HENRY,JIM WORLD REVISITED - ENVIRONMENTAL-STRESS AT THE PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL AND THE MOLECULAR-LEVELS

Ever increasing applications of sophisticated technologies in western civilization have placed great and growing demands for the rapid and a ccurate processing of multi-modal sensory information. These informati on streams may exceed an individual's performance capabilities. Failur e to respond appropriately may have serious consequences, not only for the individual but also for others, as in command situations in the a erospace environment. There are, for example, consistent patterns comm on to EEG records in a population of astronaut candidates, when expose d to increasing visual information overload, simulating hazardous flig ht conditions. The records are dominated at the point of ''information overload'' by sharply and progressively increased theta wave (4-7 Hz) activity in temporal regions, major increments in frontal beta (>14 H z) activity, and markedly reduced occipital alpha (8-12 Hz) levels. Th ese responses to a simulated stress raise questions about the brain's ability to distinguish natural reality from the mediated reality in mo dern life. It has been hypothesized that an individual's reactions wit h computers, television and new media are fundamentally social and nat ural, just as in interactions in real life. - Also immune responses ma y here offer valuable benchmarks concerning reactions to mentally stre ssful stimuli. Another type of environmental influences in modern soci ety is that of electromagnetic fields. Even fairly weak (athermal) ele ctromagnetic fields have proven to be useful tools to study regulatory mechanisms in cells from brain and other tissues. There is growing ev idence that nitric oxide may influence normal EEG patterns and that it may also participate in the pathophysiology of oxidative stress distu rbances, including influences in e.g. Parkinson's and Alzheimer's dise ases, then behaving as a free radical with reactive-oxygen-species or reactive-nitrogen-species. As a free radical, nitric oxide is sensitiv e to a variety of imposed magnetic fields, with theoretical and experi mental evidence that its actions in regulating the rate and amount of product of cerebral biochemical reactions may also be modulated by imp osed magnetic fields.