The Root of Thought (17 page)

Maybe astrocytes are responsible for Harvey’s thoughts as he worked the machine and contemplated Einstein’s brain in his kitchen cabinet; astrocyte calcium is in motion when Sugimoto obsessed over a piece of the brain; and Diamond uses her astrocytes while she looked through the microscope at Einstein’s astrocytes. Regardless of the flaws of Diamond’s study, it will be incredibly interesting if the Einstein study proves to be true. However, we still do not know because it has not been pursued. Even Diamond concluded that the glial cells only provide the neurons with more “nourishment” as the notion in 1985 was that astrocytes were support cells for the neuron.

I think we can say now that astrocytes are not simple support cells or electrical insulators. The electrical conductance of neurons is increased and insulated with myelin production. As has been shown, the predominance of neurons is rooted in the work of the nineteenth century when most work in neuroscience was performed on peripheral neurons. The discovery by Galvani of an electrical force in the periphery axon, followed by the understanding that the brain and periphery were made of single cells like the rest of the body, led to the neuron doctrine. Cajal himself said that the function of the glia cell would be illuminated as techniques get better. And now that they have, we are beginning to realize that the neuron might be subordinate to glia.

We do know four things: Astrocytes turn over in the human cortex in normal humans, which is ironically evidenced by the heavy carbon studies in the brains of people alive during the atomic testing periods. Neurons do not. Also, astrocyte turnover is associated with areas of learning as evidenced by the studies started by Nottebohm and Alvarez-Buylla in the subventricular zone and hippocampus. Additionally, Einstein had
more astrocytes in the left parietal cortex when compared to 11 “normal” brains. Lastly, we know that astrocytes communicate to each other through the fluidity of calcium waves with complete control of the neuronal synapses in their space.

The constant turnover of astrocytes occurs throughout adult life, and to accelerate it, we need to work our minds. Mental effort, like a bodybuilder lifting weights to become strong, would create greater astrocyte turnover and enable more complex thought due to more abundant astrocytes. However, the ravages of time take their toll on us biologically. The glial turnover cannot keep up, the rest of the body is bombarded by the weather of earth over time, and we perish.

Astrocytes are also the only communicatory cell in the brain that monitor and attach to blood vessels that give them the capability to bring nourishment through the blood to the brain. When we think, we can increase blood flow to the brain that can work the brain like a muscle, flexing it when we concentrate and causing more astrocyte growth. Einstein was Arnold Schwarzenegger in this sense.

In humans, we have dementia as the result of aging. At the University of Kentucky, David Snowdon studied a population of Catholic nuns in the upper Midwest. When studied for incidence of dementia, Snowdon and colleagues noticed less dementia in nuns who performed constant mental exercises, such as crossword puzzles, word games, and knitting. Using your brain staves off dementia due to aging.

This explains why Einstein had more astrocytes. Astrocytes are the thinking cell. They are the only cells that multiply in the cortex throughout our lifespans, and because cell turnover is associated with learning, this leads us to believe that working your brain will enable you to think more complex thoughts, and your brain can stave off the horrors of dementia.

The nuns Snowdon studied didn’t perform strict learning tasks, but simply concentrated with their cortex. This cortical concentration could cause increased gliogenesis and might account for Einstein’s abundance of glia in the left parietal cortex.

For the average person who is not Einstein, and that means everyone, there are likely two ways to increase astrocyte growth in the brain. The first would be the equivalent of environmental enrichment that is provided for children, sort of like an adult
Baby Einstein
that increases your experience of your environment through traveling, reading, seeing
as much as possible, acquiring knowledge (William S. Burroughs medicinal treatment not recommended), and working with your hands, such as mechanics, knitting, and so on. The other is to make more attempts to recall information, to flow the blood to your brain and activate astrocytes that sit dormant instead of just saying “I don’t know” or simply resorting to the Internet without effort—although reading and acquiring new information through the Internet is probably a good thing.

