Multiple Realities

Even now I feel this is a very controversial kind of disorder, because it is almost invisible. In some cases this disorder holds the symptoms of others and because as with most mood disorders that affect mood there isn't a whole lot of information to be able to distinguish one from another. So I went digging a little deeper to see what kind of tests could distinguish it. What I find interesting is that there isn't a whole of differentiation, however if a patient shows or a psychiatrist notices a patient maybe hearing their thoughts aloud, thoughts being inserted or being taken away, or even hearing voices are a big indication. In short it is the paranoia and delusions that make this unique.My question is how often is this misdiagnosed and what are the repercussions of that? Because in reading Biological Psychology, I noticed there are differential diagnosis, there can be mood disorders with psychotic features, substance abuse, brain damage, huntingtons disease, and nutritional abnormalities. What i'm thinking is everything else is checked first because they seem more distinguishable and more common than schizophrenia. I always feel that when it comes to these disorders it is important to recognize not only what is going on in the body but how it affects the family, and how they cope because to us, its a chemical imbalance or a gene that may or may not exist, but this is real and important to the people who have to suffer through it.

It's Okay to Not to be Okay

Unfortunately for me and my family, we have a long history of depression, it is something that I do not usually speak openly about because for  a long time acknowledging it felt like I was failing to be normal. As far as i've tried the only therapy i've done is seeing a therapist, what I never realized was how many options there were for people like me. In my personal opinion I would more likely try a different type of therapy before taking any medication, reason being that I feel that they are not a permanent solution. Any therapy that has to do with the brain is really touch and go because no one is ever really sure of what they're doing and how it will affect individuals.

Alternatively I was surprised to learn that electroconvulsive therapy is still being used as a method to help with depression. I can't imagine someone voluntarily consenting to this unless there isn't any other options.But with advancement  in this therapy it seems to look less and less lethal as time goes on, and with only slight memory loss, and quick results  it would seem like an nice alternative, but like with most therapies its effects are not long lasting and usually have to be followed with antidepressants or psychotherapy anyway.

The "What was That?!" Moment

I can definitely see the perks of living without anxiety , but at the same time reading about the woman with Urbach-Weithe disease I felt bad for her. While she never misses out on an experience out of fear, isn't it good to have at least some time of radar going off that warns you from things that really are dangerous? She literally hates snakes and she can't even feel scared about holding one. Not to mention the fact that the silent communication of people who might be in danger is not recognizable to her by looking at facial expressions. And from researching Urbach-Weithe disease children who are born with it have hoarse or inability to cry, imagine the fear of a mother who has a completely silent child not knowing if anything is wrong or whether the child is okay because they cannot the communicate the way the rest of babies can. On the opposite end of the scale what about the people who have too much anxiety? Just like anything else having too much or too little of something can be dangerous. One disorder I found particularly interesting was panic disorder, in which someone has sudden attacks of fear even when there is no real danger or an immediate cause. Physically it feels like a tightening in the chest, as if the person is suffocating, and everything surrounding feels as if said person is trapped and everything feels a lot more overwhelming and closed in.

Sleeping with Your Eyes Open

Sleep, everyone needs it and some of us don't get enough of it. And yet our body is very determined to let us know when we should be doing it even when there isn't any indication of time of day. I've never wondered how a person who has an inability to see knows when to wake up or go to sleep. In some cases a person would using a different need to set a circadian rhythm  meaning that they'll use meals, noise, or temperature to tell them when to wake up and go to sleep. In other cases however when a person is not sensitive to meal times, or other time indicators they will have a day longer than twenty four hours causing insomnia and sleepiness. There is another mechanism by which some people who are blind can tell when to go to sleep. The suprachiasmatic nucleus or SCN which has its own little system on responding to an overall average of light rather than an instant reaction to when light becomes apparent or ceases.

People who are blind can actually sync their sleeping and waking pattern to a local pattern of sunlight, and interestingly enough the SCN can also aggravate a migraine in a person who is blind because of the light. Meaning that even without being able to see people can still have light sensitive excitation. Its interesting to learn that even when our body feels inhibited there are mechanisms that are still at work to compensate for what we feel we no longer have.

