UCI-led Study Creates New Memories by Directly Changing the Brain

[Weird]

http://www.parentherald.com/article...ates-new-memories-directly-changing-brain.htm

By studying how memories are made, UC Irvine neurobiologists created new, specific memories by direct manipulation of the brain, which could prove key to understanding and potentially resolving learning and memory disorders.
Research led by senior author Norman M. Weinberger, a research professor of neurobiology & behavior at UC Irvine, and colleagues has shown that specific memories can be made by directly altering brain cells in the cerebral cortex, which produces the predicted specific memory. The researchers say this is the first evidence that memories can be created by direct cortical manipulation. Study results appeared in the August 29 issue of Neuroscience.

During the research, Weinberger and colleagues played a specific tone to test rodents then stimulated the nucleus basalis deep within their brains, releasing acetylcholine (ACh), a chemical involved in memory formation. This procedure increased the number of brain cells responding to the specific tone. The following day, the scientists played many sounds to the animals and found that their respiration spiked when they recognized the particular tone, showing that specific memory content was created by brain changes directly induced during the experiment. Created memories have the same features as natural memories including long-term retention.

"Disorders of learning and memory are a major issue facing many people and since we've found not only a way that the brain makes memories, but how to create new memories with specific content, our hope is that our research will pave the way to prevent or resolve this global issue," said Weinberger, who is also a fellow with the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory and the Center for Hearing Research at UC Irvine.
The creation of new memories by directly changing the cortex is the culmination of several years of research in Weinberger's lab implicating the nucleus basalis and ACh in brain plasticity and specific memory formation. Previously, the authors had also shown that the strength of memory is controlled by the number of cells in the auditory cortex that process a sound.

 

[Wiggs Dannyboy]

No mention of how the ability to create new memories might be misused. I can foresee all kinds of problems with this. We need to be very very careful with our growing abilities to mess with and alter and read what is going on in our brains/minds. Scares the shit out of me to be honest.

Anybody see the great movie, "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind?" Not exactly the same, but a good example of how life will be getting weird as our abilities to manipulate our minds continue to grow.

Time for a bong hit!

 

[BlueBlazer]

I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank piña coladas. At sunset, we made love like sea otters.

That was a pretty good memory . . . why couldn't I get that memory?

 

[Skip]

Why is this not surprising? Screw with someone's brain while providing specific stimulus is obviously going to provoke a reaction every time the stimulus is provided again.

Just like punching someone in the face, when whistling a certain tune. When you hear that tune again, you're going to react. Duh!

Geez, scientists get lots of research grants to prove the obvious.

 

[Crusader Rabbit]

Yeah, the title seems misleading to me. It's not that they directly created a new memory by stimulating the nucleus basalis, but that doing so immediately after hearing the tone caused the mice to have a stronger memory of the event.

 

[Wiggs Dannyboy]

Just like punching someone in the face, when whistling a certain tune. When you hear that tune again, you're going to react. Duh!

Hmmm...I think what you describe with your "punch in the face" scenario is akin to Pavlov and his dogs. What this new research seems to be doing is direct manipulation of the brain, as opposed to providing a stimulus through a subjects environment. It's definitely similar, no doubt, seems like it is a refinement on an already established fact. Now, the stimulus won't have to be delivered through a punch, they will be able to make the brain release acetycholine, which will form a memory, through direct stimulation with something installed within the brain.

Above and beyond this particular example...I've seen reports recently about current brain research, and there is little doubt that science/technology is fast on it's way to being able to read the human mind and it's thoughts. These kinds of stories kick in my paranoia because it seems to be in the same general arena as brain reading. How far away can mind control be, if current science is already on its way to reading our thoughts?

 

[Weird]

if it is possible it makes the concept of DNA memory more tangible

 

[Wiggs Dannyboy]

why?

 

[bentom187]

"Disorders of learning and memory are a major issue facing many people and since we've found not only a way that the brain makes memories, but how to create new memories with specific content, our hope is that our research will pave the way to prevent or resolve this global issue," said Weinberger, who is also a fellow with the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory and the Center for Hearing Research at UC Irvine.

If they are prone to forgetting stuff they can write down their agenda for the day with a pen and paper or keep a journal.

Global issue? did they study the earths population ?

I don't think its uses will be for anything but manipulation for political and defense reasons, the medicalization of disorders has always been used for these ends.


INVENTOR OF ADHD'S DEATHBED CONFESSION: "ADHD IS A FICTITIOUS DISEASE"

Fortunately, the Swiss National Advisory Commission on Biomedical Ethics (NEK, President: Otfried Höffe) critically commented on the use of the ADHD drug Ritalin in its opinion of 22 November 2011 titled Human enhancement by means of pharmacological agents: The consumption of pharmacological agents altered the child’s behavior without any contribution on his or her part.

