Brain activation discovery

There are limited peptidic inhibitors of the 7.4(52 subtype, and given its wide distribution in the brain, the discovery of novel inhibitors for this subtype is of significant interest.158 The unusual N-terminal tail of GID was shown to be important for activity at the 7.4(52 subtype and prompted NMR studies of structure-activity relationships of GID.157,15 The NMR structure of GID157 shows the characteristic fold of the a-conotoxins but the N-terminal tail is disordered in... 

We are inclined to assume that it is the slow progress of technological development that impeded scientific advances in studying dreaming. But this is a face-saving sop for those who were so conceptually blinded that they could not imagine the simple experiments that could have led to the brain activation conclusion. As Michel Jouvet shows in his novel Chateau du Reve, most of our vaunted twentieth-century discoveries about sleep could have been made earlier by the most useful scientific instrument of all direct observation. The direct observability of sleep is especially easy to achieve in our infants and children, the very individuals who most dramatically reveal the brain activation of rapid eye movement (REM) in their behaviour. 

If you don t have a willing bed partner, you can observe your big sister s baby or anyone s pet cat or dog, and have the same thrill of discovery. Of course you can t expect an answer if you ask them if they are dreaming. But you can answer that question for yourself now that you know that the REMs that give brain-activated sleep its most popular name are a direct readout of the internal activation. Not that dreaming occurs exclusively in REM sleep. It doesn t. REM sleep just happens to provide the most ideal condition for its occurrence. 

It was the combination of EEG and EOG that enabled Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman to make their 1953 discovery of brain activation in sleep. They called the brain activation phase of sleep REM (for rapid eye movements) because of the association of the activation of the eye movements (oculomotor activation) with activation of the brain. They asserted that dreaming might be another associated event. It was the EMG (together with the EEG and EOG) that allowed Michel Jouvet and Francois Michel to show that muscle tone supporting posture - and hence postural movement - was actively abolished in REM sleep. 

Although counterintuitive, the discovery of brain activation in sleep was rapidly accepted by those dream scientists who had sudden and transformative ah-ha experiences when they read about it. In the ensuing excitement about the similarities between waking and dreaming consciousness, few stopped to wonder what bit of this sleep-dependent brain activation could account for the difference, which, after all, is every bit as important as the similarities ... 

Finally, the presence in human post-mortem brain tissue of the active metabolite of diazepam, desmethyldiazepam, raised some curiosity and frank alarm (Sangameswaran et al. 1986). At the time of its discovery in the brain it was thought that there was no enzyme system capable of producing such halogenated compounds and that its presence in the brain reflected dietary intake from an environment contaminated by overuse of its parent compound. However, its discovery in stored brain tissue which had been obtained before the synthesis of the benzodiazepines allayed these fears. It is now thought possible that some benzodiazepines, including desmethyldiazepam, occur naturally and that they are taken in as part of a normal diet (Table 19.5). 

To take radio-activity alone. .. perhaps there is no discovery of modern times which has so disorganized the fertile but by no means plastic brain and imagination of the workers in physical science as this bomb which overthrew with a mighty force all current and reputable theories of the constitution of Matter and its inherent quality. It was the assumption that Matter existed alone in the dense ponderable condition, which we have been told by generations of scientists is its main characteristic, that caused them to fabricate the Mechanical Theory of Nature. (550)... 

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