http://asianheartinstitute.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/can-you-stomach-your-brain/

From WSJ Onlinehttps://apps.facebook.com/wsjsocial/articles/SB10001424052970204468004577164732944974356

A Gut Check for Many Ailments

By Shirley S. Wang

What you think is going on in your head may be caused in part by what’s happening in your gut.

A growing body of research shows the gut affects bodily functions far beyond digestion. Studies have shown intriguing links from the gut’s health to bone formation, learning and memory and even conditions including Parkinson’s disease. Recent research found disruptions to the stomach or intestinal bacteria can prompt depression and anxiety—at least in lab rats.

Better understanding the communication between the gut and the brain could help reveal the causes of and treatments for a range of ailments, and provide diagnostic clues for doctors.

"The gut is important in medical research, not just for problems pertaining to the digestive system but also problems pertaining to the rest of the body," says Pankaj J. Pasricha, chief of the division of gastroenterology and hepatology at Stanford University School of Medicine.

The gut—considered as a single digestive organ that includes the esophagus, stomach and intestines—has its own nervous system that allows it to operate independently from the brain.

This enteric nervous system is known among researchers as the "gut brain." It controls organs including the pancreas and gall bladder via nerve connections. Hormones and neurotransmitters generated in the gut interact with organs such as the lungs and heart.

Like the brain and spinal cord, the gut is filled with nerve cells. The small intestine alone has 100 million neurons, roughly equal to the amount found in the spinal cord, says Michael Gershon, a professor at Columbia University.

The vagus nerve, which stretches down from the brainstem, is the main conduit between the brain and gut. But the gut doesn’t just take orders from the brain.

"The brain is a CEO that doesn’t like to micromanage," says Dr. Gershon. The brain receives much more information from the gut than it sends down, he adds.

Many people with psychiatric and brain conditions also report gastrointestinal issues. New research indicates problems in the gut may cause problems in the brain, just as a mental ailment, such as anxiety, can upset the stomach.

Stanford’s Dr. Pasricha and colleagues examined this question in the lab by irritating the stomachs of newborn rats. By the time the animals were eight to 10 weeks old, the physical disturbance had healed, but these animals displayed more depressed and anxious behaviors, such as giving up more quickly in a swimming task, than rats whose stomachs weren’t irritated.

Compared to controls, the rats also showed increased sensitivity to stress and produced more of a stress hormone, in a study published in May in a Public Library of Science journal, PLoS One.

Other work, such as that of researchers from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, demonstrated that bacteria in the gut—known as gut flora—play a role in how the body responds to stress. The exact mechanism is unknown, but certain bacteria are thought to facilitate important interactions between the gut and the brain.

Electrically stimulating the vagus nerve has been shown to reduce the symptoms of epilepsy and depression. (One treatment approved by the Food and Drug Administration, made by Cyberonics Inc., is already on the market.)

Exactly why such stimulation works isn’t known, experts say, but a similar procedure has been shown in animal studies to help improve learning and memory.

Earlier this month, researchers made a small step toward understanding a gastrointestinal ailment that typically affects children with autism.

In a study of 23 autistic children and nine typically developing kids, a bacterium unique to the intestines of those with autism called Sutterella was discovered.

The results, published online in the journal mBio by researchers at Columbia’s school of public health, need to be studied further, but suggest Sutterella may be important in understanding the link between autism and digestive ailments, the authors wrote.

Dr. Gershon, professor of pathology and cell biology at Columbia, has been studying how the gut controls its behavior and that of other organs by investigating the neurotransmitter serotonin.

Low serotonin levels in the brain are known to affect mood and sleep. Several common antidepressants work by raising levels of serotonin in the brain.

Yet about 95% of the serotonin in the body is made in the gut, not in the brain, says Dr. Gershon. Serotonin and other neurotransmitters produced by gut neurons help the digestive track push food through the gut.

Work by Dr. Gershon and others has shown that serotonin is necessary for the repair of cells in the liver and lungs, and plays a role in normal heart development and bone-mass accumulation.

Studying the neurons in the gut also may also help shed light on Parkinson’s disease. Some of the damage the disease causes to brain neurons that make the neurotransmitter dopamine also occur in the gut neurons, researchers say.

