosis given the lack of any effective treatment.
Later, we took Dad to a neurologist who got through three of the standard questions and suggested he try Aricept.
We gave Dad the five-week trial supply. It profited him nothing.
I’m not saying that we should refrain from diagnosing diseases. From his neurologist Dad also got a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, and as I’ve pointed out in an earlier post, this diagnosis (though it came late in the progression of the disease) was tremendously helpful in understanding Dad’s behavior and in relieving his sense of guilt. The medication he took for Parkinson’s did him no good either, but the diagnosis itself was helpful—perhaps as much for us, his caregivers, as for him.
But Alzheimer’s is a tricky beast. There are some well-known Alzheimer’s victims like Richard Taylor and Dottie (of the Alzheimer’s Reading Room fame) who are now under fire as possible Alzheimer’s mis-diagnoses. How can anyone have Alzheimer’s for six or ten years and show no decline, or even show improvement over time? It is not the subject’s truthfulness that is questioned but the accuracy of the initial diagnosis (heaven forbid we should think Alzheimer’s can be stayed by sheer willpower—of the sufferer and/or caregiver. That would mean we don’t really need expensive meds).
Is diagnosis of value when there are so many causes of dementia that could result in a false positive? And are the statistics of any value when they are repeatedly misquoted? We keep using the phrase “there are 5.3 million Americans with Alzheimer’s” when the correct statistic is “5.3 million Americans with Alzheimer’s and other dementias“.
One last bit of datum against the usefulness of Alzheimer’s diagnoses: in the U.S., whites tend to get diagnosed and treated more frequently than Hispanics, African Americans, and Asians. Whites seek out professional medical care, while Latinos, African Americans and Asians with Alzheimer’s tend to stay home and be cared for by family. Yet whites with Alzheimer’s die sooner than their non-white counterparts.
If earlier diagnosis is helpful, where is the evidence?

Yesterday I came across Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” poem in Alice in Wonderland (you can download the whole book for free at Gutenberg).

I’ve always loved how Carroll made nonsense words sound like language. But what got me this time around was Alice’s response, and the parallel of that with how I feel about “talking” to Mom.

To which Alice responds:

‘It seems very pretty,’ she said when she had finished it, ‘but it’s RATHER hard to understand!’ (You see she didn’t like to confess, ever to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) ‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, SOMEBODY killed SOMETHING: that’s clear, at any rate—’

A lot like talking to Mom. Except that what’s clear here at home–no matter the gibberish–is that SOMEBODY LOVES SOMEBODY.

‘Twas mumfled, and the marmy words,
Did slipper-glidy on the lips;
All plummy were the huggalurds,
And hearts did do the flips.

Shoot, even when one’s speech is precise, there’s a good amount of distortion that has to be overlooked anyway, so it’s really the meta-language that counts.

May you hear and speak LOVE this day!

I don’t know how much I’ll be able to write about Parkinson’s here. If I write about Parkinson’s, it’ll be about how it’s affecting Dad. And if I tell you the things this disease makes Dad do, you won’t have a pretty picture of Dad. And that ain’t fair.
Here’s just a little, white example. A couple days ago Dad had to go to the bathroom. He asked what direction the bathroom was, and I pointed it out. He walked to the bathroom door, then asked me again where the bathroom was. I told him he was standing at the bathroom door. He said, “And now what?” I explained that he had to walk over to the toilet. He was standing four feet from the toilet and asked, “Where?” I put pressure on his back and gently led him to the toilet. He said, “And now?”
I had to help him through the whole process.
The concept “how to back up” seems to be the biggest obstacle his brain has to overcome. He can’t figure out how to back up to the toilet before sitting, or once he’s in a chair, how to back up from the edge. The same when he goes to bed.
My sister and I try “scoot back, Dad.” He scoots forward even though he’s already on the edge of whatever. We try changing the cue. “Put your back here” (while patting the back of the chair). Nothing. “Lift your bottom and move it back.” Nothing. Yesterday I tried switching languages. I said, “Put your butt in reverse” in Portuguese. He couldn’t do it, but he did double over laughing. And that’s a huge gift.
But these gifts are hard to come by. So I probably won’t write much about Dad and his Parkinson’s. I’d rather you see the adventurous man who loaded up his wife and eight kids in a van and drove from New York to Bolivia in 1966. This man taught us all kinds of good things about nature and God, and I’d rather not leave you with a highly unbalanced picture of who he is.
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The topic of fasting and Alzheimer’s has been on my mind lately because, well, Alzheimer’s is always on my mind and because recently a friend of mine got on this diet where you’re supposed to eat six small meals a day to trick your body into not storing fat.

Since intermittent fasting has been shown to slow body and brain aging, I wonder (the fat part aside) what this continual eating is doing to the brain.

