Narcolepsy

We recently watched a video about a very strange condition
called narcolepsy which could be translated as the sleep of the dead. This
disease is a rare neurological condition which is shown by excessive “sleep
attacks” when sleep overwhelms the brain. It is possibly a condition caused by
damage or a condition in which the brain does not have the ability to repair or
recharge correctly and sleep does nothing truly effective or useful for
someone. This is dangerous in that a person is constantly exhausted, and never
truly is fully recharged no matter how many times they sleep or are hit by a
sleep attack. People with this, are frequently hit by dangerous sleep attacks
which overwhelm their desire to stay awake, and cause instant extremely short
sleeps lasting anywhere from seven seconds to a matter of minutes. It can cause
over sixty attacks a day, and even cause the person to suffer from instant,
temporary paralysis. This is a condition in which any voluntary muscle from the
mouth to the legs will be taken over and the brain will not be able to command them,
which causes anything from slurred speech to complete lock of the legs and arms
causing someone to fall over. This is a dangerous condition to live with and is
impossible to cure as of yet, but medication can help.

dreams!

Recently we watched a video discussing dreams. This video discussed the stages of sleep such as rem, stage 1, 2, 3 and 4. It all discussed the purpose of nightmares.                                                                                              The brain is capable of storing important memories from our ancestors, a ability known as genetic memory. It is in this strange and profound function of the brain that nightmares arrive. The purpose of nightmares, though is unknown but it is currently accepted that it is in nightmares that we gain the ability to practice dangerous situations, so that perhaps if they ever occurred in real life we would be ready to face them. However some strange issues are addressed, such as why children dream of monsters and wolves instead of normal problems children should face, this is due to the brain being young and unadjusted just yet. As people grow older, they begin to experience more appriate nightmares such as losing their keys, getting F’s on tests and such concerns. It also addresses the ability of dreaming to solve problems.                                                                                                                                                                          It shows an experiment which involves a video game, of skiing. A boy is only sub-par at the game, but after he goes to sleep and dreams about it he’s found that he is much more skilled at it then he was before, therefore showing a normal example of skill increasing due to dreams.   

isolation

Recently in class we watched a video describing the effects of social isolation, and mental isolation, which is basically when someone is left totally alone and complelty with out an activity to entertain themselves, so without mental stimulation. This controversial test is simply to test the effects on the brain, and the theory was that the brain’s abilities would be slowed after prolonged periods of no stimulation. This was due to the study which showed that the brain can lose unused connections in order to run more effectively and spend less energy, by narrowing the pathways.                                                                                                                        Six ordinary people were choosen to particate in this experiment in which they are taken to an underground nuclear bunker where they are depreived of mental stimulation, locked in a dark room with nothing to do for two days a full forty eight hours. They were tested before hand to see their memory, information processing, and succesptiably, which is basically their ability to resist the urge to change their minds from their own view points. After the experiment they were tested again to shocking results: the women were unaffected in succesptiably while the men were much more succesptiable. This helps prove that it was a successful torture tool, due to it being able to cause men to change opions much easier. It also showed that the effects of isolation can be really bad for our brain and mental abilities.   

Definitons

1. Synesthesia stimulation causes reaction of a sense typically associated with another sense

2. grapheme-color synesthesia: perceiving a certain color when seeing a letter word or number

3. ordinal-linguistic personification the involuntary and automatic tendency in certain individuals to attribute animate-like qualities  

4. number-form synesthesia: Numbers months and years have a defined shape.

5. sound-color synesthesia: Color as a response to a certain sound

6. lexical-gustatory synesthesia: Words have taste.

Genius, Savant, and Autism

1: A savant is effectively a genius with a severe mental disability which effectively cancels out his potential for growth. Savant's typically have a remarkable mental ability and a equally remarkable mental disability which makes them somehow unable to function in normal society. http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant_syndrome/
2: A genius is a staggering natural intellect often in math, science, music, creative arts. The most crictal difference between a genius and savant is the mental disability, which often cancels out the potential of the savant, as well as a savant normally can't learn truthfully, their mental ability's potential is cancelled out by the staggering disorders they have. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/genius
3: A stroke is when the brain is deprived of blood and oxygen which causes brain cells to die. It affects the brain in many ways, capable of causing effective rewiring, unleashing inate savant like abilities and permant mental defects such as inability to speak, loss of mental ability, inabiltiy to understand langauges http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/stroke/DS00150
4: It is a process by which using magnetic pulses and observing brain activty that the area's of the brain which activity increase by certain thought processes the brain can effectively be mapped out. This increases our understanding of brain activity by showing us which brain area's are on when we think about certain things in certain ways. http://www.fmri.org/fmri.htm
5: The corpus Callosum is the organ in the brain which connects right and left hemispheres. It allows information to go through both parts of the brain and allows for the information to be fully processed. http://www.macalester.edu/psychology/whathap/ubnrp/split_brain/Corpus%20Callosum.html
6: A condition of the nervous system which causes involutary physical actions such as twitching and seizures. These are caused by misfires of the brain electrical system.Since its caused by brain malfunctions it negatively affects the brain. http://kidshealth.org/teen/diseases_conditions/brain_nervous/epilepsy.html#
7: Autism is a neurological disorder. It causes social impairment, stero typed behavior, loss of sense of reality, and communication difficulties. Although its not uncommon for autistic childern to actually be brillant when fully aware of their surrondings. http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/autism/detail_autism.htm
8: A variet of Autism in which social isolation and ecentric behavior are common. Also it causes impairments in non-verbal and verbal communication causing even more social isolation. It also causes unique often not age apporiate interests and clumminess creating social pariahs. http://www.aspergers.com/aspclin.htm