Researchers are now studying whether gut neurons, which can be sampled through a routine colonoscopy, may help clinicians diagnose and track the disease without invasive brain biopsies, says Pascal Derkinderen, a professor of neurology at Inserm, France’s national institute of health.

Write to Shirley S. Wang at shirley.wang@wsj.com

Too much buzz

Social media provides huge opportunities, but will bring huge problems

Dec 31st 2011 | from the print edition

THE only area of business that seems to be recession-proof is social media. Industrial firms are battening down the hatches. Banks are tossing thousands of workers overboard. But Facebook is looking to raise $10 billion for a small fraction of its shares when it goes public in 2012.

A recent conference in Madrid, put on by the Bankinter Foundation of Innovation, captured the enthusiasm. The assembled cyber-gurus argued that “social technologies” that allow people to broadcast their ideas (eg, Twitter), or form connections (eg, LinkedIn), are some of the most powerful ever devised. They can be supersized quickly, linked together easily and spread by customers. And they can be accessed from almost anywhere. Two billion people are already online. E-commerce sales are $8 trillion a year. So, the argument goes, this more “social” element to the internet is the next great revolution. Over-caffeinated cyber-champions talk of “empowerment” and “transparency”. But is all this as wonderful as it sounds? Or is it a new bubble in the making?

More information ought to be useful, but only if companies can interpret it. And workers are already overloaded: 62% of them say that the quality of what they do is hampered because they cannot make sense of the data they already have, according to Capgemini, a consultancy. This will only get worse: the data deluge is expected to grow more than 40 times by 2020.The great virtue of social technologies, say their boosters, is that they break down the barriers between companies and their customers. They allow firms to gather oodles of information: big companies now obsessively monitor social media to find out what their customers really think about them. Social media also allow companies to respond to complaints more quickly: firms as different as Chrysler and Best Buy employ “Twitter teams” to reply to whinging tweets.

Responding quickly to bitter tweets sounds like a nifty way to soothe angry customers. But there is a risk that companies will concentrate on a handful of activists (who tweet a lot), while neglecting average customers (who don’t). They may also ignore non-customers (who are the biggest potential source of growth) and the elderly (who seldom tweet). Many firms think that they can improve customer service by using social media to respond to complaints quickly. Really? It is already virtually impossible to talk to a real person on the telephone. Will it be any easier online?

Undaunted, cyber-enthusiasts maintain that social technologies are shifting power from a few Goliaths to many Davids. Ordinary people can easily broadcast their opinions and extend their networks. Big firms have to adjust to this new reality or go under. (As the digerati put it: “All businesses will end up looking like the internet.”) But big firms can use social data to add to their already formidable influence over the consumer: Ford, PepsiCo and Southwest Airlines monitor postings on social-media sites to gauge the impact of their marketing campaigns and then adjust their pitch accordingly. And some of the most successful internet-savvy companies, such as Google and Microsoft, are as secretive about what they do as any old-line company.

The “Army of Davids” argument—to borrow a phrase from Glenn Reynolds, an American blogger—is often applied to politics. For example, Ilya Ponomarev, a member of the Russian Duma, argues that social media make it easier for protesters in Russia to organise. (Russians spend more time on the internet than western Europeans, not least because they have no faith in state television.) This is true, but the secret police in many countries are equally excited about technology. New tools allow them to eavesdrop retrospectively, and to trace networks of dissidents. During the Egyptian uprising the advantage was clearly on the side of the dissidents, since the Egyptian secret police were digital dullards. But this may not be the case in China, where the regime’s online snoops are highly sophisticated.

Cyber-enthusiasts gush about the way social media help entrepreneurs. They have a point: disruptive technologies reconfigure old businesses and create new ones. Facebook could let companies aim their ads more accurately. Firms are starting to use internal social-networking tools, such as Yammer and Chatter, to encourage collaboration, discover talent and cut down on pointless e-mails. Youngsters are happy to embrace it, but older managers may be less keen. The use of social media within companies could be quite disruptive to traditional management techniques, particularly in strongly hierarchical firms.

Dreaming up new companies is not terribly difficult: at the conference Andreas Weigend, the founder of Social Data Lab, came up with the idea of “another person’s hat”; a product that allows you to don the digital identity of, say, an Islamic fundamentalist and see what the world looks like through his eyes. This sounds neat, but some of the new social-media technologies have a clown-suit quality to them. They are amusing the first time, but rapidly become tedious.

