Nora Volkow: Stress, Mood, Drug Abuse, and the Brain

Yesterday featured a piece based on Nora Volkow's talk to the 9th International Conference on Bipolar Disorder several days ago. Dr Volkow is the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and manages to moonlight as one of the world's leading brain scientists. Yesterday, we had a look at her work on functional resting connectivity. Today features a selection of slides from part of a much larger presentation dealing with co-occurring mood and substance use disorders. The slides pretty much do all the talking, so I'll keep my commentary brief.

Basically, combine stress with genetic vulnerability and bad things happen. Drug abuse involves much the same process. And, of course, the two interrelate. Lifetime drug abuse amongst bipolars is in the 60 percent range.

An under-active prefrontal cortex combined with an over-active amygdala is a recipe for disaster. There is no end to variations on this theme. This one involves a certain genetic variation (allele). Another variation involves kids, whose brains have yet to mature. As opposed to the heart, Dr Volkow pointed out, the brain takes 20 years to develop. Plenty of time for risk-taking activities, such as drug use. Meanwhile, early childhood social neglect impairs brain development. Too much amygdala action, not enough from the PFC and other areas.

Significantly, a good many of the shared candidate genes for bipolar, schizophrenia, and substance abuse have to do with neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity has a lot to do with how we react to our environment. If our neurons don't hold up well (such as to stress) and maintain cellular function, well, bad things only get worse. Neuroplasticity also plays a role in programmed brain development, all those gear changes that are supposed to represent smooth transitions into adulthood and beyond. Needless to say, for a good many of us, life is not a smooth transit.

Ah, dopamine.

This is your brain on drugs.

The brain may be highly differentiated, but with everything literally connected to everything in one way or another, mental illness tends to involve a system failure throughout the brain.

The Stress-Emotions Connnection

Yet another totally reworked article in my never-ending mcmanweb blow-everything-up-and-start-over project, edited for your reading pleasure ...

Stress is to mood what that iceberg was to the Titanic, with therapies increasingly geared toward neutralizing its vast destructive powers.  In a 2002 NIMH study, healthy subjects with a certain short variation (allele) to the serotonin transporter gene viewed images of scary faces as their brains were being scanned. The part of the brain which governs fear and arousal - the amygdala - lit up like a Christmas tree.

A year later, a study on a New Zealand population found that those with this very same short allele were far more at risk of depression after being exposed to four or more lifetime stressful events (including employment, finances, housing, health, and relationships) than their long-allele counterparts.

Vulnerability vs Resilience

Is mental illness a "vulnerability" disease? Are the lucky ones, in effect, genetically "resilient" to what life happens to throw their way? Or does life have a way of turning even resilient brains vulnerable?
At the 2002 American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting, Charles Nemeroff MD, PhD of Emory University asked his audience: "Is the biology of depression the biology of early trauma?"

In an experiment designed to startle lab rats by blowing an air puff in their faces, Dr Nemeroff and his colleagues found those who had been separated from their mothers as pups showed a greater stress response, with tissue samples revealing higher concentrations of the hormone CRF (corticotropin-releasing factor).

Women abused in childhood, Dr Nemeroff explained, end up with a sensitized brain system, where CRF receptors are to be found in abundance. Depressed patients have high concentrations of CRF in their cerebrospinal fluid.

A 2000 study that he co-authored with Christine Hein PhD found that women with a history of childhood abuse exhibited increased pituitary and autonomic responses to stress when given math tests and made to speak in public compared with the controls. This was especially true for the women with current depression and anxiety.

Stress Pathways

The stress response - fight or flight - kept our distant ancestors alert and alive long enough to pass on their genes, which certainly comes in handy in modern life, especially when a zeppelin is chasing you.

As Kurt Vonnegut describes it in his 1973 novel, "Breakfast of Champions":

My mind sent a message to my hypothalamus, told it to release the hormone CRF into the short vessels connecting my hypothalamus and my pituitary gland.
 
