New Research: Human Insula, Memories, Learning And The Nose

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Two news stories from this week about the human brain are very interesting because of the light some studies now shed on how our brains work and how they maintain functionality over time. As baby boomer born in the middle of the birth surge, I hope we figure out how to keep our joint sanity in old age.

For a long time, researchers thought brains couldn't mend themselves very well.

BEIJING, Feb. 16 (Xinhuanet) -- Scientists have discovered that the human brain can manufacture fresh brain cells which may lead to a better way to treat brain damage and disease like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and stroke,according to media reports Friday.

Neuroscientists from Auckland University and Carlsson Institute for Neuroscience in Sweden found a cell pathway through which the adult brain may repair itself. The report will be published as the cover story next week in the journal "Science."

These cells are born in one part of the brain and then migrate to the olfactory bulb, where smells are processed. They mature into neurons on the way.

Many of the researchers who started intense studies of the human brain did so in the hopes of fixing senility problems. We all can see from our own elderly, how insidious senility is and how destructive and dangerous its effects are, I know from my own experience how senility can make elderly people very hostile and suspicious while at the same time, they are totally insane and endangering themselves and everyone around them.

This is a very dangerous development and there are several questions appended to this condition: how and why did it evolve and is it fixable?

We know that in the wild, the great apes move about in a group but each individual takes care if him or herself except for the mother/child bond. In the famous Gombe chimp study sponsored by the National Geographic 35 years ago, Jane Goodall grew fond of Flo, the dominant female in the group she was observing. Over the years, Flo went from being a very good mother whose sons and daughter dominated the troop to senility whereby one of the mothers in the troop dominated it by working with her own sons and daughter to cannibalize other mother's infants.

She couldn't eat Flo's last child but Flo also couldn't raise Frodo well and she was unable to wean him and he harassed her mercilessly to prevent her from nursing her last baby which died from neglect.

The main explanation for the durability of the elderly in human and great ape populations is due to the protection of the group of each other and the lack of predators willing to tangle with any great apes. But the generational arc of power and senility still rules within discreet groups within these species.

We see this in history very clearly: when a king or ruler lives too long, as they go insane they destroy everyone and everything around them because they can't think very well. From Methuselah to Mao, for every sane, wise old ruler there is far more senile, dangerous, destructive rulers wrecking absolutely everything.

This latest story about how new braincells form all life long and then migrate to the nose is intriguing. Why did this evolve?

The nose-memory system is very powerful. Smelling something can trigger intense memories of the deepest sort. For example, just using literally my nose, when I visited my birthplace which I had not seen for 35 years, following intensely interesting smells, I retraced my route I took when I was raped as a child and found the rapist who was now a very old man (he died soon after I confronted him).

The scent memories of the very young endure in near perfect form for many years if not for the whole life. This is an important survival tool in nature for we use our noses to identify each other, smell danger and find food. Once human tribes evolved into densely organized tribal communities, the need to have perfectly functioning smelling became less and less important. The more civilized the population, the longer the civilization process, the weaker the smelling ability.

This is because the brutal forces of nature killing off those animals who have bad smelling processing abilities, ceases to work as the community protects the weaker members.

It is no wonder to me to see our brains still able to regenerate the complex smelling/memory systems. This is why the new braincells first migrate to the nose before parking themselves back in the brain itself. One thing I have noticed is how the elderly, as they grow senile, can't smell very well and can't tell rotted food from good food, for example. This is a recent development due to civilization protecting each other.

Which takes me to this other recent story about the human brain: the evolution and meaning of the Insula.

According to neuroscientists who study it, the insula is a long-neglected brain region that has emerged as crucial to understanding what it feels like to be human.

They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music. Its anatomy and evolution shed light on the profound differences between humans and other animals.

For example, the insula "lights up" in brain scans when people crave drugs, feel pain, anticipate pain, empathize with others, listen to jokes, see disgust on someone's face, are shunned in social settings, listen to music, decide not to buy an item, see someone cheat and decide to punish them, and determine degrees of preference while eating chocolate.

Damage to the insula can lead to apathy, loss of libido and an inability to tell fresh food from rotten.