A new medium: neither rare nor well-done

Most commentary on social media ignores an obvious truth—that the value of things is largely determined by their rarity. The more people tweet, the less attention people will pay to any individual tweet. The more people “friend” even passing acquaintances, the less meaning such connections have. As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise. For speakers, the new world will be expensive. Companies will have to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number of ears. For listeners, it will be baffling. Everyone will need better filters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help them extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz.

Economist.com/blogs/schumpet

Did a lot of men have flowing locks in ancient Judea?

By Brian Palmer|Posted Friday, Dec. 23, 2011, at 7:03 AM ET

What, Jesus might not have had hair like this?

Photograph by iStockphoto.

It’s time to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Christian savior and owner of a divine mane of flowing locks. We know that "Jesus" was a pretty common name back then, but was his trademark hairstyle normal for the time?

No. It’s very unlikely that the Jesus hairstyle shown in religious icons has anything to do with his actual coiffure. A Roman triumphal arch from that era depicts enslaved Jews with short hair, and one of the earliest images that scholars think could be Jesus—on a third-century chapel at Dura-Europos in modern Syria—also shows men with short hair. The early Christian evangelist Paul wrote, “Doth not even nature itself teach you that if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?” Paul may never have seen Jesus in the flesh, but he would have known the popular hairdos of the time.

The classic image of a bearded, long-haired Jesus emerged as the favorite in the sixth century. Early Christians painted Jesus’s hair in many different ways— long or short, curly or straight, bearded or clean-shaven. There’s even a bald Jesus on display in the British museum. The artists probably weren’t attempting to create a historically accurate image of the man. The New Testament offers virtually no physical description of him, so they would have based the portraits on their own, diverse ideas of what a god should look like. Some philosophers, like St. Augustine, appreciated the diverse ways of portraying the incarnate Jesus. He thought ineffability was more consistent with divinity. It’s easy to paint a man, he agued, but hard to paint a god.

There are two possible explanations for why the bearded, long-haired Jesus eventually won out. Some think the depictions were based on the iconography of Roman gods. Romans who viewed Jesus as the son of God would have likened him to second-generation pagan deities like Apolloand Bacchus—clean-shaven and youthful, with mid-length, curly locks. But as he increasingly came to be thought of as the king of kings, sitting on a heavenly throne, his image had to resemble the patriarchs of Olympus.Neptune and Jupiter were mature and bearded, with longer manes of hair.

Art historian Herbert Kessler of Johns Hopkins offers a more specific explanation. Pagan gods who were associated with water, like Neptune, often had long-flowing hair that merged with the water itself in statues and paintings. Ancient cities built at the confluence of waterways had their own local river gods who were similarly depicted. Jesus, too, had a relationship with water. He walked on water, he turned water into wine, and, in early paintings, he’s often shown above the four rivers of paradise. Early Christians might have favored the long-haired Jesus because they identified that hairstyle with water gods.

There have also been suggestions that early portraitists confused Jesus of Nazareth with the religious order of the Nazirites, who vowed not to cut their hair. This explanation, however, is inconsistent with the many short-haired Jesus images that survive from antiquity.

Got a question about today’s news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Robin Jensen of Vanderbilt University, Herbert Kessler of Johns Hopkins University, and archaeologist-anthropologist Joe Zias.

CARS

R.I.P. Maybach

By

Bruce McCall Illustration by

Hamish Robertson

7:15 PM, December 15 2011

Photograph by Kenjonbro/Flickr (Maybach).

Daimler AG is euthanizing its ultra-luxury Maybach brand after a nine-year lifetime of sickly sales and, more painful for the iconic lord of German industry, muted public wailing at the funeral.

God knows what the Maybach cost to develop and produce—probably north of a billion, counted in dollars or euros. Which makes its abrupt departure, announced late last month, all the more mysterious.

Or not. When it comes to royalty, aura is everything: cars that can easily crest a $350,000 price point should reward the expenditure with Ozymandias-scale mystique: look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair. They should be automobiles of such charisma as to crush the spirits of lesser breeds. The Maybach was a very good car, even superior in certain ways. Alas, as an icon, it overbowled nobody, aside from a few rappers drawn to its admitted virtue as a signifier of money wastage. Otherwise, neither movie stars nor tin-pot dictators nor Arab princelings lusted after it.