Einstein’s abundance of astrocytes could have been a genetic predisposition to producing cells or it could have been environmental. However, as we know from studies on brain aging, most destruction of the brain seems to be environmental in nature. There are some genetic causes of diseases, but usually a genetic predisposition to disease leads to early onset in the brain and the disease occurs before old age. In most brain disease, the cause is not genetic and happens randomly, indicating that you have more control over your ability to think up through your old age. Therefore, increasing your astrocyte production may be an environmental process.

The other idea is that Einstein could have had a massive growth of astrocytes at an early age instead of them growing steady over his lifetime. But either way, we know that astrocytes grow and multiply throughout life, so it is possible that Einstein had one massive moment where his astrocytes propagated and then continued at a normal pace, or it occurred gradually but at a higher rate than a normal mind.

Cell division in our brain is an asexual process; an astrocyte splits and then its daughter cell becomes a fully functioning cell, and when it is extinguished, it dies. It comes full circle, just like Einstein’s brain. In his book
Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain
, Michael Paterniti writes about his drive across the country with Dr. Harvey. In the trunk of a Buick Skylark, Einstein’s brain sloshed around in formaldehyde. Paterniti reveals at the end that Harvey, now in his 90s, has since given the brain to pathologist Elliot Krauss at Princeton Medical Center.

Flex your brain to increase the amount of astrocytes, the seat of imagination, creativity, and thought in the cortex. Based on the evidence that has mounted in the last 20 years, combined with the work on Einstein’s brain, we have moved mightily toward understanding the brain as a more subtle structure than the neural lighting storm. It needs work like a muscle to maintain its ability and it can grow after intense thought.
And the growth and thought occur in glia in the cortical astrocyte. The glial cell turnover occurs during your whole life, and if you work your mind and keep growing new astrocytes, it keeps your mind fresh. As Bob Dylan says, “I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.”

Abraham, C.
Possessing Genius: The True Account of the Bizarre Odyssey of Einstein’s Brain
. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003.

Diamond, M.C., A.B. Scheibel, G.M. Murphy, and T. Harvey. “On the Brain of a Scientist: Albert Einstein.”
Experimental Neurology
, 88, 198–204, 1985.

Fields, R.D. “The Other Half of the Brain.”
Scientific American
, March, 2004.

Paterniti, M.
Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain
. New York, NY: Delta, Random House, 2000.

Snowdon, D.A. “Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease: Lessons from the Nun Study.”
Gerontologist
, 37: 150–156, 1997.

Emus don’t get drunk and if they did, we wouldn’t know why. If a bear smokes weed, we don’t know what it feels while high. If you do, you assume you know what you experience. And you assume that your experiences are similar to other human beings because you are of the same species. You can communicate what you experience to other humans, as Baudelaire does in
The Poem of Hashish
, “The drunkenness, throughout its duration, it is true, will be nothing but an immense dream, thanks to the intensity of its colors and the rapidity of its conceptions. But it will always keep the idiosyncrasy of the individual. The man has desired to dream; the dream will govern the man.”

Like drugs, the same also goes for dreams. Unless, that is, your parietal-occipital-temporal junction of the cortex is lesioned after an injury. Then, you will be incapable of dreaming or at least incapable of remembering your dreams. Astrocytes in this area of the cortex are abundant and produce calcium waves. This is the area of the cortex in Einstein’s brain that had more astrocytes than the average person has. He must have had fantastic dreams.

From about age four on, after our explosion of astrocytes from birth, we begin to experience memories and dreams. The human dream is evidence of the sporadic ripples of calcium waves. The inner workings of the astrocyte is built in a manner to enable short puffs of calcium release. Like rain on a lake, the ripples from sporadic calcium puffs in the brain might be the seat of imagination or creativity. And therefore, it is the stuff of dreams.

