White wash

If I had even a bit of clout or medical command to go wheel all sorts of brain scan machines to the Senate or wherever else they are having a probe into the truth, I’d shove these machines on to a truck together with some neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists who think I am nuts but still like me enough go to those places. Then, we’d hook all the brains of witnesses and probers alike to watch their brains on screens and have the brain scientists tell us what parts of their brain are active when they are saying what they are saying. At worst, we could all drown and be buried in scientific jargon but at best, we could have a better understanding of what really happens inside the heads of those, who by their own admission, did what they did “without thinking,” “out of compassion,” “they were told to” or because “it was just the right thing to do.” I am particularly keen on looking at what happens to the brain of the one who says “your honor” or of the one who is called “your honor” a gazillion times a day. Is it just my irreverent brain or does it not just lose its meaning by the 312,564th time it is uttered or heard within a few hours?

I have no idea if this hypothetical Scan-Your-Politician’s (or public servant’s) Brain Day will solve our current “truth crisis” but it would be extremely interesting to watch the brains of our elected officials in action as well as their “witnesses” and see where and how much “signal” they have within their own heads. And if these scans really could happen, our gracious subjects would surely be grateful that science is always moving forward. Why, had this crisis happened a few years ago, scientists would only be looking at half their brains — the gray part known to house the neurons and the synapses (connections between neurons) that make for brain signals. But the good news now comes from the March 2008 issue of the Scientific American. The article entitled White Matter by Dr. Douglas Fields is also supported by articles that have appeared in the journals Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and Neuron in the last three years. Science, armed with a new technology called diffusion tensor imaging, is now able to look at the other half of the brain structure — the white matter — previously thought to be merely a passive bed for the firework display of the gray matter neurons. Whew, now there are more places to look for hope if the initial gray search among politicians fails.

There are several slices of insight from this new research: One slice shows us that the gray parliament is not the ultimate seat of power because current evidence shows that the gray and the white of your brain affect each other’s main work. (Incidentally, women have relatively more white than gray matter.) If you can imagine your neurons (which rest on your gray matter) to be like lampposts that only light when they are connected to another lamppost, then your white matter is the highway through which these lampposts send their signals. Second slice of insight suggests that parts of these “connections” are generously coated with some kind of crystalline gel called “myelin” while some parts are thinly coated or even without it. With lots of myelin, these highways can conduct high-speed traffic for brain signal transmission while less myelin slows down transmission. This is part of the complex system needed to coordinate the brain signals coming from many parts of the brain. These signals have to arrive at the same time to perform a given function and the white matter, awash with myelin, is responsible for timing the transmittal of these signals. Like in things bigger than neurons, a fast and furious one is nothing compared to one with impeccable timing.

The last slice of insight in this week’s science scan is particularly useful for me to know so I could be more patient to teenagers. Research showed that we do not get all the myelin we can get by the time we are born. Brain scans show that this myelin covers what it has to cover in our brains by our mid-20s and in some cases, to the early 30s. Now what is even more useful to know is that this myelin creeps up through that period from that part of your brain where your shirt collar reaches, to your forehead where your frontal lobes are. The frontal lobes are the parts responsible for high-level reasoning, planning and judging and these of course are areas where teenagers are not known to garner top honors for. So when your teenager is behaving like a wayward alien, you may want to get some patience from the fact that despite the mounds of gel he has bestowed outside his or her skull, he or she is still waiting for myelin — the gel that really matters.

From these slices in our review of the article, we now have a good working explanation of why we need to learn certain things at certain ages, especially during childhood, to be able to attain a mastery of a given craft or discipline. This is because myelin formation is still actively happening and myelin sort of “cements” the intricacy and rigor of the craft early on and wires you to facilitate even better learning of the said craft to take you to higher levels. This is shown to be true in many fields especially in math, science, music and sports. In fact, in the Scientific American article and in the supporting study that appeared in Nature Neuroscience, they studied those who have had extensive piano training and their scans showed very well “gelled” white matters. Dr. Fields also makes us turn our heads to focus on those “windows of opportunity” in our lifetimes when it is best to learn something and increase the chances of having that stick to you as part of who you are. Researchers are still looking into how much, if any myelin formation happens way past our 30s.

If myelin came in ointment tubes you can rub on people’s foreheads, I would launch a campaign to generously spread it among teenagers to shorten their myelin wait (I think my own myelin spread has deteriorated enough to make me forget that I was also once a teenager.) And what about politicians and public servants? This myelin is some powerful gel but could myelin also cement a habit of truth as much as it does learning a craft? If it does, do you think $130 million worth of the imaginary gel in tubes would be enough?

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