Neuroscience 2009 Highlights New Research on Exercise, Music, and the Brain

CHICAGO — Research presented today at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health, provides a better understanding of the brain, nervous system, and related disorders.

Specific research released shows:

The benefits of exercise on both the brain and body, and, more specifically, underscores the positive influence of regular physical activity on Parkinson's disease, depression, premenstrual syndrome, and memory.
New tools are enabling researchers to identify neural similarities and differences between species. The findings may help to explain faculties, like language, and diseases, like Parkinson's, that are unique to humans.
New insights into male behavior support the idea that many gender differences lie in the brain and are influenced by both genes and environment.
Scientists are developing novel ways to bypass the blood-brain barrier, a network of blood vessels that prevents more than 95 percent of all chemicals from entering the brain from the bloodstream. Researchers describe new methods for transporting drugs across the BBB as well as ways to enhance the brain's own immune response, which is separated from the body's immune system by the BBB.

More information on the studies released today is available at www.sfn.org.

Neuroscience 2009 is a multifaceted exchange of important science research across biological, behavioral, psychological, and chemical disciplines. Hundreds of the world's foremost researchers, clinicians, and experts on all matters concerning the brain will present research findings and be available for interviews.

A Body Transformed Through Dance

Gregg Mozgala, a 31-year-old actor with cerebral palsy, had 12 years of physical therapy while he was growing up. But in the last eight months, a determined choreographer with an unconventional résumé has done what all those therapists could not: She has dramatically changed the way Mr. Mozgala walks.

In the process, she has changed his view of himself and of his possibilities.

Read the full NY Times story here. (Make sure to watch the video, too.)

Why Exercise Makes You Less Anxious

This NY Times article was posted on Donna Luder's Somatic Mechanic blog recently.

Why Exercise Makes you Less Anxious:

Researchers at Princeton University recently made a remarkable discovery about the brains of rats that exercise. Some of their neurons respond differently to stress than the neurons of slothful rats. Scientists have known for some time that exercise stimulates the creation of new brain cells (neurons) but not how, precisely, these neurons might be functionally different from other brain cells.


In the experiment, preliminary results of which were presented last month at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, scientists allowed one group of rats to run. Another set of rodents was not allowed to exercise. Then all of the rats swam in cold water, which they don’t like to do. Afterward, the scientists examined the animals’ brains. They found that the stress of the swimming activated neurons in all of the brains. (The researchers could tell which neurons were activated because the cells expressed specific genes in response to the stress.) But the youngest brain cells in the running rats, the cells that the scientists assumed were created by running, were less likely to express the genes. They generally remained quiet. The “cells born from running,” the researchers concluded, appeared to have been “specifically buffered from exposure to a stressful experience.” The rats had created, through running, a brain that seemed biochemically, molecularly, calm.

For years, both in popular imagination and in scientific circles, it has been a given that exercise enhances mood. But how exercise, a physiological activity, might directly affect mood and anxiety — psychological states — was unclear. Now, thanks in no small part to improved research techniques and a growing understanding of the biochemistry and the genetics of thought itself, scientists are beginning to tease out how exercise remodels the brain, making it more resistant to stress. In work undertaken at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for instance, scientists have examined the role of serotonin, a neurotransmitter often considered to be the “happy” brain chemical. That simplistic view of serotonin has been undermined by other researchers, and the University of Colorado work further dilutes the idea. In those experiments, rats taught to feel helpless and anxious, by being exposed to a laboratory stressor, showed increased serotonin activity in their brains. But rats that had run for several weeks before being stressed showed less serotonin activity and were less anxious and helpless despite the stress.

Other researchers have looked at how exercise alters the activity of dopamine, another neurotransmitter in the brain, while still others have concentrated on the antioxidant powers of moderate exercise. Anxiety in rodents and people has been linked with excessive oxidative stress, which can lead to cell death, including in the brain. Moderate exercise, though, appears to dampen the effects of oxidative stress. In an experiment led by researchers at the University of Houston and reported at the Society for Neuroscience meeting, rats whose oxidative-stress levels had been artificially increased with injections of certain chemicals were extremely anxious when faced with unfamiliar terrain during laboratory testing. But rats that had exercised, even if they had received the oxidizing chemical, were relatively nonchalant under stress. When placed in the unfamiliar space, they didn’t run for dark corners and hide, like the unexercised rats. They insouciantly explored.

“It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms,” says Michael Hopkins, a graduate student affiliated with the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Laboratory at Dartmouth, who has been studying how exercise differently affects thinking and emotion. “It’s pretty amazing, really, that you can get this translation from the realm of purely physical stresses to the realm of psychological stressors.”

