Month: September 2019

Blog Post #1

The brain has a number of structures all with different functions. Yet these different structures work in unison to allow humans to function the way they do. Four of the prominent structures of the brain are the brainstem, thalamus, cerebellum, and limbic system. The brainstem is the oldest part of the brain. It begins where the spinal cord enters the skull and is responsible for automatic survival functions. The thalamus is considered the brain’s sensory switchboard and is located at the top of the brainstem and it directs messages to the sensory areas in the cortex. The part of the brain attached to the rear end of the brainstem and commonly referred to as the “little brain” is the cerebellum. This part of the brain helps coordinate voluntary movements and balance and is involved in learning skills. The limbic system is the donut-shaped group of neural structures at the border of the Brainstem and cerebrum. It is associated with emotions fear, aggression, and drives for both food and sex.

When my younger brother Landon turned ten years old he was diagnosed with a structural brain disease at the base of his skull and cerebellum called Chiari Malformation. Because of this parts of the tissue of his cerebellum were pressed into his spinal canal pinching it. This damaged this part of his brain causing him to experience extreme chronic headaches. After he was diagnosed we recognized a number of other symptoms he had been experiencing that we had not originally known were associated with his headaches, which was the only symptom we had noticed before the diagnosis. Because the cerebellum coordinates voluntary movement, Landon had struggled playing baseball, the sport he loves, and even had a hard time hitting a baseball off a tee at the age of five and six. He also had trouble speaking due to the lack of coordinated voluntary movement of his mouth. Landon eventually had a surgery that involved removing a small portion of his skull to relieve pressure and rid him of headaches.

The Psychodynamic Perspective

There are several perspectives that help make up modern psychology today. One of these perspectives, the psychodynamic perspective, can be understood as an approach that focuses on the interactions of drives and experiences, or, in other words, nature vs. nurture. This concept not only helps one to understand how our childhood experiences have influenced our behavior and feelings as we get older, but also where certain psychological problems may have rooted from. There are three parts that make up our personality: id, superego, and ego. Id can be understood as our innate personality traits and our instincts to seek pleasure, but avoid pain. Superego is the constraints and morals placed upon someone by society or parents, or the “rules” we have to follow. Ego helps to negotiate between id and superego and reflects in the decisions that we make.

Personally, looking at this perspective helps me to understand why I have a calm disposition, while my brother has a more intense temperament. As a kid, I struggled with speech and hearing problems, so I was always being tended to by my mother and received more attention. This meant that I received my natural instinct for love and protection, while my brother was neglected. Furthermore, after my father left, my brother explained that he began to feel a sense of betrayal and that he wasn’t wanted by my father. However, since I was still pretty young and was receiving somewhat more attention from my mother, it didn’t affect me as much, which is why I still have a relaxed temperament. To put it simply, my brother’s id seeked attention and love, but his superego received neglect and parental rejection. As a result, his ego created a way for him to deal with this by influencing bad behavior and creating a defense mechanism where he can’t build close relationships with people now. Although this was this case when he was younger, my brother’s disposition was able to change after finally meeting someone who could fill the void in his superego. Ultimately, our personalities and development are heavily influenced by how we are treated in early childhood and the influences from society or our parents. 

 

Fight-or-Flight

Fight-or-Flight

Have you ever been in a situation where you were forced to fight-or-flight? You can thank a part of your autonomic nervous system for that. The autonomic nervous system is split into two divisions. These two divisions work together and maintain normal body function. One is the parasympathetic nervous system which calms a person through relaxing the nerves in their body (rest and digest). The parasympathetic nervous system usually comes into action after the sympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system returns blood pressure, the breathing rate and hormone flow all return to equilibrium after it is changed due to stressful situations. The other is the sympathetic nervous system, which is located in the spine and stimulates the nerves and gets them ready to either fight-or-flight and is what we are going to focus on today. When put into a stressful or dangerous situation, the body releases a flood or hormones which boosts the bodies alertness and heartrate and sends extra blood to the induvial muscles. The persons breath rate increases, delivering more fresh oxygen to the brain along and glucose is released into the bloodstream as a boost of energy. Most of the time people do not even realize these responses are taking place.