The CRF inspired my pituitary gland to dump the hormone ACTH into my bloodstream. My body had been making and storing ACTH for such an occasion. And nearer and nearer the zeppelin came.
 
And some of the ACTH in my bloodstream reached the outer shell of my adrenal gland, which had been making and storing glucocorticoids for such emergencies.
 
My adrenal gland added the glucocorticoids to my bloodstream. They went all over my body, changing glycogen into glucose. Glucose was a muscle food. It would help me fight like a wildcat or run like a deer.
 
And nearer and nearer the zeppelin came.
 
My adrenal gland gave me a shot of adrenaline, too. I turned purple as my blood pressure skyrocketed. The adrenaline made my heart go like a burglar alarm. It also stood my hair on end. It also caused coagulants to pour into my bloodstream, so, in case I was wounded, my vital juices wouldn't drain away.

Vonnegut is describing a neuro-endocrine loop known as the hypothalymus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis as it is supposed to act in dangerous situations. But what about when there are no zeppelins in sight, when we simply need to be on our toes? The abused and depressed women in the Heim-Nemeroff study exhibited a six-fold greater ACTH increase over the controls. In effect, these women - who only needed to be sufficiently alert to do math tests and speak in public - were being primed to flee attacking zeppelins.

Throw in an over-reactive amygdala and a picture begins to emerge of the human psyche on the breaking point. As Robert Sapolsky of Stanford describes it in a Sept 2003 article in Scientific American: "When we erroneously believe a stressor is about to happen we have entered the realm of neurosis, anxiety, and paranoia."

All those glucocorticoids Vonnegut was talking about don't simply evaporate. Stress has been linked to just about every physical illness imaginable, whether as a risk factor, a cause, or the triggering event.

In the brain, the neural synapses are flooded, setting the scene for excess glutamate to overstimulate brain cells, leading to neuronal loss and atrophy. In this sense, according to Husseini Manji MD, formerly of the NIMH, mood disorders may be regarded as fundamentally atrophic (ie stemming from brain cells in physical distress) rather than symptomatic.

Back to Freud, of All Things

Of all things, the Freudian-inspired DSM-I of 1952 and the DSM-II of 1968 - the ones that everyone ridicules as pre-modern and unscientific - may have gotten it right. Those early DSMs may have wrongly attributed serious mental illness to neurotic or psychotic-reactions, but they very correctly attributed the stresses of dealing with life as the driving force to these reactions.

The "modern" DSMs III and IV, with their exclusive focus on symptom check-lists, threw us off the scent.

Maybe stress can't account for everything going wrong with our brains, but it always needs to be the first place to look. Modern brain science, in effect, has simply relocated the stress dynamic from the metaphysical construct of the mind to the decidedly more prosaic meat housed inside our skulls.

But not just any old meat. We're talking highly specialized, intricately connected meat - live meat - as sensitive to present and past experience as photosensitive paper is to light. When our environment acts, our brain reacts.

But not blindly. Our stressful reactions are telling us something. That maybe, for instance, we need to get out of our denial and recognize that things at work or in our personal relationships are not okay. That maybe, while we have a chance, we have to change ourselves or change the situation around us. Because, if we don't, our depression or anxiety or mania is going to tell us the same thing, only in a much louder voice, with far fewer choices.

Our environment molds our brains, our brains mold our environment. Round and round it goes, a constant cycle of reaction and adjustment. We the vulnerable tend to have a harder time adapting and adopting, but this very insight also tends to be our best motivator.

Be hopeful, take the initiative, live well ...

Full stress article on mcmanweb

Is the Psychiatry of 1952 More Relevant to Our Recovery Than the Psychiatry of 2010?

From my keynote I gave to the DBSA Kansas State conference in Kansas in late April ...

Let’s turn to another researcher I heard speak in San Francisco.

