Noteworthy News Articles on Mental Health Topics, November 17-23, 2005



Study Suggests Smoking Lowers IQ
Anne Rueter, Ann Arbor News- 11/17/2005

At a recent showing of the film "Good Night, and Good Luck,'' 1950s TV commercials touting the health benefits of smoking drew laughs from the audience. People know well that smoking is bad for the heart and lungs. But bad for the brain? A recent University of Michigan study raises the possibility that smokers over time may lose ability in thinking speedily and accurately, and lower their IQs. That's likely an alarming thought to smokers who find a cigarette calms them and helps them focus their thoughts.
      The new insight into smoking came as a surprising sidelight in a study that explored the effects of years of alcohol use on the brain. Scientists at the U-M Medical School's Addiction Research Center tested 172 men, alcoholics and non-alcoholics, and confirmed what other studies have found, that alcoholism is associated with thinking difficulties and lower IQ. Some of the men in the study were both smokers and current alcoholics. Others were smokers who had suffered with alcoholism in the past. Some were smokers who had no alcohol problems, and some didn't smoke. The results suggest that even among men without alcohol problems, smoking is associated with lower mental performance.
      Smokers aren't off the mark when they light up to concentrate better, says U-M psychiatry professor Jennifer Glass, the lead author of the paper in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence that recounted the findings. But they're trading momentary gain for long-term losses -- which may turn out to include loss of gray matter. Glass says the results of the study are very preliminary and scientists need to confirm or disprove the results in other studies. The data don't prove that smoking causes lowered mental abilities.
     Showing cause and effect would be key, says Peter Jacobson, a U-M researcher in the School of Public Health who studies smoking policy issues. There are other reasons why low performance on mental tests and smoking may be associated. It's known, for instance, that people with lower IQ scores tend to have less education on average, are likely to be more susceptible to cigarette marketing and to smoke as a release for mental problems. Even though the picture isn't complete, Glass says she hopes smokers see the study is "another reason to quit smoking.''
     Coincidentally, researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco, recently announced findings that dovetail with the U-M study. The California researchers imaged the brains of alcoholics, smokers and non-smokers, and found more brain shrinkage and atrophy in the smokers.
     Other studies are needed to see if there's a brain-smoking link in other groups, like non-alcoholics and women. Glass is beginning a five-year study of the effects of smoking on the brains of 100 adolescents age 15 to 21. Using brain imaging and cognitive tests, she wants to learn what happens to the brains of those who start a smoking habit. The study hypothesis is that smoking will start to cause some dysfunction in young people as well.

Apocalytic literature naturally gravitates toward the maudlin, lamenting that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, usually courtesy of someone like Eminem or Tom DeLay. This is what makes Greg Critser's "Generation Rx" such an unexpected delight. Although his message is unrelievedly depressing - drug companies, with the nation's physicians and the federal government already on the payroll, have transmogrified a self-reliant nation into a herd of functional drug addicts - there is something so congenial and non-self-righteous about the way he tells his story that few of the scoundrels singled out for public obloquy will take personal offense.
      Unlike the malignantly partisan Michael Mooreor Ralph Nader, arguably the least bubbly reformer since Oliver Cromwell, Critser spreads his gospel of rack and ruin in an almost good-natured way, explaining who paid off whom and how many Americans died as a result of it, but without getting especially nasty. Indeed, what prevents "Generation Rx" from reading like a writ of indictment is the author's folksy turns of phrase, which sometimes go off in unintentionally hilarious directions.
     Thus, describing the evolution of Glaxo from a sleeping giant to a juggernaut, Critser says that "in the boggy pharma jungle," the company "swung on the vine of prior greatness while withering on stultifying British business practices." Marveling at the liver, he writes, "It is the only organ that can, with time, regenerate itself, a kind of Donald Trump of the human body." And he identifies Washington as "an unfathomable brothel to all but the Reverends Rove and Cheney."
