narcolepsy

In this video I learned about a very peculiar condition, Narcolepsy, a neurological disorder that affects the control of sleep and wakefulness. People with this condition feel sleepy all day and experience continuos episodes of falling asleep. These individuals do not go through the different stages of sleep, they skip them and go directly into REM sleep, and this not only happens at night but also throughout the day, and since in this stage limbs are paralyzed, they experience cataplexy, which is when you loose control of your body causing you to fall when they have their attacks. The condition is caused by the lack of production of hypocretin, a chemical that tells your brain when you have to sleep and when you have to be awake. I think having this is terrible because you suffer a lot. WHY? Well, you may miss out on or interrupt beautiful moments, moments that you might not experience again and the sleepiness wins you over. You may fall asleep when you are walking or crossing the street and it may produce minor injuries or lead to terrible accidents. You will always be confused because you will have trouble realizing which part of your memories are true or which were just dreams.

dreams

We always dream, or do we? Some questions are unanswerable, but this video has helped me get an idea of what the answers to my questions can be.  I previously knew that REM, rapid eye movement, happens at a point of your sleep and it is when you dream, but I didn't know your body enters into complete paralysis at this stage. I learned that sleep walkers tend to have a less effective part of the brain that paralyses you in your sleep, causing you to act your dream. REM disorder is caused by the damage of a part of the brain stem named palm, causing dreams to seem more vivid. The parietal lobe is where dreams are created, damage to this part of a brain, being caused by a stroke or something, can cause the lack of dreaming and can only be fixed with time. People are fascinated with dreams and believe that they have a significance. It is said that we seek something in our dreams, we search for answers, maintaining our mental health. They help us process information and ergo have been the source of great accomplishments. Dreams are shaped by stimulating information that has been introduced into our senses, they help us to survive our everyday activities. But then again all this is believed to be true, is it? 

 





























1. Explain in detail what "savant syndrome" means.
syndrome in which people who despite serious mental or physical disability have quite remarkable, and sometimes spectacular, talents.
http://www.psy.dmu.ac.uk/drhiles/Savant%20Syndrome.htm


2. What does genius mean?  Explain the difference between genius and savant.
Web:
someone who has exceptional intellectual ability and originality;brilliance, ussually having anunusual mental ability who is skilled in any field, have exceptional creative ability and natural talent.
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
The difference is that a genius is average or above average in any area of their life, buts savants are only good at on specific thing, one are, and have a mental disability, strugling in other areas.
3. What is a stroke and how could it affect your mental functioning?
An acute medical emergency caused by the rupture or blockage of the artery.
http://www.womensheart.org/content/stroke/what_is_a_stroke.asp
It affects mental function by affecting your coordination ability, partial facial paralisis,

poor depth perception, hand-eye coordination and short term memory, poor decision making and unhealthy, the process of thinking logically and reasoning, short attention span, reeding and speaking illiteracy, and makes you do things slower, depending on the part that is affected.

http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4603534_stroke-affect-brain.html 

4. What is a functional MRI and how does it help us understand brain activity?

Another name for it is functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging which is the brain imaging technique that scans by measuring magnetic changes in the flow of blood to cells in the brain.
www.tuition.com.hk/psychology/f.htm 

It helps doctor to diagnose deseases and helps them know which treatment they may use. It also is used to explore the anatomy of the brain, how it functions, the effects of a stroke or trauma on this functions, the developement and its effect of tumors on brains, and guide the planning of surgery, Radiation therapy, or other surgical treatments for the brain.

http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?pg=fmribrain


5. What is the corpus callosum and what role does it play in your brain's activity?
It is a broad transverse nerve tract connecting the two cerebral hemispheres.
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
It allows communication between the two hemispheres, it also works in allocation of tasks to either hemispheres of the brain on the basis on their programming.
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/corpus-callosum-function.html


6. What is epilepsy and how might it affect your brain's abilities?
It is the tendency to have recurrent seizures caused by a sudden burst of excess electrical activity in the brain, causing a temporary disruption in the normal message passing between brain cells. 
http://www.epilepsy.org.uk/info/what-is-epilepsy
It affects the brain’s  because the messages becoming halted or mixed up. It affects the ability of the person to store memory, memory loss, verbal memory which he cant remember words, or he cant remember who he has seen, and trouble focusing attention for a long time.
http://www.articlesbase.com/diseases-and-conditions-articles/how-epilepsy-affects-the-brain-and-leads-to-memory-loss-290902.html


