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BERLIN : Your Brain Operates at the Edge of Chaos. Why That’s Actually a Good Thing

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3 years ago

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BERLIN : We derive a wealth of benefits from teetering between calmness and mayhem.
Your brain is constantly perched on the edge of chaos. And it’s not because you’re behind on 47 laptop updates or obsessing over that typo in an email you sent your boss.
No, because even at your most zen, your 86 billion brain cells strut along a tightrope between calm and catastrophe; serenity and disarray; order and disorder. At any moment, they could domino into disaster. But no need to panic.
This tricky brain stunt is actually a good thing.
It’s probably why you can juggle all your racing thoughts in the first place, and in fact, scientists even believe tracking this precarious state could one day lead to an exciting new generation of mental health therapies.
We’re part of the universe
You might’ve noticed your lungs look like trees.
It’s because both abide by a fractal sequence, where an object continuously breaks out into smaller versions of itself. Tree branches resemble mini tree trunks, twigs are like mini-mini tree trunks and so on. This methodical pattern adorns snowflakes, blood vessels, lightning bolts and even the most riveting star explosions. Our universe loves structure. It loves order.
However, as physicists often say, our universe is also headed straight toward disorder. Barring a few nuances, Murphy’s Law captures the gist: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
But between these two extremes, the universe has a third, even more intriguing state. Systems that tiptoe between harmony and mayhem. Mountains, threatening to collapse in an avalanche. The stock market, verging on a massive crash. And for the last decade or so, more and more research has shown our brains take residence here, too.
By studying the minds of monkeys, turtles, fish and, of course, humans, scientists have delved into this perilous place. It’s known as the “edge of chaos,” or less dramatically, the “critical point.”
“You have a mixture of structure that comes from the order, but then you also have some sort of randomness, which leads to variety, that comes from the side that’s on the disorder,” explains John Beggs, a professor of physics from Indiana University.

Murmurations of birds also tiptoe between order and disorder. They can disperse at any second to confuse a predator.
While some scientists believe the brain works with inputs and outputs (sort of like a computer), others — including Beggs — suggest it experiences the world by floating fluidly around this “chaotic” point. Presumably, such flux helps brains fulfill very important brain duties. A research paper published last month in Physical Review Letters, for instance, states the critical point offers brains a “desirable trade-off between linearity, optimal for information storage, and nonlinearity, required for computation.”
And when brains deviate from this crucial point, Beggs says, “that is associated with lots of disorders.” This bit is precisely why decoding the brain’s edge-of-chaos-secrets could help us revolutionize mental health treatment.
Already, studying the so-called critical point has begun changing the way scientists approach psychiatry.
“Researchers have turned to criticality based tools to improve their understanding of common psychiatric conditions like depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder,” writes Vincent Zimmern, author of a 2020 paper titled Why Brain Criticality Is Clinically Relevant: A Scoping Review.
But before we dive into that, here’s what your brain is up to right now at the border between order and disorder.

Decisions, decisions
Say your brain wants to signal for you to do something, like open up Seamless, the food delivery app. It must pass information along a network of brain cells, or neurons, to get you to tap the little orange square on your phone.

Theoretically, there are three ways it can go about that.
It can send the “hello, open Seamless” signal to more than one neuron at a time. It can send it to less than one neuron at a time. Or, it can send it to something like one neuron at a time. (Try to think about neurons as divisible into parts because we’re approaching the brain from a more mathematical standpoint than a biological one.)
Let’s assume your brain goes with one. One neuron talks to two neurons, which talk to four, and so on, like a gossip train. Soon, all your neurons are on high alert about your Seamless quest, or as Beggs puts it, the network “blows up really quickly.”
This is called supercritical behavior, and it’s usually way too much stimulation. You’d be in overdrive. Your brain would be so overwhelmed it would start glitching. And in fact, supercriticality is thought to be associated with chronic seizures, or epilepsy.
OK, that’s a no-go. What about two? One neuron sends information to half a neuron, which sends it to a fourth…then to an eighth… and the signal pretty much “dies out,” Beggs says. This is called subcritical behavior, and wouldn’t effectively pass the Seamless message along.
Our final path is three. One neuron shares information with “about” one neuron, which shares information with another, and the signal easily goes from point A to point B. This is good. This is called critical behavior. To effectively get a message like the Seamless one across a network of neurons, our brains “prefer” path three. Path one and path two both pose solid hurdles for neuron information transfer, but path three makes something like a neuron assembly line that ultimately connects the mind to the external world.
But remember how the critical point is also called the edge of chaos? Yeah, there’s more.

