Convoluted

[beetiger]

(Perhaps this all belongs over in projectmothra, but somehow I wanted it here.)

This is about the time in fetal development, if everything is going normally, that the moth's supposed to be beginning to develop the folds and convolutions typical of the human brain.

In the meantime, I keep feeling more and more scattered and incoherent.There's data out there that says that the human brain shrinks during pregnancy. A news report on NPR this morning said that new research shows that people with untreated serious depression over long periods of time show atrophy of the hippocampus.

And I'm beginning to wonder if this journal's starting to look like something out of "Flowers for Algernon".

Comments

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

I'm soooo skeptical of these attempts to apply biological factoids to humanistic issues of daily life -- especially when they're filtered through a story-hungry journalist. :) There are just too many counterpoints which might be missed, and too many individual variances to assume anything practice from them. They just sink too often into the kind of lazy logic that fuels Drug War PSA's... A-ha, but this chemical damages chromosomes! A-ha, we find out 20 years later that milk damages chromosomes under similarly artificial lab conditions! Whoops. Oh, and are oats good for you or not this week? I can't remember. ;)

In the case of the brain-shrinkage study, for instance, my first big question would be how important the changes during pregnancy are compared to non-pregnancy related changes which don't get discussed. Is the cognitive "impairment" greater than, say, that which you get from ordinary job stress? Is it any worse than the mental sluggishless most of us get first thing in the morning? Is it worse than being on allergy medication? Will you get a greater drop in functional IQ four years from now from dealing with a cranky, bouncy Mothra firing peas at you with a spoon? :)

And what parts of the brain shrink? (I hate to sound rapidly Berkeleyan-PC, but this might be one of those areas where gender-biased testing issues might be worth some thought?) Are people consistently losing those (say) 5-10 points of IQ because their verbal skills are impaired? Their math skills? Or are you just going to suffer a barely perceptible loss in your oh-so-vital ability to turn pentominoes upside-down in your head? :)

Sorry if I'm all soapboxy about this, it's not you, it's just fluffy "science" news. :) This is a major issue of interest and you have a LOT of my sympathy. When I first started showing signs of a dysautonomic disorder, the bouts of confusion and attention deficit really upset me, because they struck at the one part of my body I ever felt any pride or confidence in. I wasted a lot of time worrying about whether some core part of me was disappearing -- worrying about whether on some fundamental level I wasn't just a piece of meat, and whether that took my destiny completely out of my hands. I'm finally starting to gain some faith, though, in the resilience and adaptability of the brain...

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

They actually didn't do more than weakly imply any correlation beteen the physical shrinkage and any actual cognitive changes in the primary study. The measure they used was total brain volume (in some before and after patients, I think).

I don't have the primary research on the IQ study, but the basic evaluation was to take a bunch of women who had been previously tested to be at the same IQ, and retest them against each other on some measure or other when some of them were pregnant. The pregnant women scored in a the lowest 5% of their peers. I'm guessing fatigue's a major component on this one.