Stop Fighting

I am one to avoid violence and aggression as much as I can. While growing up, I would hate when my parents started to argue. I have never been involved in a physical fight with anybody else and probably never will. I'm terribly frightened of guns; so much so, that I constantly dream that I get shot. I'm a firm believer that wars are unnecessary and that violence doesn't solve much. On the other hand, there's people out there who rely on violence and aggression in every opportunity they get. I think that violence only makes the situation worst instead of giving a solution. I mean, of course, anger is a very common emotion but violence is not the way to get rid of it. 

So, why is it that many people recur to violence in the first place? I found this video in which forensic psychologist Laurence Miller, Ph. D., explains some of the reasons why people have violent behavior.

He explains that there's a primitive action for us to always be cooperative and competitive towards each other on items that we think are scarce. He also says that certain people are hard wired to be more impulsive and aggressive and that it goes back to their family genes, biological component. There's also an environment factor that influences the violent behavior; for example, if a person is predominantly violent but goes to a family that is stable and non-violent, the chances of that person being aggressive decrease. The last thing he mentions is that the society in which we live affects our behavior. There's some cultures that promote violence and aggression so people will act accordingly to their surroundings. 

To this, only one song comes to mind which is "Imagine" by John Lennon.

Anosmia

Making coffee in the morning, baking a cake, and walking through a garden are delightful experiences to anybody but what makes them wonderful is what most of us take for granted: the smell of each. I think the sense we think of the least is our sense of smell. We don't often think of what it would be like if we didn't have it. Olfaction is vital for the ability to taste a variety of flavors and without it, we can only taste the basic tastes of bitter, sweet, and sour. We would also be unable to detect if something is burning or if there's a gas leak, which is very dangerous. 

Anosmia is when a person loses the sense of smell. It can be caused by a head injury, certain chemicals, or can be congenital. There are other causes listed in this website.  The way we can detect odors is by our olfactory cells in the nose which then send signals to the brain. When someone has lost their sense of smell it's because either something is blocking these nerve cells or they have been injured and can't send messages back to the brain.

The following video demonstrates how many people don't know what anosmia is or have never heard about it. They show two people who have anosmia, a teenager girl and a middle age man. The girl lost her sense of smell when she was a baby through a head injury. The man lost it due to being exposed to certain chemicals during a class. They mention that the taste is more appreciated and associated with the texture of the food. 

Don't take your sense of smell for granted! 

I don't remember...

I remember when my grandfather would pass his days in an absent state of mind. He would just sit for the most part of the day, maybe watch tv. We all knew he had problems remembering things, people, and names but he was never actually diagnosed with a type of dementia. He lived in Mexico and his doctor visits weren't about cognitive function but more about physical condition.

After my grandmother passed away, he would ask where she was even though he went to the funeral. My aunts and uncles wouldn't tell him over and over again because they didn't want him to get upset. They would tell him she was out visiting a relative and would come back later. I think that after a couple of months he started to really miss her though. Only four months went by when he had a stroke but, sadly, wasn't able to recover from it. He was, at the time, 88 years old so the doctors explained that there wasn't much hope. Looking back now and with what I know about dementia, he might have had vascular dementia. That's "...subtle, progressive decline in memory and cognitive functioning. It occurs when the blood supply carrying oxygen and nutrients to the brain is interrupted by a blocked or diseased vascular system." It explains more about it in this website.

We shouldn't just assume that a person has dementia if they are just forgetful. Dementia engulfs more symptoms besides memory loss. This video explains the difference between forgetfulness and dementia or Alzheimer's. Dementia is the term used for the general problem of cognitive failure and memory loss but there's actually many types of it, most common one being Alzheimer's.

Why we say what we say

Communication is, most of the time, taken for granted. We don't realize how essential it is to our everyday lives. We are always communicating with other people around us via different means of expression. The most common type is our language and writing abilities. Now, you might think, how is it that we can talk and write? We often don't think of what part of our brain is responsible for these important tasks. For the majority of humans, the area responsible for language and writing is the left hemisphere of our brain. Broca's area is responsible for the spoken language and forming complete sentences. Wernick's area is responsible for the comprehension of such language. Imagine if you weren't able to communicate what you're thinking to another person? It would be incredibly frustrating.