This is a guy called Robert Sapolsky of Stanford. And he has dedicated his life to studying stress. So, Dr Sapolsky asks us to imagine a rat who has been trained to press a lever to avoid a mild shock.

Now, as he describes it:

The anticipation of mastery might induce a flood of dopamine to the frontal cortex and trigger pleasure. If the lever is disconnected, however, so that pressing it no longer prevents shocks, the rat will frantically press the lever repeatedly, attempting to gain control.

This, says Dr Sapolsky, is the essence of anxiety.

In human terms, I would describe it this way. Imagine waiting for a hot date to show up. The anticipation of a great night ahead triggers pleasure. But then the date doesn’t turn up on time. Pleasure changes to anxiety. And then it looks like the date will not turn up at all. So, to return to the rat, the real rat, not the no good bastard:

The shocks continue. The rat finds its attempts at coping useless. The rat basically gives up. Key neurotransmitters are depleted while stress hormones increase. In the words of Dr Sapolsky: The rat “has learned to be helpless, passive and involuted. If anxiety is a crackling, menacing brushfire, depression is a suffocating heavy blanket thrown on top of it."

That's a pretty good description, right? Says quite a lot about what we go through.

So, here you are. You’re all dressed up with nowhere to go. In the space of an hour or two, you have gone from pleasure to anxiety to depression.

Is this normal? Yeh, of course it is. The front end and the back end of the brain are working exactly as they should be. Yes, the result sucks, but if we have any kind of feelings at all, depressed is the state we’re supposed to be in.

Now, in a resilient brain, we will bounce back. Life may suck, but we cope, life goes on.

But suppose our brains are vulnerable. Say we don’t bounce back. Say we start thinking we’re worthless. Say we start over-ruminating. We lie in bed all day. And say this goes on for four months.

I’m going to finish up in a bit, but I want to throw another one at you here. I’m sure you’re aware that earlier this year the DSM-5 Task Force came out with a draft. Are people aware of that? Okay, good.

To keep it short: The DSM is due for an update in 2003. And this is the diagnostic Bible - okay? - put out by the American Psychiatric Association. No - 2013. Is that the same as two thousand - I don't know. I'm one of these guys who doesn't know if three-fifths is more than half or less than half.

Anyway, the DSM-IV is the current edition, which came out in 1994, and that's based on the DSM-III Revised which came out in 1987, which in turn is based on the DSM-III which came out in 1980, with hardly any changes all the way along. And guess what? The DSM-5 of 2013 is going to continue that tradition of making sweet F-all changes. So, basically, we're going to come out with a document that's going to set the tone for psychiatry for the next 20 years based on the DSM-III of 1980 and its ridiculously - stupid - criteria for depression.

Anyway, while I was doing my research, I dug out the old DSM-I from 1952 and the DSM-II from 1968. Basically, these are much the same and they're supposed to represent ancient history, you know, before psychiatry got modern, stuck in 1980 Ground Hog Day forever. Much of the DSM I and II had to do with this Freudian artifact called “neurosis.”

Well, guess what? According to these ancient DSMs, depression was a form of neurosis. Okay, fine. And guess what drove neurosis? Anxiety!

That’s not all. These ancient DSMs tried to break down mental illness two ways: That which they saw as biology-based - which they didn't have a clue about -  and that which was the result of a maladaptive response to stress.

So. Freeze-frame. Stress-anxiety-depression. Does that sound very close to the language Dr Sapolsky was using? Is the psychiatry of 1952 more relevant to our recovery than the psychiatry of 2010?

Well, in one sense, yes. The psychiatry back then was interested in looking under the hood, but they lacked the means. No brain scans. No gene tests. The best they could do was speculate about neurosis.

The old psychiatry also had no idea that stress was related to biology. They thought that just about all mental illness was a product of the mind as distinct from the brain. Nevertheless they knew that true recovery involved digging below the surface, deep into the mind. The catch was the only tool at their disposal - psychoanalysis - really didn’t work for most people. And it really didn't get patients all that much better.

