It's going on 10 PM. I'm just about to get some serious sleep after a full day at the Eighth International Conference on Bipolar Disorder taking place in Pittsburgh. The image comes from a PowerPoint presentation in a morning talk by Husseini Manji on the fine points of BAG-1, a protein which seems to prevent glucocorticoid receptors from migrating to the nucleus of the neuron, if you know what I mean.
Let's put it this way, when glucocorticoid succeeds in its migration bad things happen.
It was heavy duty on the brain science this morning. We're not talking "imbalance of chemicals of the brain," Dr Manji reminded his audience. Instead, think of mood disorders as "impairments of synaptic and neural plasticity."
Don't worry if you don't understand any of this. I'm just giving you a feel for how my day went. Take my word for it, this is brain science 6.0. I'll be better able to break it down for you when I have a clear brain. To bed ...
This is John McManamy, live - well, actually brain dead - from Pittsburgh.
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1 comment:
John,
You write about your day at the bipolar conference:
It was heavy duty on the brain science this morning. We're not talking "imbalance of chemicals of the brain," Dr Manji reminded his audience. Instead, think of mood disorders as "impairments of synaptic and neural plasticity."
We're being told by experts to quit describing mood disorders as chemical imbalances. What metaphor or analogy shall we deploy to replace chemical imbalance?
Impairments of plasticity?!! Holy imagination failure, is this the best we can do, Batman?
There's no poetry in plasticity. End of rant. lol
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