Migraines could be treated by ramping up the brain's cleaning system

 

Image courtesy of Victor de Schwanberg/Science Photo Library

Joel Kontinen

Amplifying the brain's waste disposal system seems to clear a substance that drives migraines, relieving some of the pain associated with the condition.

How does the brain deal with migraines. Now, it seems that an intelligent design ingredient can lessen them. It deals with the brains cleaning system.

Novel approaches are edging us closer to relieving the agonising pain of migraines for all affected

One-third of people with migraines don’t respond to current treatments, but harnessing the brain’s cleaning system could open up a new treatment option. A drug that ordinarily treats high blood pressure helped this system more effectively remove a chemical substance from the brains of mice that is a potent driver of migraines. As a result, the mice showed fewer signs of facial pain, which affects about 60 per cent of people with migraines during an episode.

Around 1 in 7 people worldwide have migraines. Pain, pressure or throbbing in the cheeks, jaw, forehead or behind the eyes are common symptoms, and can be exacerbated by even light touch. “Simply brushing their hair can be painful for [people with migraines],” says Adriana Della Pietra at the University of Iowa, who presented the research at the Oxford Glymphatic and Brain Clearance Symposium in the UK on 1 April.

Source: 

Carissa Wong 2026 Migraines could be treated by ramping up the brain's cleaning system | New Scientist 7 April 

Starfish have hundreds of feet but no brain

Image courtesy of Matthew McHenry and Eva Kanso

Joel Kontinen

Starfish feet are coordinated purely through mechanical loading, enabling the animals to bounce rhythmically along the seabed without a central nervous system.

How do starfish move? It’s not by using their feet, although they do have small feet just under their belly, and they have no brains.

But they have been given intelligently designed  little feet and a thing that is like a central nervous system.

“Starfish coordinate hundreds of feet to hop about – and they do it without a brain. A new understanding of how they manage this could inspire underwater exploration robots that work on the same principles.

The marine invertebrates, also known as sea stars, lift their bodies off the ground with their tiny tubular feet to move across underwater surfaces like rocks and sand. “[The feet are] almost like mini-organisms, all sort of attached to the same body – and you’ve got hundreds of them,” says the one who published this,  “

Surce:

 Christa Lesté-Lasserre, 2024, Starfish have hundreds of feet but no brain – here's how they move | New Scientist 16 April.

Darwinist have found an evolutionary process for woodpeckers drumming on trees

 

Image courtesy of Sławomir Staszczuk, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists have found a Darwinian process for woodpeckers drumming on trees, they say that it resembles how a bird sings.  

Now, researchers think birdsong and drumming may have both emerged from “evolutionary tinkering” in an ancient series of connections in the bird forebrain for fine-scale movements in display behaviour.

Woodpeckers are a Darwinian headache:

Woodpeckers are designed to withstand hard knocks. They have “skulls with spongy layers — particularly in the front regions — that cushion their brains. Robust neck muscles also help to soften the impact, while thick inner eyelids protect their eyes.”

Evolutionists believe that the earliest woodpeckers arrived at least “25 million years” ago, but they could never have survived if their only option was to follow the Darwinian trial-and-error approach.

Source:

 Buehler,  Jake, 2022. Woodpecker brains process tree-drumming sounds as if they're birdsong. New Scientist.  20 September,

The Human Brain Continues to Puzzle Evolutionists

Image courtesy of Patrick J. Lynch, CC BY 2.5.



Joel Kontinen

The human brain is a Darwinian enigma.

In 2008 Harvard professor Richard Lewontin admitted that scientists did not know anything about brain evolution.

That did not put an end to speculations, however. From just-so stories about our assumed lizard brain to more sophisticated – but not necessarily brainy – assumptions, evolutionists have brought up new hypotheses and resurrected some old ones.

Neuroscientists are willing to admit that the human brain is a wonderful organ, capable of “surprisingly complex interactions,” as the journal Neuron put it in 2016.

Our large brain continues to puzzle scientists. A paper published in Nature attempts to explain how it came to be so big, six times as large as those of mammals of comparable size.

According to the abstract, “establishing causes for brain-size evolution remains difficult. Here we introduce a metabolic approach that enables causal assessment of social hypotheses for brain-size evolution. Our approach yields quantitative predictions for brain and body size from formalized social hypotheses given empirical estimates of the metabolic costs of the brain. Our model predicts the evolution of adult Homo sapiens-sized brains and bodies when individuals face a combination of 60% ecological, 30% cooperative and 10% between-group competitive challenges, and suggests that between-individual competition has been unimportant for driving human brain-size evolution.” (internal references omitted).

The authors go on to conclude: “Our model indicates that brain expansion in Homo was driven by ecological rather than social challenges, and was perhaps strongly promoted by culture.”

The problem with all evolution-inspired brain research is that it assumes that our brain evolved from chimpanzee-like brains.

But if the human brain never evolved from an ape-like brain, then all Darwinian explanations turn out to be mere storytelling masquerading as science.