Well these days, we know a lot more about recovery. There are a lot of tools available to us. We know a lot of them have very good success rates, and we heard a lot about that this morning.

After lunch, I will be giving another talk. I’m looking forward to concentrating more on recovery tools. And you will also hear more speakers talk about recovery. But what I want to emphasize here is:

Recovery starts with knowledge. It helps knowing that we have vulnerable brains. That the back and front ends of our brains don’t always act the way they should. That they don’t always talk to each other the way they should. That we have a tendency to over-react. That we also have a tendency to both over-think and under-think.

Not only that, our brains are slow in resetting to normal.

What this means is - instead of coping with life, life becomes a struggle.

Do we have some kind of consensus on this? We're on the same page with this? Because - you know - you really get this wisdom going to DBSA support groups and also NAMI groups. And other groups. There's a lot of patient and family wisdom there.

Mental illness is simple, really. We get overwhelmed, overloaded. Too much of one thing, too much of everything. Too much thought, too much emotion, too much sensory input. Too much of nothing, even. Think of a fire in your brain or of being trapped deep underground, unable to breathe. There is no way the brain can respond rationally.

The brain copes, instead, by flipping out or shutting down.

But this doesn’t mean we have to give up. It only means we have to work harder and smarter.

So - know thyself. Look under the hood. Check out what’s really happening inside. Take nothing for granted. Question everything.

So here we are, on our journey, somewhere in the Land of Oz, looking to return home, to Kansas ...

Gimme Shelter

From my second talk to the Kansas DBSA State Conference in late April ...

Does anyone here know what the word “asylum” means?

Safety?

Right. That's the key one. Shelter, sanctuary. It's really not a dirty word. And back in the old days, insane asylum was not a dirty word. So, hold that thought.

My research, as I say, often takes me to strange places. This little adventure started in front of my computer. One day, for the heck of it - way too much time on my hands. obviously - I checked out the very first issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, which came out in 1844. Back then it was called The Journal of Insanity.

Yep - I could have written that one, you know. It would have been an autobiography.

The American Journal of Psychiatry is published by the American Psychiatric Association, which was also founded in 1844.

Now, you heard me mention this morning how modern brain science is showing that stress makes us sitting ducks for all kinds of mental illness and other weird stuff. And I also mentioned that psychiatry already knew this back in 1952 when the first DSM came out. As it turns out, the principle was already an old one back in 1844.

Of all things, this first issue of the Journal of Insanity had a long article dealing with Shakespeare. Cool, I thought. So I started reading. This from King Lear. He's the physician character talking to one of the daughters of the mad king. You have to imagine me with a cape on and one of those Shakespeare hats:

“Be comforted, good Madam, the great rage 
You see is cured in him, and yet it is danger 
To make him even o’er the time he has lost; 
Desire him to go in, trouble him no more 
Till further settling.”

As the Journal observed:

“Now we confess, almost with shame, that although near two centuries and a half have passed since Shakespeare thus wrote; we have very little to add to his method of treating the insane.”

Wow. So this really is an ancient principle, then. And the modern psychiatric science of 1844 just validated it.

The Journal goes on to say:

“To produce sleep and to quiet the mind by medical and moral treatment, to avoid all unkindness, and when patients begin to convalesce, to guard, as he directs, against everything likely to disturb their minds, and to cause a relapse is now considered the best and nearly the only essential treatment.”

I just want to put this to you guys: Does this sound more enlightened than the psychiatry of today?

[Affirmative responses from audience.]

Yeh, that's pretty interesting, isn't it? Cuz wasn't the 1800s supposed to be the bad old days? Before science? Weren’t asylums terrible places where they locked away - “the insane”?

Not always.

Yeh, you got it. Not always. And this is really interesting. It turns out the 1830s and 40s was a great reform era. Abraham Lincoln came of age around this time. This is the society that formed his ideas. This was a time of enlightened science meeting enlightened Christianity. Have you had a look at the buildings and grounds of these old institutions? They were beautiful. Palatial country estates.
Yep - and I'm getting reinforcement from Janet, here - they even had farms attached to them.