The elderly lose the ability to smell food properly and of course, lose libido. And the nose has a huge influence on the Insula because all creatures on land and in the air use the sense of smell to locate sexual partners and detect enemies.

Many creatures use sight to identify mates and enemies but the sense of sight is limited in time/space: namely, one sees either only after they can see oneself! And time to react is very limited! But using smell means one can see the path of potential partners or enemies and track them down stealthily or make a loud noise to attract a lover, for example.

Smells can endure for a much longer timeframe than sight and since half of existence is spent in the dark and in our own specie's case, our deepest ancestors did all their stuff at night, like owls, it is no surprise to see the sense of smell sitting on memory's throne in our brains.

In humans, information about the body's state takes a slightly different route inside the brain, picking up even more signals from the gut, the heart, the lungs and other internal organs. Then the human brain takes an extra step, Craig said. The information on bodily sensations is further routed to the front part of the insula, especially on the right side, which has undergone a huge expansion in humans and apes.

It is in the frontal insula, Craig said, that simple body states or sensations are recast as social emotions. A bad taste or smell is sensed in the frontal insula as disgust. A sensual touch from a loved one is transformed into delight.

The frontal insula is where people sense love and hate, gratitude and resentment, self-confidence and embarrassment, trust and distrust, empathy and contempt, approval and disdain, pride and humiliation, truthfulness and deception, atonement and guilt.

My inadvertent tracing down the man who raped me was due to my Insula lighting up like a Christmas tree when suddenly rediscovering old but very important sexual clues. Since a lot of pain was involved, the entire Insula went crazy causing me to rush forwards since I am now a fairly powerful adult. I wanted to discover the root cause of all this internal turmoil.

What was most interesting in our encounter was how the man, an astronomer, was tentative about who I was and why I suddenly appeared before him, his repressed memories were hidden even from himself until I got too close and he could smell me.

I wear no perfumes because I prefer the smell of humans, this pleases the primitive parts of my brain, I think perfumes are disguises and thus, maybe socially useful but not socially helpful since it prevents us from 'reading' each other carefully.

When this man smelled me, he flipped out and remembered everything quite loudly. It overthrew his own self-defenses and he confessed to me. I suspect this shock hastened his own death (note: I didn't feel sorry for him at all).

In my own case, this helped me psychologically since my own brain was happy to see it remembered things exactly right, thanks to the nose/Insula interactions. It meant I wasn't crazy but actually did have certain life experiences even if my own brain tried to hide it from myself by erasing the memory, I being only five when this happened.

The evolution of the ability to remember things is quite intricate because our brains are very big and complex.

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer

Researchers have long speculated that babies' brains were simply unable to form memories, but Bauer said new research indicates that is incorrect.

While rates of memory development vary among infants, all babies are extremely intelligent, added Lisa M. Oakes of the University of California, Davis. "The task they have before them is overwhelming."

Infants are very good at extracting information from their environment, said Oakes.

The ability to form memories depends on a network of structures in the brain and these develop at different times, Bauer said. As the networks come together between 6 months and 18 months of life, researchers see increased efficiency in the ability to form short- and long-term memory, she said.

The things we call 'memories' are usually stories we tell ourselves about ourselves or things we build boxes around and then store in various places in the brain's structures. For example, most of the time, when I write stuff, because I have been a heavy reader/WRITER all my life, I can open up all sorts of odd boxes of memories all the time. I usually try to use search engines to confirm things I remember but the ability to open up a dozen boxes and haul out information memorized earlier is a skill, it doesn't come naturally.

This is why propaganda exists: not only does it alter the past by making up stuff that is pure fiction, it erases the past by hammering into the brains of the victims consuming this propaganda, the new facts. For propagandists know, repetition is learning.

The only tool to prevent propaganda taking over the mind's memory systems is to open up the original box where the first memory of an event is stored each time one encounters propaganda.

And the way to build a fool-proof box is to WRITE down what happens when it happens. I have noticed that people who do this on the internet are much more able to keep their minds clear of garbage then people who passively read but don't write things down.

With babies, they can't write. And the urgency of memorizing things isn't very high if they are protected by mother and their clan. They are free to wander about in a limited way and all that while, the nose and the Insula are hard at work, building powerful memory boxes that can't be erased no matter how hard the rest of the brain tries to erase it.

