Dormivigilia

Many of you may have noticed that I like to counterbalance my nerdy, sciency posts with meathead, jocky posts of recent crossfit and track and field news and competitions that I have competed in. I must admit that I’ve live a double-life in which I attempt to mask my embarrassment of being a nerd with my passion for competitive athletics. This behavior most likely manifests from growing up in the blue-collar “Rust Belt” where athletics and not academics are tickets for lifelong-departure from the city. Pardon the tangent.

If you recall, I recently competed in the “Road to the Fittest on Earth” competition in West Palm Beach, FL. Below, are a collection of pictures that Montegraphia took during each of the six workouts (“wods”) that I competed in across three days.

The first workout was “Diane” which is a short, high-intensity workout that rapidly recruits creatine and glycolytic pathways, causing acidosis (lactic acid) within the first minute. It consists of 21 reps of heavy deadlifts (#155 lbs) and handstand push-ups, then 15 reps, then 9 reps. I struggled with the HSPUs due to a recent change in the criteria of the movement unbeknowngst to me and so was 4 reps short of finishing and 4 minutes off my personal best. Basically, the proper and safe position for performing a HSPU is to have your back and feet nicely aligned with the wall so as to not put any added strain on one’s back while pushing from the ground. At this year’s Regionals, however, the proper (and unsafe) position was modified to feet only, causing a severe and painstaking arch of the back and added stress of the shoulders. I spent the remainder of the weekend in need of massage therapy and ice baths due to this change in position.

The second workout was an longer, endurance based workout that elevated heart rate and breathing considerably, but did not really induce lactic acid. It started with a 2 K row.

And was followed by 50 one-legged squats (require considerably more balance than they look)

and then 30 hang power cleans, meaning that the bar can’t travel past your knee on each rep, at my body weight (#135). I only got through 15 of the HPCs in the 17 minute time cap.

That was the end of day 1. On day 2, I went in nervous because to-date, I could not successfully perform at least 10 ONE-ARMED dumbell snatches with a 70 POUND dumbell.  EEK! But I got through it after relying on my “jumps” and gravity. It was rough, nevertheless, on the shoulders and the back.

The second workout of day two was the one that I was most anticipating because I love “hero-like” wods which are extremely long, typically lighter weight, high repetition wods. This one was no different. There were three different stations with 45 lbs, 65 lb, and 95 lbs repetitions of 50 back squats, 30 overhead presses, 50 front squats, and 30 overhead squats with 40 pull-ups in between.

Despite the bad news of Saturday night of Eva’s untimely death, I managed to have a personal best on a snatch ladder that had 20 double-unders in between.

Overall, it was a wonderful weekend with training that definitely paid off!

My favorite, yet most frenzied time of year has arrived once again. For regular readers of my blog, you’ve probably noticed that I am basically away from the bench every week(s) or so in May and June. This May and June is no different, except for that my conference schedule is phase-advanced by a few weeks and I’ve replaced one meeting (the Research Society on Alcoholism) with another (International Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society; IBANGS). That being said, I will be making frequent posts on meeting content over the next several weeks from….

May 16-19; IBANGS 2012 in Boulder, CO. A few fellow postdocs and I will be presenting data on clock gene regulation of drug intake, namely related to the study of alcoholism and cocaine addiciton. This talk is Friday, May 18th.

May 20-23; Our bienniel Society for Research on Biological Rhythms meeting in Sandestin, FL. Here, I will be presenting two posters from my current postdoc research and late-life graduate school research as well as giving my first ever, and extremely stressful DataBlitz (1 slide, 1 minute) presentation.

June 9-13; The annual SLEEP meeting in Boston, MA. In addition to being the head “concierge” of the this year’s Trainee Symposia Series which precedes the start of the metting, I will be presenting a poster as well as finishing up any Board of Director duties that Ihave had over the past year.

I’ll try to post pictures from the surrounding landscape of each meeting too, except for maybe Boston because I don’t really consider Boston to be a novel, travel destination having lived there for 4 years……

Scientists are likely to fail. With funding and journal acceptance rates lingering at 10%, the remaining 90% of us are stuck in a high effort-low benefit scenario. I guess you can say that we are the 99% . I bring up high effort-low benefit and relate it to the current likelihood of success in science because there is an article in this week’s Journal of Neuroscience which examined the relationship between the extent of dopaminergic signaling in higher-order cortical areas and one’s physical and mental efforts to complete a task with little or no reward as compensation. It could represent the mind of an athlete too. Basically someone like me.

I attach the paper here if you want a more comprehensive idea of the experimental design and results, but basically the researchers “neuroimaged” (PET and MRI) striatal (caudate putamen) and frontal cortical areas (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) that are highly involved in attentional, reward-seeking, and decision-making processes during the execution of this high effort-low benefit tasks. It comes to no surprise (at least to me) that individuals, hopefully they were all blossoming scientists and/or athletes, with exceptionally higher and NATURAL levels of dopaminergic signaling in these brain areas expended more effort to complete these tasks.

Here is a beautiful array of the data showing an individual neuroimage of dopaminergic signaling against effort expended for the completion of the behavioral task.

Treadway, M., Buckholtz, J., Cowan, R., Woodward, N., Li, R., Ansari, M., Baldwin, R., Schwartzman, A., Kessler, R., & Zald, D. (2012). Dopaminergic Mechanisms of Individual Differences in Human Effort-Based Decision-Making Journal of Neuroscience, 32 (18), 6170-6176 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.6459-11.2012

It’s common for athletes to have idiosyncratic behaviors, items, and places that they have to do, need, or visit prior to or during a competition. I used to be a part of this crowd as a high school and collegiate athlete. But as my knowledge of science advanced, I have grown to realize that these are placebos for building external confidence. I am not talking about nutrition, of course, because downing a bucket of Atomic wings prior to any athletic competition at mild or high intensity is not a good idea.

