Supporting Research
The Scientific Arts Foundation would welcome the opportunity to collaborate with researchers to further explore the impact of "The Magic Mirror" CD on stress factors and sleep problems within the military.
"Our Quantitative EEG pilot study research with 4 cancer patients indicated listening to "The Magic Mirror" CD once a day for 10 days increased neurological functioning and had a direct positive impact on brainwaves disrupted by stress and trauma in 100% of those measured. Subjective questionnaires also indicated these patients felt "more relaxed, less anxious and able to focus." In 3 of the 4 patients tested, their elevated High Beta frequencies, experienced as hyper alertness and agitation, and Asymmetry, communication between the hemispheres, tended to normalize."
http://www.scientificartsfoundation.org/page/page/3529191.htm
William Collins, Ph.D.
Reintegrative Health Institute
St. Louis, MO
"Our saliva biomarker pilot studies results suggested that after 23 mins. of "The Magic Mirror" music, several individuals expressed lower stress and music response was prolonged."
http://www.scientificartsfoundation.org/page/page/5813987.htm
Abdul Waheed, Ph.D.
Dept. of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
St. Louis University School of Medicine
Every $20 Donation to "Help Soldiers Sleep" sponsors 1 CD to a military soldier
Sleep Disturbance during Military Deployment
Sleep Disturbance during Military Deployment
Authors: Peterson, Alan L.1; Goodie, Jeffrey L.2; Satterfield, William A.3; Brim, William L.4
Source: Military Medicine, Volume 173, Number 3, March 2008 , pp. 230-235(6)
Publisher: AMSUS - Association of Military Surgeons of the U.S.
Abstract:
This preliminary investigation evaluated symptoms of sleep disturbance and insomnia in a group of 156 deployed military personnel. A 21-item Military Deployment Survey of Sleep was administered to provide self-reported estimates of a variety of sleep parameters. The results indicated that 74% of participants rated their quality of sleep as significantly worse in the deployed environment, 40% had a sleep efficiency of less than 85%, and 42% had a sleep onset latency of greater than 30 minutes. Night-shift workers had significantly worse sleep efficiency and more problems getting to sleep and staying asleep as compared to day-shift workers. The results of the study indicate the need for programs to help deployed military members get more and better sleep.
Document Type: Research article
Affiliations: 1: Department of Psychiatry, Mail Code 7792, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, 7703 Floyd C Drive, San Antonio, TX 78229-3900. 2: Department of Family Medicine, Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, 4301 Jones Bridge Road, Bethesda, MD 20814-4779. 3: David Grant Medical Center, 101 Bodin Circle, Travis AFB, CA 94535. 4: Malcolm Grow USAF Medical Center, 79 MDOS/SGOH, 1050 West Perimeter Road, Andrews AFB, MD 20762-6601.
The following information was excerpted from The Franklin Institute and is included here with their permission. http://www.fi.edu/learn/aboutus.php
The Effects of Sleep Deprivation
Adequate sleep is crucial to proper brain function – no less so than air, water, and food – but stress can modify sleep-wakefulness cycles.
Any amount of sleep deprivation will diminish mental performance, cautions Mark Mahowald, a professor of neurology at the University of Minnesota Medical School. "One complete night of sleep deprivation is as impairing in simulated driving tests as a legally intoxicating blood-alcohol level."
At the American Diabetes Association's annual meeting in June 2001, Eve Van Cauter, Ph.D., reported that people who regularly do not get enough sleep can become less sensitive to insulin. This increases their risk for diabetes and high blood pressure – both serious threats to the brain.
Previous work by Dr. Van Cauter, a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, found that "metabolic and endocrine changes resulting from a significant sleep debt mimic many of the hallmarks of aging. We suspect that chronic sleep loss may not only hasten the onset but could also increase the severity of age-related ailments such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and memory loss ."1
Stress Hormone and Insomnia-Study
That stress can affect proper sleep seems obvious, but researchers at Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine have found another reason why middle-aged men may be losing sleep. It's not just because of what they worry about. Rather, it's due to "increased vulnerability of sleep to stress hormones," according to Dr. Alexandros N. Vgontzas.
