Sometimes after successfully implementing the changes that eliminate their animals’ problem behaviors, my clients comment that doing so ranked among the most difficult but most fulfilling work they’ve ever done. And no doubt their animals felt the same way. One possible reason why mental changes may strike us that way takes us back to that bane and blessing of reality: our perceptions. We live in a society that equates hard work with hard physical labor such as splitting and stacking wood, hiking, pumping iron, or doing anything that gets us hot and sweaty. Within this realm, making mental changes in ourselves and consistently implementing those that make it easy for our animals to do likewise seem about as challenging as contemplating one’s pudgy abdomen.
Those who take this view often also envision making mental changes as a passive process involving turning a few brain-switches on or off. Granted they may admit that this might occur more slowly than turning the average lamp on or off, but it wouldn’t acquire that much more energy. As it turns out though, learning involves the actual tearing down of old neural connections and replacing them with new ones. And like any renovations, this process involves a lot of activity and generates a certain amount of debris. In fact, the process is so active and creates so much debris that the brain maintains a complex immune response of its own. This makes sense because we wouldn’t want this activity to trigger the same kind of inflammatory response that occurs when we get a whopping infection. That would not be good!
But like everything in the complete dog, cat, human, or mouse, the brain and its immune response don’t live in a little world all by themselves any more than any other part of the body does. Preliminary research suggests that immune cells in the body called T cells somehow communicate with the brain’s immune response. And without that body-mind communication, the brain does a very poor job of healing itself. Moreover, this occurs even though the T cells are incapable of crossing the blood-brain barrier themselves.
Let me pause here to note that twice during the last 6 weeks, I returned from trips and found myself fighting cold and flu symptoms that left me feeling dull and stupid. Alas, I couldn’t attribute these dull and stupid feelings to any medications because I couldn’t afford to feel any duller or stupider than I already did so I didn’t take any. In that serendipitous way in which life sometimes unfolds, I picked up the March copy of Discover magazine in an attempt to jump-start my fuzzy brain and discovered an article by Carl Zimmer entitled “Can boosting your immunity make you smarter?”
In this article I learned about a fascinating experiment performed on mice by University of Virginia School of Medicine neuroimmunologist, Jonathan Kipnis. Kipnis wondered whether T cells had any effect on brain function beyond their role in the immune response. To determine this, he raised two groups of genetically identical mice: one with T cells and one without. He then arranged to send all of the mice to a colleague who studied learning using a Morris water maze As you can see in this YouTube clip, the Morris water maze consists of a smooth-sided circular pool of water with a stand just under the water’s surface. Because mice don’t like water, they frantically swim in an effort to find a way to get out. While the stand doesn’t allow them to get out, it does offer an alternative to swimming until exhausted and drowning. Normal mice typically figure out the location of the stand with or without help after several rounds and seek out the refuge when placed in the maze. When tested by Kipnis’s colleague who knew nothing about their backgrounds, the mice retaining their T cells figured out the maze. However, the tester referred to those lacking T cells as “real idiots” when it came to mastering this skill.
Kipnis then reasoned that if not having T cells somehow decreased the mice’s ability to learn, then giving them T cells should result in improved learning. So he did and they did. Once he restored their missing T cells, the formerly mentally challenged mice performed almost as well as those whose immune systems had remained intact from the beginning. In the next phase of his studies of the relationship between the immune response and the brain, Kipnis only removed the T cells from the meninges, the brain’s protective covering. These mice also displayed learning problems when placed in the Morris water maze.
As I read this article in my post-trip battle with whatever viruses float about in airports, planes, and public gatherings, I also readily appreciated Kipnis’s speculations regarding the fuzzy mental states associated with “chemo brain” and aging. Because chemotherapy often takes its toll on T cells, it seems reasonable that some of those undergoing this therapy may not feel at their mental best. Similarly as we get older, the thymus gland that plays a role in the T cell formation process in our youth gradually shrinks to near invisibility. Consequently if the body must choose where to deploy its limited supply of T cells, it seems logical that it would sacrifice mental for physical function.
Let’s take this learning process one step further and add all the data demonstrating that chronic stress decreases the T cells’ ability to multiply and also interferes with brain function and memory. Now put all this together and think about what could happen if we take our animals’ stress-related behavioral problems personally and view making any necessary changes as so unfair at best and an intolerable assault on our lifestyle at worst. Or to put more simply, think about what’s likely to happen when we allow our animals’ stress-related behavioral problems and their resolution to stress us, too.
No matter how I cut it, doing that complicates the process of learning dramatically for us and our animals. If we further up the stress component by trying to teach our animals in a complex environment with sufficient stimuli (noise, scent, motion, etc.) to confuse us and/or our animals, and we and/or our animals are tired and hungry when we start… Well, that raises such a hellish image of a set-up for failure I don’t even want to think about it! Nonetheless, such “learning” scenarios routinely play out as some of us attempt to teach our animals new behaviors as fast as possible so that we can end any negative stress those behaviors may cause us. Alas for us and our pets, how fast we can teach them and ourselves may not translate into how fast they and we can learn.
The more I appreciate what an active neurological process learning is and all the different factors that may affect it, the more I appreciate my clients and their willingness to do this for their animals.
If you have any comments regarding subject matter, favorite links, or anything you’d like to see discussed on or added to this site, please let me know at mm@mmilani.com.
