2008 Podcast Show Notes

Episode #0063 — July 25, 2008
Time: 00:16:37 | Size:15.2 MB

Balintfy: Welcome to the 63rd episode of NIH Research Radio with news about the ongoing medical research at the National Institutes of Health--the nation's medical research agency. I'm your host Joe Balintfy. Coming up in this episode we hear about how Jazz musicians improvised while having their brains scanned. And we’ll have an interview about the basics and promises of stem cell research. But first, a report on why after drug use has stopped, the brain still craves cocaine. That's next on NIH Research Radio.

(BREAK FOR PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT)

Researchers identify Brain Mechanism Underlying Cocaine Cravings

Balintfy: For this first story, we turn to Wally Akinso. He reports that scientists have identified a mechanism in the brain that helps to explain why craving for cocaine, and the risk of relapse, seems to increase in the weeks and months after drug use has stopped.

Akinso: It has to do with cues.

Vocci: We think there are a number of things both internal and external that trigger craving.

Akinso: Dr. Frank Vocci is the Director of the Division of Pharmacotherapies and Medical Consequences of Drug Abuse at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Vocci: Also with cocaine, cocaine primes itself. So the old George Carlin joke was-"what does cocaine make you feel like?" And the answer is it makes you feel like taking more cocaine.

Akinso: In a NIDA study, using rats, researchers demonstrated that after prolonged withdrawal from cocaine use, there is an increase in the number of proteins called AMPA glutamate receptors in a brain region which deals with motivation and reward. Exposure to environmental cues, such as people places and things, can trigger drug craving, often leading to relapse. Dr. Vocci talks about the long term implications of the findings.

Vocci: The findings suggest two things. One is that there are downstream effects of taking cocaine that occurred during cocaine abstinence. And that if we want to keep people from relapsing; what we have to do is to somehow modulate that effect. Now we can modulate that effect with an AMPA antagonist. And there are AMPA antagonists that are being developed as drugs. And the AMPA antagonist, some of them are being developed as anti-epileptic drugs; but they can also be evaluated in substance dependence too.

Akinso: AMPA antagonists are drugs which help block or dampen AMPA receptors. Dr. Vocci says that the findings also suggest that medications could be developed to block atypical AMPA receptors in the reward and motivation area of the brain, thus reducing cocaine and other drug cravings. This is Wally Akinso at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.

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Creativity and the Brain

Balintfy: In this next feature, I’m happy to introduce my colleague Jeff Dehoff. He reports on a study showing that when jazz musicians are improvising, a large region of their brains is shut down, while another small region is highly active.

[music]

Dehoff: Hear that?

[music]

Dehoff: What is being played is called the Scale paradigm and is based on a simple C major scale. Now listen.

[music]

Dehoff: Notice the difference? This sample is based on the first, but this time the musicians were asked to improvise. These music samples are two of the same pieces used in a study, conducted by researchers the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). The study showed that when jazz musicians are engaged in the highly creative and spontaneous activity known as improvisation — what you just heard in that second sample — a large region of the brain involved in monitoring performance is shut down, while a small region involved in organizing self-initiated thoughts and behaviors is highly active.

Braun: We asked six professional jazz musicians to, essentially, jam for us.

Dehoff: Dr. Allen Braun, chief of the NIDCD's Division of Intramural Research Language Section is one of the study authors.

Braun: We had them play a couple of different pieces, one being very simple and the other being a little more complex that served as the baseline. One was a simple quarter note scale and the other was a piece that was over-learned -- given to them a couple of days before -- and they memorized it. They had to lie on their backs while we scanned their brains. It was not the ideal state to produce music, but they were professionals, and they did it quite well. We had them improvise with the same sorts of constraints, but instead of going up and down the scale, they went all over and created some spontaneous piece of what turned out to be fairly decent music.

Dehoff: You may be asking yourself at this point, "If I'm not a professional jazz musician, what does this mean for me?" Well, the researchers propose that this and several related patterns are likely to be key indicators of a brain that is engaged in highly creative thought. Because of the many variables involved when the brain is thinking creatively it has been, until now, difficult for scientists to study. Dr. Braun, explains how music was used in this study to help identify the region of the brain responsible for creative thought.

Braun: Well, we've been interested for a while in what sort of brain processes enable creative behavior; make it possible for people to produce creative materials. That's one of the reasons that music appealed to us. You want a control for sensory motor activity. It seemed to be easy to control for the excursion of the fingers on a piano by creating pieces that were over learned like the scales we used. That would be the baseline condition. Then we could allow the subjects, the jazz artists, to improvise in the scanner. The difference, when we subtracted one from the other, would give you what was happening during the creative process.

Dehoff: From the researcher's perspective, here is what is happening in the brains of the artists as they improvise:

Braun: What we saw was that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that does many functions — but one of them is to construct goal-oriented behaviors, sequences of behaviors that are well thought out, well planned, and to monitor oneself when those behaviors are being executed; make corrections; watch what you do, and change things in mid-course if they don't follow the pre-determined plan — those areas were deactivated, as you might expect. These subjects were simply not watching themselves, they just let it go.

[music]

Dehoff: Regina Carter, a professional jazz musician, describes what it is she thinks about when she is improvising:

Carter: If I'm comfortable with the cord structures that are under me, if I'm comfortable with the environment, if I'm comfortable with the musicians I'm playing with, and if it's a tune I really like, I usually just can let go and let the music come out . So, I'm not really.I'm not thinking, if there is such a thing, you know, where my mind is totally clear and the music has just taken over.