I wonder if this had to do with the fact that the Maybach flaunted an image without content. Against legends like Rolls and Bentley, the name radiates a nomenclatural sexiness somewhere between Agnes and Edsel. Daimler’s history is long and glorious, but outside the Daimler-Benz Museum, “Maybach” evokes zero historical resonance or romance. The worthy Herr Dr. Wilhelm Maybach (1846–1929) designed Mercedes engines and Zeppelin engines and built a trickle of eponymous luxury cars between the wars. Good for him, but when not even the all-time winningest Jeopardy contestant could identify who he was, presenting his name as a synonym for world automotive supremacy is an uphill trudge.

O.K., but if the car itself boggles the mind with technological innovation, or otherworldly performance, or stunning looks, couldn’t a mystique eventually develop? Maybe. But in that regard, the Maybach was thunder without the clap. Oh, of course, it was outfitted with fluted crystal champagne glasses and seats that electrically melted into beds and other such nabob amenities; but fanatical polish of creature comforts isn’t innovation. The new Wunderwagen declined to sweeten its impact and appeal with any major technological advances—exceedingly odd for a car-maker as prodigiously innovative as Daimler had been for 125 years.

For equally inexplicable reasons, the board chose to give its all-new brand a physical presence mild to the point of underwhelming. A car meant to signal more than double an S-Class Mercedes sedan’s price and triple its status looked almost exactly like . . . an S-Class Mercedes. They didn’t even bother changing the shape of the radiator grille.

Doubly odd, because Daimler had always owned the bold Wagnerian automotive gesture. Even in the 20s, the Emperor of Japan rode in a boxcar-size Mercedes limousine. In the 30s, a succession of overpowered and overbearing Grosser Mercedes sedans and limousines and landaulets—big Brunhildes festooned with lights and horns up front between bulbous front fenders; with hoods long enough to bowl on; with multiple fat exhaust pipes spilling out the sides—radiated a sort of merciless swagger, before which all motordom scattered like squirrels.

Even after World War II had hammered a near-fatal dent into the prestige of everything Germanic, bombed-to-smithereens Mercedes brushed off the brick dust and by 1953 had climbed back to eminence. The stately Mercedes 300 quickly became Official World Car of the Winners, with Hollywood stars and international playboys queuing up to buy coupe and cabriolet versions.

A new apogee came in 1963, just as Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder economic comeback crested. Enter the immodestly named Grand Mercedes 600, all three tons of it—still, almost half a century later, maybe the most bullish iteration of a limited-production luxury car ever conceived.

The Grand Mercedes had so much attitude it made Otto von Bismarck look bashful. It was positively and unmistakably Teutonic: a blunt object, all squared-off edges and rigid straight lines, and with its wide, low stance and big chunky tires, managing to look three tons heavier than it was. That was just the standard “short” sedan; the aptly named Pullman stretch version was long enough to host 120 Scrooge McDucks.

The 600 defined what my automotive mentor, the late editor and publisher David E. Davis Jr., once said: “You can be blindfolded and spun around three times and sat down in a Mercedes-Benz, and you’d know it was a Mercedes-Benz.”

What I believe he meant was that, whereas “luxury” in the popular vernacular is synonymous with soft and warm, the luxury of the 600’s interior decor was as cool as a casket, deluxe only in a specific, austere Swabian way: hard, thick, upright seats in stiff leather that must have been torn off rhinos; enough glassy-finished dark-chocolate hardwood to trim a yacht; a horn loud enough to bore a hole through a glacier. Buried deep inside was a network of hydraulic pipes and tubes, a system complex enough to baffle a Citroën engineer, which powered everything the engine didn’t. That design also helped guarantee that timeless quirk of great automobiles: horrendous maintenance costs.

Cars meant for the gentry usually provide a decorous mode of travel, valuing restraint above all. Not the 600. A 6.3-liter V-8—humungous by European displacement standards—propelled those three tons briskly. No, energetically. No, fast. I’ll forever treasure the memory of being hurtled around California’s Riverside Raceway in a 600 with the great Mercedes chief engineer (and grand-prix-level driver) Rudolf Uhlenhaut at the wheel, discovering in a few bowel-loosening minutes what it felt like to move over the earth in the first caviar-quality sedan to fuse the build of a Sumo wrestler with the agility of a Barishnikov. This in an era when a Rolls-Royce still manifested all the road-going panache of a 1939 Hudson.

