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.