High risk 
Consider the stock market, which also stands at the critical point.
Always, some people want to sell and others want to buy. It’s an almost exactly balanced duality, which is why markets are usually pretty steady. But what if something catastrophic occurs, like a global pandemic? Or a war?
People would panic, and as most financial gurus would agree, they’d start to sell. That’d spur massive market fluctuations. Chaotic fluctuations. “Market crashes are sometimes orders of magnitude larger than the typically observed daily loss,” Beggs explains. Think of these “fluctuations” as a signature of edge-of-chaos systems.
Think of each spike in this video as a massive brain fluctuation.
Getty Images
By contrast, some things follow what’s called Gaussian distribution, aka a standard bell curve, which doesn’t lead to those fluctuations. Human height is a good example of something with Gaussian distribution. If we were to map the height of every person in the world, we’d rarely see anyone fall far from the average. No massive fluctuations.
Of these two options, brains seem to have the edge-of-chaos signature.
When a horror movie jump scare happens, for instance, your neurons might “panic,” like stock market investors, and fluctuate into supercritical land. “You can have a cascade of activity or a neuronal avalanche that could travel through the entire brain,” Beggs said.
Now, you might be thinking, why wouldn’t the brain prefer a calmer, Gaussian lifestyle? The edge-of-chaos world seems highly risky. Well, there are a wealth of benefits to teetering between order and disorder, too.

High reward
Edge-of-chaos systems have a super-duper-ultra-wide range within which to work, thanks to the whole fluctuation thing.
With stock markets, there’s the chance you hit the jackpot. And with brains, “you could have information passed from one part of the brain to the next … and perhaps even go through the entire brain,” Beggs said.
Realistically, that’s important for alerting neurons to remain vigilant in a frightening situation, or maybe creating new brain connections while learning languages. In other words, when done very carefully, the brain can tread into chaos to help us function in a very (very) complicated world.

“About” one neuron at a time is usually best for the human brain, but sometimes our mental control centers might tread into dangerous waters.
If the brain followed a Gaussian distribution, by contrast, it’d sort of be restricted when communicating stuff. It couldn’t reach neurons far across the organ during frightening situations to be like “hey neurons, turn on high alert, something is going to happen.”
In a 2009 paper, Manfred Kitzbichler — a neuroscientist from Cambridge University and among the first to consider the brain as residing on the edge of chaos — said criticality “would allow us to switch quickly between mental states in order to respond to changing environmental conditions.”
Further, leaving the critical point and heading into subcritical land might be helpful for our brain when we want to be on autopilot. Though scientists still aren’t quite sure how this mechanism would work, Beggs says “one possibility is if something is extremely well learned and highly rehearsed, it gets transferred to some sort of stereotypical circuit that just repeats its pattern.”

I’m on board, now what? 
Well, most of the time in physics, researchers aren’t trying to negate what we already know, or even come up with new angles. Rather, they’re refining questions that have already been answered. This way, we can keep finding increasingly precise solutions.
The same is true for edge-of-chaos studies.
Human brains are constantly bombarded with external stimuli like people talking, bustling street noise and even the warmth of holding a coffee cup. This means neurons turn on and off constantly. Because of such flux, it’s unrealistic for the brain to be at the ideal critical point all the time. Imagine trying to walk along a straight line but people keep jostling you around as you step forward. It’s kind of like that.
Therefore, a follow-up question might be: What does our brain do instead? How does it operate there?
In a paper published last year in Physical Review Letters, Beggs’ team might’ve found the answer.
After running neurological experiments on mice, they saw that if the animals’ brains couldn’t access the critical point, they optimized themselves by following what’s called the Widom line, or simply, the second best choice.

On the right, you can see what Beggs’ team uses to plot brain fluctuations during edge of chaos studies.
John Beggs
Beggs calls this phenomenon “quasi-criticality.”
Other researchers studying how the brain operates around the critical point, by contrast, have suggested non-quasi-criticality solutions. Some have suggested brains always work slightly below criticality and others believe they randomly move around the critical point.
But, rolling with the quasi-criticality principle, Beggs started considering whether the brains of people suffering from mental illness, such as depression, have trouble accessing that second-best path.
“We looked at about 600 patients, and we’ve been plotting their different critical points,” he said. “From the trends, you can notice the age of the patient, or the gender of the patient, based on where they lie near this region of quasi-criticality.”
Therefore, it’s likely that “aging causes you to go to one place, depression causes you to go to another and epilepsy to another. But, they all might be equally far away from the critical point.”