Accidental Genus

In this video we met a savant. A savant is a person whose mental abilities would be remarkable even in a normal person, and these people often have a staggering mental disability such as retardation, or extreme lack of social skills. We met a artist who had a hemorrhage in his brain which although it didn’t kill him, didn’t affect him too badly expect for one thing: he become a skilled artist, who has a obsession with painting. His wife left him, and he went on drawing, although at point he became scared and sent out a message for help. A neuroscientist in Harvard answered, and she had a very special connection with this man. She had a similar accident which caused her to develop a similar condition in the terms of mania but instead of drawing, she felt a obsessive compulsion to write what happened to her, she wrote everything on everything.  We also met another artist with very good drawing skills, who happened to be a calendar drawer, but his origins were different, instead he was born with his unique talent due to a tester tone overload before he was born, while he was still in the womb. This video demonstrated that genus isn’t always made or created on purpose but can come from surprising sources.

Made genus

This video discussed how genus could be made with only some natural talent, an early start, and a good background. We met and talked too Susan Pulgar in this video, she is a chess “genus”. She is a young woman who was raised by someone determined to break the natural genus stereotype, someone determined to prove that a genus isn’t always born but can be molded. Her father was a above average chess player, who taught her how to play at age four even though the world of chess like many other things at that time was a male dominated world. She rose through the ranks and become an acknowledged grand master, defeating the stereotype that women can’t play chess. She proved that genus can be made, and helped show the world that women can be just as good at chess as others. She also is the mother of an other chess genus a young seven year old who is a ranked US player for his age group. She says however that “he has a long way to go, and a teacher who will teach him”

Natural genus

In class we recently watched a video talking about natural geniuses. In this video we talked a boy who could play the piano extremely well, this could have been because his mother made him listen to piano songs as a unborn infant in her womb, and that may have influenced his talent in musical instruments by making his forming brain already become accustomed to these sounds. This child also possessed an extremely rare musical talent so rare in fact that only one in ten thousand people have it, Perfect pitch which is basically the ability to remember the sound of any noise you hear and have an instinctual ability to repeat it, or knowledge of how to repeat it. This child is still young, and according to the video he has a long road to walk, due to the teenage years and drama, it is said in the video if he doesn’t stray during his teen years then he will be golden, and be able to become one of the best in the classic musical industry. This child is truly a gifted student but can he become the best? Only time will tell.

Homosexulaity

We recently watched a video in class about homosexuality. This video discussed the possible origins of it, by showing various studies on twins and the older brother effect.                                                                                    This video taught us that identical twins have the same genes while fraternal twins have different ones this allows researchers to take out the nature out of the study and focus solely on nurture allowing studies to be more decisive with their results and know that whatever occurs in the studies it is from nurture not nature.                                                                                                                                                       We also learned about the older brother effect, a strange occurrence which increases chances of someone being born gay if they are male and right handed.  In order to explain this someone must understand the function of the immune system, which is the “firewall” of the human body. It is the way a human can recover from an illness, due to the body recognizing that the germs are foreign substances which don’t belong in the human body. This causes the body to produce anti-bodies that assault the foreign substance attempting to force it to leave the body. The older brother effect affects males only simply because the male inside the female body is a foreign and unknown substance, causing the immune system to attempt to produce anti-bodies to assault the baby, if they are male. The first born boy only has a 2% percent chance of being born gay, and from then on if another boy is in the womb then the body has anti-bodies on hand to fight them and the chance of being born gay is increased by nearly a third, and this effect is staked, increasing each time a new boy is born. For some unknown reason the studies have shown this only effects boys who are born right handed, so take for example that a boy has five older brothers the increased chance of being born attracted to males would be negated if he was left handed. 