In my lifetime I have experienced many situations where my sympathetic nervous system played a huge role and I was in a fight-or-flight moment. I am from Northeast Pennsylvania where I spend a lot of my time out in the woods hunting. Hunting season in NEPA usually runs from the fall into winter. My fight-or-flight moment happened in the fall, when I was hunting out of a tree stand. The day before, somebody harvested a deer at the location I was hunting and left the scraps in the woods. I saw them and thought nothing of it and got in the tree stand and sat there for hours. Just before dark it sounded like someone threw a boulder down the hill behind me, and I could feel my adrenaline start pumping because I thought it was going to be a group of deer and my season would be over that night. Unfortunately, that group of deer ended up being a large adult black bear who was looking for a meal while bulking up for hibernation. I didn’t know what to do at that point, I could feel my body change as the feeling of danger overcame me. All I saw was a large bear towering high on its hind legs trying to locate the bloody deer carcass that was fifty yards in front of me. I didn’t know what danger felt like until it was ten yards away from a hungry bear in a twelve-foot-high tree stand with only a bow and three arrows. At that moment there was no thinking, my body was instantly preparing me for the worst and telling me to get out of the area or if I had to, to try and eliminate the threat and fight for my life. The bear made a beeline to the gut pile and started ripping it apart, I figured that was my opportunity and I climbed out of the tree and quickly walked out of the woods.

At that time, I didn’t realize it until my parasympathetic nervous system started to calm me down, but my sympathetic nervous system was playing a huge role in that experience. It immediately took over and started making my body do things I didn’t realize I was doing until I was out of that situation. When I later thought about it, I felt the adrenaline flowing, my heart beating crazily out of chest, my body stared pouring sweat, and my breath rate was through the roof. And this is just one major situation, I’m sure we experience situations where both systems come into play weekly. We should be grateful these systems exist, because they play a huge role in human survival, and without them who knows where we would be.

Sources:

Complete Autonomic Nervous System Management for Any Coach. (2019, July 11). Retrieved from https://simplifaster.com/articles/autonomic-nervous-system/

Fight or Flight: The Sympathetic Nervous System. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.livescience.com/65446-sympathetic-nervous-system.html

Myelin, Brain Lesions, and MRI’s in Relation to Multiple Sclerosis

The myelin sheath may not seem to be too important in the overall grand scheme of the central nervous system. However, I personally know what damage to this thin layer of protein and fat can cause in a human being. In 1996, two years before I was born, my maternal grandmother was diagnosed with chronic progressive multiple sclerosis. She first noticed that something was awry in 1994. Her leg began to flop when she walked, she had blurred vision, and had very limited strength in her hands. After numerous spinal taps and testing, she was diagnosed after a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan. MRIs are able to image soft tissue very well and are therefore used to see the structure of the brain. The imaging capabilities are expanded when considering the superior spatial resolution. This spacial resolution allows the doctor to see brain details down to the millimeter. All these features were crucial in observing the brain lesions in my grandmother’s brain which ultimately led to her diagnosis. Brain lesions are an area of brain tissue that has been damaged. Brain lesions can be compared to scar tissue except instead of being on the skin, they are located in the brain. Multiple sclerosis has been proven to have a direct correlation to brain lesions.

Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease that results from the immune system attacking the myelin sheath that encapsulates the axons of neurons in the brain and spinal cord. The myelin sheath assists in spreading nerve impulses from the soma, or the cell body, to the terminal branches of the axon. The anatomy can be seen in Figure 1. The myelin sheath also insulates and protects the axon and allows the messages through the neurons to speed up. In the case of multiple sclerosis, the body’s immune system attacks the central nervous system and targets the myelin sheath directly. Also, oligodendrocyctes, the cells that make myelin, are damaged and killed. The amount of damage is indirectly related to the consistency of the signal getting through. That is, the more damage that is inflicted on the myelin sheath, the more damage there is to the axon, and less of the initial signal gets through. This is due to the nature of an action potential. The action potential is a quick charge that travels down the axon. The action potential is created by the movement of charged ions in and out of channels in the axon’s membrane. Therefore, if less charged ions are able to get through to the axon’s membrane, there will not be enough voltage to cause an action potential. A graphical and pictorial representation can be seen in Figure 2. Reaching threshold is required in order for the neuron to fire. Any amount below threshold will not be able to cause the neuron to fire. This progression of less and less action potentials was seen in my grandmother. My grandmother went from completely healthy to not being able to do anything. Her neurons were so badly damaged that she could not voluntarily move any part of her body after only a handful of years. Ultimately, she passed away from the complications of multiple sclerosis in December 2001. From her, I grew up knowing the complications of multiple sclerosis. However, this assignment allowed me to understand more about the disease in connection to the nervous system. I also learned about how the disease progressed and how she was diagnosed by getting information from my mother. Overall, this tiny myelin sheath can have major complications if it is damaged. The myelin sheath has much more importance in the grand scheme of the body as proven by multiple sclerosis.