As men age, it appears they become more sensitive to the stimulating effects of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH). When both young and middle-aged men were administered CRH, the older men remained awake longer and slept less deeply. (People who don't get enough of this "slow-wave" sleep may be more prone to depression.)
"The increased prevalence of insomnia in middle-age may, in fact, be the result of deteriorating sleep mechanisms associated with increased sensitivity to arousal-producing stress hormones, such as CRH and cortisol," Vgontzas and colleagues suggest.2
In another study, the researchers compared patients with insomnia to those without sleep disturbances. They found that "insomniacs with the highest degree of sleep disturbance secreted the highest amount of cortisol , particularly in the evening and nighttime hours," suggesting that
chronic insomnia is a disorder of sustained hyperarousal of the body's stress response system.3
Sleep and Sleep Patterns-Study
Why do some people lose sleep during periods of stress, while others seem to "sleep like a baby"? Research suggests that the difference may be explained by the ways people cope.
At Tel Aviv University, Dr. Avi Sadeh conducted a study of students. He found that those "who tended to focus on their emotions and anxiety during the high-stress period were more likely to shorten their sleep, while those who tended to ignore emotions and focus on tasks extended their sleep and shut themselves off from stress."
The researchers think that "stress may take the During a routine week of studies, and again during a highly stressful month, sleep patterns of 36 students (aged 22 to 32) were documented. Sleep quality improved or remained the same for students who directed their focus away from their emotions, but diminished for those who fretted and brooded as a way to cope with stress.
Almost titling his paper, "If you can't cope with it, sleep on it," Sadeh said "sometimes sleep can help you regulate your nervousness and offer you an escape from stress, particularly when there's nothing you can do about it."4
Sleep Enhances Brain Connections in Early Development-Study
Animal studies show that sleep dramatically enhances changes in brain connections during a period of early development. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, examined the effect of sleep on brain plasticity in young cats that had just experienced an environmental challenge. The animals that were allowed to sleep for six hours after the stimulation developed twice the amount of brain change, compared to cats kept awake afterward.
"This is the first direct evidence that sleep modifies the effect of environmental stimuli on the development of new brain connections," said Marcos G. Frank, Ph.D. The finding has broader implications for plasticity in the brains of adult animals and people.
"I think it's likely to be true that other areas of the brain, higher areas of the brain, have their critical (developmental) periods later in life," said the study's senior author Michael P. Stryker, Ph.D., "and some of them, in the highest areas, the critical periods never close until senility."12
What's more, the amount of plasticity (connections between nerve cells) in the brain depends on the amount of deep sleep, which is indicated by large slow brain waves. This is the sleep that a person falls into when they first go to sleep, and accounts for half of sleep time in young animals and human babies, (who get up to three times more sleep than adults). Stryker said this is precisely the time in life when the brain reorganizes its connections to attain the perfect precision it needs as an adult.
Sleep and Stress
1. The Lancet, October 23, 1999
2. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, April 2001
3. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, August 2001
4. Associated Sleep Societies annual meeting, June 2001
12. American Journal of Epidemiology, March 15, 2001
Every $20 Donation to "Help Soldiers Sleep" sponsors 1 CD to a military soldier
Further information from the Franklin Institute:
Stress On the Brain
http://www.fi.edu/learn/brain/stress.html
“Attack of the Adrenals”-A Metabolic Story
The ambulance siren screams it’s warning to get out of the way. You can’t move your car because you’re stuck in a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam that reaches as far as the eye can see. There must be an accident up ahead. Meanwhile the road construction crew a few feet from your car is jack-hammering the pavement. You are about to enter the stress zone.
Inside your body the alert goes out.