     Here it is unclear whether he is arguing that the nation's capital is an unfathomable brothel open to every client except Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, or that everyone, including Rove and Cheney, is welcome at the brothel, though they alone can fathom it. Whatever the case, it certainly makes a nice break from all the dreary paragraphs about prostaglandins, rofecoxib and Heliobacter pylori. These strange analogies, bizarre metaphors and weird solecisms provide reassuring grace notes in a book whose thrust is otherwise quite sober. They also make one wonder if the people involved in the editing process may not have experimented with a few
     "Generation Rx" contends that large drug companies have co-opted the federal government, seduced the medical establishment and mesmerized a temperamentally supine public into taking far more drugs than is strictly necessary, much less healthy. Worse, Americans have fallen victim to "polypharmacy": using so many drugs for so many ailments that they have no idea how the various medications are interacting.
     Nevertheless, this is not the work of a conspiracy theorist. The public, particularly "the Tribe of High-Performance Aging," genuinely adores Viagra, Zoloft, Paxil and Prozac, believing that they vastly improve one's quality of life. As in his previous book, "Fat Land," Critser says the public has been complicitous in its own seduction. Gleefully voting with their tongues, Americans use drugs to combat depression (Paxil, Prozac), reduce the ruckus from the kids (Ritalin), make bedtime more like a night in the seraglio (Viagra) and turn the workplace into a hearty party (Vicodin).
     Despite the book's misleading title, the triumph of "big pharma" is yet another national tragedy, like Michael Flatley's career, that can be laid directly at the feet of baby boomers. As Critser writes, "The generation of Americans who rebelliously experimented with drugs is now a generation upon whom drugs are experimented, with barely a squeak of protest." Actually, this argument is a bit hard to follow. Young baby boomers never protested against drugs, merely their price, quality, availability and the advisability of buying them from furtive men named Sweet Memphis or Chucky the Swede. So why on earth should they complain about drugs now? (For the answer to this question, go ask Alice. When she's 10 feet tall.)
     Because of the dry nature of the subject, "Generation Rx" is unlikely to replace Harlan Coben as bedtime reading. Moreover, while some details may be new, the overall theme - doctors are on the drug industry tab, Republican legislators view regulation as Stalinist, consumers have developed an almost Incan belief in the power of chemicals, lobbyists run everything - is not. Still, the book is a lively, well-told tale, chock-full of fascinating tidbits that will bring a smile to the face of even the gloomiest Gus. For example, the Learning Annex, in addition to its tutelage in pole dancing, offers an online course called "Three Days to a Pharmaceutical Sales Job Interview!" And a New York internist's Web site offers "pen amnesty" to physicians who wish to quietly turn in all the writing materials they have had foisted on them by drug companies over the years.
     Some assertions seem debatable. When the author reports that Vioxx, "by one count," has caused as many as 100,000 heart attacks, one wonders: precisely whose count was that? Similarly, when he reports that by the late 1990's, the United States was consuming 90 percent of the world's Ritalin, some may be shocked. Judging from the children of the corn my son and daughter have been dragging in off the street for the past 20 years, I would have sworn that number was far too low.
     Unsurprisingly, one of Critser's major villains in the pharmaceuticalization of America is the Reagan administration, which helped tear down the Chinese wall that once separated regulators from drug makers and created, in Critser's view, an ambience of potentially disastrous chumminess. Yet he lauds William Rehnquist, a staunch conservative, for issuing a prescient warning about the unforeseen perils of direct-to-consumer advertising. "Pain getting you down?" he wrote derisively in a dissenting 1976 Supreme Court opinion. "Insist that your physician prescribe Demerol. You pay a little more than for aspirin, but you get a lot more relief."
     Nothing in the book is more alarming than the disclosure that the drug industry spent $50 million on political campaigns between 1999 and 2003. True, it is comforting to read that "Republican causes and candidates" pocketed almost 80 percent of the cash; if only from the shareholder's perspective, it is reassuring to know that at least the money is being spent wisely. But from a patriot's point of view, the paltry size of the bribe is unnerving. Compared with the billions in revenue garnered by the sale of hyped, dangerous or ineffective drugs, $50 million is mere chicken feed. This suggests not only that our politicians can be bought, which is bad, but that they can be bought cheap, which is worse.
     Somebody, pass the Demerol.