Figure 1
Figure 2

 

Works Cited

Immune-Mediated Disease. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.nationalmssociety.org/What-is-MS/Definition-of-MS/Immune-mediated-disease

My Vans Conundrum

The brain is a miraculous muscles that is beautifully interconnected and woven together in order to make the greatest piece of machinery ever, function. The brain is split into many different parts each with their own specific purposes, as well as the largest amount of additional unassociated areas of any mammal to walk the earth. An area of the brain I personally find incredible is the brains sensory neurons. These neurons fire the moment something needs to be processed from the body. From this an even cooler effect is the idea of Sensory Adaptation. This phenomena refers to the idea that when the body is continually stimulated it will eventually diminish the sensitivity, until it is unable to be felt. Like when walking in the cold, or a band-aid on the skin, when the body is stimulated by the same factor for a prolonged period of time, the neurons simply allow it to turn to the wayside of your attention.

I have terrible spending habits. The part of my brain that is in charge of self control and good decision making died a long time ago. This means nothing scientifically, however in the physical realm it means I bought 5 pairs of shoes this week. Now when you buy a new shoe there is initially a very upsetting consequence. Blisters. Now when you buy 5 new pairs of shoes, the blisters are prolonged much longer in order to break them all in. So now a couple days after having these shoes you can imagine I am in a great deal of pain. In response to this pain I have been going through an absurd amount of band-aids. Now allow me to assure you that Sensory Adaption is not a miracle worker so I still feel the blisters in full force, however I never feel my band-aids.

This is incredible to me because I never really thought about the inability to feel the band-aids until Tuesday. It was also incredible because while I thought it was acting as a buffer between my shoes and my foot, it was doing nothing but protecting the skin. So I still 100% felt all the pain associated with the blister, but I felt no band-aid. The constant stick to my skin was low level enough that my sensory neurons decreased my sensitivity to just the band-aid. This very minor change therefore required a reaction, that then my brain deemed unworthy to continue feeling. This is also mind-blowing because it was selective only to the band-aid. When I am walking, I can still feel the pain of my blister but no band-aid. The sensory neurons can be so selective that they can feel one thing but millimeters away they stop the processing of my band-aid. I find that simply incredible.

Reflexes: My experiences with Bunsen burners

The central nervous system consists of one’s brain and spinal and is involved in various tasks, such as controlling reflexes. Reflexes are a prime example of bottom-up processing, where the signal begins with sensory information or stimuli observed from the surrounding environment, such as the heat from the candle, which is then relayed to the spinal cord and the brain. However, one difference between bottom-up processing and reflexes is that even before the signal reaches the brain to be processed, the spinal cord has already sent out a response signal, which in the figure shown below is a stimulation of the motor neuron that causes the person to move their hand away from the candle. While the response signal is being sent from the spinal cord, the sensory signal from the sensory neuron is being passed on from the spinal cord to the brain, where it can be processed. When the brain processes this sensory information, it first reaches the thalamus, which acts as a switchboard mechanism and relays this sensory information to the correct part of the brain to be processed. For instance, in the case below, the sensory information from the skin is sent from the thalamus to the sensory cortex, where the brain can comprehend what has happened. However, the brain doesn’t necessarily need to send a return signal because the spinal cord reflex has already sent out a response signal.

My personal experience with reflexes and bottom-up processing has occurred in many different areas of my life. For instance, when I am working with a Bunsen burner in lab, it is not common for me to touch the flame. During these instances, similar to the figure shown above, my reflexes move my hand away from the Bunsen burner just as I start to feel the pain.

 

Sources

“Chapter 3 – Neuron and the Brain.” Psychology, by Josh Wede,

psu.pb.unizin.org/intropsych/chapter/neuron-and-the-brain/.

Selective Attention

I want to open by introducing what selective attention is and how everyone experiences this daily. Without an explanation of what selective attention is, my story later in this blog will leave you perplexed and with questions.  Selective attention is “the capacity for or process of reacting to certain stimuli selectively when several occur simultaneously”. It is the process of attending to one or a few sensory inputs as there are millions around you that you ignore. A simple example of this is someone who drives and has other distractions all around them. There focus is the road, but the light is on in the backseat, there are other cars beeping at the, and their phone is ringing. All those things that are occurring around you as the driver are sensory inputs. Selective attention allows people to focus on the most important sensory input as in this instance, the road.

 

Another way to look at Selective attention is by thinking about what we know and what we don’t know. As expressed by Dr. Wede in class, the mind can only process so fast and store so much.  People receive information in so many ways all the time and probably don’t even realize to the extent that it comes. Information can come from speech, lights, other random sounds, movement, and more. Selective attention gives our minds the ability to take in the important information or what we as the person getting the attention want. This is all due to that fact that we as humans can not take all information in that we receive in multiple ways.

