Dr. Sarah Ruback

In The Sound of Music, Fraulein Maria sang, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start, when you read you begin A B C…”  In practicing mindfulness, start at the very beginning too. Go back to kindergarten, or preschool. Begin with not knowing anything. When you take away everything that you know, you are left with awareness, breathing and compassion. The very beginning of the rest of your life is now. That is always where you begin a mindfulness practice.

The reason that it is important to practice mindfulness is that it helps you to train you mind to feel better. Most people begin a mindfulness practice because they are suffering. Pain can be located in the body, but suffering is located in the mind. Attending to your mind will help you to work with and through your suffering.

If suffering brings you to a mindfulness practice, then you begin by being mindful of suffering. Suffering can be complicated, if you try to sort out all the things that contribute to your suffering, you could sort forever. To cut right through the complications, put all that down. Go back to the beginning, by bringing your mind back to the present moment. Now.

What reminds you of mindfulness is awareness. You are always aware of something. When you become aware of your awareness, you are being mindful. Often, what brings you to mindfulness is a painful feeling, suffering. The natural reaction to suffering is to try to get away from it. With mindfulness, you don’t try to get away from your suffering, you acknowledge it. When you notice suffering, recognize your awareness. Recognize your awareness of your suffering. When you notice that, you are present.

The next step is breathing. After recognizing your awareness, to remain with your awareness, breathe consciously. Breathing allows you to be in the present moment, grounded in your body and able to observe the activity of your mind. As you breathe and watch the activity of your mind, the activity will change. Although it will change anyway, when you attend to the change, you influence the change, with compassion.

Compassion is the attitude you adopt toward yourself as you breathe into your suffering. Recognize that you do not enjoy the feeling, and that you would be feeling differently if you could. Recognize that you do not deserve to suffer and that you would like to find a way to not suffer. Acting on compassion involves quieting your mind and looking into your experience to see if there is something you can do. If you notice something you can do. You can try to do it. Being aware of your feeling and your breathing as you activate compassion, is already compassionate action, but you may notice something else you can do too.

Meditation and mindfulness go together because meditation is the practice of awareness, breathing and compassion. You practice meditation when you are not acutely suffering. Practice when you have time to sit and rehearse the skill of focusing your awareness on the present moment. By practicing meditation, you strengthen the habit of attending to your experience, whatever it may be. When you regularly practice meditation you are more likely to turn to mindfulness in a moment of need, rather than turning toward avoidance habits.

Peace is not passive, it is mental clarity and compassion in action. Your healing not only benefits you and everyone you encounter, but it helps you make better and more humane decisions in a rapidly changing world. 
Personal healing is important, but collective healing is also critical. Human beings do not live in a vacuum, our interconnectedness is what gives us the opportunity to thrive. It definitely helps the world when we heal ourselves, but we should also find ways to do our part to support movements for a better and more just world. When people move together around a common cause, history changes. 
It is easy to recreate the harm that has happened to us if we never take the time to process it in a healthy way. This is why your healing is a gift to the people who will cross your path in the future. 
The same way it is to your personal benefit to not harm others, it is also to your personal benefit for others to be safe from harm and have their material needs met. When more people can truly flourish, the shared happiness of humanity will also increase. 
The mental clarity that comes after healing helps us engage more deeply with complexity, which is what we need to understand the issues in front of us so we can substantially decrease direct and indirect forms of harm.

Brain circuit connects feeding, mood in response to stress

Many people have experienced stressful situations that trigger a particular mood and also change certain feelings toward food. An international team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine looked into the possibility of crosstalk between eating and mood and discovered a brain circuit in mouse models that connects the feeding and the mood centers of the brain. Published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, these findings may help explain some of the observations between changes in mood and metabolism and provide insights into future solutions to these problems by targeting this circuit.

“This study was initiated by first author Dr. Na Qu, a psychiatrist of Wuhan Mental Health Center, China, when she was visiting my lab,” said corresponding author Dr. Yong Xu, associate professor of pediatrics and of molecular and cellular biology at Baylor College of Medicine.

Qu, a practicing psychiatrist who also conducts basic brain research, was interested in investigating whether there was a neurological basis for the association between depression and other psychiatric disorders and alterations in metabolism, such as obesity or lack of appetite, she had observed in a number of her patients.

