SWAlexander
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There are several ways things can go wrong in the body. You can have too much or too little of something. You can have something that just sits there – doesn’t respond at all. You know you really have a problem, though, when you have what this study found: a complete reversal of normality. In this study, a part of the brain that became deactivated in healthy controls after exercise got turned on in the ME/CFS group.
In what the authors called “a remarkable discordant finding”, blood oxygenation levels (an analog of activity) declined in the medial prefrontal cortex after exercise in the healthy controls but shot up in the people with ME/CFS.
This finding was so strange that the authors suggested it might constitute a biomarker for ME/CFS. It was all the more interesting because except for this region of the brain, the blood oxygenation levels (e.g., the activity levels) in the rest of the ME/CFS patients’ brains were lower than normal after exercise. The activation of the medial prefrontal cortex, in other words, stood out like a sore thumb.
The authors proposed that a radical perturbation in something called the default mode network, (DMN) had occurred. The default mode network is most activated when a person is at “wakeful rest” and is not focused on the outside world. Instead, the brain is kind of ruminating; thinking about what’s going on, thinking about others, thinking about themselves.
Rumination is the antithesis of action. In order to get a task done, you have to turn off your default mode network and focus on the task at hand. In what appears to be something of a recipe about how NOT to get things done, the exercise challenge turned the DMN on in the people with ME/CFS. The authors called it “task-related deactivation”.
Nor is rumination thinking about something – it’s something more on the order of – in Landmark Education parlance – getting thought by something. Meditation, on the other hand, is the opposite of rumination: it actually turns off the DMN. The psychedelic clinical trial underway in fibromyalgia is attempting to turn off the DMN.
https://www.healthrising.org/blog/2022/01/05/exercise-brain-discordance-chronic-fatigue-syndrome/
There are several ways things can go wrong in the body. You can have too much or too little of something. You can have something that just sits there – doesn’t respond at all. You know you really have a problem, though, when you have what this study found: a complete reversal of normality. In this study, a part of the brain that became deactivated in healthy controls after exercise got turned on in the ME/CFS group.
In what the authors called “a remarkable discordant finding”, blood oxygenation levels (an analog of activity) declined in the medial prefrontal cortex after exercise in the healthy controls but shot up in the people with ME/CFS.
This finding was so strange that the authors suggested it might constitute a biomarker for ME/CFS. It was all the more interesting because except for this region of the brain, the blood oxygenation levels (e.g., the activity levels) in the rest of the ME/CFS patients’ brains were lower than normal after exercise. The activation of the medial prefrontal cortex, in other words, stood out like a sore thumb.
The authors proposed that a radical perturbation in something called the default mode network, (DMN) had occurred. The default mode network is most activated when a person is at “wakeful rest” and is not focused on the outside world. Instead, the brain is kind of ruminating; thinking about what’s going on, thinking about others, thinking about themselves.
Rumination is the antithesis of action. In order to get a task done, you have to turn off your default mode network and focus on the task at hand. In what appears to be something of a recipe about how NOT to get things done, the exercise challenge turned the DMN on in the people with ME/CFS. The authors called it “task-related deactivation”.
Nor is rumination thinking about something – it’s something more on the order of – in Landmark Education parlance – getting thought by something. Meditation, on the other hand, is the opposite of rumination: it actually turns off the DMN. The psychedelic clinical trial underway in fibromyalgia is attempting to turn off the DMN.
https://www.healthrising.org/blog/2022/01/05/exercise-brain-discordance-chronic-fatigue-syndrome/