Each dot represents a “neuron spike.”
John Beggs
That is, more research is needed to really decode the brain’s edge-of-chaos. Nevertheless, Beggs believes these findings will eventually lead to innovative therapeutics.
For example, he says we know the brain kind of shuts down for a while after having a really bad seizure. During that period, it has ways of trying to bring itself back online, one of which is growing lots of new connections. But, remember the supercriticality conundrum where way too many neurons turn on high alert, then “blow up” the network really quickly?
“You’d think that’s a good thing to do, because it’s just saying, ‘Hook this thing up again, and we’ll get some activity,’ but when it grows those connections after a seizure, once it comes back online, it’s over connected. So, it’s actually more common to have a seizure the next time.”
However, if we can harness the critical point, maybe we can stimulate brain tissue somehow and prevent it from sensing it’s in its shutdown state in the first place. Instead, it’d think everything’s fine, and therefore not make all those new connections that could lead to a subsequent seizure.
“If you sort of tricked it into not forming new connections,” Beggs said, “It would be far less likely to have a seizure.”
Right now, Beggs and fellow researchers are still in the process of dissecting how all of this works. It’s going to be a long, yet rewarding, road ahead. And if you’ve read until here, first of all congratulations.
Second, if you walk away with only one message, I hope it’s this one: The next time you’re stressed out, if someone asks how you’re doing and you say, “I’m on the edge of chaos,” you’re not being dramatic at all.
You’re being scientifically accurate.

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WASHINGTON: Social Media Has Direct Impact On Mental Health- US Surgeon General To NDTV

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1 year ago

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October 20, 2024

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WASHINGTON: There is a direct connection between social media use and mental health, especially among teenagers, the US Surgeon General Vice Admiral Vivek Murthy said. He said that his office had even issued an advisory in this regard, appealing for more focus on this very concerning issue.

The US Surgeon General is the doctor to all of the United States of America. The Surgeon General is consulted by the President of the US on all public health issues and health-related emergency matters. It is one of the topmost posts in the US and is responsible for America’s overall healthcare system, new technology in the sector, and scientific advancement in medicine.

The current Surgeon General, Vice Admiral Vivek Murthy spoke on a range of issues, including a growing mental health crisis globally and how social media impacts it.

“There is a need to protect our children,” the Surgeon General said, adding that it is a priority for him and his department to “make mental health the priority that it needs to be.” He said that “Many countries are struggling with mental health crisis, with many cases of depression, anxiety, and sadly suicide.”

‘THE STIGMA’

Vice Admiral Murthy explained that his advisory aims to focus on the “stigma around mental health”, which he says “makes it harder for patients to talk about it at home with their families, and makes their struggle harder because not often can they ask for the help they need.”

As an increasing number of young adults are battling mental health issues globally, the top doctor of the United States said, “Fundamentally what we have to do is to see mental health for what it is – It is part of our overall health, and mental health is just as important to a person as their physical health is, and must be treated with the urgency and priority that it deserves.”

‘GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES, COMMUNITY OUTLOOK’

“Older generations are not always used to talking about mental health issues,” the Surgeon General said, acknowledging that “different generations look at mental health differently, as do different communities.”

“While older generations do not talk about it openly, the younger generations are far more open and sensitive to mental health challenges,” he said.

Speaking about cultural views on mental health and the stigma attached to it, Vice Admiral Murthy said, “We see a lot of cultural differences when it comes to viewing mental health issues. My family is originally from India, and the Indian-American community which I grew up in, we never spoke about mental health issues. In fact, it was something that was seen as a source of shame.”

Giving an example of his own experience of the stigmatisation of mental health challenges, he said, “I had an uncle who sadly lost his life to suicide. I remember the sense of shame around the family that something like this had happened. There was so much concern about telling other people what had happened because of what they would think about the family. That kind of stigma and the message it sends to both young and old people, is that these issues are just not okay to talk about.”

