Author: acs6057

Schizophrenia is a mentall illness that affects about one in 100 people worldwide.  It is often found in people during late adolescent and early adulthood (right round college age).  Symptoms can be delusions (fragmented, bizzare thinking that can cause distorted beliefs), disorganized thoughts, possibly selective attention failure, possible perception of things that are not there (hallucinations).  Most commonly the hallucinations are auditory rather than visual, olfactory, gustatory, and somatosensory.  Schizophrenic people can have inapproproate emotions and actions.  For example, they may laugh at the news of the death of a loved one or they may show no or extremely little or no emotion.  Within the many many symptoms of schezophrenia they are catogorized into positive and negative symptoms.  Some postive symtpoms are the presence of inapropriate behaviors, disorganized thinking, delusions, hallucenations, and inapropriate emotions.  Some negative symptoms are the absence of appropriate behavior and emotions and a rigid or expressionless face and body.  The actual brain abnormaliy is that there is an overacity of dopamine.    The specific medicine that is used to help with scheziphrenia tries to reduce dopamine levels in the patient.  Scizophrenia is extremely genetically tied.  It is most common that someone who has Schizophrenia’s relative also has the disease.  Different external stressors can trigger an indivual who was already predisposed to the disease.

My uncle has schizophrenia and was diagnosed when he was a late teenager.  His family later learned that his mother’s uncle had schizophrenia and that it was genetically passed down to him.  Throughout his childhood, it did not seem he had a problem.  It was nto until he started heavily using hallucinegenic drugs that the symptoms began to arise.  In the case of my uncle, drugs like LSD were the triggers that made his predispostion present.  My Uncle’s symptoms were voiced he heard in his head that were very mean and negative toward him.  As a person he did nto like to talk much but when he did it was something extremely sweet and caring.

In three out of the six classes, I have taken at Penn State University I have learned about Piaget’s Theory of Development.  Piaget’s theory has 4 main stages of development that he based off of his children.  The four main stages are Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operational, and Formal Operational.  In the sensorimotor stage, the child learns object permanence.  Object permanence is when one learns that when an object is out of sight like covered with a blanket, that the object still exists.  The following stage is the preoperational stage.  In this state, children learn the concept of conservation.  This is, for example, when there is the same amount of liquid in two cups but one is put into a different shaped cup, the child will still be able to acknowledge that there is the same amount of liquid in both cups.  Also in this stage, the theory of mind is solidified which is that if the water bottle becomes out of sight for me, I know that people in a different spot int he room can see it.  In the concrete operational stage which is from ages 7 – 11, the children gain different mental operations that help them think logically.  In this stage children also begin to understand mathematical operations and transformations.  In the final stage, the formal operational stage which is from ages 11 and up, children can begin to think logically about abstract situations and concepts.  Though Piaget believes this stage starts at around the age of 11, it is now believed that it starts a little earlier.

Now I chose to write about this because I babysit, a lot.  And one of my favorite things to do when I babysit very young kids is to play “peek-a-boo” or to hide a little toy under a blanket in front of them and have them look for it and then move the blanket away and show them the toy was right in front of them the whole time.  Before learning about the stages and when object permanence comes into play, I did not know why children did not understand that the toy was just under the blanket even though they watched it get covered.  Now I feel bad like I might have caused the child worry but they always smiled so I think it is okay.

 

The Nervous System can be split into two main groups: the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system.  Within the peripheral nervous system, there are two more groups: the autonomic, which controls self-regulated organs or glands, and the somatic, which controls voluntary movement of different skeletal muscles.  Then within the automatic system, there are two more groups, the sympathetic, which is arousing, and the parasympathetic, which is a calming system.  The two systems work together to almost keep balance in the body.  The sympathetic system is a biological response to some situation which can result in sweaty palms, raised heart rate, inhibits digestion, the stopping of salvation, dilated pupils, and other bodily functions.  It is important to differentiate the fact that the sympathetic nervous system does not account for how you choose to fight or how you choose to fight.  If you decide to run away from a scary situation, that would not be your sympathetic nervous system, that would be your somatic system because you chose to run away, it was not a biological impulse. 

 

Source: https://neuroamer.com/2017/06/19/what-happens-to-the-body-following-simultaneous-stimulation-of-the-sympathetic-and-parasympathetic-nervous-system-autonomic-conflict/

As you can see in the picture, the sympathetic system is located in the center of the spinal cord (which is also where the CNS is) and operates through fast-firing neurons.  The sympathetic system releases adrenaline.   The Parasympathetic system occurs in both the brain and the sacral spinal cord.

I have had the first-hand experience with both parts of the autonomic system.  When I was going into my freshman year of high school I went to France with my family and my friends.  We went to Lake Annecy and swam a lot.  We ended up sailing to a beautiful cliff jump.  All of my friends went to free climb a slippery cliff.  I watched my friends climb up and jump off.  I knew they would ask me soon why I am not doing it too.  Right before I started to climb I could feel my heartbeat quicken, my hands start to sweat, my breathing becomes uneasy, and I thought I had to pee, but I did not fight and I did not fly away, I started to climb.  As I got higher and higher I could feel the “symptoms” getting worse.  As I reached the top I felt the most intense part of the “symptoms”.  I knew that I would have to jump soon so I stood for a little to try and get my breathing back to normal and then I jumped.  Honestly, it was one of the most terrifying things I have voluntarily done.  Once I hit the water I felt my body almost instantaneously calm down.  I could feel my heartbeat go back to normal, my breathing normalizes and could tell my body was in a more calm state.  I can thank the parasympathetic system for that.