That amounted to interference in the child’s freedom and personal rights, because pharmacological agents induced behavioral changes but failed to educate the child on how to achieve these behavioral changes independently. The child was thus deprived of an essential learning experience to act autonomously and emphatically which “considerably curtails children’s freedom and impairs their personality development”, the NEK criticized.



The alarmed critics of the Ritalin disaster are now getting support from an entirely different side. The German weekly Der Spiegel quoted in its cover story on 2 February 2012 the US American psychiatrist Leon Eisenberg, born in 1922 as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, who was the “scientific father of ADHD” and who said at the age of 87, seven months before his death in his last interview:“ADHD is a prime example of a fictitious disease”.

Since 1968, however, some 40 years, Leon Eisenberg’s “disease” haunted the diagnostic and statistical manuals, first as “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood”, now called “ADHD”. The use of ADHD medications in Germany rose in only eighteen years from 34 kg (in 1993) to a record of no less than 1760 kg (in 2011) – which is a 51-fold increase in sales! In the United States every tenth boy among ten year-olds already swallows an ADHD medication on a daily basis. With an increasing tendency.

When it comes to the proven repertoire of Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda, to sell the First World War to his people with the help of his uncle’s psychoanalysis and to distort science and the faith in science to increase profits of the industry – what about investigating on whose behalf the “scientific father of ADHD” conducted science? His career was remarkably steep, and his “fictitious disease” led to the best sales increases. And after all, he served in the “Committee for DSM V and ICD XII, American Psychiatric Association” from 2006 to 2009. After all, Leon Eisenberg received “the Ruane Prize for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Research. He has been a leader in child psychiatry for more than 40 years through his work in pharmacological trials, research, teaching, and social policy and for his theories of autism and social medicine”.


And after all, Eisenberg was a member of the “Organizing Committee for Women and Medicine Conference, Bahamas, November 29 – December 3, 2006, Josiah Macy Foundation (2006)”. The Josiah Macy Foundation organized conferences with intelligence agents of the OSS, later CIA, such as Gregory Bateson and Heinz von Foerster during and long after World War II. Have such groups marketed the diagnosis of ADHD in the service of the pharmaceutical market and tailor-made for him with a lot of propaganda and public relations? It is this issue that the American psychologist Lisa Cosgrove and others investigated in their study Financial Ties between DSM-IV Panel Members and the Pharmaceutical Industry7. They found that “Of the 170 DSM panel members 95 (56%) had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry. One hundred percent of the members of the panels on ‘Mood Disorders’ and ‘Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders’ had financial ties to drug companies. The connections are especially strong in those diagnostic areas where drugs are the first line of treatment for mental disorders.” In the next edition of the manual, the situation is unchanged. “Of the 137 DSM-V panel members who have posted disclosure statements, 56% have reported industry ties – no improvement over the percent of DSM-IV members.” “The very vocabulary of psychiatry is now defined at all levels by the pharmaceutical industry,” said Dr Irwin Savodnik, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles.

This is well paid. Just one example: The Assistant Director of the Pediatric Psychopharmacology Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School received “$1 million in earnings from drug companies between 2000 and 2007”. In any case, no one can easily get around the testimony of the father of ADHD: “ADHD is a prime example of a fictitious disease.”

The task of psychologists, educators and doctors is not to put children on the “chemical lead” because the entire society cannot handle the products of its misguided theories of man and raising children, and instead hands over our children to the free pharmaceutical market. Let us return to the basic matter of personal psychology and education: The child is to acquire personal responsibility and emphatic behavior under expert guidance – and that takes the family and the school: In these fields, the child should be able to lead off mentally. This constitutes the core of the human person.

MEDICALIZING QUACKERY
by

Thomas S. Szasz, M.D.

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines "medicalize" as "to view or treat as a medical concern, problem, or disorder" and offers this phrase as illustration: "those who seek to dispose of social problems by medicalizing them." Accordingly, we speak of the medicalization of homosexuality and hostility, but do not speak of the medicalization of malaria or melanoma.

The concept of medicalization rests on the assumption that some phenomena belong in the domain of medicine, and some do not.

However, where a thing "belongs" is the result of how we classify the "thing," that is, the result of (more or less arbitrary)human action. Is an anencephalic baby a human being? Is smoking crack a crime, a disease, a right? Answering such questions is what religion, politics, and, today, medical ethics is all about. The point to keep in mind is that, unless we agree on clearly defined criteria that define membership in the class called "disease" or "medical problem," it is fruitless to debate whether any particular act of medicalization is "valid" or not.

Everything that we do or happens to us affects or depends on the use of our body. In principle, we could treat everything that people do or that happens to them as belonging in the domain of medicine. Conversely, we could maintain that nothing that we do or happens to us belongs in the domain of medicine, because all is ordained by God and belongs in the domain of religion. Such, indeed, was the case in ancient times, before people distinguished between faith healing and medical healing. A similar view is held today by Christian Scientists, whose faith is based on a radical denial of the reality of the material world. For them, only the spiritual realm exists or is "real." Nothing belongs in the domain of materialist medicine. Christian Science represents the most radical case of demedicalization possible.