“We need to change this. I aim for a day where we can talk about the mental health issues we face just as easily as we would about a sprained ankle or heart disease. We need to talk about it with the same amount of openness” he said.

‘BUILDING BLOCKS OF A FULFILLING LIFE’

Young people are under tremendous pressure and stress of performing well in life, said the top doctor, and so, I asked a lot of young adults what success means to them, he added.

“We need to ask ourselves what we are doing to define success for young people in order to help them having a fulfilling life. When I spoke to young people in the US, many of them said they feel they are being asked to hustle behind a definition of success that is largely dependent on – ‘How much money you make’, ‘How much fame you can acquire’, and ‘How much power can you attain’ – And while there is nothing wrong in wanting to amass power, fortune and fame, if we feel that that is what is going to lead to long-term fulfilment, unfortunately life’s experiences and challenges tends to make us feel the other way,” he said.

“So, if we really want our children to be truly and deeply fulfilled, the thing we need to increasingly think about is – How can we help them build a life that is focussed on meaning, on purpose, on service, and on community – because these are the building blocks of fulfilment that we all ultimately want for our children,” he explained.

THE ESSENTIAL INGREDIENT TO MANAGE STRESS

Delving on the issue of stress and the pressures faced by young individuals, Vice Admiral Murthy said, “We need to see and understand where the pressures being faced by our children are coming from. We also need to mitigate and manage them to make the environment that our children are growing up in much more hospitable and welcoming.”

Explaining his statement, he added, “One of the things we know is that pressure is a lot easier to deal with – stress in general, is a lot easier to deal with when we have social support around us. Which is why the issues of loneliness and isolation being a broader epidemic is a serious problem in the US and increasingly across the world.”

SUICIDE – THE DEEPEST PAIN, A GLOBAL EPIDEMIC

Speaking about an ever-increasing suicide rate globally, the Surgeon General said, “Suicide is one of the most painful consequences of all of the broader mental health challenges we are facing today. The thought of losing your child to suicide is the deepest pain for any parent to deal with.”

He further explained that “Suicide deaths have increased significantly across the world in the last two decades.” This, he says, is due to several reasons:

  1. Loneliness has become a profound issue among children. It affects the entire population, but is hitting young people the hardest. It is now an epidemic across the world.
  2. The impact of violence and the fear of violence – Over 50 per cent children in the US now fear a school shooting.
  3. Negative news and mobile phones – Most children today carry or have access to smartphones that are constantly buzzing with negative and violent headlines which make them feel like their life and the future is bleak because nothing positive is happening around the world.
  4. Most of all, Technology and Social Media – Children are, on average, spending more than 3 hours a day on social media. By doing so, they face double the risk of depression and anxiety. It is one of the many reasons we have to address the harms of social media.

‘WE’VE FAILED AS A SOCIETY’

Social media algorithms are what make these platforms so addictive. These algorithms have a direct impact on the brain and the hormones secreted by it. But there are no laws to keep these algorithms in check. While even smoking or drinking have their own set of laws to not pose a risk to the public, social media firms have no such rules to bind them from using their algorithms indiscriminately.

Elaborating on the challenges faced in combating the harms of social media, the Surgeon General said, “For the last 20 years that social media has been around, we have broadly failed as a society to ensure that social media companies meet safety standards.”

Giving the example of cars, Vice Admiral Murthy explained that “Cars have a basic level of safety and standards in place. These standards ensure that that brakes are working, the seat belts and the engine are in sound condition, the frame of the car is such it protects the occupants of the vehicle. But we do now have anything like that, especially in the US, when it comes to checks and balances for social media. There are no safety standards to protect children in particular from its harmful effects.”

“The entire burden of checks and balances for social media are entirely on kids and parents. Not only is that unfair, but is ineffective, and we can see that from how it is manifesting today,” he said.

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TORONTO: Protein May Help Age-Related Diseases, Indian-Origin Scientist Discovers

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1 year ago

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October 16, 2024

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TORONTO: A team of researchers, led by an Indian-origin scientist, has discovered a new function of a protein that may treat age-related illnesses.

The team from McMaster University in Canada found a previously unknown cell-protecting function of a protein, which could open new avenues for treating age-related diseases and lead to healthier ageing.

According to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, cells can create proteins incorrectly, and the cleanup process can become faulty or overwhelmed.

