The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
High Stress Levels Linked to Cellular Aging (Scientific American, 11/30/2004)
Telomeres, chromosomal caps that promote genetic stability, naturally shorten with each cellular replication: shorter telomeres are associated with greater biological age. In the new work, Elissa S. Epel of the University of California at San Francisco and her colleagues studied healthy premenopausal women to investigate the link between psychological stress and telomere shortening. For the high-stress group, the researchers recruited 39 mothers of chronically ill children and compared them to control women who had healthy children. In a questionnaire, mothers with sick children reported that they were more stressed compared to mothers with healthy children. When the scientists obtained cell samples and compared stress levels to telomere length, they found correlations between the length of caregiving (and thus stress levels) and cellular aging. According to the report, women who felt more stressed had cells with shorter telomeres, lower levels of the associated enzyme telomerase, and greater levels of oxidative stress.
This report fails to mention which cells were measured so there is an assumption here that more than one kind of cell was measured for the telomeres.
Current thought about stress would require more than one kind of stress to have more than one kind of response. A stress of starvation or drug use or physical injury would expect to leave evidence in the body, but the stress of empathy (as in this case) is not explainable according to those rules. How does the brain communicate stress in the case of empathy? In my explanations of the brain using an algorithm where every subset of processing is a measure of pleasure and pain or a seeking of pleasure and avoidance of pain, then this kind of stress is much easier to explain. To witness somebody that you love (pleasure) going through pain is to bring conflict into the nervous system where something that is supposed to be a pleasure is associated with a pain. Conflicts of pleasure and pain are stress and cause interference of usual pathways for the assignation of pleasures and pains. If the person you witness in pain is someone as close as a child, then there are an enormous number of emotional associations with that subject and that stress is in the emotional center of the brain - the switchboard that is responsible for executive function and also closely involved with regulation of internal organs and other various functions of the body. The brain communicates this stress throughout the body based on connectivity and the brain has involvement with the regulation of cell replacement. So this evidence goes beyond my explanation that aging is a collection of stress (with greater rigidity and growing imperfections of function) in the mathematics of the nervous system, and shows that the changes in the nervous system actually change the age of the cells or advances the generation of cells in the body (only so many generations of cell replacement are possible according to current theory).
If you accept my theory, then the concept that physical stress (injury, etc.) is the same as emotional or thinking stress makes much more sense. This would eliminate the need to do all of these various studies of various different kinds of stress and showing their effect on some subset of function (and then coming up with some new "theory" that the body is designed to respond physically to something like the mother/child relationship using the creative writing of evolutionary psychology) and get on with more important work that actually teaches us something new. All pleasures and pains and all thinking changes the structure of the brain (as changes in the structure of the brain define the act of thinking and living) so get on to work that gives us something big and useful to learn rather than different flavors of the same study over and over again (as apparently these kinds of studies are much too easy to get approved by thesis advisors these days).
(Although, it might be useful to notice how the stress of a disorder is the same as the stress of aging. So I predict here that any study that measures the telomeres of people with various mental disorders/developmental disorders will find a statistical difference where those with disorders have shorter telomeres. I don't know of such a study but I'm willing to bet these results will be obtained according to the principles mentioned above and below...)
Stress ages the brain and the stressed brain ages the body. Lesson learned. Move on.
[Click to Go Back to Unified Theory More Essays Page]
[Click to Go Back to Unified Theory Directory Page]
Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
On these pages you will find ideas that should haunt you. Included are new concepts in science, medicine, sociology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy and more...
This website and the podcasts of Everyone's Revolution explain how the brain creates the mind, but many side issues must be resolved in order to teach this material. Once you realize that the "hard problems" are really the first problems to be answered, you then have a tool for changing all of science and medicine by explaining a massive number of discoveries that will fall into line in order to unify the evidence. All of the evidence is good. The interpretations of the evidence are mistaken in many cases. For ten years now there have been new discoveries of evidence that all move in the direction of supporting this theory (or this school of many theories) and its predictions. Quite a few people have started to pay attention to this theory as well.