This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis
Sandra Blakeslee, New York Times- 11/22/2005

Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true. The new experiments, which used brain imaging, found that people who were hypnotized "saw" colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought that they were gibberish. "The idea that perceptions can be manipulated by expectations" is fundamental to the study of cognition, said Michael I. Posner, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon and expert on attention. "But now we're really getting at the mechanisms."
      Even with little understanding of how it works, hypnosis has been used in medicine since the 1950's to treat pain and, more recently, as a treatment for anxiety, depression, trauma, irritable bowel syndrome and eating disorders. There is, however, still disagreement about what exactly the hypnotic state is or, indeed, whether it is anything more than an effort to please the hypnotist or a natural form of extreme concentration where people become oblivious to their surroundings while lost in thought.
     Hypnosis had a false start in the 18th century when a German physician, Dr. Franz Mesmer, devised a miraculous cure for people suffering all manner of unexplained medical problems. Amid dim lights and ethereal music played on a glass harmonica, he infused them with an invisible "magnetic fluid" that only he was able to muster. Thus mesmerized, clients were cured. Although Dr. Mesmer was eventually discredited, he was the first person to show that the mind could be manipulated by suggestion to affect the body, historians say. This central finding was resurrected by Dr. James Braid, an English ophthalmologist who in 1842 coined the word hypnosis after the Greek word for sleep. Braid reportedly put people into trances by staring at them intently, but he did not have a clue as to how it worked. In this vacuum, hypnosis was adopted by spiritualists and stage magicians who used dangling gold watches to induce hypnotic states in volunteers from the audience, and make them dance, sing or pretend to be someone else, only to awaken at a hand clap and laughter from the crowd.
     In medical hands, hypnosis was no laughing matter. In the 19th century, physicians in India successfully used hypnosis as anesthesia, even for limb amputations. The practice fell from favor only when ether was discovered. Now, Dr. Posner and others said, new research on hypnosis and suggestion is providing a new view into the cogs and wheels of normal brain function. One area that it may have illuminated is the processing of sensory data. Information from the eyes, ears and body is carried to primary sensory regions in the brain. From there, it is carried to so-called higher regions where interpretation occurs. For example, photons bouncing off a flower first reach the eye, where they are turned into a pattern that is sent to the primary visual cortex. There, the rough shape of the flower is recognized. The pattern is next sent to a higher - in terms of function - region, where color is recognized, and then to a higher region, where the flower's identity is encoded along with other knowledge about the particular bloom.
     The same processing stream, from lower to higher regions, exists for sounds, touch and other sensory information. Researchers call this direction of flow feedforward. As raw sensory data is carried to a part of the brain that creates a comprehensible, conscious impression, the data is moving from bottom to top. Bundles of nerve cells dedicated to each sense carry sensory information. The surprise is the amount of traffic the other way, from top to bottom, called feedback. There are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as there are carrying it up. These extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see, hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call "top down processing." What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face.
     The top-down structure explains a lot. If the construction of reality has so much top-down processing, that would make sense of the powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor will make you ill), talk therapy and meditation. If the top is convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled. This brain structure would also explain hypnosis, which is all about creating such formidable top-down processing that suggestions overcome reality.
     According to decades of research, 10 to 15 percent of adults are highly hypnotizable, said Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford who studies the clinical uses of hypnosis. Up to age 12, however, before top-down circuits mature, 80 to 85 percent of children are highly hypnotizable. One adult in five is flat out resistant to hypnosis, Dr. Spiegel said. The rest are in between, he said.
     In some of the most recent work, Dr. Amir Raz, an assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Columbia, chose to study highly hypnotizable people with the help of a standard psychological test that probes conflict in the brain. As a professional magician who became a scientist to understand better the slippery nature of attention, Dr. Raz said that he "wanted to do something really impressive" that other neuroscientists could not ignore. The probe, called the Stroop test, presents words in block letters in the colors red, blue, green and yellow. The subject has to press a button identifying the color of the letters. The difficulty is that sometimes the word RED is colored green. Or the word YELLOW is colored blue. For people who are literate, reading is so deeply ingrained that it invariably takes them a little bit longer to override the automatic reading of a word like RED and press a button that says green. This is called the Stroop effect.