Dehoff: While researchers were able to pinpoint differences in how the brain functions when the musicians are improvising, they conclude that there is no single creative area of the brain. Instead, they found that when a subject shifted from a control task to improvisation, a strong and consistent pattern of activity was observed throughout the brain. Dr. Braun says he is interested in continuing this research:

Braun: We'd like to follow this up to look at other domains and see if this sort of generalizes to all forms of creative behavior. I don't know if we'll get around to looking at classical music. Classical music typically isn't associated with improvisation, but classical music involved a lot of improvisation in the nineteenth century and it would be interesting to look at that as well. I was contacted right away when this hit the Internet by a guy in L.A. who does rap music -- he does a kind of rap called free-styling which is spontaneously rhyming. And, this would lend itself perfectly to this sort of behavior - looking at a language domain or the interface between language and music.

Dehoff: This is Jeff Dehoff for NIH Research Radio at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

Balintfy: Thank you Jeff. Now stay tuned, coming up, an interview about the basics of stem cell research.

(BREAK FOR PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT)

Balintfy: At a recent symposium here at NIH, we talked to Lesley Stewart. She’s the Science Policy Advisor and the Director of Legislative Affairs for the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. She also works for the NIH Stem Cell Task Force. For this interview, we asked her about the basics of stem cell research. She reminds that scientists and researchers use different types of stem cells.

Stewart: So, an induced pluripotent stem cell, the term that they gave it, is a result of reprogramming, and what happens during that process is they take, say, a skin cell and they use certain factors to revert it back to an embryonic-like state. And they use sort of a chemical mix to do that, and by doing so it’s similar to an embryonic stem cell, but more research needs to be done to decide what the differences are between those two types of stem cells.

Whereas embryonic stem cells have the most potential in terms of differentiation, they can differentiate into all the different types of cell types, whereas adult stem cells are somewhat limited in the type of cell type they can differentiate into. And then there was also mention of cord blood stem cells and amniotic stem cells. Each has a different area of origin, and each has a different ability to differentiate it to a different cell type. So that’s sort of a breakdown of the different types of stem cells.

Balintfy: But a key thing about these types of stem cells and the research in general is that more research needs to be done, right?

Stewart: Definitely.

Balintfy: And as discussed in the symposium, there are no stem cell treatments as yet either?

Stewart: Right, we’re many years off from therapeutic applications. In terms of other types of information that we can learn from stem cells, I would say that drug toxicity testing, which is being used currently, its helpful if you use, say -- if you differentiate a stem cell to a cardiomyocite, and then you’re able to test a certain drug on a human cell instead of testing an animal model. That can currently be done, and that would be very beneficial and more efficient in terms of deciding how is that going to impact a potential patient.

So, there are areas that can be used currently, like I said with adult stem cells, bone marrow transplants have been done for years. So, there are areas right now that are being used. There still is a lot of work that needs to be done, and there is a need to research all types of stem cells to decide which has the best potential for therapeutic application because at this point we don’t know which type of stem cell is going to have the best possibility to treat a given disease or disorder.

Balintfy: What is a good take home or take away message summarizing the current state of stem cell research?

Stewart: I think the take home would be to be cautious about some of the information that you get in the media and to know that there are both sides to the issue, that some are very, very positive and some are very, very negative, and to just take it with caution and be a very conscientious consumer of information. And just to know that, yes, there’s a lot of potential with stem cell therapies. We’re far off from those being readily available in the clinic at this point, but with additional research and with more and more research towards this area, there is a huge potential in the future for this to treat a variety of diseases and disorders.

It’s not going to happen in a year or two years. It might be 10 years away, but there are going to be potential discoveries that’s going to revolutionize medicine as we know it now.

So, just in terms of even the knowledge we obtain from learning how a cell decides to differentiate and become the different types of cells that it does, and there’s all types of knowledge that we don’t have that we can potentially learn through more and more research in that area.

Balintfy: Is there anything else that I may have missed that you think is important to be mentioned or emphasized?

Stewart: I think, overall, again, was just to really be careful about the information that you receive, to be a very conscientious consumer of information, to do as much research as you can.

And that NIH supports all types of research on all types of stem cells.

Balintfy: What’s the website?

Stewart: http://stemcells.nih.gov... There’s a link called “human embryonic stem cell research,” or “stem cell research.” If they click on that link, we have a comprehensive amount of information on the President’s policy, on the different stem cell lines available for funding, on recent science advances. We have a stem cell mailbox to contact our office. We’ll be more than happy to answer any questions that people have. We keep legislation updates on what Congress is doing. So, a variety of different types of information and also educational resources for the public in terms of -- even for school teachers or just if you want to educate yourself in general, there’s that information available to them.

Balintfy: Lesley Stewart, thank you very much. For another look at this topic, we’ll be producing a video podcast episode in the coming weeks with more interviews and information from the symposium. Check out our vodcast “I on NIH” by visiting www.nih.gov/news and clicking on the link “NIH Vodcast.” You can also look for individual reports from the vodcast on YouTube.

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Balintfy: That's it for this episode of NIH Research Radio. Please join us again on Friday, August 8 when our next edition will be available for download. I'm your host, Joe Balintfy. Thanks for listening.

NIH Research Radio is a presentation of the NIH Radio News Service, part of the News Media Branch, Office of Communications and Public Liaison in the Office of the Director at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services.

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