The Boy/Girl Problem

I find it interesting that there are so many aspects to becoming a gender, when you're little everyone is either a boy or girl, you don't know why you just know thats they way it is. And until studying this topic a little more, I never knew how little information I did know about the development of how people become who they are. In the beginning everyone is literally all the same, all the right parts and the right hormones to become either gender. It all just depends on whats more prominent, and what hormones a mother is exposed to while pregnant. Many illegal drugs can actually feminize a fetus during early development and even something as simple as aspirin can have an affect on gender development. So with all these outside influences how are gender and gender roles affected during a persons life. In children socialization is not the only reason certain genders only play with certain toys. Some research has shown that injecting or exposing women to certain hormones while they're pregnant can cause the child to show a certain preference to toys or items they are interested in. However it is a combination of both socialization and hormonal influences that affect behavior and preference.

A Jumble of Senses

What would it be like if we could hear colors, taste sound, see music come to life, literally. Synesthesia gives people the mixing of their senses, and whats really interesting is no two people with this abnormality have it exactly the same. Some will hear a taste, but they each hear a different taste, or see the music but the colors will different for everyone based on the note. While this is considered to suggest genetic predisposition, people aren't born with this because children have to learn what numbers, letters, and having a knowledge of the realization that they're senses aren't going together with the right action. So this mixing of the senses continues to develop over time, but is it really a "mix of the senses."  In actuality these "mixing of the senses" is an illusion, meaning that a person is having the experience because they think that hearing color was the stimulus they had, but that is not actually the stimulus they are getting. One possibility about why this happens is that, some of the axons from one cortical area branch into another cortical area.

What is interesting is that these crossing of senses only happen one directionally and there isn't any thought that goes into it, people just already as a response have synesthetic qualities. Strangely enough although words may sound the same some people with synesthesia will taste or see different thing when word that sounds the same is spelled differently. I can't even image how overwhelming this situation with be when a word might evoke a disgusting taste or smell? How do you handle having a sense connected to a different response?

Forgetfulness or Something More?

 

Alzheimers is a very interesting disease that hits very close to home, because rather than learning it in a text book I see it everyday in my little grandmother. The thing is while being around it my family can of course see the signs and her progressively getting worse, but I guess I never really understood what it meant for her brain and what is happening chemically. It was as if the only important information was that she had it and that there isn't anything anyone could do about it except "slow it down". I never understood what that meant till now,simplified when a person has alzheimers amyloid accumulates both inside and outside the neurons which damages dendritic spines, decreases synaptic input and decreases plasticity. This all causes plaque to build up which cause major parts of the brain to waste away. And if that wasn't enough the amyloid also cause more phosphate groups to attach attach to tau proteins, meaning they can't attach to their usual targets within axons. "Slowing it down" would most likely refer to giving my grandmother medication that stimulate her acetylcholine receptors.



 

But when I look at my grandmother I don't see whats happening to her brain but her behavior and her inability to remember what our family did last easter. I see the look on my family's faces when they have to answer the same question five different times, or when she does the same action over and over again because she is sure she didn't just wash that dish. Or the feeling I get when she looks at me and can't remember if I am me or my aunt. And knowing that its going to get worse, and "slowing it down" won't be an option anymore, its waiting game of how long she can hold onto what little memory she has left.

The Two Brain Problem

When I first started reading about the left and right hemisphere it just reinforced the idea of how complicated the brain really is for me. Our brain is separate but connected and without a nice balance it can throw a persons hole thinking process off. In a video I viewed I was very affected in hearing about this experience Dr. Taylor had while having a stroke and how it was almost impossible for her to be able to focus enough to get herself help while she was having a stroke. And while I know that strokes are horrific, I never really understood what was taking place, what does it mean for someone to have a stroke? I'd always been told about the paralysis and the loss of speech bet never really whats happening in your body. It seems such a simple and horrifying experience, a blood vessel bursting is all it takes and without rhyme or reason. The worst part is that anyone can have one, and while there are health factors that do cause an increase in possibility such as smoking, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, a previous stroke...etc. And while maintaining you're body and making sure to be aware of these factors is no guarantee by any means that a stroke won't occur in a persons lifetime.

A Phantom Pain

Growing up with an aunt who was born without a limb, was scary to say the least as a child. I was always afraid that when she held one of my baby sisters she would drop them because in my eyes I just couldn't imagine how a person functions without an arm. As I got older I began to wonder what it must feel like to be missing a piece of yourself when you never had it in the first place. And what was worse having had it and then losing one of your limbs. When i found out later that there was such a thing as a phantom limb it almost seemed unbelievable, how can a person whos lost a limb, or never had one to begin with feel something thats supposed to be gone. I find it interesting that before doctors really new where phantom pain was coming from they would cut off more of the limb to see if the pain would go away; it just shows how far we've come from hacking off to tricking the mind into believing that the limb isn't missing. 