There's this one out here ... that used to be a beautiful building. It was like a spa.

And they don't put evil insane people in beautiful places. That's not what these buildings were designed for.

Well, talk about coincidence. It turns out that this same 1844 Journal - the one that had a long piece on Shakespeare - it also had a report describing an institution in Utica, that was then in operation for 18 months. According to the report, of 433 patients admitted, 123 had recovered.

Okay - we can’t be sure what the report meant by the term, recovery. But it is fair to assume that in an age of no psychiatric meds or other treatments -  or even “treatments” that made patients worse, like throwing mercury down the hatch - more than one-quarter of those admitted were deemed to be in good enough condition to return to their homes and communities.

Not long after I came across that 1844 psychiatry journal almost three years ago, I found myself in LA. This was about three years ago. Maybe it was two - I can't count. I was on my way to my daughter’s wedding in New Zealand and I was staying at a friend’s house before flying out.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t look forward to any holidays. Because that means I have to crank out three weeks of work in just one week. So here I was, in LA, all worked out - stressed like nobody's business needing to relax, needing to get away from work.

I should have known. I'm sure a lot of you know this already. If you’re a mental health advocate, you really gotta watch hanging out with fellow mental health advocates - they're bad for your health. So what’s my friend’s idea - who's a mental health advocate - her idea of a good night on the town in LA? Attending a three-hour lecture on mental health, that’s what.

Great. I’m in vacation mode. I want to forget about work, and here I am being dragged out into the night to sit in on a university class for some psychology majors at USC. A leading world authority on psychiatric rehabilitation, Robert Liberman of UCLA, was giving a guest lecture.

Okay, I decide to go along with my friend, because I hate fights. But that didn’t mean I had to listen.

So, anyway, here I am, in a college classroom, in one of those ridiculous classroom desks that I used to sit in back in the 1960s - how these survived into this century I don't know.  So, I'm trying very hard not to listen, when suddenly Dr Liberman starts telling us how the insane asylums of old were very enlightened places, with high recovery rates.

My ears pricked up. Wasn't I just reading something like this?

This is the way we learn. We need a few repetitions before the message gets in there.

So Dr Liberman went on to say in so many words that mental illness was a product of the industrial age. Just jam people into large noisy smelly dirty cities and watch what happens.

This is why, you know, Kansas is so nice with its open skies. It's spacious. I felt my mind resting when I came out here.

Asylums were built to get people away from all that. Only later, he explained, did cash-strapped state governments give up on us. I guess it's easier putting up nice buildings and you don't have people doing enlightened stuff in the nice buildings, anymore. You just make prisoners out of us.

So, of all things, on the ride back, I’m thanking my friend profusely for dragging me out into the night. So I still go up and visit her every once in a while.

Anyway, when I got back from New Zealand, I looked up Dr Liberman, and it turns out he is one of the leading proponents of what they call the “diathesis-stress” model, namely that certain individuals are more genetically disposed than others to break down under stress.

Now he came up with that in the 1970s, and of course we find that the brain science of the 2000s is validating it. We're those people who break down under stress ...

Are Bad Times Actually Good For Us?

An article in the Oct 28 Business Week reports on a ten-year (1996-2006) study which found that, among other things, workers laid off from Boeing were happier than those still working there.

Say what???

The article reports that four researchers embedded themselves into Boeing during a decade of great upheaval when Airbus was giving the company a run for its money and when one-third of its workforce was shed.

According to Business Week:

With each round of layoffs, the survivors hustled to reinvent themselves. They re-proved, re-auditioned, and repositioned, only to watch yet another new manager — pushing the fad du jour — parade through the door. Employees who had once seen themselves in every plane that flew overhead were now trading in gallows humor. As in, "Dead worker walking."

