A few weeks ago, we learned about how categories in the brain develop and how they differ from person to person depending on their expertise on the object. I’d like to mostly focus on the idea of a dog in this post. When a three year old looks at a dog, they think, “Hey look! It’s a dog!” When a cat person looks at a dog, they think, “Oh look, its a dog!” But when I look at a dog, I think, “Oh my gosh! Look at that gorgeous Cavalier King Charles Spaniel!” This lesson was very intriguing to me. I always just assumed I knew more about dogs than others because I groom and puppy sit. Of course, that is still true, but now i know that people who are uneducated on dog breeds filter out their knowledge differently.

For example, my semantic network looks like this:

Mammal – dog – husky – Siberian husky, Alaskan Malamute, Yakutian Laika – Alaskan Malamute/Wolf Mix, German Shepherd/Siberian Husky Mix

Others semantic networks may look like this:

Mammal – dog – golden retriever  or  Mammal – dog – Husky

Although to me that looks like generalizing, other people see it as specific as they can. The amount of nodes they hold in their network are much smaller compared to mine based on the amount of expertise they have on dogs, itself. If it came to cats, I would only know a cat as a cat and maybe be able to go further and say cat – tiger, lion, jaguar, house cat. Others would be able to identify different breeds of cats and differences between those different breeds as I can with dogs.

 Alaskan Malamute/Wolf Mix

 Siberian Husky/German Shepherd Mix

While doing lesson seven for cognitive psychology, we were asked to watch a short video on Clive Wearing, a man with the worst amnesia case ever known. As I started to think back to when I first learned about HM, I realized I have never actually watched a video on him, only read stories and listened to what my professors had to say. So, of course with my attention span of a gnat, I went digging.

I decided to Youtube “HM Memory.” Unfortunately, no real videos of him popped up. I started watching the first thing that was in my search results: “Bringing new life to ‘Patient H.M.,’ the man who couldn’t make memories.” It was an interesting interview with a man named Luke Dittrich, the grandson of the surgeon that preformed HM’s surgery. He discussed how his grandfather had helped make the lobotomy popular and a “quick fix” concept for all psychological problems in a time where lines between medical practice and medical research was blurry and when lines that shouldn’t be crossed were more often crossed than not (Brown, 2016). He spoke of how his grandfather, Dr. William Scofield, became such a world renowned surgeon and why psychosurgery was so important to him at the time. It turns out that Dr. Scofield’s wife was institutionalized in the same hospital that he practiced in and was searching for a cure for his ill wife.

After learning some fun facts and cool details on HM’s life, the next video came on of a professor by the name of “Professor B.” from the University of California, San Diego (Flactemb, 2013). It seemed to be an introductory course for Psychology where he discusses the basic facts of HM. But as I am about to turn it off and go back to the lesson (something I should have done 30 minutes before this video even started), he mentions a book. I am not a person who will read a book for fun at all, but something about what he said really caught my ears. This book is called Memory’s Ghost.

Of course, I go to amazon and it’s only $2. I have to buy it. It arrived to my house 4 days later and I start reading. Holy moly, this book is fascinating. I don’t understand half of the words in it, but I’m drawn in by this person’s interest in the case, just as I was when I first heard about it back in 2012.

This book has truly sparked an interest for memory in me. Although it is a non-fiction auto-biography/biography, I am completely indulged in learning everything and anything about HM and who he was as a person with no new long-term memory. For the first time ever, I am grateful for my short attention span for allowing me to discover this cool find. If memory is something that also sparks your interest, I highly suggest spending the $2 to learn something from an insighter’s point-of-view.

Flactemb. 05 Mar. 2013. “Patient HM and Jacopo Annese.” YouTube. YouTube, 05 Mar. 2013.     Web. 15 Oct. 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqVUVREIXKg

“Bringing New Life to ‘Patient H.M.,’ the Man Who Couldn’t Make Memories.” Interview by Jeffrey                Brown. PBS News Hour. PBS. Washington, DC, 9 Aug. 2016. Television.

Hilts, Philip J. (1995). Memory’s Ghost: The Nature of Memory and the Strange Tale of Mr. M. New     York, New York. Touchstone.

I have been lucky enough to work at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center for the past year and a half and gained a lot of knowledge working in the department of Radiation Oncology. Brain cancer can be one of the hardest cancers to treat depending on the type of cancer and the size of the lesion or tumor. In all cases, patients require a plethora of scans in order to be treated and to see how the treatment is working. One of these scans most used are MRIs.