Source:

González-Forero, Mauricio and Andy Gardner. 2018. Inference of ecological and social drivers of human brain-size evolution. Nature 557, 554–557.

Our Big Brain Is a Darwinian Enigma

Big-brained fish. Image courtesy of Bjoertvedt, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).



Joel Kontinen

Our big brain is a Darwinian enigma. As evolutionists believe that all creatures have a tiny common ancestor, their problem might be understandable though not logical.

And as they detest the idea of human exceptionalism, they often look at parallels in the animal kingdom.

Yes, they have found a fish that – proportionally, that is – has a very big brain.

Research published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B looks at mormyrids, African electric fishes. They use “weak electric discharges to locate prey and to communicate with one another,” as Science Daily puts it.

One of them, Peters' elephant-nose fish (Gnathonemus petersii), has a rather large brain, which makes up 3 percent of its body size.

Ours is between 2 and 2.5 per cent, but the fish is a lot smaller than we are.

Large brains come with a cost. They need more oxygen and more energy than if they were smaller. This prompts evolutionists to assume that something exceptional has to happen before a creature can “evolve” a big brain:

Here’s their suggestion: “Really big brains can evolve only if constraints on energy intake are lifted.”

It seems that common descent is a creed that leads to sloppy thinking – even with big brains like ours.

The human brain is a wonderful organ.

Its amazingly complex interactions cannot be explained away by Darwinian just so stories.


Source:

Washington University in St. Louis. 2016. Why big brains are rare: Studies of electric fish support the idea that really big brains can evolve only if constraints on energy intake are lifted. Science Daily. (21 December).

Our Brains May Be Designed to Help Us Learn Rapidly, Research Suggests

Our internal music might be more pertinent than that we actually hear. “The musical hum of our brainwaves” may help us to analyse information rapidly, new research suggests.




Joel Kontinen

There’s an interesting article in New Scientist on our ability to understand that what we hear and see:

“Our brain's ability to rapidly interpret and analyse new information may lie in the musical hum of our brainwaves. We continuously take in information about the world but establishing new neural connections and pathways – the process thought to underlie memory formation – is too slow to account for our ability to learn rapidly.”

The article reported on research conducted by Evan Antzoulatos and Earl Miller at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They investigated the role of brainwaves in learning.

While their research was done on monkeys, it may also be applicable to human learning.

According to Miller, "the research demonstrates that the music the brain produces may actually be central to how it encodes specific thoughts.”

This could help us understand how the very first man Adam could comprehend that what God told him. In addition, Adam was able to name all the land animals that the Creator brought to him.

The human brain is a marvel. As far as we know, there is nothing like it.

The brain is proof positive that we are wonderfully and fearfully made, as the ancient Psalmist put it.

Source:

Hitchings, Lauren. 2014. Our humming brains help us learn rapidly. New Scientist (18 June).

New Scientist: ”Evolution Does Not Explain Consciousness”

We cannot invoke this organ to explain consciousness. Image courtesy Henry Vandyke Carter, Public Domain.




Joel Kontinen

The equation consciousness = the brain does not work. “We have failed to explain how consciousness equates to neural activity inside the skull because the task is self-contradictory,” says professor Raymond Tallis in this week’s New Scientist.

Tallit, who is a professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, UK, and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, refutes this Darwinian equation in his new book Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Acumen, 2011).

He gives a summary of his ideas in New Scientist, saying that in contrast to what the orthodox Darwinian view postulates, consciousness cannot be reduced to neural activity nor can a physical organ be used to explain something that is non- physical.

According to professor Tallis, Darwinian evolution fails and will always fail to explain an immaterial trait with a material reason because it is impossible.

Evolutionists, known as latter-day Sadducees, would like to explain everything by material causes. However, reality has more dimensions than what they are willing to admit.

Source:

Tallis, Ray. 2011. You won't find consciousness in the brain. New Scientist 2742: 28-29.

New Scientist: ”The brain is a vast community of microscopic computers.”

The ribosome is not exactly simple. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

Recently, Nature acknowledged that life is complicated. This week New Scientist suggests that the human brain might be a trillion times more capable than we thought.

Brian J. Ford, a research biologist at the University of Cambridge writes in New Scientist:

“For me, the brain is not a supercomputer in which the neurons are transistors; rather it is as if each individual neuron is itself a computer, and the brain a vast community of microscopic computers. But even this model is probably too simplistic since the neuron processes data flexibly and on disparate levels, and is therefore far superior to any digital system. If I am right, the human brain may be a trillion times more capable than we imagine, and "artificial intelligence" a grandiose misnomer.“

We have come far from the days of Charles Darwin. The Father of evolution did not have a clue as to how complex a cell could be.

It is rather ironic that in the very same issue of New Scientist another article suggests that life must have originated by chance and evolved through Darwinian pathways.

Source:

Ford, Brian J. 2010. The secrets of intelligence lie within a single cell. New Scientist 2757 (26 April)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627571.100-the-secrets-of-intelligence-lie-within-a-single-cell.html?full=true