"Attention all parasympathetic forces. Urgent. Adrenal gland missile silos mounted atop kidneys have just released chemical cortisol weapons of brain destruction. Mobilize all internal defenses. Launch immediate counter-calm hormones before hippocampus is hammered by cortisol."
Hormones rush to your adrenal glands to suppress the streaming cortisol on its way to your brain. Other hormones rush to your brain to round up all the remnants of cortisol missles that made it to your hippocampus. These hormones escort the cortisol remnants back to Kidneyland for a one-way ride on the Bladderhorn. You have now reached metabolic equilibrium, also known as homeostasis.
Inside Homeostasis
When a danger finally passes or the perceived threat is over, your brain initiates a reverse course of action that releases a different bevy of biochemicals throughout your body. Attempting to bring you back into balance, your brain seeks the holy grail of "homeostasis," that elusive state of metabolic equilibrium between the stimulating and the tranquilizing chemical forces in your body
If either the one of the stimulating or tranquilizing chemical forces dominates the other without relief, then you will experience an on-going state of internal imbalance. This condition is known as stress. And it can have serious consequences for your brain cells.
Parasympathetic and Sympathetic Nervous System
The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) turns on the fight or flight response. In contrast, the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) promotes the relaxation response.
Like two tug-of-war teams skillfully supporting their rope with a minimum of tension, the SNS and PNS carefully maintain metabolic equilibrium by making adjustments whenever something disturbs this balance.
The strongmen on these teams are hormones, the chemical messengers produced by endocrine glands. Named after a Greek word meaning "to set in motion," hormones travel through the bloodstream to accelerate or suppress metabolic functions.
The trouble is that some stress hormones don't know when to quit pulling. They remain active in the brain for too long – injuring and even killing cells in the hippocampus, the area of your brain needed for memory and learning. Because of this hierarchical dominance of the SNS over the PNS, it often requires conscious effort to initiate your relaxation response and reestablish metabolic equilibrium.
The Emotional Brain- Limbic System
The primary area of the brain that deals with stress is its limbic system. Because of its enormous influence on emotions and memory, the limbic system is often referred to as the emotional brain. It is also called the mammalian brain, because it emerged with the evolution with our warm-blooded relatives, and marked the beginning of social cooperation in the animal kingdom.
Whenever you perceive a threat, imminent or imagined, your limbic system immediately responds via your autonomic nervous system – the complex network of endocrine glands that automatically regulates metabolism.
The term "stress" is short for distress, a word evolved from Latin that means "to draw or pull apart." The Romans even used the term districtia to describe "a being torn asunder." When stressed-out, most of us can probably relate to this description.
Distress Signals from Your Brain
Your sympathetic nervous system does an excellent job of rapidly preparing you to deal with what is perceived as a threat to your safety. Its hormones initiate several metabolic processes that best allow you to cope with sudden danger.
Your adrenal glands release adrenaline (also known as epinephrine) and other hormones that increase breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure. This moves more oxygen-rich blood faster to the brain and to the muscles needed for fighting or fleeing. And, you have plenty of energy to do either, because adrenaline causes a rapid release of glucose and fatty acids into your bloodstream. Also, your senses become keener, your memory sharper, and you are less sensitive to pain.
Other hormones shut down functions unnecessary during the emergency. Growth, reproduction, and the immune system all go on hold. Blood flow to the skin is reduced. That's why chronic stress leads to sexual dysfunction, increases your chances of getting sick, and often manifests as skin ailments.
With your mind and body in this temporary state of metabolic overdrive, you are now prepared to respond to a life-threatening situation.
Getting Back to Normal
After a perceived danger has passed, your body then tries to return to normal. But this may not be so easy, and becomes even more difficult with age. Although the hyperactivating sympathetic nervous system jumps into action immediately, it is very slow to shut down and allow the tranquilizing parasympathetic nervous system to calm things down.
Once your stress response has been activated, the system wisely keeps you in a state of readiness.