Human resources specialist Frank Zemek was the researchers' main contact. In an interview, he recalled "the survivor's guilt of the people who were left, who were waiting and not knowing if the hatchet was going to fall on them. They experienced the worst stress."

Meanwhile:

Average depression scores were nearly twice as great for those who stayed with Boeing vs. those who left. The laid-off were less likely to binge drink, often slept better, and had fewer chronic health problems.

Earlier this year, I attended a conference where Stephen Bezrucha MD of the University of Washington knocked us over with a feather with the observation that mortality rates in the general population actually go down during economic hard times. One reason, he said, may have to do with people having more time to connect with their friends and families.

As if to back up the speaker, the Sept PNAS published a University of Michigan study showing that during the Great Depression rates of death went down while life expectancy went up. Suicides, however, did increase.

According to a Medical News Today account of the study, during expansions firms are very busy and demand a lot of effort from employees. This can create stress, reduce sleep, and change health-related behaviors. Also, more time on the job may translate into greater social isolation and less social support.

In contrast, during recessions, people slow down because there is less work to do. There is more time for sleep, and they cut back on alcohol and tobacco.

No doubt, this comes as cold comfort to those of you who have been laid off or are in fear of losing your jobs. But, as Business Week notes:

Thanks to the unceasing uncertainty inside Boeing, those who left felt as though they had escaped a bad marriage. At the time one Boeing employee told researchers: "You feel better when someone takes their foot off your neck."

Industrial Disease: What Are We Doing To Ourselves?

Consider:

The average working couple in America spends 20 minutes a day together.

"Family time" has become a goal, an achievement, rather than a natural consequence of being a family.

Most Americans are trapped in a vicious cycle of overwork and over-consumption.

Dropping in on a neighbor is practically nonexistent.

Keeping busy and multitasking are praised, while slowing down is frowned upon.

This from Therese Borchard, writing on the Huffington Post. She was drawing from a book by Abby Sexias, "Finding the Deep River Within."

"The disease of a-thousand-things-to-do," is how Ms Seixas describes it. I would give it another name: industrial disease.

In 2004, a major World Health Organization survey of 14 countries and two Chinese cities found Nigeria and Shanghai with the lowest prevalence of mental illness, way lower than the US and Europeans. In mood disorders, the Nigerians were at the very bottom (less than one percent over 12 months compared to nearly 10 percent in the US).

Maybe Nigerians are too worried about where their next meal is coming from to ruminate on the things we do. But I have a strong suspicion that they have something we haven't got, things we lost a long time ago, things our kids will never know about.

The beginning of the industrial revolution in the mid-eighteenth century coincided with a sudden explosion in mental illness. It didn't take people long to finger the stresses of urban life as the culprit. The asylums - literally sanctuaries - that sprang up in nineteenth century were beautiful country estates with farms attached. They were the product of the various reform movements of the age that included abolition, self-improvement, and enlightened Christianity.

In other words, way back when, people actually recognized that if you treated the mentally ill with compassion, took them away from stressful environments, and gave them opportunities to take pride in their work then their condition might actually improve.

The inaugural 1844 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry (then called The American Journal of Insanity) reported on an institution in Utica, then in operation for 18 months. According to the report, of 433 patients admitted, 123 had recovered.

It was only later that these same institutions became the chambers of horrors that shame us as humans.

So, have we learned anything over the intervening years?

Yes. If we place families under impossible financial obligations with absurd expectations, force both partners to labor late into the night in high pressure corporate sweat shops devoid of fresh air and natural light, sleep-deprived and alienated from nurturing communities, sooner or later they will go crazy and drive other people crazy.

Not only that, see what happens when we over-school and over-regiment their kids.

Our brains simply weren't built for this.

If you scroll back to some of my recent blogs, you will note a number of short home-made nature videos. They are there for a reason. Since moving to a rural environment more than two years ago, I noticed something astonishing - my mental health improved, dramatically so. I work from home. I keep my own schedule. When I need a mental health break, I take it. All I have to do is step outdoors.