Xu, Qu and their colleagues worked with a mouse model of depression induced by chronic stress and observed that depressed animals ate less and lost weight. Then, they applied a number of experimental techniques to identify the neuronal circuits that changed activity when the animals were depressed.

“We found that POMC neurons in the hypothalamus, which are essential for regulating body weight and feeding behavior, extend physical connections into another region of the brain that has numerous dopamine neurons that are implicated in the regulation of mood,” said Xu, who also is a researcher at the USDA/ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor and Texas Children’s Hospital. “We know that a decrease in dopamine may trigger depression.”

In addition to the physical connection between the feeding and the mood centers of the brain, the researchers also discovered that when they triggered depression in mice, the POMC neurons were activated and this led to inhibition of the dopamine neurons. Interestingly, when the researchers inhibited the neuronal circuit connecting the feeding and the mood centers, the animals ate more, gained weight and looked less depressed.

“We have discovered that a form of chronic stress triggered a neuronal circuit that starts in a population of cells that are known to regulate metabolism and feeding behavior and ends in a group of neurons that are famous for their regulation of mood,” Xu said. “Stress-triggered activation of the feeding center led to inhibition of dopamine-producing neurons in the mood center.”

Although more research is needed, Xu, Qu and their colleagues propose that their findings provide a new biological basis that may explain some of the connections between mood alterations and changes in metabolism observed in people, and may provide solutions in the future.

New study suggests exercise is good for the aging brain

Exercise seems to endow a wealth of benefits, from the release of happiness-inducing hormones to higher physical fitness. New research shows it may provide a boost to the mind too.

University of Iowa researchers have found that a single bout of exercise improves cognitive functions and working memory in some older people. In experiments that included physical activity, brain scans, and working memory tests, the researchers also found that participants experienced the same cognitive benefits and improved memory from a single exercise session as they did from longer, regular exercise.

“One implication of this study is you could think of the benefits day by day,” says Michelle Voss, assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the study’s corresponding author. “In terms of behavioral change and cognitive benefits from physical activity, you can say, ‘I’m just going to be active today. I’ll get a benefit.’ So, you don’t need to think of it like you’re going to train for a marathon to get some sort of optimal peak of performance. You just could work at it day by day to gain those benefits.”

Previous research has shown exercise can confer a mental boost. But the benefits vary: One person may improve cognitively and have improved memory, while another person may show little to no gain.

Limited research has been done on how a single bout of physical activity may affect cognition and working memory specifically in older populations, despite evidence that some brain functions slip as people age.

Voss wanted to tease out how a single session of exercise may affect older individuals. Her team enrolled 34 adults between 60 and 80 years of age who were healthy but not regularly active. Each participant rode a stationary bike on two separate occasions—with light and then more strenuous resistance when pedaling—for 20 minutes. Before and after each exercise session, each participant underwent a brain scan and completed a memory test.

In the brain scan, the researchers examined bursts of activity in regions known to be involved in the collection and sharing of memories. In the working memory tests, each participant used a computer screen to look at a set of eight young adult faces that rotated every three seconds—flashcard style—and had to decide when a face seen two “cards” previously matched the one they were currently viewing.

After a single exercise session, the researchers found in some individuals increased connectivity between the medial temporal (which surrounds the brain’s memory center, the hippocampus) and the parietal cortex and prefrontal cortex, two regions involved in cognition and memory. Those same individuals also performed better on the memory tests. Other individuals showed little to no gain.

The boost in cognition and memory from a single exercise session lasted only a short while for those who showed gains, the researchers found.

“The benefits can be there a lot more quickly than people think,” Voss says. “The hope is that a lot of people will then keep it up because those benefits to the brain are temporary. Understanding exactly how long the benefits last after a single session, and why some benefit more than others, are exciting directions for future research.”

The participants also engaged in regular exercise, pedaling on a stationary bike for 50 minutes three times a week for three months. One group engaged in moderate-intensity pedaling, while another group had a mostly lighter workout in which the bike pedals moved for them.

Most individuals in the moderate and lighter-intensity groups showed mental benefits, judging by the brain scans and working memory tests given at the beginning and at the end of the three-month exercise period. But the brain gains were no greater than the improvements from when they had exercised a single time.