When we dream, our body is thought to be resting from our intense electrical neuron firing throughout the day. Our sensory inputs and motor outputs are constantly active. One way to study them is to use the same techniques originally pioneered in the nineteenth century by
Fritsch and Hitzig to study electrical firing in the brain (without removal of the skull). For more than a century, researchers have taken their ideas to perform electroencephalographs (EEG). A researcher places electrodes on the scalp, which theoretically studies the electrical activity inside the brain. The EEG from a person sleeping falls into a monotonous predictable pattern as opposed to the sporadic EEG of wakefulness.

EEGs are a lot like the duck-billed platypus. We know they exist, but we’re not sure what they mean. Dreams are thought to occur when the pattern changes in electrical firing after falling into a deep sleep. This pattern of activity might be instigated by calcium waves.

Without sensory information reaching the brain, we are able to retrieve thoughts and images. The EEG activity during sleep occurs in several different stages—one stage that has received a lot of attention is the rapid eye movement phase or REM sleep. This was previously believed to be the only time when we dream. However, now we know that dreaming can occur throughout our sleep. As we are shut off from the world, the ripples in our brain can spread and fire adjacent neurons leading to REM activity. However, the lack of integration from our senses results in the randomness and surreal nature of the experience.

Dreaming might not be as random as we think. It’s possible astrocytes have been inundated with information as we make new experiences, and at night, they need to grow more cells to gain greater capacity for processing and solidify connections with their neuronal counterparts to better act on the new information the next day.

Many of us have experienced a tough day where we tire quickly after being bombarded by incessant experiences. We need to sleep, or reboot, to be fresh again for the next day. Throughout our waking state, our astrocytes could be developing in areas pertaining to our experiences. New astrocytes at night would need to make solid neuronal connections so we can act on our experiences better the next time we encounter them. The rapid eye movements seen in REM sleep could be glia experimenting with the neuronal firing to make sure their connections are solid.

Dreams follow experience. Imagine seeing a car going 50 miles per hour on a city street hit a pedestrian. The person flies halfway up the block and lands in a grotesque bloody heap, his limbs askew at awkward angles. Bystanders run in horror or stand with their mouths agape. This would leave an impression that would filter into your dreams. Just as the
instant of winning the lottery or giving birth to a child would influence your dreams.

Monotony, such as working in a plastics factory making shovel handles, computer monitors, or letter trays all day with each new piece of plastic popping out of the mold every 30–40 seconds, can seep into dreams. However, on the weekend or at night, we can break it up with activity and entertainment.

We tend to have foreboding or sad dreams if we have been paranoid or insecure that day. And if we’ve seen a funny movie, maybe our dreams can be more comedic. It is easier to instigate a calcium wave from a puff in a group of astrocytes that has been primed. The percolating calcium raindrops will more ready explode into a full-fledged wave traversing many astrocytes.

When we are sleeping, these waves have nowhere to go but stay in our thoughts. We can have waves corresponding to thoughts throughout our brain, but long-distance communication through neurons to muscles is impossible; all that remains is the disjointed integration we experience in dreams. We have no feedback with our senses to reassure our thoughts.

Psychologists have believed for some time that our dreams are meaningful. This might be true. They might be triggered in the waves of our most dominant astrocytes, the ones used the most from the pool of our active thought while awake. Maybe we have a recurring dream as the calcium waves from a particular population of astrocytes continually dominate the night. Or maybe astrocytes that haven’t been used spark puffs and waves at night as a way to get activity when the more active astrocytes repair their machinery.

It was believed that neurons laid down new memories by making stronger connections through synaptic growth in areas that have been used more often by our brain. Strength of wiring does not occur first in the astrocyte-dominated theory of information storage. Astrocytes grow in areas that are used the most. This growth contributes to the overall pool where sporadic calcium waves occur in dreams.

If we try to retrieve information from something that happened a long time ago, we might first go through avenues in our brain we are familiar with, but when we reach the populations we are searching for, the complexity will have increased with the excess growth. There is more life in a jungle than a desert and more to growing astrocytes than the electrical wasteland of a static neuron.