Author Archives: Alaa Elamin

Wow! You Have a Really Good Occipital Lobe!

Wow! You Have a Really Good Occipital Lobe!

 

Ten years ago if anyone used the comment above in a conversation I probably would have had some unpleasant thoughts about him or her. However, this was a comment from my ten-year-old daughter last week that she casually used in a conversation. I know, it sounds odd. Well, let me first introduce my daughter, the brains as we call her. She is ten years old, has ADHD, and Asperger’s. She has an IQ of 112. She is currently in fifth grade age wise and is studying seventh grade math and language. Anyway, we were baking a cake and she was trying a chemistry experiment to imitate the action of the rising agent in the cake by blowing up a balloon using yeast and relating to the chemical bonds involved. To make baking more interesting my daughter was explaining to me how she learned about the different parts if the brain, as well as explain which areas of the brains I have deficits in such as my parietal lobe – which she associated with my lack of screaming when I touched the hot pan. While she was talking my inattentive brain (with good occipital lobe functions) wandered on to think about the formation of the brains of children with ADHD. She continued to tell me how she is trying to train her frontal lobe and in particular the motor cortex. The way she put it was that having speech therapy for many years helped her think about her pragmatics and social skill. Why can’t she do the same to improve her sense of space and bodily movement? I will not go into Asperger’s and brain function here. I plan to go to graduate school to learn about that.

It is common knowledge that the main deficits in ADHD are inattention and excessive movement. Furthermore, it is known that the frontal lobe which is located in the front of the brain is the main player for reasoning, motor skills, cognition, and expressive language. To be exact the motor cortex at the back of the frontal lobe works as a receiving station to utilize the information received from the different brain parts and carry out body movements. For individuals with ADHD, these functions can be impaired. Up until recently the differences in brain formation that lead to such differences were unknown. However, with the major advances in technology these changes are becoming more apparent. In a study by Mostofsky and colleagues they found that in boys with ADHD the frontal lobes were on average 8.3% smaller in total cerebral volumes (Mostofsky &colleagues,2002) . These finding suggest that the decreased volume in white and grey matter in the frontal lobe can be a cause for the clinical deficits associated with the disorder.

On the contrary, The National Institute if Mental Health, NIMH states that brain scans of individuals with ADHD suggest that the brains actually develop normally. However, they just develop slowly; on average the brains of individuals with ADHD mature 3 years later than those of typical individuals (NIMH, 2012). Now these delays can explain many aspects of the life long process of ADHD. It can explain why many adults with ADHD can regulate their behaviors and impulses. Nevertheless, I wonder can these delays in brain maturity be attributed to the different brain formation? Do they explain the lack of white and grey matter in boys with ADHD? That I do not know. Furthermore, if ADHD in fact is attributes to maturity delays, why bother medicate these children? After all, these medications can change the way their brains evolve and grow.

Going back to my daughter’s debate of training her brain, it makes sense. If you can train a person with speech deficit to speak properly, why not train them to overcome ADHD. With that being said, ADHD is obviously far more involved that just training. I recently read this study about the brain imaging of individuals with ADHD. The results if the study were definitely intriguing. Giedd and colleagues in this study found that the differences found in the brains of children with ADHD are suggestive of different functioning mechanisms that could possible lead to diagnostic ability by the use of MRI scans and PET scans. This study shows that in the brain of an individual with ADHD there is more involvement in the frontal lobe, basal gangalia, corpus callosum, and the cerebellum. (Giedd & colleagues, 2001). Their findings confirm the fact that there are brain deficits and abnormalities in the ADHD brain. Such finding can be really helpful when diagnosing and treating ADHD in the future.

 

 

 

GIEDD, J. N., BLUMENTHAL, J., MOLLOY, E. and CASTELLANOS, F. X. (2001), Brain Imaging of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 931: 33–49. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2001.tb05772.x

 

Wolosin, Sasha M., Marin E. Richardson, Joseph G. Hennessey, Martha B. Denckla, and Stewart H. Mostofsky. “Abnormal Cerebral Cortex Structure in Children with ADHD.” Human Brain Mapping 30.1 (2009): 175-84. Web.

 

“Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.” NIMH RSS. N.p., 2012. Web. 15 Oct. 2014.

 

Dairies of an absent minded mom

 

Where should I start? Well, I am absent minded! That is the best description for how I felt all the time. I could read a page ten times, however, still could not remember details. I knew what the subject was about. Before this class I used to re write everything in the book to insure that I mastered it.  Obviously, my style needed fine toning.  In this class while reading about memory consolidation the study that was done by Georg Muller and Alfons Pilzecker caught my attention and then I was fully alert. I planned to try the techniques implemented in the study and testing for my self if they actually worked. I needed to know if the interruption of memory consolidation causes the memory to be less coherent.

My experiment took a whole week.  The first two days I read a chapter a day and went straight to bed. For days two and three I read a different chapter in the early evening and had family time. Days five and six I read a chapter early in the morning the continued with my daily routine.

Before I started this experiment I printed out multiple-choice questions about every chapter and administered the test on day seven. Each chapter had 25 questions that were straightforward.  I shoveled the test to insure that they were not in the same order I read the chapters. Each test took about ten minutes.  I only checked the accuracy of my answers after I finished all the tests.

To my surprise I performed much better with the chapters I read earlier in the week. I got one question wrong in the second chapter. I got ten wrong answers total in the middle chapters. I scored 50% in the later chapters. Just as stated Robert Stickgold in his research “that is converging evidence that offline memory reprocessing during sleep is an important component of how our memories are formed and ultimately shaped.” Similar studies were done to examine the effects of sleep on memory consolidation in animals such as the experiment done by Matthew P. Walker and Robert Stickgold,

The findings of these studies and others all contribute a great deal to my overall strategy of studying. In my conclusion I will be giving information enough time to settle in and become solid memory, which I believe will make retrieving the information easier. I will adopt this technique for all my studies through this semester and others to come. I am confident that I would be able to master the material covered better and become a better student.

 

 

Stickgold, Robert. “Sleep-dependent Memory Consolidation.” Nature437.7063 (2005): 1272-278. Web.

Walker, Matthew P., and Robert Stickgold. “Sleep-Dependent Learning and Memory Consolidation.” Neuron 44.1 (2004): 121-33. Web.