Sometimes after successfully implementing the changes that eliminate their animals’ problem behaviors, my clients comment that doing so ranked among the most difficult but most fulfilling work they’ve ever done. And no doubt their animals felt the same way. One possible reason why mental changes may strike us that way takes us back to that bane and blessing of reality: our perceptions. We live in a society that equates hard work with hard physical labor such as splitting and stacking wood, hiking, pumping iron, or doing anything that gets us hot and sweaty. Within this realm, making mental changes in ourselves and consistently implementing those that make it easy for our animals to do likewise seem about as challenging as contemplating one’s pudgy abdomen.
Those who take this view often also envision making mental changes as a passive process involving turning a few brain-switches on or off. Granted they may admit that this might occur more slowly than turning the average lamp on or off, but it wouldn’t acquire that much more energy. As it turns out though, learning involves the actual tearing down of old neural connections and replacing them with new ones. And like any renovations, this process involves a lot of activity and generates a certain amount of debris. In fact, the process is so active and creates so much debris that the brain maintains a complex immune response of its own. This makes sense because we wouldn’t want this activity to trigger the same kind of inflammatory response that occurs when we get a whopping infection. That would not be good!
But like everything in the complete dog, cat, human, or mouse, the brain and its immune response don’t live in a little world all by themselves any more than any other part of the body does. Preliminary research suggests that immune cells in the body called T cells somehow communicate with the brain’s immune response. And without that body-mind communication, the brain does a very poor job of healing itself. Moreover, this occurs even though the T cells are incapable of crossing the blood-brain barrier themselves.
Let me pause here to note that twice during the last 6 weeks, I returned from trips and found myself fighting cold and flu symptoms that left me feeling dull and stupid. Alas, I couldn’t attribute these dull and stupid feelings to any medications because I couldn’t afford to feel any duller or stupider than I already did so I didn’t take any. In that serendipitous way in which life sometimes unfolds, I picked up the March copy of Discover magazine in an attempt to jump-start my fuzzy brain and discovered an article by Carl Zimmer entitled “Can boosting your immunity make you smarter?”
In this article I learned about a fascinating experiment performed on mice by University of Virginia School of Medicine neuroimmunologist, Jonathan Kipnis. Kipnis wondered whether T cells had any effect on brain function beyond their role in the immune response. To determine this, he raised two groups of genetically identical mice: one with T cells and one without. He then arranged to send all of the mice to a colleague who studied learning using a Morris water maze As you can see in this YouTube clip, the Morris water maze consists of a smooth-sided circular pool of water with a stand just under the water’s surface. Because mice don’t like water, they frantically swim in an effort to find a way to get out. While the stand doesn’t allow them to get out, it does offer an alternative to swimming until exhausted and drowning. Normal mice typically figure out the location of the stand with or without help after several rounds and seek out the refuge when placed in the maze. When tested by Kipnis’s colleague who knew nothing about their backgrounds, the mice retaining their T cells figured out the maze. However, the tester referred to those lacking T cells as “real idiots” when it came to mastering this skill.
Kipnis then reasoned that if not having T cells somehow decreased the mice’s ability to learn, then giving them T cells should result in improved learning. So he did and they did. Once he restored their missing T cells, the formerly mentally challenged mice performed almost as well as those whose immune systems had remained intact from the beginning. In the next phase of his studies of the relationship between the immune response and the brain, Kipnis only removed the T cells from the meninges, the brain’s protective covering. These mice also displayed learning problems when placed in the Morris water maze.
As I read this article in my post-trip battle with whatever viruses float about in airports, planes, and public gatherings, I also readily appreciated Kipnis’s speculations regarding the fuzzy mental states associated with “chemo brain” and aging. Because chemotherapy often takes its toll on T cells, it seems reasonable that some of those undergoing this therapy may not feel at their mental best. Similarly as we get older, the thymus gland that plays a role in the T cell formation process in our youth gradually shrinks to near invisibility. Consequently if the body must choose where to deploy its limited supply of T cells, it seems logical that it would sacrifice mental for physical function.
Let’s take this learning process one step further and add all the data demonstrating that chronic stress decreases the T cells’ ability to multiply and also interferes with brain function and memory. Now put all this together and think about what could happen if we take our animals’ stress-related behavioral problems personally and view making any necessary changes as so unfair at best and an intolerable assault on our lifestyle at worst. Or to put more simply, think about what’s likely to happen when we allow our animals’ stress-related behavioral problems and their resolution to stress us, too.
No matter how I cut it, doing that complicates the process of learning dramatically for us and our animals. If we further up the stress component by trying to teach our animals in a complex environment with sufficient stimuli (noise, scent, motion, etc.) to confuse us and/or our animals, and we and/or our animals are tired and hungry when we start… Well, that raises such a hellish image of a set-up for failure I don’t even want to think about it! Nonetheless, such “learning” scenarios routinely play out as some of us attempt to teach our animals new behaviors as fast as possible so that we can end any negative stress those behaviors may cause us. Alas for us and our pets, how fast we can teach them and ourselves may not translate into how fast they and we can learn.
The more I appreciate what an active neurological process learning is and all the different factors that may affect it, the more I appreciate my clients and their willingness to do this for their animals.
If you have any comments regarding subject matter, favorite links, or anything you’d like to see discussed on or added to this site, please let me know at mm@mmilani.com.