Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Botox Brain

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

Botox can chase away the lines on your face, apparently it can chase away your depression, borderline personality disorder, and anxiety too.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I don't know Dave. He'll be glad to hear that later on. Yes, and this is not about pinky in the brain. It's about Botox in the brain. Yes, it is. Because when I saw Botox in the brain, I was like, that sounds like a TV show, but I was like, no, I'm just thinking pinky in the brain. No, Botox in the brain is a cop show, not a cartoon. Big thanks to Helio and Live Science, Very Well Health, Study Finds, Neuroscience News, and other sources.

Take it away, Josh. So we're talking about Botox, right? Botox, I believe, is a brand name, but it's like Kleenex. It's become a proprietary eponym. Is it really? Yes, for sure. There's all sorts of different brands of Botox, like Disport, and there's plenty of others. But what they all are is the Botulinum toxin, or BTX, and that is produced by Clostridium Botulinum. And Botulism, anybody who's ever seen Dead Calm knows what Botulism is and how horrible it's supposed to be. But it's a bacteria that grows in the absence of air, typically on food.

I think beef is like a real big grower of Botulism, which is why if you ever have like a dented can of beef stew, just throw it away because it could kill you. Because Botulinum toxin is the most potent neurotoxin known to humans. And the reason it's so potent, Chuck, is it goes in there, into your nerve cells, and it binds to them. And in particular, it binds to nerve cells where your blood and your muscles meet, which is usually fairly close to the skin. And it blocks acetylcholine from coming and getting into the ends of those nerve cells, which means that those nerve cells just don't function. Which means that your muscles are paralyzed, which is bad enough when it starts in your mouth, but then it goes to your throat and eventually your lungs and then you die. A really terrible death from Botulism. So it's, of course, totally unsurprising that somebody figured out that you could use this incredibly potent neurotoxin to get rid of wrinkles.

Yeah, using Botulism, I'm sorry, I guess it is Botulism, using Botox medically, came around in the 70s with Dr. Alan B. Scott, who went to the FDA and said, hey, I think I can treat Strabismus, which is, I guess, wandering eye, could be a lazy way of saying that or lazy eye. Sure. And he said, I think I can treat Strabismus with this. FDA said, have at it. He would inject it locally in the face. One thing that did was prove that it was safe to do, relatively speaking. Yeah.

And it could treat muscle disorders and then starting in the 2000s is when it really came on the scene with estheticians doing what we all think of as Botox's main function now, which is you get these injections locally in very specific places in your face, usually, and takes three or four days and then all of a sudden, for about three months, you will be walking around with a forehead smooth as a shiny apple and an expression that says nothing. Right. You can really get a good poker face from around a Botox. Yeah. So, yeah, it just relaxes those muscles that cause the wrinkles, say, around your eyes, around your mouth and your forehead in between your brow in particular. Those are called your leavens.

And by paralyzing those muscles, it relaxes them and hence the wrinkles aren't there anymore. And like you said, it lasts for about three to four months. And because you can't, you have just like a blank face in a lot of ways, depending on where you get the Botox injection, you can't really smile. Like you physically are incapable of smiling because the muscles involved are paralyzed. More often, you can't really frown or furrow your brow because those muscles are paralyzed. And so, right off the bat, people started reporting that if you saw somebody with Botox, they couldn't express emotion using their faces anymore for that three to four month period. Yeah. And to be clear, like, you know, you can make the shape of a smile with your mouth and the shape of a smile or a frown with your mouth.

But what people, you know, I think people realize this is about to say what people don't realize. But when you think about it is what I meant to say. Right. You express emotion with your face. It's you smile and frown with your face, not just your mouth. Sure. Your mouth may go up, your mouth may, I guess, go down or express upsetedness. But it's really, you know, people smile with their eyes and their faces.

And, you know, like you said, your brow gets furrowed. It's a whole face experience, which is a great album title. Yeah. And Botox, that's what it cuts off, and that's what can be kind of creepy looking is when someone is smiling with their mouth, but the rest of their face is dead. And it's a little strange. Yeah, played a great effect in Insidious. Right. Love that stuff.

Should we take a break because this is where things get super interesting. Yes, I agree. Yes. All right. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessi, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything. But imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged with waterproof tech. So when everyone else is staying in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again.

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Fun fact about Lacey, she's not as beautiful as I am. You guys, we have a brand new podcast on Will Ferrell's big money players network called The Amber and Lacey Lacey and Amber Show. We are New York Times bestselling authors, and we've written two books on everyday racism that make you gasp and laugh at the same time. We done did it. We sold a bunch of books. We were on late-night with Seth Meyers and The Amber Ruffin Show. And now we only have one frontier to conquer. That's podcast.

Podcast, baby. This quiz show is going to be fun. We're going to have celebrities. We're going to quiz them about things that they are experts at. And we'll see who wins. And who loses. You got to watch us. Oh, no.