     Sixteen people, half highly hypnotizable and half resistant, went into Dr. Raz's lab after having been covertly tested for hypnotizability. The purpose of the study, they were told, was to investigate the effects of suggestion on cognitive performance. After each person underwent a hypnotic induction, Dr. Raz said: "Very soon you will be playing a computer game inside a brain scanner. Every time you hear my voice over the intercom, you will immediately realize that meaningless symbols are going to appear in the middle of the screen. They will feel like characters in a foreign language that you do not know, and you will not attempt to attribute any meaning to them. "This gibberish will be printed in one of four ink colors: red, blue, green or yellow. Although you will only attend to color, you will see all the scrambled signs crisply. Your job is to quickly and accurately depress the key that corresponds to the color shown. You can play this game effortlessly. As soon as the scanning noise stops, you will relax back to your regular reading self." Dr. Raz then ended the hypnosis session, leaving each person with what is called a posthypnotic suggestion, an instruction to carry out an action while not hypnotized.
     Days later, the subjects entered the brain scanner. In highly hypnotizables, when Dr. Raz's instructions came over the intercom, the Stroop effect was obliterated, he said. The subjects saw English words as gibberish and named colors instantly. But for those who were resistant to hypnosis, the Stroop effect prevailed, rendering them significantly slower in naming the colors. When the brain scans of the two groups were compared, a distinct pattern appeared. Among the hypnotizables, Dr. Raz said, the visual area of the brain that usually decodes written words did not become active. And a region in the front of the brain that usually detects conflict was similarly dampened. Top-down processes overrode brain circuits devoted to reading and detecting conflict, Dr. Raz said, although he did not know exactly how that happened. Those results appeared in July in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
     A number of other recent studies of brain imaging point to similar top-down brain mechanisms under the influence of suggestion. Highly hypnotizable people were able to "drain" color from a colorful abstract drawing or "add" color to the same drawing rendered in gray tones. In each case, the parts of their brains involved in color perception were differently activated. Brain scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized. Top-down processes override sensory, or bottom-up information, said Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn, a neuroscientist at Harvard. People think that sights, sounds and touch from the outside world constitute reality. But the brain constructs what it perceives based on past experience, Dr. Kosslyn said. Most of the time bottom-up information matches top-down expectation, Dr. Spiegel said. But hypnosis is interesting because it creates a mismatch. "We imagine something different, so it is different," he said.



When Mindful Awareness Goes to Your Head
Eric Nagourney, New York Times- 11/22/2005

People who meditate regularly appear to undergo changes in parts of the brain that handle perception and attentiveness, a new study suggests. The study sample is small, and it is unclear what the changes may mean, but researchers said that when they compared M.R.I. scans of people who meditated with those of people who did not, they found more gray matter in the frontal cortexes of those who meditate. "We presume it's a good thing, but we don't know for sure," said the lead author of the study, Sara W. Lazar, a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital. The study appears in the current issue of NeuroReport.
      While early studies have found evidence that people who meditate extensively, like Buddhist monks, experience long-lasting changes in their brains, the researchers here were interested in what effect, if any, more moderate amounts of meditation have. For this study, they looked at 20 people who practiced a form of meditation known as mindful awareness, which does not involve the repetition of a mantra. Five of the volunteers taught meditation or yoga, but the rest held traditional jobs and reported meditating on average once a day for 40 minutes. All had taken part in at least one weeklong mediation retreat at some point. These volunteers, the researchers found, had thicker tissue in the parts of the brain involved in attention and sensory processing than the other volunteers did. The difference was especially notable in older volunteers, suggesting that meditation may help reduce the cortical thinning that comes with age, the researchers said.
     The study could not establish that the differences were attributable to meditation, but Dr. Lazar noted that other studies had found structural changes in jugglers' brain, presumably caused by the demands of their craft. She said the researchers believed other forms of meditation and even yoga might produce the same results.