Before it was though that the sensation or pain came from the stump of amputated limb, when in actuality the pain was coming from only the relevant portion of the somatosensory cortex recognizing and becoming responsive to other inputs. In which case the feeling of the "limb" is actually coming from different parts of your body such as the face. The more I get into the reading for my physiological psychology class the more I feel grateful that i'm healthy and that my body is in one piece.





Discovering Something that Doesn't Exist



 

What would it be like to discover something that no one believed could exist, to awake from a dream and know how to prove everyone wrong? Otto Loewi proved even himself wrong when he conducted an experiment in the middle of the night on two frogs, an experiment that he might have doubted in broad daylight, transferring fluid from heart to heart. One crazy, unconventional experiment and Loewi discovered that nerves send messages by releasing chemicals. Imagine where we would be in science or in understanding how drugs and alcohol affect the body if we still thought nerves sent messages electrically.

Without knowing any of this information we would not be able to understand how an imbalance of chemicals in the brain can cause inhibition on reactions or cause a great change in behavior. Its strange to know that these neurotransmitters come from our own diet cause side effects when interacting with drugs. Take cocaine for example, it actually blocks the dopamine transporter from reabsorbing dopamine, increasing the effects of the dopamine which causes an increase in excitement, alertness and activity. The fact that a person is actually directly affecting their brain by adding these substances is ironic because other than inhibiting it, there is no other way to cause the brain to do something. Before reading Biological Psychology I had never even heard of the nucleus accumbens is the most influential when it comes to the area of our brain that is most effected by any illegal substances.





Every Action has a Reaction

The Brain, while all the pieces that make up our bodies are important, it is the reason all of those pieces can work together. Inside this mass of tissue is not little men sometimes displayed in cartoons working in an office sending requests but an intricate and sensitive system of about 100 billion neurons. It is beyond my span of thinking to imagine that while I do everyday activities my brain is constantly sending messages neuron to neuron through the axons.  And that without the Blood-Brain barrier or any damage to the myelin that covers the axons, my body would not function the way I’m used to it. I can’t imagine what it would be to go from being completely healthy and nothing functionally wrong with any of the rest of my body, to my brain malfunctioning and causing the rest of me to go haywire. Multiple Sclerosis literally destroys your nervous system, and can take away tasks that we take for granted like writing, and speaking.

The worst part of all of this is that the perceived cause is the immune system attacking the myelin, and there isn’t a way to know why or when it happens, just that when the myelin is damaged the axon can’t deliver the message as efficiently and quickly as before and your whole system is thrown off. It's almost as if your own body turns against you when this occurs.

Introduction to Physiological Psychology

 I want to start this off by saying I am an animal lover, I have eight dogs, four cows, five chickens, three horses, a pony, a mini mule, and a cat to prove it. With that being said in all honesty I have to say I am a minimalist when it comes to the debate on animal testing.  I feel that it is a necessary evil, is it fair, most definitely not. But when disease spreads all anyone wants is results, and results come from a dark place that has a tendency to be ignored because everyone feels guilty about where it’s coming from.  In the case of small pox for example (the deadliest disease known to man) animals were and still are detrimental to providing a vaccine that will combat any threat of an outbreak. I once read a book called The Demon in the Freezer, one of the most horrifying accounts I’ve ever read about smallpox but it opens the mind to where people would be without the sacrifice of these animals. While everyone would like new advances such as stated in the text with the three R’s (Reduction, Replacement, Refinement), technology just isn’t there yet. In the mean time I feel that abolitionists are hurting their cause by wasting effort and money on protests on scientist who are going to keep doing what they are doing because it is what is best for the human population. Instead they could be using that time to find faster technology to speed the process along to a time where animals won’t be needed for testing. Do I advocate for torturing animals, I believe strongly in the regulations and guidelines that research facilities have to fulfill to even start researching with animals. And in any case there is a lot of hypocrisy going on in the background, PETA, one of the biggest if not the biggest advocate for animal rights, kills a large amount of animals each year, animals that could have been used for a better cause rather than just killing it off. I love my animals but when it comes to self-preservation for now there is just no other way to safely make people healthy without the use of these animals.