Katie Perry 

9/19/19 

Blog Post 1 

Professor Joshua Wede 

During the fall, Halloween season, it is always fun to go to haunted trails or houses. What is better than paying to be scared out of your mind? This past October, I went to a haunted trail with two of my friends. It was safe to say that was one of the times I had been most afraid. I experienced the ‘fight-or flight’ response that night. When one of the characters had heard my friends say my name, a creepy “murderer” with a scary mask and fake axe had heard and came up close to me and began singing my name. Even though I knew that it wasn’t real, and I was safe, the two thoughts in my head were to either sprint away screaming or to stay and get ready to fight. I choose the flight response and my friends and I took off the other way. Fight or flight response is when the body’s sympathetic nervous system becomes active when hormones are released. Heart Rate, Blood Pressure, and Breathing rate increase because of this rush of adrenaline in response to acute stress. Other reactions may be dilated pupils, pale and flushed skin and trembling of the body. I took the haunted trail character as a threat, so my body went through these reactions as I decided between running or fighting. Fight or flight is important because it plays a role on how we deal with threats or immediate stress. The tensing of muscles prepares the body to act against the danger, if it needs to start running or beginning to fight. This stress from the potential threat can help you be prepared in a situation when you need to run or act quickly to because your body has already begun to go through physiological reactions. I remember my heart had been beating rapidly the entirety of the walk through the trail. This was because my body was automatically beating rapidly to provide energy and oxygen to the body in case I either had to run or fight. The fight or flight response overall prepared me when I was in a time of fear to be ready to react if I needed to. My body went through the fight or flight response when I was in fear and through this reaction I was prepared in case I had to act quickly. 

The world around us contains more information than we can interpret and or process at once, therefore people can focus and interpret only specific stimuli at specific timing. This notion is known as selective attention. Selective attention depends on certain factors that may hinder or help ones attention span. These factors may include ideas like mental effort, how tired one may be, and mental capacity. As a student, it is relatively easy to understand the idea of selective attention. I can provide numerous examples of myself in class undergoing selective attention. I remember my 10th grade English class vividly, while my teacher was doing a lecture on diction, I could not stop staring at a drawn picture of a duck on the white board. A student had drawn it and left his initials right under it. I didn’t put in any mental effort in trying to pay attention to the lecture on diction, but I stared at the duck for about 30 minutes out of he 45 minute lecture. It was a rude awakening when my quiz grade came back to me and now I realize that the incident directly represents what selective attention is. I was able to deal with some stimuli (the image on the board), and not other information (the lecture). The diction lecture to me was boring, so I didn’t put in any mental effort into paying attention. Another personal example I have of this was about a year ago when I was crossing a street to meet my friends. My friends were already on the other side, so I was looking straight at them. I was really exited to go get food, but I didn’t realize the enormous tow truck coming right towards me while crossing. I was so focused on my friends that I had blocked out the rest of the setting around me. This reveals that selective attention is probably used commonly, and reveals that selective attention includes factors like mental effort.

Humans experience “fight or flight” situations quite frequently throughout their lives, and even in their daily lives. This reaction originates in a subsection of the Nervous System called the Sympathetic Nervous System, which lies under a more general subsection called the Autonomic Nervous System. The Autonomic Nervous System is responsible for regulating functions humans cannot necessarily control like heart rate, sweating, and pupil dilation.

This is important to note as one’s body will naturally react when placed in a situation that could be deemed as dangerous or stressful, which is a response of the Sympathetic Nervous System. The body’s reactions are due to the Sympathetic Nervous System’s signals exiting the spinal cord in the mid to lower spine region and transferring to muscles, cardiac muscles, and glands. Reactions can vary throughout the body, especially due to the release of adrenaline. The spike in this hormone causes a higher sense of alert, sweating, faster heartbeat, and short, shallow breaths.

These effects can soon disperse, though, once the Parasympathetic Nervous System takes over. The Parasympathetic Nervous System is a subset of the Autonomic Nervous System and works in conjunction with the Sympathetic Nervous System. It is considered to be a period where one “rests and digests.” This name is appropriate as the system seeks to conserve energy while lowering one’s heart rate and increasing activity in the intestines.

I have had countless moments where my Sympathetic System took precedence, and then eventually the Parasympathetic System took over. One of these moments happened recently. I was at the Career Fair, standing in line to talk to a representative from CVS Health to discuss possible internships. While waiting in line, I felt my heart start to beat both faster and harder. I noticed my hands were beginning to sweat and my breaths became shallower. Thoughts about failure began to run through my head. My body was in this “fight or flight” mode, and I so desperately wanted to “take flight”. However, I made the conscious decision to “fight” and confront my worries and fears. After talking to the representative, I felt my body start going through the Parasympathetic System as my body relaxed. I was finally able to tell myself that it wasn’t that bad, and I continued to talk to other representatives with more confidence.