Stress is Not All Bad
Bear in mind that an appropriate stress response is a healthy and necessary part of life. One of the things it does is to release norepinephrine, one of the principal excitatory neurotransmitters. Norepinephrine is needed to create new memories. It improves mood. Problems feel more like challenges, which encourages creative thinking that stimulates your brain to grow new connections within itself.
Stress management is the key, not stress elimination. The challenge in this day and age is to not let the sympathetic nervous system stay chronically aroused. This may require knowledge of techniques that work to activate your relaxation response.
Stress Compromises the Blood-Brain Barrier
Stress can dramatically increase the ability of chemicals to pass through the blood-brain barrier. During the Gulf War, Israeli soldiers took a drug to protect themselves from chemical and biological weapons.
Normally, it should not have crossed the BBB, but scientists learned that the stress of war had somehow increased the permeability of the BBB. Nearly one-quarter of the soldiers complained of headaches, nausea, and dizziness – symptoms which occur only if the drug reaches the brain.
The BBB (Blood Brain Barrier)
Permeating the human brain are 400 miles of blood vessels – providing nutrients, fuel, and oxygen, while removing waste and excess heat. The capillaries in this vascular system also comprise what is called the blood-brain barrier (BBB), a protective network unique to the central nervous system.
Present in all vertebrate brains, the BBB is laid down within the first trimester of human fetal life. Although far from perfect, it does shield neurons from some poisons, viruses, and other toxins in the bloodstream – as well as from unpredictable fluctuations in normal blood chemistry.
Primary and Secondary BBB
The primary BBB is formed by cerebral capillaries that are different from those elsewhere in the body. Most capillary walls contain tiny openings called "slit pores" that permit molecules to diffuse easily into the surrounding tissue – somewhat like a soaker hose.
Cerebral capillaries do not have these clefts. They are lined with firmly connected endothelial cells, whose intercellular junctions are as tight as any in biology. Molecules must pass through cerebral capillary walls by active transport with certain carrier molecules, instead of through slit pores.
The secondary BBB surrounds the cerebral capillaries. It is composed of "glial" cells, the other family of brain cells that outnumber neurons by a factor of ten. Certain types of glial cells form a buffer between the brain's capillaries and its neurons. These support cells further obstruct toxins from the bloodstream, while regulating the correct flow of necessary nutrients.
Every $20 Donation to "Help Soldiers Sleep" sponsors 1 CD to a military soldier
Stress and Noise
Sudden sound is an urgent wake-up call that alerts and activates the stress response – a biological alarm that affects the brain in powerful ways.
Because loud noise often heralds bad news, animals and humans have evolved a rapid response to audio stressors: the roar of a carnivore, the crack of a falling tree, the scream of a child. More recently: the explosion of a weapon, the wail of a siren, the crash of the stock market.
Our Startle Response to Noise
Human infants are all ears. They are very conscious of sound and focus on every word they hear, so they can learn to speak. Loud noises trigger a "startle response" – large movements of the baby's limbs and torso – even while in the womb. Until 18 months old, infants react strongly to distress sounds from other infants.
Crucial to survival, this instinctual reaction to noise enables us to go from a deep sleep to a quick sprint in a matter of seconds. . . or to do battle with surprising strength. Today, however, our stress response is getting knee-jerked around by all the bells and whistles of modern civilization. From the clatter and jar of diesels and dump trucks, to chest-thumping teenage car tunes, noise is almost impossible to block. It's very uncontrollability further adds to the stressful impact.
Noise Stress and Brain Function-Study
Stress can exacerbate a number of psychiatric disorders, many of which are associated with the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the area of the brain unique to humans. A Yale University study looked at the effects of noise stress on brain function in monkeys. Results indicate that stress impairs PFC cognitive function through its influence on dopamine, a key neurotransmitter that's involved in many brain disorders, including ADHD and Parkinson's disease.
The researchers think that "stress may take the PFC 'off-line' to allow more habitual responses . . . to regulate behavior. This mechanism may have survival value, but may often be maladaptive in human society, contributing to the vulnerability of the PFC in many neuropsychiatric disorders."2
Preconscious Response to Noise-Study
Because of the immediate need to respond to noise threats, the conscious mind is bypassed. It may not be fast enough to deal with a situation that could be a matter of life and death.
