Sunlight

Just back from a holiday with a bit too much sun.
I wasn't sunbathing at all I can assure you - I try to cover my skin and wear medically effective sunglasses to block all types of lightwaves. The glasses are to protect my extremely light sensitive eyes, which produce one of the seven forms of vitamin D in the body resulting in big swings in my condition.

As I am generally physically better after more than a year on my personalised drug treatment (hooray!), I was trying to be more active and sociable with my family on holiday. Unfortunately the kickback from the excess of sun has knocked me for six. Back to trying to have a normal life while keeping myself away from too much UV light (which also includes some fluorescent lights).

Has anyone else noticed an increase in pains or depression or other physical changes about one or two days after getting an excess of sunshine - maybe by the sea with the extra reflections from the water? Sometimes the sunlight and changeable weather at the turn of the seasons have a similar effect.

P-p-p-Peston

I think I knew I wasn't cut out for broadcast journalism when I stuttered my way through an interview with Sir Michael Parkinson in his backwater days when he had a talk radio show in London.

When I say stuttered, I mean that I paused and muttered "umm" a lot. Afterwards I didn't feel like I had presented a very good image of a professional female journalist, though I was only a cub reporter at the time.

Now that I have experienced some significant - though intermittent - cognitive dysfunction as part of my illness it has led me to reflect more on the speed at which other people's brains individually assess and respond to conversations and situations.

I was listening tonight to the BBC's business editor Robert Peston on the Radio 4 PM programme. Now he is highly regarded as a journalist and has a lot of intelligent insight.

But I was thinking - if he was a woman journalist and he spoke as he did tonight, I believe he would be assumed to be a stuttering incompetent and simply not up to the job.

I have no idea if Robert Peston simply has an idiosyncratic speaking style or genuinely has the same problem as I have; the need to stop for a second, consider what the person has just asked me, recall the information in my brain, then arrange my words in the most helpfully communicated order.

Unfortunately the interview doesn't appear to be on the BBC website for you to listen again, but in this case Peston was not only slow and erratic in his speaking (something he does already get criticised for); he seemed to be thrown by Eddie Mair's initial comments, emitted a strangulated pause and was unable to construct a reply that made sense.
It sounded like he might have been fine if he had simply been able to launch in to the material he had prepared for the interview. But he was interrupted in his thought pattern and had to respond as quickly as he could, which appeared to be incredibly slowly.
But nobody would dare question his intelligence.

Unfortunately women (often professional women) are significantly more likely than men to get a chronic illness, and many include the rarely recorded symptom of cognitive dysfunction. If it is recorded by doctors then it often gets put down as part of anxiety or depression, or simply the catch-all thing that "sometimes happens after you've had children".
But let's face it, we all have unique brains with our own patterns of thinking and recalling information. The speed of recall will also vary, and this should have no bearing on our ability to learn, understand and use information in our work. Yet we sadly do judge people by how they can respond, particularly we females who stumble over our facts, or admit we can't remember the name of something (tut, tut).

I am so glad that I was never tempted to take the radio or TV career path.
I much prefer the written word because I can take... my... time over it.
(And to be fair to Robert Peston, he writes an excellent blog.)

Does your brain feel ill?

When we have been ill for a little while it is natural to feel "down", isn't it?
A bout of sickness, flu, or a bad flare-up of our chronic symptoms will often lead to feelings of lethargy and depression and we usually find our fellow humans' response to this is: "That's not surprising after being unable to do things normally - I would get depressed about it too!"
But this is a strange Western rationalisation of the brain as separate from the body. Obviously the brain is actually connected to the body, and the brain tissue can become ill as well.
New research has shown clearly that our brains actually respond to infection in the body to make us FEEL ill; it is not just a psychological after-effect of a physical event - the brain makes this happen.

Now some clear research studies have shown the process involved. The innate (initial defensive) immune system produces proteins called cytokines whenever they encounter a bacterial challenge.
This then signals to the brain, then the entire balance of "mini" hormones and different chemicals in the endocrine system undergoes a change. These signals run through the neurotransmitters and alter our mood and behaviour.
There is already enough evidence to show that the root of depression is in something called the subgenual cingulate of the brain.
When researchers watched the subgenual cingulate with an MRI scanner they found that patients who had mild inflammation from a typhoid injection showed activity here. And those who had the largest inflammatory cytokine response had the greatest problems with their mood and a slowing down of their normal responses.

Dr Neil Harrison of Sussex University told the World Service's Healthcheck programme that many different illnesses with a bacterial element and immune response cause this real physical action in the brain:"Cytokines can cross the blood brain barrier but can also bind to nerve endings and be signalled in the brain."

One thing he didn't touch on was why the body might want the brain to make it feel so bad. If your body feels confused, withdraws from social situations, suffers depression and slows right down, according to this research, that's because it is busy mounting an immune response to infection.
So, may I suggest, it might at times be healthy (for all concerned) to stay at home in bed and avoid others, instead of taking some tablets and making a psychological effort to get back in to the swing of things.