7. What is autism?

moderately rare condition resulting from a complex developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life. A neurological disorder that causes communicative, social and cognitive deficits.

http://www.psy.dmu.ac.uk/drhiles/Savant%20Syndrome.htm

8. What is Asperger's Syndrome?

Syndrome in which individuals have normal intelligence and language development, but have impaired social skills, unable to communicate effectively with others, and have poor coordination.

http://kidshealth.org/parent/medical/brain/asperger.html

Alone

Harsh punishments are used on criminals to get information from them, but something I learned about this video was that a technique that is used frequently as a punishment is Sensory Deprivation. It consists on starving people's senses from stimulation, reducing their ability to process information. This also harms the Central Executive, affecting your language, memory, vision and the ability to interact with people. To prove this, scientist did an experiment on 5 individuals for 48 hours. Some of them were constantly stimulated like a student, comedian, runner but another loved to spend time alone and meditate. The three that were placed in a dark room started to hallucinate after several hours, like a man who had been in prison for 18 years in the darkness, he also saw things that were not really there. Most of them started to walk back and forth and started talking funny. This is because the detrites start loosing connections because of the lack of stimulation. At the end, just by hearing the voice of another person frightned some individuals becasue of the long hours of brain understimulation. Processing information was reduced becasue before they did the tests they were asked to do simple things and did them slower after they went out. As for the man that was locked up 18 years, he lost  the ability to follow direccions and cant remember the order in which he did something. I think it suprising how understimulation affects a person's developemnt and how it changes people. I think the idea of being like that for 18 years scares me, a person may go insane! But if i was choosen to do something like that for 48 hours, im sure i would sleep most of the time.

Synesthesia

1. Synesthesia: A condition in with the senses are cross wired. Its when you see colours upon hearing a sound, or can actually taste words; It is the stimulation of one sense that causes an inappropriate stimulation of another
http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n17/mente/synaesthesia.htm

2. grapheme-color synesthesia: When people percieve particular colors when seeing a letter, word, or number.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19302164 

3. ordinal-linguistic personification: associating words, letters or numbers with a personality.
http://theparfaitprincey.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/ordinal-linguistic-personification/ 

  

4. number-form synesthesia: When a persons sees diagrams of numbers in their heads.

http://community.babycentre.co.uk/post/a11638125/number-form_synesthesia

5. sound-color synesthesia: when a persons hear sounds in color or sees colors in sounds.
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-02-09/health/synesthesia.genes_1_synesthesia-brain-regions-visual-areas?_s=PM:HEALTH

6. lexical-gustatory synesthesia: whenspeech sounds induce an involuntary sensation of taste.
http://home.comcast.net/~sean.day/WardSimner2003.pdf

accidental Genius

What I learned in this video were the existence of amazing human beings called savans. These individuals have a mental disability but excel and have extraordinary talents in a certain area. Some examples were Kim Peak, he is mentally retarded but can reed 500 pages of a book in an hour, and has memorized 9,000 books. Then we have Lesly Lensky who is blind and mentally disabled but once he hears a melody y can play it in the piano. I personally think this is amazing because they have all this talent with the mental disability, I mean I have always thought mentally disabled people were amazing and some had talents but not those extraordinary talents. Then we have Tommy, he had a brain injury that could have killed him but soon after he began to walk again he began to draw and write weird things and poems expressing hi feelings. The doctors said these sudden traumas to the brain make cause the person to change drastically and acquire gifts like painting very well because savans normally catch a lot of detail. I knew that their were special people in the world but i am glad  that some mentally disabled individuals have genius skills.

made Genius

Something that i knew was that its important to like what you do, after that everything comes easily. I learned that Women have the luck of having better use of the left brain than boys, making it easier for them to use reasoning when coming to a decision of how to learn stuff and memorizing them. Like chunking, which is to memorize things by chunks and constantly repeating it is a good way to remember things because it goes into your long term memory. What i found most interesting is the story about Susan who received a special education when she was little and her dad taught her how to play chess since she was small. The thing that makes her so good at chess was that the part of her brain that was most active when she played was the one who memorizes faces, names ect. making her remember perfectly the moves and techniques and everything she needs to know to be a good chess player. She is one of the best chess players in the world, proving that you don't have to be born Genius to be a genius, but you have to have a good education to become one.