BIOLOGY OF MUSIC: THE EARTH HAS MUSIC FOR THOSE WHO LISTEN

By René A. Azeez, Honours BSc. Developmental Biology, University of Toronto. June 12, 2011.

               In William Shakespeare’s play, Twelfth Night, he is famously quoted as having written “If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may so sicken and die.” Biologists and philosophers have wondered for as long as there has been biology and philosophy, just how deeply intertwined is music in the very nature and success of life. Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory, believed that it is in the process of sexual selection, that the origin of music lay. In commenting on the struggle of males for females as part of the greater goal of natural selection, Darwin says “These struggles are generally decided by the law of battle, but in the case of birds, apparently, by the charms of their song, by the beauty of the power of courtship, as in the dancing rock-thrush of Guiana.”

                David Rothenberg, professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, is a great believer that one can use a musical vantage point to attempt to explain the vast beauty and diversity of nature. In particular he marvels at the commonality between the precise choreography of Australia’s lyrebird, flawless and beautiful, and the humpback whale, mysterious and awesome. Rothenberg remarks, “Why should whales and birds, two animals so different from each other, makes sounds that somehow seem related?”  In fact, if you were to speed up a whale’s song, the similarities to a complex bird song that you would observe is nothing short of remarkable. Rothenberg contends that humans may not be able to explain the beauty and profusion in the songs of species as different as lyrebirds and humpbacks, but that evolution has conserved them for some reason.

                In the Journal Lancelet, Claudius Conrad wrote an essay entitled, “Music for healing: from magic to medicine.” Depictions as far back as 4000BCE, he explains, illustrate harp-playing priests and musicians hinting at early contextual use of music for healing. While work remains to be done in understanding just how exactly music related to positive medical outcomes in yet unexplained ways, music is currently used to overcome some of the “anonymity and deindividuation of the clinical environment.”

                A culture without a musical compartment is yet to be identified. Mothers soothe their babies with a melodious “motherese” singsong; a quality that Dean Falk of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, notes is unique to humans. Falk proposes that these singsongs are common across the human spectrum, higher in pitch and slower than adult speech, and are imperative to mother-child bonding.

                Robin Dunbar, a psychologist of Oxford University, investigates the musical role in bond strengthening in small groups of hominids. He proposes that the evolution of music occurred because the grooming practices of primates were impractical in human society, with groups becoming much larger. Dunbar and his group were able to find a remarkable connection between people who moved their bodies to music and those who merely listened, elevated thresholds for pain due to elevated levels of endorphin release.

                The mysteries and complexities of music and its role in our lives, everyday and over large time scales in an evolutionary sense, are far from understood. One can’t help but think; maybe it is better that way. Marvel as a part of our everyday existence, the wonder and the unknown, may just be music’s biggest gift to us.

REFERENCES:

Rothenberg D. Singing Nature’s Tune. USA Today, November 2010, 58-59.

Kivy P. Charles Darwin on Music. Journal of the American Musicological Society. 1959, 12(1): 42.

Zimmer C. The Brain: Is music for wooing, mothering, bonding, or is it just “auditory cheesecake”. Discover Magazine. December 2010.

Conrad C. Music for healing: from magic to medicine. The Lancelet, December 2010, 376 (9757): 1980-1981.

ALCOHOL: BEAUTY IN THE EYE OF THE BEERHOLDER

By René A. Azeez, Honours BSc. Developmental Biology, University of Toronto. June 09, 2011.

               

              Alcohol has in some way affected every individual, directly or indirectly, socially or religiously, positively or negatively, at one point or another in our lives. Whatever your beliefs about alcohol and its use or misuse, it is undeniable that alcohol is surrounded by many tales and equally as many truths. Despite its widespread social permeation, alcohol still retains the allure of mystery, especially to eager to grow up adolescents.

                In a study published in the Journal Addictive Behaviors entitled “Making Sense of alcohol experiences, young adolescents’ accounts of alcohol-related critical incidents”, Joris J. Van Hoof and his team decided to explore the implications of alcohol use in the life of young adolescents in the Netherlands. Researchers decided to look closely at the consequences, parental roles, and adolescent evaluations of alcohol use and incidents stemming from alcohol use.

                Researchers conducted 45 interviews using the ‘critical incident technique’ or CIT; a technique used in research to observe and inherently attempt to evaluate human behavior, in this case adolescents between 15 and 16; through methodically defined criteria.  Of the incidents recalled, researchers were able to find that the most prevalent consequence was that of ‘becoming ill’. This was seen in 19% of recollected alcohol related incidents, followed by ‘doing strange things’ seen in 16% of recollections, ‘interpersonal conflicts’ in 12%, ‘accidents or injuries’ in 11% and finally, ‘making contact more easily’ was recollected in 10% of incidents. Furthermore, parents were only aware of incidents in their entirety in about half the total number of cases.