In my own case, the things I was adverse to as a child remain so today no matter how hard I try to undo them. Certain things give me great unease and no therapy can undo this because they are stored in the Insula. I can only tolerate them and understand why they are part of myself, unchanging.

The many memories of small children are not useful as adults or even children learning the lores and mannerisms of their tribal group so the brain ditches them and concentrates on the learning skills rather than processing events.

Namely, the ability to learn how to talk, walk and make tools are tremendously important for a baby to learn as it grows to adulthood while remembering people's faces or events is far less important. So the brain retains one and not the other. Just as the brain throws out the memories of dreams as 'useless' unless the dreamer has a long record of dreaming the future.

Then they get to be Cassandra. Heh. I remember many of my dreams.

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Comments

[DeVaul]

I definitely believe the elderly cannot smell well. I once lived in a house with my friend and an elderly woman. We had the upstairs as an apartment and she lived downstairs, but the smell from downstairs bothered me intensely. Actually, my roommate could not smell it either, so....

Anyway, one day Mrs. Van Winkle caught me on my way out the side door. (She would wait at the bottom of the stairs for us.) She wanted to show me the new sweeper her sister had given her for Christmass. I think she was about 85-88 years old at this time.

I patiently stood there and remarked at what a neat thing it was (not), when to my horror, she placed it down on the carpet and started pushing it around -- right on top of a pile of dog poop!!!!

She could not see it or smell it, but she ground it up into a fine powder with her new sweeper (making it impossible to clean out of the carpet now) while I stood there trying not to breathe. I decided to say nothing because she seemed so happy, but I will never forget that moment. I can still see it in my mind clear as day.

Perhaps it was the smell.

[blues]

It's my understanding that the brain may be aptly described as comprising a paleocortex, basically the part nearest the brain stem, and a neocortex, the large convoluted organ above it. As I recall, the paleocortex is much tougher. It can keep a person alive even when the neocortex is completely out of commission. (Terri Schiavo is an example — I was absolutely against the removal of her feeding tube — which got me severely lambasted by the 'liberal' blogosphere.) This 'old brain' controls the most vital functions, such as breathing (in tandem with the neocortex), the heart-rate, blood pressure, etc. It includes the olfactory bulb, which operates in tandem with the neocortical insula.

The old brain is quite different than the new brain. The old brain is slow because its neural axons lack myelin sheaths, which are fatty cells that surround the neocortex axons, and which dramatically speed up the conduction of impulses. I would guess that all brain activity begins in the paleocortex, which determines the context of all human activity. It calls the shots, and the fast neocortex then processes the relevant activities. The various functions of life are controlled by specific areas of the brain, but these areas differ somewhat among various individuals.

For me, this is a complex situation. Now, suppose a person has a stroke. That means that some spot in their brain has died, and they lose the function that that area performed. I have a theory, which I have discussed with my neurologists at the behavioral neurology clinic at Harvard. I have proposed that my developmental condition is due to a misconnection between my paleocortex and my neocortex. Up until about five years ago, I was completely unable to type. It was just like I had had a stroke, except for one thing. The neurons that were not connected were not dead. So what happened was, they assumed occupations that were unavailable to neurotypical people. I could do incredible things with math theory, etc.

I have lots of 'theories'! For example, I don't think social behavior, which is ultra-complex, is not 'hard-wired' into our brains at all. I think it is compressed, just like a 'ZIP' file, in our genes, and thus useless. So the genes build the brain, and then the brain itself un-zips those compressed files. For some reason, people with developmental conditions have trouble doing that un-zipping. Just my theory.

[DeVaul]

Beautiful drawing, Elaine.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

The DNA of other parts of the body trigger actions in the brain via 'timing' which causes various actions to begin or cease depending on how much time passes. Namely, we learn faster when young but remember less daily stuff but when we get to a certain age, the genes trigger a change in the chemistry of the brain's interactions with the body and retention of daily data increases while learning drops off very steeply.

Then we accumulate data rather than learning skills until the brain switches that off and goes into a new mode: I suggest this happens because it protects us from worrying about dying? Accidentally, this evolved.