Welcome to my world.

Your world - and your responsibilities - are certainly a lot different. But your brain undoubtedly has the same limited warranty as mine. This is a tough world, growing tougher by the day. Survival depends on your creativity in carving out sanctuary - asylum.

It's a principle as old as the hills. Our ancestors understood it. Nigerians and other societies probably still do. We are incredibly slow learners in a painful process of relearning.

Oscar Night High Wire Act

"Man on Wire," directed by James Marsh, last night received an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Below is a "rerun" of a blog post I published Feb 3. Enjoy ...

It was a nice relaxing walk - a quarter mile in the air over New York City.

Last night, I watched "Man on Wire," a 2008 documentary about Philippe Petit's improbable 1974 tightrope walk back and forth between the two World Trade Center towers.

Phillippe Petit had already accomplished similar (and illegal) feats between the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral and the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

As the documentary makes clear, pulling off the World Trade Center caper was equivalent to plotting and executing a bank heist. Months of planning, reconnaissance, and rehearsal went into the operation. On numerous occasions, Petit and his accomplices snuck into the towers as they were under construction. Sometimes in the dead of night. Other times during the day, posing as contractors or journalists.

Then, one muggy August night, two separate teams hauled up their equipment, eluded security guards, and strung their wire and its moorings across the chasm.

The operation was not exactly flawless. Petit and his accomplices were amateurs performing the job of professional criminals, and things went wrong. Several times, the mission came close to being aborted. Then, just about dawn - with barely a second to spare - the team on the other tower radioed that they had secured the wire.

It was now or never. Petit stepped out onto the wire - and suddenly he was in his element.

During the bank heist phase of the film, the main soundtrack theme was Greig's "Hall of the Mountain King." Now, suddenly it was the dreamy piano music of Satie's "Trois Gymnopedies."

Get this - now that Petit was back to doing what he was good at doing, he could RELAX. The hard part was over. Walking - make that dancing - a tightrope 104 stories above Manhattan traffic, piece of cake.

The brain is funny that way.

A Walk in the Country

I seem to be on a nature video kick these days, but a picture is literally worth a thousand words. Getting along in today's world takes its toll. We need breaks. We need time out.

I shot this two days ago. This is a walk I frequently take, on old Route 80 that used to lead into San Diego, 40 miles away. The scene is about three miles from my house. Enjoy ...

High Wire Act

It was a nice relaxing walk - a quarter mile in the air over New York City.

Last night, I watched "Man on Wire," a 2008 documentary about Philippe Petit's improbable 1974 tightrope walk back and forth between the two World Trade Center towers.

Phillippe Petit had already accomplished similar (and illegal) feats between the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral and the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

As the documentary makes clear, pulling off the World Trade Center caper was equivalent to plotting and executing a bank heist. Months of planning, reconnaissance, and rehearsal went into the operation. On numerous occasions, Petit and his accomplices snuck into the towers as they were under construction. Sometimes in the dead of night. Other times during the day, posing as contractors or journalists.

Then, one muggy August night, two separate teams hauled up their equipment, eluded security guards, and strung their wire and its moorings across the chasm.

The operation was not exactly flawless. Petit and his accomplices were amateurs performing the job of professional criminals, and things went wrong. Several times, the mission came close to being aborted. Then, just about dawn - with barely a second to spare - the team on the other tower radioed that they had secured the wire.

It was now or never. Petit stepped out onto the wire - and suddenly he was in his element.

During the bank heist phase of the film, the main soundtrack theme was Greig's "Hall of the Mountain King." Now, suddenly it was the dreamy piano music of Satie's "Trois Gymnopedies."

Get this - now that Petit was back to doing what he was good at doing, he could RELAX. The hard part was over. Walking - make that dancing - a tightrope 104 stories above Manhattan traffic, piece of cake.

The brain is funny that way.