                Perhaps the most important finding of the study was that whilst participants were clearly able to link the negative consequences of alcohol consumption to their personal experience or being witness to someone else’s negative experience, it was unlikely that they were deterred from intentions to consume alcohol again, or consume less alcohol. In fact, interview participants tended to label negative consequences as overall positive experiences in their accounts.

                Researchers believe that these findings point out two important observations in adolescent alcohol consumption. Firstly, it is complex in nature and a greater understanding of the roles of parents and the information being provided to adolescents is needed. Secondly, the study points towards the failure of the ‘scary story’ approach to prevention of alcohol consumption in teens and young adults. They contend that this approach may have the opposite effect and instead of deterring, encourage the early consumption of alcohol. Efforts in controlling availability and encouraging parental involvement seem to more likely offer a solution to the problem.

REFERENCE: Van Hoof J J V, Van den Boom S, and De Jong M D T. Making sense of alcohol experiences: young adolescents’ accounts of alcohol-related critical incidents. Addictive Behaviors, 36: 849-854; 2011.

REMEMBERING TO FORGET: PKM ROLE THE FIRST STEP TO TARGETING SPECIFIC MEMORIES?

By René A. Azeez, Honours BSc. Developmental Biology, University of Toronto. May 05, 2011.

             Old science fiction has, with surprising regularity, become new science. One is reminded of this fact when encountering a new study from scientists at UCLA including David Glanzman, professor of integrative biology and physiology and of neurobiology, in the April 27 issues of the Journal of NeuroScience.

The research focused on examining the effects of eliminating a particular protein kinase, an enzyme that modifies other proteins by facilitating the addition of phosphate groups to them, on the long term memory of a marine snail known as Aplysia. The protein kinase, protein kinase M (PKM), is one form of the protein kinase C (PKC) family of proteins that had previously been shown to play a critical role in mammalian long-term memory.

Snails under attack have an elevated sensitivity to their environment, a demonstration of long term memory. In training snails they showed that administration of an electric shock caused them to exhibit a reflex contraction when touched that lasted about 50 seconds, as opposed to a contraction lasting only a few seconds witnessed when snails have not experienced electric shock training. In snails which had established the long term memory from shock training, they found that administering PKM inhibitors resulted in the snails responding with a very brief contraction, the type of reaction expected had they not undergone chemical shock training.

They injected inhibitors to disallow the action of PKM and found that they successfully erased the memory for the long term sensitization (LTS) of the siphon-withdrawal reflex (SWR) of the snails for days after training. Furthermore, they saw a break from the normal occurrence; in which long term facilitation (LTF) of sensorimotor synapses underlies LTS; when the PKM inhibitors were administered. They therefore were specifically able to support the idea that PKM is important in the maintenance of long term memory in Aplysia. They were able to replicate these results using the isolated sensory and motor neurons of the snail’s nervous system in a petri dish, strengthening their hypothesis. They are in fact the first scientists to illustrate that a long-term memory can be erased at a single connection.

               So what does this all mean? How can this be of importance? These results can potentially be a first step in understanding and treating conditions of addiction, post-traumatic stress, Alzheimer’s, and event associated depression, to name a few. Glanzman and his group believe that this result is the first step into understanding the formation of specific memories, and therefore the first step to some day in the future being able to target and weaken these specific memories in cases where this would be desirable. Alternatively, the possibility exists that boosting PKM activity could have beneficial implications for persons with afflicted memories, such as Alzheimer’s patients. However, the research team admits that the research is complex and we are a long way off from being at the stages of deleting specific memories or finding a magic bullet for Alzheimer’s disease. They concluded, “the demonstration of memory erasure in this relatively simple model system should greatly facilitate a reductionist analysis of how the activity of PKM supports the persistence of memory.”

REFERENCES: D. Cai, K. Pearce, S. Chen, D. L. Glanzman. Protein Kinase M Maintains Long-Term Sensitization and Long-Term Facilitation in Aplysia. Journal of Neuroscience, 2011; 31 (17)

EMOTIONAL OR RATIONAL: WHAT BUDDHIST MEDITATORS CAN TEACH US ABOUT DECISION MAKING

By René A. Azeez, Honours BSc. Developmental Biology, University of Toronto. April 21, 2011.

Have you ever wondered why we make the decisions that we make? Human nature is, on the face of it, determined by a combination of cognitive and emotional processes.  That is not to say that human beings can be generalized into percentages of rationality and emotionality, but what determines this ratio is a fascinating question and has been explored by researchers.