Exploring a Hormone for Caring
Nicholas Wade, New York Times- 11/22/2005

The lack of emotional care given to infants in some Romanian and Russian orphanages has provided researchers an opportunity to study the hormonal basis of the mother-child bond. Researchers led by Seth D. Pollak of the University of Wisconsin have found that these children, even three and a half years after adoption into Wisconsin families, produce two critical hormones in a different pattern from children with traditional upbringings.
      The hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin, are small proteins produced by the pituitary gland in the center of the brain. Although they influence bodily functions like giving milk and the water balance, they also have a range of effects on social behavior, at least in laboratory rodents and monkeys. These include fostering positive interactions with other individuals, notably the social bonds between mother and child and the sexual bonds between male and female.  In June this year, oxytocin was reported to elevate the level of trust among people who received a nasal spray of it before playing a game created to test their tolerance for being betrayed by other players. The game was created by an economist, Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich.
     Dr. Pollak and his colleagues have looked at how the two hormones are involved in shaping the bonds between mother and child. In normally raised children aged about 4½ years, they found, oxytocin levels rise after half an hour of physical interaction with their mothers. But the previously neglected children in their study did not show this oxytocin jump, Dr. Pollak and his colleagues write in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The hormone levels were measured from samples of the children's urine.
     Dr. Pollak believes that oxytocin acts through the brain's reward system and gives infants a positive feeling about social interactions. The finding that the adopted children in the study apparently get less of an oxytocin reward could explain why some children from Eastern Europe, as they grow older, have difficulty forming social relationships. "Tens of thousands of these infants are entering the U.S. every year, and the children are having problems in social relationships, and we haven't a clue why," Dr. Pollak said.
     Many young children when distressed will accept comfort only from a parent, not a stranger, but some previously neglected children will run to the nearest adult, sometimes ignoring their adoptive parents. The Wisconsin team noted that the adopted children in their study produced very low levels of vasopressin. This hormone, they say, is critical for recognizing individuals as familiar, an essential step in forming social bonds.
     Dr. Charles Nelson, a Harvard pediatrician who has studied children in Romanian orphanages, said the Wisconsin team's method of measuring the two hormones in urine, if reliable, would be a major advance in tracking emotional development in infants. The new finding can be interpreted in several ways. One possibility, Dr. Nelson said, is that there is a sensitive period in the first two years of life for developing a strong relationship, and that later relationships depend on the biological mechanism having been set correctly, as judged by the oxytocin response. It could be that the previously neglected children have missed this critical window of development, Dr. Nelson said. Or, the biological system may be flexible and it will just take longer for the children to develop a normal oxytocin response. . The best possible intervention for neglected orphan children would seem to be adoption into loving families. But maybe this is not enough and if so, the oxytocin measurements may point to the need to do something else, Dr. Nelson said. It is unclear why humans, a highly social species, are not born with an innate ability to form social relationships instead of having to develop the skill in infancy, as is apparently the case. Perhaps the arrangement is a safeguard against forming bad relationships, Dr. Nelson suggested.

Meditation seems to energize the sleep-deprived. It seems to help with concentration. It even seems to bolster the very structure of the brain as we age. Neuroscientists presenting their latest research at a convention of 34,000 colleagues last week had so much praise for meditation that it was starting to sound like a mantra.
      Their work fits into a growing body of data that tries to bring modern science to bear on age-old methods to quiet the mind. Enthusiasts have long touted the health benefits of meditative practices such as chanting, yoga, and prayer. Now, using the latest high-tech tools of neuroscience and biochemistry, they are teasing out how those benefits work. And increasingly, they are focusing on how meditation may help not only the body but the brain. ''As time goes on, we're understanding this phenomenon in ever more advanced scientific terms," said Dr. Herbert Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute and a Harvard Medical School associate professor who has studied the body's ''relaxation response" for nearly 40 years. ''And why it's so important today is because over 60 percent of visits to the doctor are in the stress-related realm." While some of the most striking studies have involved monks who were experts at meditation, the new research also backs up claims that garden-variety meditation can bring scientifically demonstrable benefits.