Everybody with money and ego wanted a Grand Mercedes. What an owners’ club: Mao Tse Tsung, Elvis, the Pope, Averell Harriman, Leonid Brezhnev, Jackie Gleason, Saddam Hussein, and every Third World tinhorn extant. Even tyrants and assholes slavered after the car and its cachet.

Daimler never replaced the Grand Mercedes after its run ended in the late 70s. Meanwhile, Volkswagen has returned Bentley to its long-neglected glamour, while in 2003, BMW yanked Rolls-Royce out of its prolonged dotage with an intimidatingly big and brawny new design dripping with mystique.

In brief, the stakes for what constitutes the best car in the world have shot upward since the heyday of the Grand Mercedes; with the Maybach, Daimler seemed content to take a pass.

Why raise the do-we-need-an-NCD-or-do-we-really-need-more-than-one question when the answer is so simple:  The agency stands to gain:

1. Very satisfying strokes are granted and maintained among key creative personnel.
2. Clients are gratified, and re-gratified that ‘such senior creative people’ are assigned to their brands.

My first brush with designations happened somewhere in 1993, when I was promoted to ‘Creative Supervisor’. Suddenly, I came to experience, first-hand, the phenomenon of the ‘parking slot’ designation. The company gets to reward you with a title, you get to brandish a title, and this gives the company breathing space because there are now 2 years between you and the next promotion. A small hike the following year should keep the little buggers quiet, the company tells itself.

Of course, it is inevitable that the gratification of being promoted becomes a major challenge for promoter and promotee. Delaying those perplexing moments has led to a profusion of parking slots: ACD, AVP, CCO et al. There are some really creative ones too: I remember seeing ‘Chairman of the Creative Council’ around not too long back.

Of the entire splay of tailfeathers, I personally find ‘Country Head’ and ‘Business Head’ very amusing. Imagine that. Seniority by body part!

It all reminds me of a story I once read of this pompous ass in British government who wanted a designation, and a big one that that.
The Ministry of Defence cheekily conferred on him, in a memo simultaneously sent out to the entire ministry, the title of ‘Supreme
Head of Intelligence Training’. He was checkmated, because he couldn’t refuse the promotion, and was helpless to do anything about the acronym.

Did I digress?

I remember vividly, a strange situation,  about a decade ago when a very large agency’s Delhi branch had 3 ECD’s and a CD who did not report to any of the 3. Fact was that one big client had demanded a specific ECD and a specific CD, and the CD had to be brought in from another agency, and came in on the understanding that they would report to no one. Apparently the client didn’t care about the internal circus that this would cause, the powers that be in the agency at the time didn’t care about upsetting the other ECD’s, and a strange set of bedfellows ruled the creative roost.

It’s the client, stupid. The client is the consumer … this time, of the designation. Remember, the agency cannot be caught doing anything a client would view with concern, or disadain, or disapproval. So it is important that we all remind ourselves that 3 NCD’s is not a case of an agency pleasuring itself in splendid isolation. Those appointments must be plausible, credible and incontestable. That arithmetic has been made, and holds well, with the client.

But why are we wringing our hands over this?

Are we not the country whose scriptures include the praiseworthy Draupadi, who held her own ground impeccably with 5 husbands, had a son from each, is still a unimpeachable icon of virtue and balance, and is eternally celebrated as one of the Panch-Kanya, The Five Virgins, of Ancient Hindu Mythology?

What of Ravana, each of the 10 heads symbolic of a great quality?

India,more than any other country, knows how to make one tapestry out of a thousand different strings and colours.

Tsk. Tsk. Methinks we doth protest too much. Lets do what we want, there are 1 billion 300 million of us. This is not an issue. It is not even a storm in a teacup. It is really, honestly, not going to make any difference to the fabric of the universe. We can comment, dissect, predict all we want, the machinery of it all will simply crunch forward regardlessly.

You want to discuss the significance of individuals? Let’s talk, on October 5, 2014, when it will be two years from the date Steve Jobs passed away. Now that is a matter worthy of consideration.

In the meanwhile, more power to you, Bobby. You earned it, and you can do it.

Chalo, bacchhon, bolo mere saath, Jai WT!