Interestingly, it had been previously shown that in a scenario known as the ultimatum game, in which there exists a “proposer” and a “responder” that may share a sum of money as suggested by the proposer, human nature as the responder is to reject all offers that permit the proposer more than 80% of the total sum. Rational thought would advocate that the responder accept all non-zero offers but humans tend to prefer to gain nothing than to gain what they consider to be an unfair portion. Brain imaging confirms that rejection of the ultimatum game correspond to activation of portions of the brain correlated with emotions. Why are some of us more capable of favoring rational thought? Who is capable of uncoupling emotional reactions from actual behavior and what makes them so?

                New Research published in the April edition of Frontiers in Decision Neuroscience by Ulrich Kirk, Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Virginia Tech; Jonathan Downar, University of Toronto; and Read Montague, Virginia Tech; shows that Buddhist meditators are far more likely to take what is offered.              

                Mindfulness meditation advocates a spirit of observation as opposed to judgment and involves techniques developed with the goal of well-being and emotional balance. This lead the researchers to believe that meditators would be more accepting in the ultimatum game of rewards that were socially considered unfair, than non-mediators. What they found was that the areas of the brain normally activated by an unfair proposal, specifically the anterior insula which is associated with emotions of disgust, violations, rejection and betrayal; were as expected, expressed in the non-meditator control group. However, meditators showed “no significant activation for either fair or unfair offers, and there was no significant relationship between anterior insula and offer rejection”.

              Meditators are therefore able to uncouple the negative emotional social understanding of an unfair offer from their decision making process. The western world has only recently begun to embrace mindfulness meditation but the origins of mindfulness meditation date back 2500 years in Buddhist tradition.  Meditators were found to draw on areas of the brain involved with attending to internal bodily states and attention to the present moment, whereas the control group of non-meditators drew upon areas associated with episodic memory and fictive error.

They concluded that “the trick may lie not in rational calculation, but in steering away from what-if scenarios, and concentrating on the interoceptive qualities that accompany any reward, no matter how small.”

REFERENCE: Kirk U, Downar J and Montague P. Interoception drives increased rational decision-making in meditators playing the Ultimatum Game. Front. Neurosci., 5:49; 2011.

THERE’S SOMETHING IN THE FOOD CHAIN: CHEMICAL COMPOUND LINKED TO CHILDHOOD WEIGHT GAIN

By René A. Azeez, Honours BSc. Developmental Biology, University of Toronto. April 10, 2011.

It is often the case in the study of human biology that the more answers provided by research, the more questions arise. The increase in the prevalence of obesity in the general population may have yet another element to consider as Spanish researchers have now been able to show that rapid weight gain and elevated obesity percentages occurring in infancy is in fact linked to the prenatal exposure of the pregnant woman to a chemical compound known as DDE (dichloro-diphenyl-dichloroethylene). It follows that a higher body mass index (BMI) in infancy increases the likelihood of obesity and metabolic diseases later on in life.

The team lead by Dr. Michelle A. Mendez was particularly interested in exploring the effects of endocrine disrupting compounds such as DDE, a byproduct of the infamous pesticide DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane). The results, published in the Journal Environmental Health Perspectives, showed that from a total of 657 women in early pregnancy, DDE exposure in the first trimester doubled the risk of rapid weight gain in infants of normal weight mothers. Moreover, there was also a correlation with DDE exposure and an elevated BMI later on in infancy.

           Obesity is known to result in illness in many areas of medicine including cardiology, dermatology, gastroenterology, neurology, oncology, psychiatry, and endocrinology, to name a few. Although it has long been known that increased risk of obesity may well be established early in life, the factors surrounding this have been uncertain. It follows that wholly and solely blaming increased consumption of energy-dense foods and declining physical activity for the increased incidence of obesity is a misleading stance to take. A greater understanding of the mechanism of obesity will go a long way to reducing the stigma with which it finds itself surrounded.

Whether or not DDE’s role is causative in nature or part of a mechanism which enables increased infancy weight gain is unknown but it is at the very least cause for concern and further investigation. DDE is soluble in fat and known to accumulate in the fish and meat supply as a result.  The unfortunate fact is that the ban of DDT usage did not globally eradicate its use immediately and its appearance in the food chain, and therefore the appearance of its byproduct DDE, is still very much unpredictable.

References: 
Michelle A. Mendez, Raquel Garcia-Esteban, Monica Guxens, Martine Vrijheid, Manolis Kogevinas, Fernando Goni, Silvia Fuchs, Jordi Sunyer. "Prenatal Exposure Compound organochlorines, Rapid Weight Gain, and Overweight in Infancy." Environmental Health Perspectives , vol. 119, no. 2, February 2011.