Thrive's Foster Gamble

Lilou interviewed Foster Gamble on his movie THRIVE, for those of you that are interested. I slipped the DVD into my husband's stocking this year. Apparently, the film is doing well all over the world.

Wake Up Interview

For all of you that watched the movie Wake Up, and might like to hear more about the documentary, Coast to Coast interviewed both Jonas and Steve Hutinksky on December 1st.

The interview was quite interesting as it's been awhile since the documentary was released. Oprah will be showing the film on her network, OWN, as well.

Here is the trailer to the movie if you don't know what I'm talking about:

Dream Action, Real Brain Activation

A neat little study has brought Inception one step closer to reality. The authors used fMRI to show that dreaming about doing something causes similar brain activation to actually doing it.

The authors took four guys who were all experienced lucid dreamers - able to become aware that they're dreaming, in the middle of a dream. They got them to go to sleep in an fMRI scanner. Their mission was to enter a lucid dream and move their hands in it - first their left, then their right, and so on. They also moved their eyes to signal when they were about to move their hands.

Unfortunately, only one of the intrepid dream-o-nauts succeeded, even though each was scanned more than once. Lucid dreaming isn't easy you know. Two didn't manage to enter a lucid dream. One thought he'd managed it, but the data suggested he might have actually been awake.

But one guy made it and the headline result was that his sensorimotor cortex was activated in a similar way to when he made the same movements in real life, during the lucid dream -  although less strongly. Depending on which hand he was moving in the dream, the corresponding side of the brain lit up:

EEG confirmed that he was in REM sleep and electromyography confirmed that his muscles were not in fact being activated. (During REM sleep, an inhibitory mechanism in the brain prevents muscle movement. If the EMG shows activity this is a sign that you're actually partially awake).

They also repeated the experiment with another way of measuring brain activation, NIRS. Out of five dudes, one made it. Interesting this showed the same pattern of results - weak sensorimotor cortex activation during movement - but it also showed stronger than normal supplementary motor area activation, which is responsible for planning movements.

This is rather cool but in many ways not surprising. After all, if you think about it, dreaming presumably involves all of the neural structures that are involved in really perceiving or doing whatever it is you're dreaming about. Otherwise, why would we experience it so clearly as being a dream about that thing?

It may be, however, that lucid dreaming is different, and that the motor cortex isn't activated in this way in normal dreams. I suppose it depends what the dream was about.

That raises the interesting question of what someone with brain damage would dream about. On the theory that dream experiences come from the same structures as normal experiences, you shouldn't be able to dream about something that you couldn't do in real life... I wonder if there's any data on that?

Dresler M, Koch SP, Wehrle R, Spoormaker VI, Holsboer F, Steiger A, Sämann PG, Obrig H, & Czisch M (2011). Dreamed Movement Elicits Activation in the Sensorimotor Cortex. Current biology : CB PMID: 22036177

The Real "Contagion" Virus

Seen Contagion yet?

It's pretty scary. A new epidemic disease comes out of nowhere and starts killing everyone. It infects the brain - victims suffer seizures, or fall into a coma, and die. It spreads like wildfire. Humanity's only hope lies in Lawrence Fishburne and Kate Winslet.

Luckily, that's fiction. But only just.

In the movie, the killer bug is called "MEV-1", but it might as well have been called the Nipah virus, because it was closely based on a real disease of the same name. So much so that this post about Nipah contains movie spoilers.

The Nipah Virus came to the world's attention in late 1998. There was an outbreak of a severe fever accompanied in many cases by encephalitis (viral infection of the brain) in Malaysia and Singapore. 276 patients were recorded. 40% of them died.

In the initial outbreak, there was probably no person-to-person transmission of the virus. Rather, only people who came into contact with Malaysian pigs - mainly farmers and butchers - caught the disease. Over a million pigs were culled in 1999 to try and contain the outbreak, and this seemed to be effective.

But since then, there have been several other smaller Nipah outbreaks in Asia, one almost every year in fact. In some of these, person to person transmission has been detected, notably in Bangladesh and India. The fatality rate in these more recent outbreaks has also been higher (70-90%). Luckily, unlike in the movie, it doesn't seem to be very contagious - so far. Most years have seen only 10 or 12 cases. But who knows what the future holds?

The virus is distantly related to measles, but is much more severe. Symptoms can begin anywhere from 4 days to 2 months after infection, but generally within 1 to 2 weeks. More recent outbreaks seem to have a shorter incubation period. The symptoms include fever, headache, vomiting, seizures, muscular jerks, and altered consciousness (confusion, coma).

Even after the initial infection is over, a minority of patients (4-8%) later suffer a relapse encephalitis. The virus seems able to remain dormant in the body before re-emerging to infect the brain again. Survivors may suffer neurological problems such as epilepsy, movement disorders, fatigue, and others. This is especially common following relapse encephalitis.

Where did it come from? It turns out that various strains of Nipah-like viruses are common in certain bats that inhabit various Asian countries, specifically fruit bats of the Pteropus genus, aka "flying foxes". The bats don't get sick, but infected bats are highly contagious, excreting the virus in their urine.

The virus seems to have made the leap into humans not once but several times, from different kinds of bats. Each outbreak could represent a new crossover event. Often there was an intermediate animal host, such as the domestic pigs in Malaysia .

Nipah is a classic zoonotic disease - it jumps from animals to humans. Zoonoses are scary for two reasons. They're new to humans, so humans haven't had a chance to develop immunity. And they may be especially deadly, because they haven't evolved not to be deadly to us.

Viruses and bacteria don't actually want to kill you. They want you alive, so that you can keeping breathing, walking, having sex, and otherwise spreading them. So pathogens tend to evolve to be less lethal to their primary hosts. Unfortunately, that's only good news if you are the primary host, and in the case of zoonoses, we're not. Bats don't get sick, but we do.

Lo, M., & Rota, P. (2008). The emergence of Nipah virus, a highly pathogenic paramyxovirus Journal of Clinical Virology, 43 (4), 396-400 DOI: 10.1016/j.jcv.2008.08.007

Movies Worth Watching

I don't know if you've noticed, but I've built quite a video library over on my sidebar. All of these movies I can personally vouch for, but one or two stand out in terms of content, how easy they are to understand, and how interesting they are to watch from a visual point of view. Two are made by the same company, Avaiya, and of those two I would like to highlight one of them today.

Leap! Let Your Adventure Begin. I found this film to be interesting, amusing, and perfect for someone who is new to the whole consciousness field of understanding. From the movie jacket:


"Each of us is cast into this amazing Human Game. For many of us, we've created countless situations and storylines to hide our true power and limit our experiences while playing. Ike Allen and Chad Cameron have created Leap! to remind you that you're here to be the main character and hero in this amazing creation and ultimately, uncover your own meaning, totality and True Identity. The only question now is will you take the Leap! or stay asleep?"


Here is the trailer:





I have watched several more that did not make it to the sidebar. They may have been interesting, but not well-made, or vice-versa. In other words, not worth your money. But if you are a visual learner and would like to understand more about how science is on the cutting edge of some really fantastic leaps in understanding, I would highly recommend this film. I can guarantee it will make you feel good!


I'm also open to suggestions from you. Watch any good movies lately?