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Best veiw with
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Volume Please..
Nicotine helps people to think, yet you are banned from getting help in
these ways, and society would rather you be drunk in public as
long as you don't drive, what's wrong with that picture? Here is some
research to prove the benefits of nicotine in conjunction with brain
tissue.
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Scientists find volume knob in brain
22 August 2007 - By Jeanna Bryner - msnbc.com
Highways in the brain thought only to transport
information passively from one brain cell to another can actually
boost or dampen the traveling signal, a new study suggests.
The results, found in mice, could explain how nicotine in
cigarettes enhances mental sharpness in humans, a phenomenon
documented in several past studies.
"We don’t intend to say cigarettes are good by any stretch of the
imagination," said study team member Raju Metherate, a neurobiologist
at the University of California, Irvine. "But one reason [that] people
probably like cigarettes is because it probably enhances their
thinking ability."
| Comment: Are you saying
enhancing our thinking is not good? Sounds like it to me. That's a
neuro biological statement all righty. |
Well-connected
Until now, neuroscientists thought hair-like extensions called axons
were like the "wires" in a radio, conveying signals between brain
cells.
“But we found that if you stimulate the axon, the signal can be
altered, like turning the volume knob on the radio,” Metherate said.
The scientists studied a region in the mouse brain associated with
hearing that contained a brain cell with an axon connected to the
brain's cortex. Like many axons in the brain, this one contains a
receptor that is activated by acetylcholine; nicotine from cigarettes
also binds to the acetylcholine receptor.
In their experiments, the scientists either stimulated the axon with
nicotine or did not apply nicotine. Without nicotine, about 35 percent
of the messages sent by the brain cell reached the cortex, while the
success rate jumped to nearly 70 percent with nicotine.
To confirm the nicotine was acting on the axon itself and not the
initial brain cell or the destination (called the terminal), they
added the nicotine only to the axon and also isolated the axon. The
results held in both cases.
Multiple solutions
Metherate said the implications range from the effects of cigarette
smoking to treatments for psychiatric disorders to the basics of how
the brain works.
"Nicotine enhances cognitive function, that's been documented in
dozens of studies, but people really haven't understood why,"
Metherate told LiveScience. "This is probably one major reason it's
enhancing cognitive function, because it's allowing the cortex to be
more sensitive to incoming input."
The finding, published online in the Aug. 19 edition of the journal
Nature Neuroscience, also has implications for certain mental
illnesses, such as schizophrenia, which have been associated with
nicotine abuse or the loss of nicotine receptors.
© 2007 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.
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