Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot by Richard Restak M.D

Author:Richard Restak, M.D. [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307421302
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Published: 2009-03-14T05:00:00+00:00

Figure J A schematic drawing of the link involving the cerebral hemispheres, the hypothalamus, and the adrenal glands. This pathway is important in mediating the stress response.

Stress produces just the opposite effect—a loss instead of a gain of cells—in another part of the brain, the hippocampus. For instance, PTSD victims, as well as monkeys subjected to experimentally administered forms of stress, lose neurons in the hippocampus, the initial encoding site for the establishment of a memory.

Indeed, if sufficient hippocampal cells die off, this vitally important brain structure actually shrinks in size. Both PTSD and severe depression can lead to cell loss and resulting hippocampal atrophy. And the greater the stress, the greater the hippocampal atrophy, as suggested from a study correlating increased combat exposure among veterans and decreased hippocampal size.

What’s more, today’s stress can exert future repercussions. Military veterans with PTSD that resulted from their war experiences still expressed elevated CRF levels when tested a quarter of a century later! And when adults who had been abused as children experience stress, their ACTH overreacts, suggesting that their early life traumas have forced both CRH and ACTH into permanent overdrive.

In short, there are a lot of sound, neurological reasons to get your stress response under optimum control. By far the most effective method for reducing stress involves conscious modifications of the processes controlled by the autonomic nervous system. The easiest to modify is your breathing rate.

Whenever you’re excited or overly exerting yourself, you tend to breathe deeper and faster in order to increase the level of available oxygen. With more oxygen in the blood, the body is prepared for emergency situations, the so-called flight or fight response. While this response can be lifesaving under threatening conditions, it’s extremely harmful under most daily circumstances. Rapid respiration tricks the brain into responding as if an emergency exists.

Panic disorder represents an extreme example of an inappropriate flight or fight respiratory response. A person suffering from panic disorder suddenly becomes afflicted with a sense of impending doom. In response to this feeling, he or she begins taking rapid, shallow breaths. With further progression of the attack, the person experiences a sensation of restricted or compromised breathing. This misperception provokes the person into breathing even harder and faster. Eventually, this combination of a subjective sense of suffocation and the ensuing efforts to combat the sensation via compensatory overbreathing leads to an escalation of the panic and in many instances flight to the nearest emergency room.

When seen by the doctor, the panicked patient is caught up in a vicious cycle: his fear-induced rapid breathing is bringing about an imbalance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood. This imbalance leads to more panic and, in compensation, even more rapid breathing. While sedative medications can be depended upon to break the panic, a similar result can often be achieved simply by getting the person to breathe more slowly. In this case, a change in the sufferer’s mental attitude plays the major role in bringing about positive change.

Of course, panic disorder is just that: a disorder.

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