Contemporary public health is the mirror image of Christian Science. Everything in our lives -- housing, food, education, work, recreation, and procreation -- affects our health. Hence, everything -- not only health care narrowly defined -- belongs in the domain of medicine as health care. Linda Landesman, a former president of the Public Health Association of New York City, states: "We expect and demand that government ensure that we breathe clean air, drink safe water, work with minimum danger ... Left on our own, we don't always make the healthiest choices." In this view, we are uninformed, undisciplined children whose health and well-being require the unremitting protection of the therapeutic state.

In practice, we must draw a line between what counts as medical care, and what does not. The question is where to draw that line. What is a disease and what is not? What should be treated medically, by physicians or medical personnel, and what should not? Because people in modern societies expect the state to defray all or most of the cost of what is deemed a "medical service," where we draw the line between "health care" and "not health care" is informed more by economic and political considerations than by medical or scientific judgements.

Moreover, not only must we demarcate disease from nondisease, we must also distinguish between medicalization from above, by coercion, and medicalization from below, by choice. Not by coincidence, these strategies match psychiatry's two paradigmatic legal-social functions, civil commitment and the insanity defense, social control and excuse-making.



Disease and the Patient Role

The difference between disease as objective physical condition and the patient role as social status is obvious, provided we are willing to recognize it. Having a disease and occupying the patient role are independent variables: not all sick persons are patients, and not all patients are sick. Physicians, politicians, the press, and the public nevertheless continue to confuse and conflate the two categories. This is a cultural setting conducive to the growth of medicalization.

Medicalization is a two-way street. Until recently, homosexuality was considered a disease. Today, it no longer is. Has it been cured out of existence? No. It has been demedicalized. At the same time, hundreds of behaviors never before treated as medical problems are now diagnosed as diseases: for example, "gender disorder" and "substance abuse." Have these new diseases been discovered? No. They have been invented, that is, they are the products of medicalization.

Ironically, technological advances in medicine, combined with the conflation of the concepts of disease and patient role, facilitate not only medicalization but also confusion between discovering diseases and creating diagnoses. As a result, when a behavior categorized as a disease is "declassified" -- as happened with homosexuality -- journalists, science writers, and the public are easily persuaded by the stakeholders in medicalization that demedicalization is also a product of scientific progress and moral enlightenment, and not the product of a power struggle between stigmatizers and stigmatized.

Neither medicalization nor demedicalization are new phenomena. Formerly, people spoke about imaginary diseases and persons who pretended to be ill. Molière (1622-1673), the great satirist of malingerers and of the quacks whose harmful ministrations they invite, titled one his plays The Imaginary Invalid (Le malade imaginaire).

Although medicalization encompasses much more than psychiatry, we must be clear about one thing: Psychiatry is medicalization, through and through. Whatever aspect of psychiatry psychiatrists claim is not medicalization, is not medicalization only if it deals with proven diseases of the central nervous system, which belong to neurology, not psychiatry. (Psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy, qua medical practices are, of course, also instances of medicalization.)



Semantic-Social Strategy

In short, medicalization is not medicine or science; it is a semantic-social strategy that benefits some persons and harms others. In the past, the persons most clearly benefiting from medicalization were psychiatrists, and the persons most obviously injured by it were mental patients. "[T]he medical treatment of [mental] patients began with the infringement of their personal freedom," observed Karl Wernicke (1848-1905), the pioneer German neuropathologist. Today, the situation is more complex, more "democratic." Anyone may, at some time, be helped or harmed by medicalization; the only consistent gainers from it are the agents of therapeutic state.

Formerly, the priest was both protector and punisher. Today, the physician plays both roles. Formerly, people could not imagine living in a society unguided and uncontrolled by God: church and state formed a holy union, called "theocracy." Today, people (in the West, but not in the East) cannot imagine living in a society unguided and uncontrolled by science, especially medical science: medicine and the state form a "healthy" union, called "pharmacracy."

I will leave just a portion of this article:

PSYCHIATRY: A BRANCH OF THE LAW
by

Thomas S. Szasz, M.D.

Indeed, psychiatrists never tire of asserting and reasserting their right to deprive people of liberty. In 2005 Steven S. Sharfstein, president of the APA, reiterated his and his profession's commitment to coercion: "We must balance individual rights and freedom with policies aimed at caring coercion." The term "caring coercion" would have fitted perfectly into the Nazi lexicon, along with Arbeit macht frei ("labor liberates") and Gnadentot ("mercy death").

Because the ideas about psychiatry I have been presenting in these columns differ radically from what people read in the newspapers or see on television, I always present the evidence for my view. The reader is free to judge the information and come to his own conclusion. In support of my contention that psychiatrists have an unappeasable appetite for assisting the legal system in imprisoning individuals who irritate and upset society, I offer the following evidence

many more articles can be found here:http://www.szasz.com/szaszwri.html