Effects of Music

Music has always been an interest of mine.  I like playing the piano as well as listening to different varieties of music.  I'm not a super hard core pianist or anything so I doubt my brain would be changed, but I found it fascinating to know that anything can affect a person's brain to the extent that it will change it and morph it to be different than a normal person’s brain.  The two most changed areas of the brain due to this are hearing and finger movement, but their gray matter is also increased.  The auditory, motor, and visual spatial areas of the cerebral cortex in musicians tend to be dramatically different than those of normal people.  I believe that this may have something to do with just how much musicians use those things the most.  I searched in hopes to find an image to show visually the difference between a normal brain and a musician’s brain, but didn't have any luck.  However, an article I read said that they are visually different.  The human brain is a fascinating thing and to know that it can be altered is just mind blowing.  I found the article below which also talks about how musician's brains have changed and become more highly developed.    Use it or lose it is basically what I got from it.  The more you use it the more it is strengthened and becomes part of you.  We are responsible for the changes in our brain and musicians’ brain are just one way of proving this.  

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505083421.htm

Neurotransmitters: Fire Away Fire Away

       While I was doing this week's readings, I realized/ remembered how much I hate reading textbooks.  It's not that they're not interesting, it's just that most of the time my attention-span can be very short.  In module 3.1, our textbook talks about synapses and basically what they are and their properties.  Chemical synapses or neurotransmitters, are the communicators of the brain. My quest was to learn about neurotransmitters the way that made the most sense to me.  I found this website below that links to their synapses overview.  I personally liked the picture because it's really colorful and helped my remember it better/easier.  Also, I browsed through their website and found other cool things such as, their synapses journal club, other articles focusing on different parts of the brain and dendrites, astrocytes, etc.  I went back and looked at the astrocytes on because we had gone over them last week and learned that they have relationships with the synapses in the hippocampus.  I thought that was cool and also as I continued looking through the website, I found a reconstruct software that is free and is supposed to let you examine the brain.  (http://synapses.clm.utexas.edu/tools/reconstruct/reconstruct.stm)

next to this picture on the website, it takes you to a microscopic view of the different components that make the neurotransmitters.  I found this useful because drawings are nice, but seeing the real thing makes it amazing to know that those are what the ones in me look like.  It is absolutely fascinating that we start with about 10 ,000 trillion synapses and as we age we end up with roughly 1,000 to 5,000 trillion synapses.  This is a lot less than what we start off with, but the number is still in the trillions.



http://synapses.clm.utexas.edu/anatomy/chemical/synapse.stm

Glia- Astrocytes: The Rising Star

Since our group name is the astrocytes and I was having trouble understanding the different types of glia, I decided to look them up on Youtube.  In the video below, it color codes glia and neurons and shows how they work together.  As I research astrocytes, they kind of sound like a mother.  Astrocytes are responsible for upkeep of the CNS as well as nourishing and repairing and communicating between neurons. They aren't always given the proper recognition and no one really knows all they do, but they are responsible for keeping the CNS running so smoothly.  These little "jack of all trades" have many different talents and many more that still need to be discovered.  They fix and build up scar tissue on cells that have been injured as well as provide nourishment.   It's still fairly new how astrocytes help, but it has become an interesting subject to me.  Astrocytes are the majority of glial cells.  They act like a glue for neurons and can also get nutrients to neurons as well as digest pieces of dead neurons.  As the research concerning these star-shaped glia continue, it has been learned that astrocytes can communicate.  Although they do not send electrical signals, they are able to modify the signals they send and receive via chemicals. There is also evidence proving that astrocytes can alter how a neuron is built by directing where to make synapses or dendritic spines.  At the bottom of the video, I have provided a link to a website that provided an easy understanding to all three types of Glia also known as the neuron's support group.  

Neuron's Support Group

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

I was having trouble understanding the concept of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) from the book, but this video did a good job in explaining what they are used for.  TMS is a procedure that uses magnetic fields to stimulate nerve cells in the brain. The first scientists to ever try anything with electricity were Galvani and Volta. In the late 1700's Galvani had a dead frog on a tin plate who's leg twitched with a metal knife.  This reaction led to a conclusion that frog muscles must contain electricity.  Volta demonstrated that the frog's muscles had nothing to do with the electricity, rather the two different metals and the moisture between them caused the electricity.  Just like this experiment over  200 years ago, we are now using TMS to manipulate electric current internally by an externally generated changing magnetic field.  The technique relies on electromagnetic reduction which is done by using a hand-held coil which passes current and is driven by a machine.  The magnetic field is passed through the skull into the brain.  TMS is able to influence movement, visual perception, memory, mood, and many more brain functions. TMS has been used for patients with depression, movement disorders, to test the excitability of connections within and among motor areas of the cortex, and basically anything dealing with the neurological and psychiatric aspects of the central nervous system.   There have been different uses for TMS. The video above, demonstrates that TMS is a less evasive treatment and is fairly new to treating depression.  With the advances that TMS has brought, maybe one day we will be able to treat all mood disorders with TMS and not with harmful medications which often has as many symptoms as the "cure" it gives the patient.