 

Now that you know about selective attention from what I have said above, my personal experience with selective attention will make much more sense. A couple of weeks ago me and my girlfriend were watching tv together. As we were watching she started to talk to me, and at that time I was focused on the show and not so much her as bad as that sounds. Well she continued to talk as I continued to watch until she asked a question and I gave no response. Of course, she knew that I was not listening to her directly when I gave no response. Later that evening she got her revenge.  She pulled a prank on me by telling me that she had to leave Penn State to go home because of a family issue and that she tried to explain this to me earlier.  At the earlier time my selective attention was focused on the television and not her, and that is why I did not hear her talking earlier in the day.  This is my personal experience with selective attention and how people see this every day.  Below is a link to a cartoon video of selective attention to help you further understand.

https://study.com/academy/lesson/selective-attention-definition-examples-quiz.html

 

Sources

Cherry, K. (2019, May 6). How We Use Selective Attention to Filter Information and Focus. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-selective-attention-2795022

Anesthesia and the Central Nervous System

The nervous system controls the human body. The nervous system divides into two categories: the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. The peripheral nervous system (PNS) is the neurons that connect the CNS and the rest of the body. The central nervous system (CNS) is the brain and spinal cord. We can think, feel, and behave because of the brain. The basic structure of the brain is the brainstem, thalamus, cerebellum, frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe, and occipital lobe. The oldest and innermost region in the brain is the brainstem. It controls the most basic function such as breathing, paying attention, and motor response. The thalamus is located on the top of the brainstem. It receives signals from the spinal cord and sends them to the higher levels in the brain after filtering. The cerebellum is the “little brain” that is placed behind the brainstem. It helps to coordinate the voluntary movements and balance. The cerebral cortex is the outer layer of the human brain. It is divided into two hemispheres, and each hemispheres are consist of four lobes: frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe, and occipital lobe. Each lobe has responsible for different functions of the brain. 

When I was twelve years old, I had surgery on my left foot. I was under anesthesia while I was getting surgery. When I went into the surgery room, the doctor and the nurses were preparing diligently.  As soon as they got settled, one of the nurses put an injection into my arm and told me to count to ten. I did what she told me to do, and I do not remember anything after counting up to five. When I woke up, the surgery was successfully done, but I could not retrieve anything from the surgery room. The thalamus can explain how this happened. The thalamus filters the sensory information and sends it to the higher brain levels. It is also closely related to sleep and anesthesia because it enables us to rest by blocking the incoming signals. What happens in our brain is that the connection between the thalamus neurons and the cortical nuclei is disrupted by Anesthesia and within the cortical neurons, which stopped me from uniting information.

Resources:

Fukuda, S., et al. (2011). “Effect Sites of Anesthetics in the Central Nervous System Network–Looking into the Mechanisms for Natural Sleep and Anesthesia.” Masui. The Japanese Journal of Anesthesiology. U.S. National Library of Medicine. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21626858.

Wede, J. “Introductory Psychology.” Affordable Course Transformation: The Pennsylvania State University. Retrieved from https://psu.pb.unizin.org/introductorypsychologywede/

Illusionary Correlation or My Good Luck Charm?

Several people believe in superstitions and that other “forces” cause certain things to happen when they do something specific or act a certain way. In reality, superstitions represent a false relationship between two things. This type of inaccurate relationship is known as an illusionary correlation, meaning that it gives off an illusion of two things being related. Two different scenarios can show similar results, no matter how extremely different they seem. An example of an illusionary correlation is shown below.

From: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

This graph shows a strong direct relationship between US oil imports and the number of people killed from trains. Although these two events show a similar trend on the graph, they have no actual correlation to each other and neither one affects the other, it just doesn’t make sense for them to be connected.

For me, I have been basing my success in my education off of an ongoing superstition. When I take exams or quizzes, I will usually wear this specific necklace because I believe it is my good luck charm, which is another example of an illusionary correlation. When I had my Confirmation back in 2013, as a gift, my grandmother had bought me a gold and diamond cross. At the time, this was one of the most valuable items I owned, so I handled it (and still do) with extreme care and would only wear it for special occasions. A few years later when I went into high school, I started wearing the necklace basically everyday. At this time as well, I started putting in much more effort and time into my studies than I did in middle school because I knew colleges would see my freshman year grades. When I started to see myself receiving better grades, I initially blamed it on wearing the necklace and that is when I started calling it my good luck charm. In reality, the necklace wasn’t doing anything; I had just started putting more time into my work. I still wear it to this day whenever I had a major test because it sort of tricks me into doing well. When I don’t have the necklace on for an exam, it throws me off slightly because I’m so used to wearing it and giving it credit for helping me do well. It is obvious that there is no real relationship between me wearing a necklace and doing well on an exam, but it creates an illusion in my eyes.