Many humans who don't 'switch' to the new mode of thinking commit suicide because they fear death. This is probably why 'brain dead' people can 'live' so long: they have no fear at all so the body simply runs on and on, all the other gears happily engaged while the thinking mind is totally dead.

Of course, in nature, any slip up leads to instant death. It is only in civilization we see all these 'sleeping beauties' peacefully processing food and naught else.

[blues]

Man's brain rewired itself, doctors contend
Nerve connections severed in accident nearly 20 years ago

By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times | July 4, 2006

http:
//www.boston.com/news/nation

/articles/2006/07/04/mans_brain_rewired_itself_doctors

_contend/

LOS ANGELES -- Terry Wallis awoke from a coma-like state 19 years after tumbling over a guardrail in a pickup truck and falling 25 feet into a dry riverbed. Now doctors armed with some of the latest brain-imaging technology think they may know part of the reason why.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Possible axonal regrowth in late recovery from the minimally conscious state

American Society for Clinical Investigation

Received for publication October 3, 2005, and accepted in revised form April 4, 2006.

http:

//www.
jci.org/cgi/content

/abstract/116/7/2005?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT

=1&author1=Voss&andorexacttitle=and&andorexacttitleabs

=and&andorexactfulltext

=and&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec

We used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to study 2 patients with traumatic brain injury. The first patient recovered reliable expressive language after 19 years in a minimally conscious state (MCS); the second had remained in MCS for 6 years.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My friend who died of cancer was 'treated at home' by a 'hospice' organization. Since I have hyperlexia, I knew that she needed to be getting potassium in her IV solution, but they refused to do so for weeks on end. She developed aphasia and then fell over and severely injured her head and neck and shoulder. Awful! It took ten days of intensive potassium infusion at a nursing home before she was able to say good-by to her son and me. The hospice networks get billions of dollars from the government to make sure terminal patients 'die on time'., which saves them billions more! People like me, who have developmental conditions, know that we will be next. Most infants with developmental conditions die before leaving the hospital. If the doctors decide you are 'brain dead', 90% of the time they will just let you die, rather than try to save you. This is considered standard practice.

Hitler terminated us first. Terri Schiavo was killed in a Scientology-run hospice. They believe that life is not for the weak. They sue people a the drop of a hat. They always want to let the weak ones die. There is a huge movement among the crippled people to stop them, but the courts, the media ghouls, and the medical establishment make sure you will never hear of it.

Not Dead Yet:

http://www.notdeadyet.org/

Ordinary people can do the carpentry and plumbing of science and technology. But It's primarily up to those few of us with savant syndrome to lay the foundations. The so-called liberal 'netroots' bashed the living hell out of me when I deplored the removal of Terri's feeding tube. They thought they were being liberal. They were really being fascist dupes.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

I find stories of people who recover from comas interesting. Unfortunately, the prognosis isn't very good for them even if they 'wake up'. Most often, the mental confusion of being 'in the wrong time' overthrows the brain's ability to organize itself and they fade away fast.

There are so few people who recover that it is hard to generalize right now. I know my grandmother, who couldn't walk or talk or anything for many years, suddenly got out of bed and wandered around the nursing home, talking.

Then she died. We still don't understand how that was possible.

[blues]

My quess is that, if a person laid in bed for years, and then suddenly stood up and walked around, something would go wrong.

[blues]

Also, I had a marriage that went sour in three years to a woman who's brother was in a coma for about nine months, due to an auto accident, and he came out of it. He was a very nice fellow.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

The shorter the coma, the better the prognosis if they waken. Again, we don't understand how or why.

[JSmith]

"As baby boomer born in the middle of the birth surge, I hope we figure out how to keep our joint sanity in old age."

You think we actually have any 'joint sanity' to save? I was born in the mid-50s... and I'd say our generation has been one of the loopier ones on record.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Hooray for us!

[blues]

I'm getting a new bottle of wine this afternoon! February 19 is Loopy Boomer Day!

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Pour me a glass, Blues!

[supra vaider]

Beautiful!!! You truly have an eye for colour.

[supra for boy]

He is a good friend that speaks well of us behind our backs.

[moncler jacket]

Go for someone who makes you smile because it takes only a smile to make a dark day seem bright.

[moncler vest]

Go for someone who makes you smile because it takes only a smile to make a dark day seem bright.

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