Mind of a murder

This study was very completle. It provided for nearly all cases expect the most intelligent serial killers and it had a very good acrute study providing for roughly 80% of murderers. It showed us some examples and professers who studied and worked alongside the main researcher to help back up her study with facts and examples. Also by showing some of the killers the lady spoke too was a good way to show her kind of research and even showing how well credited her study is even in the law system where it was not very well credited for it's time. My reaction to the video was a mixture, I wasn't too surprised that most killers have mental defects and a history of abuse, because people being naturally violent isnt natural. However the fact that alot of court's dont acknowledge this research is strange even more so the reaction's that people had to her reasrch even going as far as to taunt her and say she has pity for killers who in full awareness murder someone, you would think that the courts that have allowed other research to occur would take such a shocking study more seriously. However this is probably due to a case of bias where every single person who kills deserves to die, rather then simple foolishness. This helps prove that many violent people deserve to life rather then die and be rehabitated rather then imprisoned and helps to show that foolishness and rash decision making has probably killed then it saves.

This also helps to prove a critical fact in many court cases. The denial of evidence which could change the outcome from being guilty to being innocent. In many cases both the researcher in the video and many others have been denied the right to have some time with a "guilty murderer" and this if corrected could possibly help bring new evidence to light which sheds new insight on a crime. Also it could cause others to be made guilty of crimes since many killers have a history of abuse, it could cause the parents to be in trouble and charged with child abuse.

Brain Damage

In this video we learned about the types of brain damage and their affects on the human brain. Moderate is sustained from a blow to the head as are all types, however this is the easiest to recover from, due to its relatively small effects and short period of recovery time. This deals only small damage to the brain and can typically be recovered from in a 3-6 months. Mild is the next category, with more impact on the brain, often caused by a period of comatose like behavior causing the brain even more damage, however even this rarely takes more then a year to recover from. This does however have the possibility if only small of causing more or less permant damage to the brain. Severe brain damage however is impossible to recover from, or if possible will take years to recover from due to severity of the damage. In most cases this can only be overcome by family and friends providing support and the damage is nearly always permant symptoms include: inability to do certain actions such as count, focus for more then a few seconds, relearning languages and how to do certain basic actions such as walk.

Mind reading!

In this video we learned the possibilities of mind reading. However it failed to show that our specific thoughts couldn't be read with this, and failed to address the possibility of us seeing a place over the internet or pictures not the actual place. Although the therorecticial knowledge is correct, the actual specifics are not, and the video was lacking in detail. It is also a violation of human rights, the thought that therorectially in the future you could use a distance mind reading device goes agaisnt our freedoms and personal liberites as well as all moral ethnics by invading our only true private place the sanctuary of our minds. It also showed that even though currently the possibilities of having our mind read is only limited to the MRI, and it can't be forced that supposedly in the future "We could have a distance mind reading machine" this is unlikely due to the ethincal issue, tech issues, as well as government actions this is extremely unlikely. I didn't like this video because in all honesty it was extremely controversal, and filled with errors that no one bothered to point out or correct. Also it failed to point out that if such a powerful piece of machinery was stolen the consiquences could be a disaster of unseen proportions in human history, also a powerful point in why such a machine would never be built. 

Teen brain video response

The teenage brain is a mysterious thing. The video we saw discussed certain area's of teenage development like risk factors which obviously due to our "undeveloped" frontal lobes are higher then any other age groups. It all discussed our need for more sleep due to the growth spurs of the brain while we sleep. The video discussed why parents think teenager's are pretty much the worse thing to happen to man kind since pandora's box was openned. I was mostly interested by the section on sleep and learning, due to its obvious effect on students abilities to learn.
The way this video relates to me is probably different from other students. I feel very different from normal teenagers on the parents issue. I don't want my parents to get closer to me due to the way I study, which is mostly on my own like alot of the things I do. According to the video most teenager’s want their parents to come more into their lives then they let on, but I believe that a large portion of teenager’s are actually honest when it comes to the attention they want from their parents, I know I am. When I want attention I ask my parents, sadly most of the time they annoy me. Despite this I am still close to them when I want to be not pushing them away but not attempting to draw them closer like the video says. This video was most likely surprising to most teenagers including myself. Even when I come to school lacking sleep I still attempt to perform well and normally by eight I am wide awake, so despite the video’s revealing studies on sleep I am always “on my A game”. Most of the other teenager’s I know are also wide awake by eight in the morning during first block so at least in the sleep department I am not alone. Adults can’t “hold a candle to our flames” but more then most teenager’s give credit for they can understand how the teenage brain works. While this video was surprisingly in depth I doubt the people in it actually act like they did in the video as it seemed to be to heavily the adult stero-type of a teenager. Also the parents seemed too relaxed for it to be a actual non-scrpited parent.