The stress-reducing changes wrought by exercise on the brain don’t happen overnight, however, as virtually every researcher agrees. In the University of Colorado experiments, for instance, rats that ran for only three weeks did not show much reduction in stress-induced anxiety, but those that ran for at least six weeks did. “Something happened between three and six weeks,” says Benjamin Greenwood, a research associate in the Department of Integrative Physiology at the University of Colorado, who helped conduct the experiments. Dr. Greenwood added that it was “not clear how that translates” into an exercise prescription for humans. We may require more weeks of working out, or maybe less. And no one has yet studied how intense the exercise needs to be. But the lesson, Dr. Greenwood says, is “don’t quit.” Keep running or cycling or swimming. (Animal experiments have focused exclusively on aerobic, endurance-type activities.) You may not feel a magical reduction of stress after your first jog, if you haven’t been exercising. But the molecular biochemical changes will begin, Dr. Greenwood says. And eventually, he says, they become “profound.”

Interested in Becoming a Dance/Movement Therapist?

The Center for Movement Education and Research, CMER, is offering a Dance/Movement Therapy with the Elderly course in Southern California in January and February, 2010.

Please sign up! The course is in danger of being canceled due to low enrollment, and selfishly, I NEED THIS COURSE! :)Tell all your friends!

Info below:

January 9,10, 2010 – Scripps College -- Claremont CA
February 13,14, 2010 – Pomona College --Claremont CA
9:00am – 5:30pm


Course Title: Dance/Movement Therapy with Seniors —30 hrs
This dance/movement therapy theory, practice and application course will cover the specific developmental needs of seniors and the dance/movement therapy skills pertinent to working with this population age group. The course content will focus on physical, psychodynamic, psychopathological, and enculturating factors impinging on the later years of human development. Students will be exposed to various clinical concepts of dance/movement therapy viewed within a developmental framework that are pertinent to selected late adulthood populations, including clinical disorders of late adulthood and, the types of somatic transference/countertransference issues that might be encountered.

This course has been approved by the American Dance Therapy Association as meeting the Alternate Route Requirements for the R-DMT credential" and satisfies 30 hours of DMT Theory and Practice Training.


This course meets the qualifications for 30 hours of continuing education credit for MFTs and/or LCSWs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences (Provider #3888). Students taking the class for continuing education are excused from the required assignments other than attendance and participation.

Course Objectives:
1) Students will develop an understanding of the developmental needs, tasks and challenges presented when working with various senior populations.
2) Students will develop a basic understanding of dance/movement therapy assessment and application of dance/movement therapy interventions as they apply to various senior populations.
3) Students will learn interventions through which to facilitate an individual or group dance/movement session for various senior populations.
4) Students will be able to design and facilitate a dance/movement therapy session for seniors that is developmentally sound and takes into account the unique developmental, physical, emotional, psychological and cognitive needs of seniors.
5) Students will conclude the class with a beginning level awareness of dance/movement therapy processes and techniques utilized in working with seniors.

Locations:
Scripps College
Richardson Dance Studio
1030 Columbia Ave
Claremont, CA 91711

Pomona College
Pendleton Dance Center, Studio 16
210 East 2nd Street
Claremont, CA 91711

Course Fee: $750.00

Course Instructor: Gabrielle Kaufman MA, BC-DMT, NCC
is a CMER faculty member, dance/movement therapist and counselor with close to twenty years experience in the helping profession. She has taught creative movement to preschoolers and elementary school students, has used DMT with the elderly, Holocaust survivors, adults with mental illness, individuals with eating disorders and body image issues, with teens at high risk and other individuals suffering from anxiety and depression.
Currently, she is the coordinator of the New Moms Connect Program of Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles. She has run several programs for high risk children and teens in both English and Spanish languages, taught classes to parents of newborns and toddlers, and runs support groups for single parents, women with eating disorders and women with perinatal mood disorders and with seniors. She is a coordinator with Postpartum Support International and has a private practice in Los Angeles.

For Information and Application Contact:
Judy Gantz-CMER Director
POB 2001
Sebastopol, CA 95473

(310) 477-9535

Arts in Healthcare

From Musings of a Dance/Movement Therapist blog:

Arts in Healthcare Seen Yielding Benefits
According to a new study by the Society for the Arts in Healthcare, Americans for the Arts, The Joint Commission and the University of Florida Center for the Arts in Healthcare documents that incorporating the arts into health-care settings has multiple benefits for patients and may reduce health-care expenses. Up to half of health-care institutions in the U.S. incorporate arts programming into their care. Benefits from arts programming include shorter hospital stays, less need for medication, and a boost for job satisfaction and employee retention. Philanthropy Journal, Oct 19, 2009