Usually when people aren't able to communicate what they want to say it's because they've had a stroke and it affected the left hemisphere of the brain, and in consequence also the language areas. The term for term used to describe someone who has had this happen to them is aphasia, which is a language disability. The following video shows a guy that had a stroke and affected his left hemisphere. Due to the stroke and since each hemisphere is responsible for the opposite side of the body, he experiences Broca's aphasia and right side weakness on his entire body. It shows how he has difficulty forming words he wants to say as well as walking.

There are rehabilitation services for these kinds of situations and it seems he is recovering well. Of course, it takes extensive hours of hard work and patience to recover from something like this but it's totally doable.

Lobotomy Uncut

A surgical procedure that became popular during the 1940s was lobotomy. If you don't know what it is or have never heard of it, I'll explain. It's when a surgeon cuts or scraps away all of the connections to and from the pre-frontal cortex to the rest of the brain. The procedure most commonly used during this time was called transorbital lobotomy, in which they inserted an ice pick through the top part of the eye and pushed it in with a hammer to break the thin bone in order to cut off connections to the pre-frontal cortex.

This was usually done to treat patients in psychiatric hospitals who had schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, among other mental illnesses. During that time period, there weren't any drugs to treat these mental illnesses, so they relied on operations like this one to cure the patients. It was also a time when more and more people were taken to mental hospitals and they were getting full of people. They had to take drastic measures to try and salvage these persons from their illnesses, or so they thought. The following video shows the steps of how they did, or in rare cases still do, a transorbital lobotomy. It's not graphic in the scenes but it is a little with the language and how frigid they make it sound.

 They also say and show how the "doctors" would put the patient to an unconscious state, using electroshock therapy until the patient would pass out. They didn't have any other kind of anesthesia in those days either. It amazes me how we look back now and think it was the most awful thing that someone can do. It similar to when they used electroshock therapy and trepanation . I wonder what future generations think is awful of the procedures we currently use, maybe taking so many pills or plastic surgery? 

For it or against it?

Hello,
I know that this is a common debate that's going around about legalizing cannabis (marijuana) in the U.S. and I'm aware that some states have legalized it. I just found it incredibly interesting a video I watched about cannabinoids receptors that we have in our brain, and it binds naturally to THC. The video explains how it evolved through time and came to be in our brain. This was completely new information to me when I heard it and made me think a bit differently about it, not that I thought negatively, just differently. Maybe it's not as bad as people make it seem.

Then, during my Medical Aspects class, my Professor started to talk about drugs and how damaging they are to our brains. Obviously, the topic of marijuana popped up and several students started sharing stories about how their grandmothers or moms would use it as teas or some sort of ointment to take pain away or numb an area of the body. That's when my professor said that one time, he had horrible pains all over his body due to his disability but the medication given to him was not working so some of his former students offered to give him "herbal tea" from Mexico. I think that it definitely has some benefits to it and then I stumbled with this video that says it can actually cure some types of cancer by making the cells kill themselves or "commit suicide". This is an excerpt from a documentary:

I'm still skeptical about it but I have to admit that it would be amazing if this is true and it cures some types of cancer!

Glue cells are in

When researchers learned about the brain, they wanted to know about neurons! It was what everyone was interested in and the focus when it came to seeing the activity of the brain and how it functions. The truth is that neurons only constitute 15% of brain cell and the rest is made up of glia cells or "glue" cells. They were named like that because it was believed that they were the glue that held the neurons together but recent discoveries and research show that they do much more and that idea is non-existent now.

Because neurons communicate through electrical activity and glia don't, neuroscientist over looked glia cells. The way that they studied activity in the brain was via electrodes that recorded electrical activity between neurons. Now, they have found new ways to study communication between glia cells and neurons like "laser and video microscopes". This is a breakthrough in the processing of brain function and a eye opener of how much more we can learn about the complexity of our brain. Dr. Douglas Fields is one of the leaders neuroscientists who have taken the challenge of understanding the role of glia cells and how important it might be for future understanding of behavior and brain functions. He has recently written a book named The Other Brain. The following video is him explaining glia cells:

I think this is amazing discoveries and shows that there still so much that we can learn and explore, especially when it comes to the brain. It's certainly a field of discoveries and that will help with diseases of the brain and memory problems. Impressive!