     Considered on the fringes of science just a generation ago, serious research on meditation now includes hundreds of studies examining its possible benefits. Three of five researchers on a panel about meditation at last week's Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington, D.C., were from Harvard. In recent years, academic researchers seeking to turn anecdotes into hard data have suggested that meditation may provide a broad array of benefits, from lifting depression to relieving pain to fighting flu.
     Skeptics remain. Many of the studies are small and preliminary, and some depend on the meditators' own descriptions of what they feel, which could be biased by their desire for it to work. When the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader and a longtime collaborator with brain scientists, was scheduled to speak at the Society for Neuroscience conference, several hundred scientists signed a petition questioning his presence, and arguing that meditation research has not been objective enough.
     But researchers say that that is their very aim: to improve the quality of the research, using new tools and better methods, to determine more conclusively what meditation really does. ''If we're going to make extraordinary claims, and claim that certain individuals can break the rules we have about human performance, the methodology has to be absolutely airtight," said Sam Moulton, a psychology graduate student at Harvard. As the power of meditation gained credibility during the 1970s and 1980s, Moulton noted, researchers were looking mainly for physiological effects, such as blood pressure and heart benefits. ''Now, we're looking for mental effects."
     Monks are considered the superstars of meditation, but Benson and others say benefits can come from a spectrum of repetitive, mind-clearing practices that elicit the so-called relaxation response -- from swaying in prayer to saying the rosary to knitting. Under that broad definition, about one-half of Americans perform some sort of meditation, mainly prayer, Benson said.
     Among the studies presented last week was one by Massachusetts General Hospital researchers, who scanned the brains of 20 people who meditated regularly. These people had four regions of cortex -- the rind of the brain, associated with higher functions like memory and decision making -- that were thicker than in 15 subjects who didn't meditate. In addition, the researchers found signs that one area of the cortex seemed to have aged less quickly than it did in nonmeditators. The study did not look at whether those brain differences had a noticeable impact on behavior, but researchers are now doing follow-up work to assess that. The findings ''provide the first evidence that alterations in brain structure are associated with Western-style meditation practice, possibly reflecting increased use of specific brain regions," said Sara Lazar, of Harvard, the study's lead author.
     In other Harvard-affiliated work, researchers reported that by using a device that can analyze every breath a person exhales, they could objectively measure the depth of relaxation a person had achieved. People who reached deeper states of relaxation exhaled more nitric oxide, a gas known to relax the smooth muscles in arteries, and aid blood flow. ''Our results provide initial evidence of how the relaxation response intervention and other mind/body approaches might lower blood pressure," said Jeffery A. Dusek, the study's lead author. ''In the near future, it may even be possible to use our new technique to determine an effective 'dose' of meditation for a given person, or to identify characteristics of individuals who best respond to the relaxation response intervention."
     Another new study, from the University of Kentucky, found that meditation could offset the sluggishness of sleep deprivation better than a nap. Researchers tested volunteers on a button-pressing speed task, and found that even novice meditators improved their performance more after 40 minutes of meditation than after a 40-minute nap. Meditation helped even after a full night of sleep deprivation, the study found, said researcher Bruce O'Hara.
     And Buddhist monks have demonstrated yet again that meditation can give them extraordinary powers of mind, according to work by Olivia Carter, also of Harvard. Her team tested the powers of concentration of 76 Tibetan monks, by showing them different images in each eye. Normally, people's brains flip between the two images every 2.5 seconds. But the monks averaged about four seconds per eye, and one monk reported focusing on one of the images for 723 seconds.
     Ultimately, scientists aim to understand not only the powers of monks but the everyday experiences of an amateur like Philip Hresko, a 63-year-old Boston architect who began training six weeks ago at the Mind/Body Medical Institute out of concern for his heart health. Along with more prolonged techniques, he said, he has been learning to relax when he gets a spare 20 to 30 seconds. ''When I'm stuck in traffic, instead of gripping the steering wheel and getting upset, I might look through the skylight of my little car and count clouds or watch the birds flying," he said. Already, Hresko said, his high blood pressure has fallen, and he has more energy. And does he feel mentally and emotionally better? ''Oh, my God, yes," he said.