“The result that a single session of aerobic exercise mimics the effects of 12 weeks of training on performance has important implications both practically and theoretically,” the authors write.

The researchers note their study had a small participant pool, with a homogenous population that excluded anyone with chronic health conditions or who were taking beta-blockers.

The brain has a knack for safekeeping our most treasured memories, from a first kiss to a child’s birth. In a new study in mouse cells, Columbia neuroscientists have mapped some of the molecular machinery that helps the brain maintain these kinds of long-term memories. By observing the activity of nerve cells of the brain, called neurons, that were extracted from the brain’s memory center, the researchers outlined how the protein CPEB3 primes neurons to store memories that stand the test of time.

These findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide a never-before-seen view into one of the brain’s most universal and basic cellular functions. They also suggest new targets against neurodegenerative diseases characterized by memory loss, most notably Alzheimer’s disease.

“Memory is what makes us who we are. It permeates our lives and is fundamental to our very existence,” said Eric Kandel, MD, the study’s co-senior author who is codirector of Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, a University Professor and a Kavli Professor of Brain Science at Columbia. “But at its core, memory is a biological process, not unlike a heartbeat. With today’s study, we’ve shed new light on the molecular underpinnings behind our brain’s ability to make, keep and recall memories over the course of our lives.”

All memories, even fleeting ones, are made when tiny branches, called axons, which extend out from neurons, connect to each other. These connection points, called synapses, are like handshakes: They can be strong or weak. When they weaken, memories vanish. But when they strengthen, memories can stand the test of time. Strengthening a synapse, researchers recently reported, causes an observable change to neurons’ anatomy.

In 2015, Dr. Kandel and his team identified a protein in mice, CPEB3, that plays a critical role in this anatomical change. They found that CPEB3 is present at the brain’s synapses when memories are formed and recalled. When the researchers prevented mice from making CPEB3, the animals could form a new memory but could not keep it intact.

“Without CPEB3, the synaptic connections collapsed and the memory faded,” said Luana Fioriti, PhD, Laboratory Head at Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research, Assistant Telethon Scientist at Dulbecco Telethon Institute in Milan, Italy and adjunct associate research scientist on sabbatical in the Kandel lab. Dr. Fioriti is the paper’s co-senior author. “Discovering CPEB3’s precise function inside the neurons was the impetus for today’s study.”

Within the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center, CPEB3 is produced at regular intervals inside the centers of neurons. In today’s study, the Columbia team found that once CPEB3 is produced it is transferred to P bodies, isolation chambers that keep CPEB3 dormant and ready for use.

“P bodies do not have a physical barrier, like a membrane, to contain CPEB3,” said Lenzie Ford, PhD, a postdoctoral research scientist in the Kandel lab and the paper’s co-first author. “Instead, P bodies are denser than their surroundings. This difference in densities holds P bodies together, creating a kind of biophysical forcefield that keeps CPEB3 contained inside and away from the other parts of the cell.”

Once laden with dormant CPEB3, the researchers found, P bodies leave a neuron’s center and travel down its branches toward the synapses. When an animal has an experience and begins to form a memory, the P bodies dissolve. CPEB3 is released into synapses to help create that memory. Over time, as more CPEB3 is released, these synapses strengthen. This alters the neurons’ anatomy and, as a result, stabilizes that memory.

“Our results underscore the central role that protein synthesis plays in the maintenance of memory,” said Dr. Kandel, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator whose pioneering work on the molecular basis of memory earned him the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. “And while there are likely additional processes involved that we have yet to discover, this study, which incorporated state-of-the-art biochemical, genetic and microscopy tools, reveals an elegant biological mechanism of memory in unmatched detail.”

Beyond what this research reveals about memory, it also provides insight into neurodegenerative diseases characterized by memory loss. Because of CPEB3’s demonstrated importance in memory storage, and because a version of CPEB3 is also present in the human brain, this protein represents a promising area of focus.

“The science of how synapses form and are strengthened over time is important for deciphering any disorder in which synapses — and the memories associated with them — degrade and die, such as Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Fioriti. “By continuing to build this understanding, we could one day develop useful methods to boost CPEB3 in a way that prevents synaptic degradation, thus slowing memory loss.”

Another area of focus, according to the Columbia team, relates to the protein SUMO, which the team also found played a central role in this process.