118 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
needles which don’t interfere with MRI scanners, and they are small — no golf swing problems here. Studies of knitters show that when they initially learn a skill, several areas of their brain light up, but after a while, the brain activity becomes concentrated in the sensorimotor striatal territory.
Glucose, the brain’s power source, is a sugar we get directly from eating sweets or indirectly by digesting starch. Some studies show children do slightly better at school if they eat starchy foods in the morning for breakfast — a bowl of cereal or porridge. When you think and work your brain consumes the glucose in your blood, and blood glucose level drops. If there is a steady source of glucose from the starch digesting in your gut, the glucose is constantly topped up and the level will stay high. If there is no input of glucose from your gut, the body will first get glucose from glycogen in your liver or generate it by converting fat reserves. This takes more work so the body tends to avoid doing so until it absolutely has to. You can function with slightly lower glucose levels but the body will shut down a little. One thing that suffers as a result is the brain’s ability to perform cognitive tasks. A quick and easy way to fix this is to consume some raw glucose and most fridges have a ready supply in the form of sugary drinks. Stories of kids ranning amok, due to sugar highs brought on by too many sweets and sodas, appear to be an urban legend. In tests, parents told their children have had a sugar drink report them to be hyperactive even if they had been given a sugar free drink. ’'m not suggesting you drink lots of sugary drinks — it is bad for your teeth and will make you fat — but the occasional soda is fine.
Memory
Scientists are just beginning to explore the mechanisms that lay down memory in the brain. There are two main classes of theory. ‘The first believes memory is formed in the large scale wiring of the brain. Neurons connect with other neurons and the number and strength of these connections cause memory. When we learn, new connections are formed. The electrical activity in a given part of the brain triggers the formation of new dendrites. They grow, piloted by tubulin micro-tubes, rather like vines growing in a slow motion nature clip. Once a micro- tube guided filament is close enough to other, a synapse forms. This gross-scale wiring growth is one method of memory formation. Another gross-scale effect is myelination. Myelin is the insulation the body uses on nerves cells, including nerve cells in the brain. It looks a bit like the insulation we used in the 1930s. Before the invention of plastic, strips of waxed canvas were wrapped around wires to provide insulation. Myelin
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