You have to listen to us. I mean, you can still watch us, but you got to listen. But like, if you're watching us, you have to tell us. You can't just be watching us. Listen to the Amber and Lacey Lacey and Amber Show on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the I Heart Radio Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, it makes sense that you can't really read someone's emotions through their face after they've gotten a pretty good round of Botox. But there was something stranger that started to come in as reports from people who got Botox injections or other kinds of botulin injections that they weren't experiencing emotions like they used to. And in particular, this showed up most pronounced in people who suffered from depression.

They started to notice that after they got Botox injections in certain parts of their face, especially around their forehead and their brows called the glabular region, their depression symptoms, if they weren't alleviated totally, they were certainly less pronounced than they had been before. And this was a little odd. Yeah, definitely a little bit odd. But so again, we're not talking about showing emotion, we're talking about actually feeling the emotion. Right. But there's this thing, and it all kind of makes sense when you look at the big picture, called the facial feedback hypothesis. Yes. The very dumbed-down way of saying it is that the idea of like, hey, if you're feeling depressed, maybe just try smiling more, because that can actually work. And they've done research on stuff like this.

And one way it can, you know, manifests itself is we have this tendency to mimic expressions of other people near us, and it probably comes from just evolution of like wanting to fit in in a group. And like, maybe so you won't be killed. Like everyone else here is smiling at that guy's and laughing at his joke. So I'm going to do the same thing. So I just fit in better. There's that facial feedback hypothesis at work, where it's sort of this feedback loop of smiling from someone else will usually lend to a smile, even if you're not feeling it, especially happy. I'm not saying like everyone's in a good mood, so they're smiling, but literally just smiling because someone else in is smiling. And then that will in turn generally make your emotions pick up as well.

Yeah, and the opposite can be true too, if you're scowling or you see someone else scowling, you mimic their scowl unconsciously. It will have a depressed state on your mood, right? And that's really interesting because people always thought that facial expressions reflected what you felt inside, not vice versa, but there's it definitely goes both ways. And that's the facial feedback hypothesis. So when people started saying like, my depression symptoms are kind of alleviated when I get Botox, they chalked it up to facial feedback. And in particular, what they suspected is that with your brow area, the glabular region, so it's like the area right above the bridge of your nose, up to kind of spreading out like a Jonathan Adler fan above your eyebrows for a little bit, okay? Yeah, that's the you cut me off in traffic zone of my face. Exactly, well put, Chuck.

That's the new name of it, I would say. If you get injections in that area, it actually has an effect on your amygdala. Amygdala is the seed of your fight or flight, just famous friend of the podcast, fight or flight response. Early days. Yeah, it's the seed of negative emotions like anger, fear, anxiety. And if you have depression, your amygdala is overactive and it causes you to develop a bias toward interpreting the world negatively and yourself negatively. And what they they posited was that Botox short circuited that feedback loop by paralyzing the muscles that trigger your amygdala to experience negative emotions or produce negative emotions. Yeah, and not necessarily that it can completely take away those emotions, but it tamps it down and makes things less intense.

And so they, you know, they basically stumbled upon this thing where they can actually treat depression through Botox injections. Yes, which is huge because it's not direct, it's not like they're injecting the needle into your amygdala and inserting the Botox in it. The Botox is just acting on your muscles, but it's indirectly acting on your amygdala, which makes it a much safer treatment than say pharma that acts directly on your amygdala chemically. Yeah, and they've, this isn't just from talking to people and getting that kind of feedback. This has been confirmed in the Wonder Machine and the FMRI. They've confirmed these findings that basically the scan showed different kinds of altered activity in the amygdala. If you were a depressed patient who got those injections and, you know, they basically are saying this is like a real thing now. Yes, so yes, they've shown that it alters the activity in the amygdala and not just patients with depression, but people who have borderline personality disorder as well.

Yeah, that's really interesting, I think. Their amygdala is on hyperdrive and the thing that makes it different from depression is that it's also coupled with lower impulsivity threshold. So they're much more likely to lash out at people around them with those negative emotions, which is what we talked about in our emotional pain episode, why it's just such a terrible disorder to have. But it's their amygdala being hyperactive as well, and so they found that Botox injections in the right place can actually reduce or eliminate BPD as well, at least for the three to four months until your muscles come back online and are able to trigger those emotions again. Yeah, and if you're an adherent of acupuncture and you think, hey, this sounds kind of familiar, it's sort of along the same lines. They did comparison group treatments with acupuncture patients, and acupuncture did show improved clinical symptoms, but it did not hold up under the Wonder Machine examination. No, it still had its effect, but it didn't have a neurological effect. Botox has a neurological effect. It's actually acting on the amygdala. It's huge. It was a huge, huge breakthrough when they figured this out and then now that they've proved it.

It can also be used to treat anxiety if you inject it in your head and neck muscles, and you can use Botox to treat migraines, and insurance has started to cover it for migraines, but they're hoping that they'll start to cover it for things like depression or borderline personality disorder or anxiety as well. Cover it, insurance. If it helps people, cover it. For sure. And my hat is off to my dear sweet wife, Yumi, who tipped me off to this one. Oh, nice. Thanks, Yumi. Yeah, thanks, Yumi. Since we both thanked Yumi, Chuck, wouldn't you say that short stuff is out? I would indeed.