Does poor memory result in poor immune response?
The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses
31–40 of 93 posts
Re: The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes and perhaps some placebo effects activate stored immunological responses.
I think more technically it is nocebo effects which cause the (bad) immune response, whereas the placebo effect cancels or at least ameliorates it. Paul Garner has described how worry about covid helped to maintain his long-covid / ME/CFS symptoms, and he was finally able to recover after addressing those fears: https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/25/paul-garner-on-his-reco... I managed to fully recover from ME/CFS mys…
How did you do to recover exactly?
Re: The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes and perhaps some placebo effects activate stored immunological responses.
Placebo is such an interesting phenomenon. I had a certain physical pain difficult to describe that I could’ve sworn to have felt, but after addressing my perspective I’ve no longer had any such symptoms. Not sure if related, but I still don’t understand it.
> after addressing my perspective
Could you please elaborate on that?
Re: The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses
#34Does poor memory result in poor immune response?
There is more than one type of memory in biology. Just like there are different types of memory in computing.
Re: The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses
#35Sometimes I think consciousness is an accidental side effect of a whole load of other processes that we don’t even notice happening.
Or perhaps the processes are an accidental side effect of consciousness.
Re: The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses
#36I've heard it phrased "Stress wrecks the body in strange ways." It is one of the best aphorisms I've been given. A physiologist friend told me this years ago when I was remarking how it seems like psychological stress seems to cause every subsystem of the body to freak out, yet there's no obvious connection between these things - why should the brain, which is evolutionarily "late", affect such deep subsystems?
This paper offers a clue into just such a connection. Immuno-psychiatry might be the next big thing.
Re: The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses
#37Sometimes I think consciousness is an accidental side effect of a whole load of other processes that we don’t even notice happening.
"Side effect" is perhaps not the right term, since the effect loops back into the processes; evidence for that is that we are talking about consciousness.
Re: The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses
#38Preprint fulltext: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.03.409813v2.... "Remembering immunity: Neuronal ensembles in the insular cortex encode and retrieve specific immune responses", Koren et al 2020
People who have more background than me: What does this have to do with memory and recall of immune responses? So they infected a mouse, monitored the mouse’s neurons to see which ones are active during inflammation, then waited a while, then hit those neurons again and observed inflammation even though there’s no disease the second time. If they hit the “same” neurons in a mouse that never had the disease in its lif…
The prevailing knowledge about the immune system says that immune responses are stored in T-cell reservoirs, not in the brain, and that immune cells are produced autonomously from the bone marrow in response to immune cell activity in the body. The brain doesn't inform or control this system.
This research seems to indicate that not only are specific immune responses stored in some area of the brain, the brain can trigger such a response by itself.
(I'm not a biologist or MD, though)
Re: The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses
#39At first glance, it seems to support the idea that biofeedback can be effective, at least to some degree and for some things.
yes and perhaps some placebo effects activate stored immunological responses.
Did you see Ross Douthat’s NYT piece on using EMF vibrations to cure his Lyme disease?
Using a Rife machine. He knows it doesn’t work but still thinks it works.
Re: The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses
#40I've heard it phrased "Stress wrecks the body in strange ways." It is one of the best aphorisms I've been given. A physiologist friend told me this years ago when I was remarking how it seems like psychological stress seems to cause every subsystem of the body to freak out, yet there's no obvious connection between these things - why should the brain, which is evolutionarily "late", affect such deep subsystems? This…
This is also the reason why a lock-down against a virus is not always the best option for healthy people. A lock-down causes stress and this weakens the immune system.
Personally I think it is obvious why the connection between stress and 'subsystems' is there. Stress puts the body into survival mode. Heavy breathing is an example. But when the stress holds on for too long it exhausts your body causing all kinds of trouble. The most extreme example is a burnout.