Brain energy - Christopher M Palmers

Why I decided to read this book:

A lot of my study has confirmed that diet is one of the most important things that we should pay attention to, it’s like a daily medicine. Since it falls into one of my goal verticals, this came up on my scanner and I think Chris was on one of the podcast I follow and this book came highly recommended. Also it recommends a way of fixing brain disorders by changing the metabolic pathways specifically healing them - this is of great interest to me. Getting hands on this was hard since there was a very long wait at the SF library

• Basically Palmers is laying out a case of tying all brain and resulting mind states(emotions, attitudes, moods etc) to metabolism (and mitochondria). He is also proposing that it works both ways - ex metabolic states can change brain states and prolonged brain states can alter metabolism

• A good case that the cause/ trigger of depression is a combination of factors - biological, social and psychological

• Some interesting thoughts on Occam’s razor, circular loops and causality and correlation

  • Occam’s razor is a principle that states that, when presented with competing explanations for a phenomenon, one should select the explanation that makes the fewest assumptions.
  • Collecting a bunch of signs, symptoms and trying a universal theory which justifies and integrates all of them in the most simple manner is usually the correct solution. In reality things when looked together are less complex, when looked separately (with increased magnification) might look like to come from different sources
  • Circular loops as we found are easy to establish but very hard to break, but there might be a different way to look at them - at the process which is powering all sides of that loop - or which is providing a platform for these processes to occur (enabling them etc). Once we identify that it’s easy to break into the circular loop and fix things
  • Correlation refers to a statistical relationship between two variables, where changes in one variable are associated with changes in the other variable. It is important to note that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Many times we can notice correlation between variables but the only way to identify causality is to do a randomized trial - where you can select a variable and set it as stimulus and observe the change in other variable

• Obesity, cardio vascular and diabetes are laid down as the three main metabolic issues which lead to several mental health issues

• Okay - just found out the the DNA of the mitochondria is not the same as human DNA 💥 What? So is it like a symbiotic agent in every cell of our body? The most efficient organic energy processor in the world? and every biological cell has bonded with it?

• Think of brain itself as a super controller for protecting the individual so that he can replicate - the function is now to identify any body part under trouble by sending the urgent and worst kind of signal possible - pain. The function is also reward any good behavior - like food and sex by sending massive amounts of chemicals that make the body feel good/excited/ happy. But what happens when there is a problem with the controller itself - then we have these mental disorders or problems of moods, attitudes, perception of reality itself changes. Insane 🤯 ! A very different way of looking at biology - who exactly is pushing this - is is the first replicator molecules / genes or something arising out of symbiosis of these?

  • to be in line with the super controller analogy - brain symptoms dominate the same symptoms being experienced by he body

• Insulin promotes glucose absorption from bloodstream to the cells. There can be two things going on here - either low insulin production or cells being resistant to insulin which can result in type 2 diabetes or hyperglycemia - high blood sugar

• A body under stress can be imagined as in a state of alarm, the brain starts issuing commands via it’s neurotransmitters to boost certain functions and lower down certain others - eg secreting cortisol via the HPA axis and adrenaline via the SAM axis. The strategy changes from relax, observe things and propagate to be ready for fight or flight - alertness, energy in muscles etc. Book also mentions changes of gene expression in the hippocampus - which is a brain NN to store fact & based memories, and spatial memories(location and place) and also act as an index for memory retrieval based on contextual information - time and place. I think it’s logical to conclude that these hippocampus functions might not be needed any more and hence are suppressed when under stress

• Imagine a normal distribution of stress levels and time spent in a human life - the majority of the time is spent in low stress, while there are extremes of very high or very low stress- but they account for very short durations. eg an attack / drug use. Being in a constant state of stress as to be compensated by similar behaviors from the body - like increased propensity/ probability for violence, fight flight, drug use risk taking etc. Since the body is always ready in that state of extremes. Addiction can also be explained - where when you are always on the high end of state - you naturally are attracted to a substance which can reduce and bring the stress levels to super low and the body starts to attach the substance to stress reduction which becomes addiction. The moral is to monitor stress and be at optimum levels which boost productivity and remove hard to body. Extreme stress events should be very low in number and time spent

  • this response is so acute and so deep that these hormones even bundle RNA (instructions to code for new proteins) into stress granules 🙊

  • A feeling that everything you are doing is incorrect and you are just doing it, a kind of veil over the present moment, where you are just gliding over it but never truly clutching - like identifying with something where you have spent your blood and sweat on. These moments become rarer and rarer. An example being the trigger of dementia in Farzi tv series of the dad. The symptoms are shown once he discovers that Kranti is shutting down - which is a major stress event/ setback for him. It conveys that everything he believed was wrong and something else was more important than just doing moral stuff - the loan sharks ate him and he was bad at money management. At this point in time he doesn’t have the time, money and power left to find a solution, one way is to think the memories over and over and the other is to forget it all 😥. The brain cannot compensate with such a radical shift in reality - that all the time, effort and energy spent of something which it considered of supreme importance was not true at all - in other words the brain made a blunder in interpreting reality and numerous people and itself have to now suffer for it and there is nothing left to correct this. What is the way now - to be stuck in a limbo and lament this for the rest of the life or to forget and start anew? Forgetting seems logical to some brains which promote efficiency kind of like a greedy function rushing towards a local minima when the global minima requires some momentum to scale this small hill

    बगावत या क्रांति में बस हार और जीत का फ़र्क है - जो जीत गयी वो क्रांति और जो हार गयी वो बगावत।

• This looks like a brain strategy to delay small fixes or just to behave as if they are not there or will not have an impact on all. When you notice a small inconsistency with your belief system and the reality you decide to just forget it and not explore/ investigate it. And then it piles up and you get a sense of disorder in a section of perceptual systems and memories and you try to rely on it less and less to a point that even thinking about it might result in anxiety. And one day that door has to be opened and that part of perception, time spent etc is closed off permanently - there is lack of interest, lack of trying to understand what went wrong and how to fix - rather there is a weird fixation on escape from responsibility and escape from the blame of what resulted in this mess. Where as there are people who crave these inconsistency and brutally pursue them - they might even live for them. They derive pleasure from fixing sections of mis perception in their brain NN sections. I think even that is not the way - when there is too much information there is bound to be confusion, latency, hesitation and anxiety since more information is by nature diving deeper into the fractal

  Ignorance is a bliss

• Flow feels like alignment or a process of correcting / sorting/ weaving something in a periodic manner sort of like knitting where there is a small effort small reward

• Mitochondria looks like a fascinating area of research - need to read - Power_Sex_Suicide

• Eating sweets to deal with the stress of the day (dopamine) > leading to insulin resistance > leading to changes in metabolism > lethargy and more stress. So sweets are not the solution to stress infact they are part of the cycle of stress > sweets. We should identify the source of stress and deal with that and substitute sugar with protein, chia etc