As a result, proteins can clump together, leading to a harmful buildup that has been linked to such diseases as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

“If the cells are experiencing stress because this protein aggregation has started, the endoplasmic reticulum, which is where proteins are made and then released, gets the signal to stop making these proteins,” said Professor Bhagwati Gupta who supervised the research.

The team found that a class of protective proteins known as MANF plays a role in the process that keeps cells efficient and working well. Previous studies have shown that MANF protects against increased cellular stress.

The team set out to understand how this happens by studying microscopic worms known as C. elegans. They created a system to manipulate the amount of MANF in C. elegans.

The team discovered that MANF plays a key role in the cell’s disposal process by helping to break down the accumulated proteins, keeping cells healthier and clutter-free. Increasing MANF levels also activates a natural clean-up system within cells, helping them function better for longer.

“Although our research focused on worms, the findings uncover universal processes. MANF is present in all animals, including humans. We are learning fundamental and mechanistic details that could then be tested in higher systems,” said Shane Taylor, now a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia.

To develop MANF as a potential therapy, researchers want to understand what other players MANF interacts with. “Discovering MANF’s role in cellular homeostasis suggests that it could be used to develop treatments for diseases that affect the brain and other parts of the body by targeting cellular processes, clearing out these toxic clumps in cells and maintaining their health,” said Gupta.

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LONDON: Indian-Origin Teen In UK Gets “Life-Changing” Cancer Treatment

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1 year ago

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October 1, 2024

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LONDON: Yuvan Thakkar, an Indian-origin teenager diagnosed with cancer, says he is now able to enjoy the things he loves after life-changing treatment thanks to a fund set up by the UK’s state-funded National Health Service to make innovative therapies accessible to thousands of patients.

According to NHS England, 16-year-old Mr Thakkar from Watford near London was the first child in the UK to benefit from a pioneering CAR T therapy called tisagenlecleucel (Kymriah) thanks to its Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF).

It comes as the National Health Service (NHS) marks a milestone this weekend of 100,000 patients benefitting from early access to the latest and most innovative treatments with the help of CDF. The undisclosed cost of such treatments is covered by the fund.

“My life has changed so much since I received the CAR T therapy,” said Mr Thakkar, who thanked Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) in London for the “incredible” care he received.

“I remember I had to take so many trips to hospital and had long periods out of school… They have helped me recover to a state where I am able to enjoy so many things I love doing, such as playing snooker or pool, meeting friends and family, and going on wonderful holidays. It’s hard to imagine how things would have been if the treatment wasn’t available,” he said.

Mr Thakkar, diagnosed with a form of leukaemia aged six, received a treatment which modifies a person’s immune cells to recognise and attack cancer cells.

His treatment began in 2019, when he was 11 years old after he relapsed following other treatments such as chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. His mother Sapna said the family had received a “second chance” at life since the success of the treatment. Without the fast-track access available through the CDF, the 45-year-old said there may have been no other way for her son to receive the life-saving treatment.

“It felt like our prayers were finally answered. We still feel so grateful for this chance that’s been given to us and not a single day passes by when we haven’t felt thankful for all the doctors and nurses that have helped us through this long and difficult journey,” said Sapna Thakkar.

The CDF, which opened in its current form in July 2016, is used by NHS England to provide fast-tracked access for patients to all new cancer treatments approved by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), in addition to gathering further evidence of long-term effectiveness for promising drugs. It allows faster access to more than 100 drugs to help improve, extend or – in some cases – save their lives.

“Treating 100,000 cancer patients in England with innovative treatments through the Cancer Drugs Fund is a fantastic milestone for the health service to reach, and testament to the hard work of oncologists and their teams across the country,” said Professor Sir Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director.

“This vital fund is helping ensure patients get access to the most promising drugs far quicker than would otherwise be the case, helping people with cancer like Yuvan receive a life-changing intervention that sets a path for a longer, healthier life spent with family and friends,” he said.

The fund benefits people with common cancers, such as breast, lung, colorectal and prostate, as well as those with less common cancers, such as ovarian, cervical, kidney, skin, myeloma, lymphoma and leukaemia, and rare cancers, including thyroid and biliary tract.

The current CDF budget of GBP 340 million is 70 per cent more than the previous CDF and is used alongside NHS England’s Innovative Medicines Fund of GBP 340 million, which the health service said means a total of GBP 680 million is ringfenced for fast-tracking new medicines.

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