Ashok Gupta discusses a study showing the insular cortex stores memories of past infections that can reactivate immune responses. When researchers decreased insular activity in mice, inflammation dropped. Gupta argues this supports his brain-retraining approach for long Covid, ME/CFS, and fibromyalgia.
So a recent study published in the last, I think the last few weeks, and reported on in several scientific journals, including scientific publications such as Scientific American Neuroscience, the brain has a special kind of memory. For past infections. This form of recall may control immune responses beyond the central nervous system. And essentially what's happened here is a team of researchers in Israel, they would take mice and they were able to observe this particular strain of mice regularly suffered from colitis, which is inflammation of the bowels. And then they did lots of brain scans of these mice's brains, mice's brains, and they found that the core of it was in the insular cortex. So the insula that we talk about regularly in the Gupta program, so we talk about amygdala and insular retraining, and what they were then able to do was stimulate purely the insula by itself in the brain and create the same inflammatory response in the body. And this has been a real groundbreaking piece of research here. So in this particular research, it says just as the brain remembers people, places, smells and so on, it also stores what they call memory traces of the body's past infections. Reactivating the same brain cells that encode this information is enough to swiftly summon the peripheral immune system to defend at risk tissues. So once again, this idea that the conditioning of the immune system actually lies in the brain. And the team focused on a brain center called the insular cortex, the insula that we've been talking about. And once again, these mice with colitis, and they were able to find that the brain had retained the memory of infection. And this is the other thing I wanted to mention here. So it's saying is this new study provides unassailable evidence that the central nervous system can control the peripheral immune system. It's an incredibly important contribution to the fields of neuroscience and immunology. So previously, people felt that the immune system was suppose, self regulatory at the peripheral level. So that essentially means that the cells around your body will detect pathogens and create the appropriate response. But here, what we're finding is that there is a central sentinel, a part of your brain that actually maps out all this information and stores that immune response. So in the future, it can be stimulated. And although it may be obvious to us as part of the Gupta program, in terms of neuroscience and immunology, this is still quite a groundbreaking result because it's. It was always theoretical before and now it is proven or certainly in animal studies. And what they're doing here is, check this out. The researchers think that this causes neurons in the insular cortex to misfire, reactivating an immunological memory and triggering a misguided immune response. They were able to successfully alleviate colitis in mice by simply decreasing activation in the insular cortex. Now, I assume that with animal studies, they actually create lesions in the actual parts of the brain to decrease the activation. And they suspect that placing human patients in functional magnetic resonance imaging machines, FMRI machines, and teaching them to consciously reduce activity in that region of the brain could relieve gut inflammation with less dependence on medication. So that's what's very interesting is that their conclusion ultimately is once again brain retraining. We can retrain the brain to relieve the downstream immune responses. Isn't that fascinating that this kind of research is out there? So we're certainly going to contact the authors of this paper and let them know that in fact we are working in exactly this area and have been working this area for many, many years. And there are some solutions that go beyond putting people in an FMRI machine and getting them to control through a biofeedback process. So yeah, some interesting research that a couple of our patients shared with us. And so once again, that conditioning in the insula is dependent on the original sensitizing event. So if you have got long Covid, your trigger was the COVID 19 infection that created a immune memory. And why does the brain do this? Because ultimately it's efficient. So creating that immune memory can protect us against dangers in the future. It's immunological learning. And if you're exposed to mold, once again, aspects of the immune system, the nervous system, store that response. And then there is something called differential activation. And I'm going to write this word in the chat window because I think I forgot it last time when I was talking about this. So differential activation is a nice little juicy word for you all and essentially what that means, as I described last time, you may be exposed to mold, to 100 units of mold. And the brain then engages in differential activation, which means that just 1% of what you previously experienced is able to then create this response that's normally only reserved for 100 units of exposure to mold. And then in a similar way with chronic fatigue syndrome, ME long Covid, the brain had traumatic response to the original infection, has stored that in the insula. And now the insula is being stimulating itself in an over excited manner, an inappropriate manner, creating the downstream symptoms. And finally with fibromyalgia, although that's been seen as predominantly kind of pain type condition, actually there is now evidence that even fibromyalgia has been potentially triggered as a response to some kind of immunological disturbance or threat, and in addition to potentially some kind of pain triggering event. So this now really supports the overall hypothesis of conditioning in the brain causing our bodies to stay stuck in the same system or the same processes that were occurring right at the beginning of our condition, whatever we're exposed to. So really fascinating research, really supporting what we're doing. So I want you to know that we're constantly looking at neuroscience updates around these types of areas and looking at what supports our hypothesis, what doesn't support hypothesis, and kind of adjusting accordingly and looking at all of the latest tools and techniques that are out there that are supporting these types of conditions.