While listening to one of my favorite podcasts today, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, during some sleep scoring, these issues were discussed. Check it out!

If you recall, we adopted Eva from the Atlanta Humane Society nearly six months ago. Since then, she has grown extremely attached to Montegraphia and has become more tolerant to me. It’s been a wonderful experience to see her personality blossom and her confidence in humans grow despite the several years of neglect in a puppy mill. Unfortunately, these happy memories have come to an end as we learned that Eva was hit and killed by a car while run away to presumably find us this past weekend. Montegraphia and I were in West Palm Beach for the CrossFit Southeast Regionals (more posts to come) and learned about her disappearance and ill-received outcome Saturday night and Sunday morning. Here is one of my favorite pictures that Montegraphia has taken because it encapsulates her developing playfulness and shows off one of her most distinctive features: a really soft cauliflower ear.

These poor birds have a messed up circadian rhythm (er, likely no rhythm). Unlike songbirds of the Northeast which predictably wake up around 4 AM every spring/summer morning, the birds of the ATL start chirping when I go to bed (1230 AM)! I guess it’s no surprise given the light pollution emitted by 6 million people. Here’s the view from our balcony. For the non circadian biologists, you may be surprised to learn that the integration of light within the classic circuitry between the retina and SCN  is different in birds compared with mammals. It’s pretty easy to see these differences

 in the schematic below:

This data was recently compiled by the NBA and published in the LA Times. Do you want to consult next time? I blogged about this being the potential cause of poorer performances per NBA analysts two months ago.

In the meantime, I received the full list of brutal, pain-wrenching workouts that I will be doing next weekend.

For years, it has been observed through electrophysiological, pharmacological, and molecular studies that levels of adenosine released from glia in the basal forebrain are closely aligned to episodes of sleep and wakefulness. In brief, adenosine levels rise across wakefulness, due, in part, to increased demands for ATP, and dissipate during sleep. This temporal profile of adenosine expression can also be interrupted by sleep loss which prevents adenosine levels from falling at night.

In this week’s Journal of Neuroscience, neuroscientists used adenosine biosensors, which would provide better temporal resolution of changes in adenosine across wakefulness and sleep than previously conventional methods like microdialysis. They also undertook electrophysiological studies to examine changes in adenosine receptor-mediated suppression of excitatory transmission, which is another common characteristic of adenosine (it suppresses cholinergic signaling in order to enhance sleepiness). Third, they compared these adenosine-related effects found in wild-type mice with those in transgenic mice that have impaired exocytotic release of adenosine at the level of SNARE complexes on glia.

As hypothesized, the researchers found that adenosine levels and adenosine-mediated excitatory signaling deriving from the hippocampus increased during wakefulness, dissipated during sleep, and continued to rise with sleep loss. This temporal (and rhythmic) profile has severely attentuated in the SNARE-mutated mice demonstrating that glial complexes are extremely important for adenosine-mediated transmission and subsequent effects on behavior, in this case, on sleep and wake and related memory encoding processes.

Schmitt, L., Sims, R., Dale, N., & Haydon, P. (2012). Wakefulness Affects Synaptic and Network Activity by Increasing Extracellular Astrocyte-Derived Adenosine Journal of Neuroscience, 32 (13), 4417-4425 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5689-11.2012

Tonight, I have to do the unbearable: sleep over in an airport. I have a flight that leaves tomorrow morning at 6:15 am, but two circumstances prevent me from delaying my arrival until early tomorrow morning: 1) MARTA (rapid transit) does not start service until 5:30; and 2) Montegraphia is in Ohio finishing his dissertation so I can’t bum a ride from him. In an effort to not compromise my crossfit training, I have to obtain as much sleep as possible even if some of the crossfit superstars can function (though I imagine barely) and train hard with a daily 5-6 hrs of sleep.

That being said, I discovered this site (www.sleepinginairports.net), which is a first-hand consumer’s guide to snagging the best places to sleep. I hope it is credible, but I will find out later this evening.

For years, it has been observed (and assumed) that aging causes sleep to worsen; that is, the elderly may spend more time in bed, but they spend more of that time in bed awake compared with younger and busier adults. Many of these studies were conducted in laboratory environments and in age-appropriate animal models. However, a recent study published in SLEEP–the flagship journal of the Sleep Research Society–presents refuting evidence; that elderly individuals (around 80) actually report better sleep than younger adults. I read a press release of this study in The Atlantic before reading the actual study of which I not surprisingly overlooked while browsing through the monthly contents of SLEEP in search of studies on animal models of sleep processes (sorry), but even after reading through the study, I’m still not convinced that this study should be viewed as groundbreaking or game-changing because it is reliant on self-reports. And while, er so I’ve heard from fellow researchers who study subjective measures of sleep in humans, that there is a more rigorous checks and balances system for accurate self-reporting in all areas of research nowadays, we can’t dismiss the fact that there may be a big ol’ whooping confound of aging-related cognitive dissonance in all aging studies. So, to those of you who are more knowledgeable and experienced in human data collection, can these confounds be overlooked and can conclusions be clearly drawn since cognitive decline seem to be inherent of all aging-related studies?