University College London researchers observed the process using functional MRI brain scans of human test subjects who had been stressed by an unpleasantly loud noise that was combined with visual images. Even when a fearful stimulus was present only at the unconscious level, the threat signal triggered activity in the attention center of the cerebral cortex, where the fear response is then channeled to other parts of the brain that prepare the body in the classic flight or fight reaction.
Lead researcher Jorge Armony said, "It makes perfect sense – you can't stop and think about certain things, you have to react."3
Responding to Noise We Cannot Hear-Study
Even sounds you can't hear can have a powerful affect on your nervous system. One example is the "infrasound" in the roar of a tiger.
A tiger's intimidating roar has the power to paralyze animals. Even experienced human trainers are stunned. "We suspect that this is caused by the low frequencies and loudness of the sound," says Elizabeth von Muggenthaler, a bioacoustician from the Fauna Communications Research Institute in North Carolina. "Humans can hear frequencies from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz, but whales, elephants, rhinos, and tigers can produce sounds below 20 hertz."
The shocking power of a tiger's roar is one example of how humans react to a sound they cannot detect with their ears. But what about all the noise generated by our modern world – including the multitude of ultrasounds whose frequencies are above 20,000 hertz and beyond our hearing range?
Tiger Sound- Study
In the first study of its kind, von Muggenthaler and her colleagues recorded every growl, hiss, chuff, and roar of 24 tigers at the Carnivore Preservation Trust in Pittsboro, North Carolina, and the Riverbanks Zoological Park in Columbia, South Carolina. The bioacousticians found that tigers can create sounds at about 18 hertz, and when tigers roar they can create frequencies significantly below this.4
This unheard, low-pitched infrasound can travel long distances – permeating buildings, cutting through dense forests, and even passing through mountains.
Low-Level Noise and Stress-Research
Not just loud or sudden noises provoke a stress response. Chronic low-level noise also negatively influences the brain and behavior. Whether from the road or in the office, low-intensity noise has a subtle yet insidious effect on our health and well-being.
Noise at home or school can affect children's ability to learn. Compared to kids from quieter neighborhoods, children living near airports or busy highways tend to have lower reading scores and develop language skills more slowly. Psychiatric hospitalizations are higher in noisy communities. Bad moods, lack of concentration, fatigue, and poor work performance can result from continual exposure to unpleasant noise.5
According to Dr. Alice H. Suter, an audiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health: "Included in noise-related problems are high blood pressure, peptic ulcers, cardiovascular deaths, strokes, suicides, degradation of the immune system, and impairment of learning. Noise is also associated with an increase in aggression and a decrease in cooperation."6
Females at Higher Risk from Noise Stress-Study
When children have no control over prolonged exposure to noise, it can lead to "learned helplessness" syndrome – a condition linked to forms of depression and to poverty. "It's a pretty pervasive phenomenon," says Evans. He found that "girls exposed to the traffic noise become less motivated, presumably from the sense of helplessness that can develop from noise they couldn't control."
Women respond differently to loud noise, too. A study at Texas A&M University found that "women have a lower threshold to experience noise as stressful," according to psychologist Dr. Mary W. Meagher. "Our data suggest that women may be more sensitive to noise stress than men." (While the women in the study were more easily "frightened" by a loud unexpected noise, the men were only more "startled.")7
Stress on the Brain
1. Psychophysiology, September-October 2001
2. Arch. General Psychiatry, April 1998
3. Neuroscience 2000 Conference, November 7, 2000
4. American Institute of Physics, Acoustical Society of America meeting, December 2000
5. Family Circle, November 1991
6. New York Times, March 6, 1990
7. The Journal of Pain, February 2001
Every $20 Donation to "Help Soldiers Sleep" sponsors 1 CD to a military soldier