Lanese, Nicoletta. “Fight or Flight: The Sympathetic Nervous System.” Live Science. 9 May 2019. https://www.livescience.com/65446-sympathetic-nervous-system.html. Accessed 19 Sept. 2019.

“Parasympathetic nervous system.” Science Daily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/parasympathetic_nervous_system.htm. Accessed 19 Sept. 2019.

“Sympathetic Nervous System vs Parasympathetic Nervous System.” Major Differences. https://www.majordifferences.com/2017/03/9-differences-between-sympathetic.html#.XYMBXChKhPY.

Illusory correlation is when a person finds connection, or correlation between two random events that share no actual correlation. This could be thinking you got an A on your exam because you wore green that day. People enjoy finding order in the chaos.

My friends and I were talking last week about weird phobias. I have one friend afraid of thunderstorms, and another afraid of toes. I then said that I am afraid to throw up. This sparked a conversation that relates to psychology. We all talked about certain foods that we cannot eat anymore because we associate eating them with being sick or throwing up. My one friend cannot eat ice cream anymore because she thinks eating it causes vomiting. I cannot have Nutterbutter’s. We all consider these foods to cause or be a precursor to becoming sick.

We also learned in class that correlation does not mean causation. I am not allergic to peanuts, chocolate, or wafers. This mean there was no way that a Nutterbutter caused my illness. I probably caught a disease and happened to eat that beforehand.

After talking about weird illusory correlations, my other friend explained how she is certain that the Steeler’s win because she wears the same socks every time they win. She explained how she also thinks that because she sleeps on her left side, she will get an A on her tests the next day. She insists this is the only reason that she does well on exams.

We all try to find the correlation between things to explain the  chaos in our lives. It is comforting to think that as long as we avoid chocolatey snacks or cold creamy desserts we won’t get sick anymore. It is nice to think that we helped our favorite team win because of our socks.

In the spring of 2017, I was diagnosed with a concussion. I was at a lacrosse practice running through a drill when something hit my head and blacked out. I woke up on the gym floor and a pool of people were crowded around me. My coach walked over to me and escorted me to the sideline. I was confused and scared. I had been informed about concussions in the past and I was nervous about what would happen to the rest of my season. My teammate came up and explained what happened to me. I was hit in the head with a lacrosse ball while guarding a teammate. How did I not see the ball coming? The thrower was only 20 feet from me. I should have seen it.

In a lot of cases, when people are in car accidents they claim that they “didn’t see the other car,” which is a similar thought as to when I got hit in the head. How can you not see something that is in your field of vision? Well, as humans our

brains can only truly process a small part of our range of sight. When you are focused on something else, you can be blind to very significant things, which is considered inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice a visible object entering your line of sight. It was a lacrosse ball in my case. I was so focused on the drill and who I was guarding that I did not notice the ball flying at my head. Additionally, my brain only has the capacity to process, in detail, a small part of my field of vision. Selective attention means that you can only process a certain amount of stimuli when several occur. In my case, I was processing my task in the drill and I did not have the capacity to also process the ball flying at me. Selective attention typically leads to inattentional blindness.

Sadly, due to inattentional blindness and selective attention I was benched for a month. However, I am no longer beating myself up for not being more careful. My perception, being aware through one’s senses, of my environment was skewed by my brain’s limited capacity to process information. Luckily, I made a healthy recovery and stayed alert on the field, to the best of my ability.

When I was 14, my grandfather had a stroke and right after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. With this disease, he had to stay in a nursing home because there he would have nurses who would know how to take care of him the right way and how to deal with all of the memory loss and the new way that his brain was functioning. Given that the brain completely modified after the stroke (brain plasticity). He stayed in this same situation for about two years until he passed away. It was a very difficult time period for everyone in our family, but especially to my mom because she would visit him more at the nursing home he stayed at. She experienced a lot of his memory loss and episodes where he wouldn’t know what to do with his body or mind in certain situations because his brain wouldn’t function as it used to.

The brain is one of the most important organs of our body, maybe possibly even the most important. Alzheimer’s is a disease that affects the brain and its various functions. Alzheimer’s is a neurodegenerative disease that causes a decline in cognitive functions, reducing work skills and social relationships and interfering with one’s behavior and personality. At first, the patient begins to lose his most recent memory. You may even remember events from years ago, but forget that you have just had a meal. My grandfather lost the complete notion of his automatic survival functions that he used to have before the stroke. His brainstem was damaged so badly that he couldn’t even go to the bathroom by himself, a daily and basic survival function.