From Psychology Today (2003):

It has been known for years that sharply restricting the calorie intake of laboratory animals increases their life span. But a new study by researchers from the National Institute on Aging found
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Here's a fun little fact about joint caregiving: it can turn a tiny disagreement into a full-blown I'll-move-to-the-North-Pole and you-move-to-Antarctica fight. The constant demands, the inability to comprehend half of those demands, the lack of time off, lack of perspective and sundry other issues will wind the coil so tight that a slight breeze or feather of conflict between those sharing the caregiving responsibilities can cause a mighty painful snap.
Funny how that commercial for Pristiq antidepressant gets it wrong. The last thing in the world we Alzheimer's victims (on both ends) need is a big old hand winding us up even more! Yikes! A better image would be seeing that key spin in the opposite direction, letting that purple-clad lady relax completely. Now there’s a pill I'd buy!
It’s ads like that that take me back to Princess Bride and Wesley’s pronouncement: "Life is pain, highness! Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something." A lot of people have to put up with a lot of pain. It's not just us.
So perspective helps some.
Here are some other things that help:

• A good cup of coffee in the morning
• Music (it's amazing how music can change the mood)
• A five minute sit on the porch
• A hot shower
• A good cry
• Painting
• Blogging
• A long primal scream

When dealing with Parkinson’s, sometimes one symptom can dictate behavior and end up causing a cascade of physical problems.
Symptom and consequence in point: hand tremors can lead to decreased liquid consumption (because the Parkinson’s patient is embarrassed to spill every time he drinks), and decreased liquid consumption can exacerbate constipation and possibly lead to impacted bowels in a Parkinson’s victim.
In dealing with Dad, we found that one solution to this cascading problem is a spill-proof sipping container. Dad used to spill everything on himself, the table, the floor. Now when his shaking is bad, we put all liquids in the spill-proof water bottle, and he is no longer embarrassed to drink.
The nice thing about the Camelbak water bottle is it’s sleek, sporty design which makes Dad feel like he fits in more with our physically active family.
So if you are having a hard time coming up with a Father’s Day gift for your Parkinson’s dad, this is my suggestion.

The U.K. recently decided that Aricept and other acetylcholinesterase inhibitor drugs can be prescribed for mild Alzheimer’s cases (in addition to moderate cases. See article U.K. Reverses Stance On Alzheimer’s Drugs NICE is now recommending that three drugs known as acetylcholinesterase inhibitors—Aricept from Pfizer Inc. and Eisai Co.; Reminyl from Shire PLC; and Exelon from Novartis AG—be considered for use in patients with “mild” forms of Alzheimer’s, in addition to the patients with “moderate” forms of Alzheimer’s for whom NICE previously endorsed the drugs.). The more obvious reason is that these drugs should be getting cheaper once their patents expire, and therefore easier on the state’s prescription coverage budget. The less obvious reason is the relative ignorance Brits have regarding the sport of baseball.
I’ll explain:
First, you have to know how neurons and neurotransmitters work. Here is a short animation that shows how neurotransmitters work in the brain:

The cycle is a fantastically efficient one. Neurotransmitters are shocked into action, released into the synapse where they interact with receptors on the other side of the synapse, then swept up to make room for the next wave of neurotransmitters.
In Alzheimer’s, the favorite neurotransmitter tagetted by drug companies is acetylcholine because it is crucial for the formation of new memories. In the Alzheimer’s brain, there is an increasing shortage of acetylcholine, making it harder and harder for the brain to form new memories. The enzyme that recycles acetylcholine is acetylcholinesterase. What Aricept (an acetycholinesterase inhibitor) does is inhibit this recycling process, so the neurotransmitters hang around longer in the synapse and interact more often with memory-forming receptors.

Here is a video of a different neurotransmitter (serotonin) and its recycling inhibitor. It’s a good picture of the process that takes place with acetylcholine and acetycholinesterase inhibitors:

All of this is easier for Americans to grasp, because it can be compared to baseball: in baseball, players are stored in the dugout, called into action on the field, then recycled back into the dugout when their action is no longer called for.

Suppose that a team were to lose all but four of its players. Someone would have to block the dugout so the players wouldn’t sit back on the bench but rather take up the bat once more.

The players are the acetylcholine, the rule that sends them back into the dugout is the acetycholinesterase, and the person blocking the dugout when there is a shortage of players is the acetylcholinesterase inhibitor.

This also, by the way, illustrates why Aricept et al eventually fail: the four players get tired of playing the whole game all season long and quit.

Someone must have finally explained baseball to the Brits.

On Saturday, August 21, 2010, God took Dad home. God did not wait until we were ready for this. He waited until Heaven couldn’t stand Dad’s absence any longer.

I’m posting this video about how we deal with death in our current culture because I think our attitude of denial in the face of death needs to change. Considering my family’s immediate reaction of trying to revive Dad–even though he requested a DNR–I’m speaking from experience. Our natural tendency is to hold on as long as possible. But this isn’t necessarily the best for those we love.

Letting go is so stinking hard!!
All the more reason to think and plan ahead for the death of those you love.