So you hear the news, it’s cancer. A lot of thoughts and feelings rush through your brain. One of the first thoughts is, ‘Where do I go from here?’ In most cases, you are referred to an oncologist who will most likely order you a PET scan. Although in psychology, most PET scans are used to determine parts of the brain that are being used during activities such as speaking or viewing, PET scans are detrimental to the treatment of cancer because it highlights the areas of the entire body that are being effected by cancer, as oxygen is pulled towards these areas in order for them to grow and survive. Next, they would order either an MRI or CT scan depending on its location to figure out what the best course of treatment would be. You find out that you have an aggressive form of meningioma. He starts you on a strict diet and an aggressive course of chemotherapy. One month after your first 4 weeks of chemo, you get another MRI done. It hasn’t grown, but it isn’t shrinking the way your doctor would prefer it to. He refers you to a radiation oncologist.

During the time in the waiting room, you’re filling out an intake sheet with questions like, ‘could you be pregnant?’ and ‘do you plan on having children in the future?’ Weird. The nurse comes out to room you. The doctor comes in and introduces himself. You talk about what procedures you’ve had done, how you are feeling with the chemo medications, so on and so forth. Then he gets into the explanation of how radiation works. He states, “Well, one option is whole brain radiotherapy. In this case, we would use your previous MRIs and locate the general region that we would want to target in your brain. We would start by getting what is called a CT Simulation. We would put a lovely mesh mask on your face, melt it to the contour of your head, and take approximately 3 different scans of your head to pin point to the best of our ability where the radiation will go. Now the down fall with this, is that the radiation would have to go through other areas of your brain in order to reach its ideal destination causing some brain damage. The amount is unknown, but most likely permanent.” You look at him and say, “So for me to get better, I would lose brain function?!” He smiles and says, “Not necessarily. There is a procedure called Gamma Knife. It is much more invasive but it’s usually a once and done kind of thing. What we would do is take a detailed MRI of your brain, so detailed that we can see everything by the millimeter. Then, we take you back into the procedure room and get you prepped. We would sedate you just enough that you’re a little loopy but you’re awake. We then numb parts of your head above your two temples, and two parts behind your head. Stick with me, this isn’t a scifi movie, I promise. Then we make four 2mm incisions in the spots we numbed and drill four small holes into your scull. Then, we place a head frame on you, like you have probably seen in movies. What this does is helps us keep you totally still and keeps the radiation where it needs to be. After that, we start the gamma knife process where we use the MRI taken earlier, and outline your tumor. And then we blast it with a very high dose of radiation. The results are almost instantaneous. We then send you down for one more MRI to see if we got the whole tumor.” …Wow. That was a lot of information. He then adds, “oh, and there is no other brain damage to you other than to the tumor.” Sold. He adds that I also must have a consultation with a neurosurgeon who must be present during the procedure.

Today is the day! You walk into the hospital and get checked in at 6:30am. A nurse comes to get you and your nerves are going crazy. In walks both doctors that reassure you everything will be okay. First step is going to radiology to get the first MRI done. During the MRI, they place a plastic coil around your head to make sure you stay as still as possible. This can make you a bit claustrophobic so you take a few deep breaths and relax. The machine can be quite loud because of the magnets, so they give you some headphones to listen to music. As the MRI gets started, they take a practice scan to make sure they get the exact picture they want. Then the real MRI gets going. As you’re listening to Queen, you begin to think about how MRIs work in the first place. Then you remember taking a class in college where you learned that the magnets align the hydrogen atoms in your brain and then they disperse back to where they were originally positioned and that’s how they get the images perfect. As you start jamming, the tech comes in and lets you know you’re finished! Step one: completed. When you get back to the gamma room, your doctor brings over his laptop and shows you what the MRI looks like. He changes the contrast of the picture to see the tumor better and shows you that after this is over, this will be much less in size. Your nurse gives you the sedative that they had talked about and you start to feel sleepy and loopy. You don’t even feel them drilling the holes in your skull. About an hour later, you come to. The doctors tell you that you did wonderful and now you go down to get your last MRI. They do the same as before.

The doctor takes you back up to the exam room where he pulls up both MRIs. He adjusts the contrast again so you can see the original size of the tumor. You frown a bit. Then you look at the next image. It looks like an MRI of a different persons brain, but it’s actually yours. The meningioma shrunk in half! He shows you all the different angles of the MRI in positions like T1 and T2. Although still a little foggy from the sedative, you can see the clear difference in size. He tells you he wants to see you again in one month with another MRI to make sure it keeps shrinking with the chemo.

MRIs are one of the most useful tools we have to see images of the brain. Without them, we wouldn’t have a clear image of a brain in a live person. Without them, patients like this wouldn’t have the chance to live. Although this isn’t a psychological view on MRIs, it shows how MRIs are useful in viewing all areas of the body, in particular, the brain.

Side note:

Before and after Gamma Knife