The stroke that my grandfather had made it possible for his brain to get damaged and lose certain abilities (neuro-psychology). With the evolution of the condition, Alzheimer’s has a great impact on the person’s daily life and affects learning ability, attention, orientation, comprehension, and language. This disease affects both the left (specialized in language) and right (specialized in art, music, recognition of faces and shapes) hemispheres of the brain causing the person’s inability to do some easy day-to-day skills.

Alzheimer’s disease causes nerve cell death and tissue loss throughout the brain. Over time, the brain shrinks a lot, which affects almost all of its functions. This explains why a lot of the brain’s functions are drastically delayed with Alzheimer’s or even a minor stroke. My grandfather’s cerebellum was also mainly affected, where it helps coordinate voluntary movements and balance and it is also involved in learning skills. His limbic system, a part of our brains that is associated with emotions, was slightly damaged as well. Although he could feel fear and irritation, it was very stressful how at some point he couldn’t even express happiness. The function of the cortex was not as injured, but there were some complications involving the motor and sensory cortex area. The motor cortex controls voluntary movements. And the sensory cortex receives information from the skin surface and sense organs.

Even though the brain has various important functions and it controls most of our bodies it can also be easily damaged causing some of these functions to not work as they used to. Unfortunately, Alzheimer’s disease can affect the whole brain and therefore create complications to the whole system making it difficult to do simple daily actions changing out entire behavior.

Sources:

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        For this blog post I will be focusing on split brain patients and how they process information. In the most serious cases of epilepsy the corpus callosum is severed to prevent widespread seizures. The corpus callosum is a mass of neural fibers that connect and allow the left and right hemispheres of the brain to communicate with each other. This means that a split–brain patient’s left hemisphere that specializes in language, can’t communicate with the right hemisphere. This also means that the right hemisphere that specializes in art, music perception, recognition of shapes, and recognition of faces cannot communicate with the left hemisphere.

       My story is not about a personal experience, but I’m going to evaluate an experiment executed by Dr. Michael Gazzaniga, testing a split-brain patient named Vicki. In one section of the experiment Vicki must stare at a dot in the middle of a screen and name a picture when it flashes on the left or right of the dot. In most instances, when a picture is flashed on the right, Vicki can name the picture instantly. However, when Vicki is shown a picture of a woman on the phone on the left, she can identify that it’s a woman, but she has trouble saying it’s a woman on the telephone. After Vicki’s confusion settles, Dr. Gazzaniga asks her to write what she saw with her left hand. When Vicki finishes writing her response, Dr. Gazzaniga asked what she wrote and Vicki replies, “skipping rope” (Split Brain Clip). In about a, split second Vicki can comprehend that the woman in the picture is in fact talking on the phone.  

          The experiment on Vicki is related to my topic of split-brain patients because based on the behavior in the experiment we can evaluate how and why Vicki’s brain functions. In the first part of this experiment, Vicki was given pictures on the right side of the dot and she could verbally define what she saw. The reason Vicki could identify these pictures was because they were in her right field of view, which is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain. Since the left hemisphere is responsible for language, it’s easy to see why Vicki can easily identify each picture. In the second part of the experiment, Vicki is shown a picture with a woman on the phone to the left of the dot. In this instance, Vicki can identify the woman, but she can’t say that the woman is on the telephone. Vicki can identify the woman on the left because the right hemisphere is responsible for visual imagery amongst art, music perception, and facial recognition. Unfortunately, she does not have the corpus callosum that would communicate the information from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere so she can put the visual information into verbal language. The most interesting part is when Dr. Gazzaniga asks Vicki to write what she saw other than the woman with her left hand. It’s very fascinating that Vicki thinks that she wrote, “skipping rope” (Split Brain Clip), even though she wrote telephone because the right hemisphere had received all the information from the picture. Now Vicki can write the word telephone with her left arm because all the information from the picture came from the right hemisphere. Also, the right hemisphere controls the left arm allowing a transfer of the visual information to be expressed through the left arm. After Vicki sees the word telephone, she quickly realizes that the picture is a woman on the telephone. When Vicki said that she saw a woman her left hemisphere guessed that the woman was jump roping because the right hemisphere is unable to tell the left hemisphere that the woman is on the phone. When Vicki sees that she wrote telephone, both the left and right hemispheres are on the same page and can finally answer “talking on the telephone” (Split Brain Clip). 

Here’s the link for the video I used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvcH4Yfb8xw 

To see the part I focused on only watch from 3:10-4:42 

Citations: 

Hartman, RC. “Split Brain Clip.” YouTube, YouTube, 25 July 2013. 

Wede, Josh. “Powerpoint.” Lecture 5 – Brain. Lecture 5 – Brain Psych 100 section3, Sept. 2019, University Park, Forum Building 102.