Many people believe that coffee is one that that can be used to sober you up. This is proven to be wrong. This is a common misconception held by many people. Drinking coffee when your drunk can also result in a negative outcome causing people to be more alert but still be drunk. This is why many people believe the caffeine sobers you up; it gives you more energy so it cancels out the drowsy effects of the alcohol. This does not mean you’re more sober by any means.

There is no way to bring down your blood alcohol content by drinking the coffee, therefore there is no way it can sober you up from being drunk. The only way one’s blood alcohol content can be lowered is just simply giving it time to get out of your system. According to Psychology Today, “Alcohol metabolism follows what pharmacologists call “zero–order kinetics,” meaning that nothing can speed up or slow down its burn rate in the body’s furnace.” This means the higher the blood alcohol content, the longer it takes for it to get out of your system completely. The reason being that it takes time for your body to metabolize the alcohol in your system. Even when you feel “sober” this doesn’t necessarily mean that your body’s blood alcohol content has gone back to zero. Claudia Hammond writes about the process of how the body metabolizes the alcohol; ” The body processes it in several ways. Mostly it’s broken down in the liver by two enzymes, alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenase. After several steps the alcohol is eventually excreted as water and carbon dioxide.”

There have been experiments done to prove this myth wrong. I read about two experiments that did a good job in breaking the theory that “coffee sobers you up.” One of these experiments was done by Mythbusters. In this experiment, the team had done some hand-eye coordination test as the control for their experiment. After this, the team proceeded to drink alcohol and then try the test again. Finally, they drank some coffee and did the last trial of hand-eye coordination tests. The results of this experiment showed that drinking coffee did not improve the ability to do these hand-eye coordination tests. In another experiment written about in WebMD showed similar results. Thomas Gould and Danielle Gulick did an experiment on rats to try to determine if caffeine can sober someone up or not. They took different groups of mice and injected them with alcohol and caffeine. The control group of this experiment was injected with saline. After injecting the mice, they had them try to solve/learn the maze. Hendrick, from WebMD writes, “the scientists tested three aspects of behavior — the ability to learn which part of a maze to negotiate in order to avoid exposure to a bright light or sound; anxiety, which was reflected by time spent exploring the maze’s open areas, and general locomotion.” The results of this study found that the mice injected with alcohol learned less than the mice that were injected with only the saline. Gould and Gulick found that the caffeine did not combat the negative effects of the alcohol injections.

In conclusion, coffee does not help you sober up. The only way for this to happen is for you to wait and let your blood alcohol content to metabolize them back to zero.

As most people would guess; people who tend to go out and drink alcohol on the weekends tend to have lower GPAs then those who did not. Yes, there are external factors to this like there are with all studies but there is a very strong correlation between alcohol consumption and GPAs of students. Is there data to support this? Yes; a survey showed that time spent drinking was one of the leading causes of lower student GPAs. This survey was done by Todd Wyatt and surveyed a total of 13,900 students from 167 different schools. The conclusion of this survey was; “Wyatt found that, after time spent studying, the amount of time a student spent drinking was the strongest predictor of that student’s GPA – even more so than time spent in the classroom. “The more time spent partying with alcohol, there’s a significant decrease in GPA,” said Wyatt.” Another part of this study showed that not only did the alcohol effect normal college kids but it affected college kids at “Elite Schools” with above-average GPAs. The results of this were that even though these students had high GPAs, their GPAs could’ve been higher if they did not participate in drinking.

I’ve always figured that alcohol drinking on people’s spare time obviously had negative effects but I’ve always wanted to know the specifics behind it. The study done at the University of Portland listed a few reasons that this could happen;

“Alcohol use can contribute to:

• Skipping class
• Missing deadlines
• Bombing a test or project because of the aftereffects of drinking
• Impairing the ability to think abstractly for up to 30 days, limiting the ability to relate textbook reading to in-class discussion

Taken together, all of these factors can result in lower grades as a result of increased alcohol use. A nationwide CORE Alcohol and Drug survey found the following trend:  Impairing the brain’s ability to form new memories, thus making it difficult to study.” Drinking alcohol can lead to many different factors that would bring down GPA.

There are statistics that show that the amount of alcohol consumed can also have a direct effect on certain GPAs. Dr. Bruce Friesen gave a survey out to his students and asked them to answer questions inorder to find out their regular drinking habits. The study led to statistical conclusions about the relationship between the amount of alcohol consumed and the average GPA of these students. The data showed, ” that the amount of alcohol consumed negatively affects a student’s grade point average. This is supported by the fact that the majority of students surveyed who drink at least four alcoholic beverages at a time (62.3%) had less than a 3.0, while those who drank three or less earned a 3.1 or higher (52.3%). In both cases, the relative amount of alcohol consumed reflected on the grades of the students, wherein the students who drank less alcohol simply earned better grades and vice versa.”

Based on the results of each of these studies; I concluded it would be beneficial for consumers of alcohol to stop/cut down if they are worried about their academic progress. Whether or not you chose to drink in college you should be aware that there are detrimental effects to your academic success. There are many other factors that could lead a student to have a lower GPA separate from or in addition to consuming alcohol but these studies definitely show a correlation.

Schizophrenia was always something I knew about but had no real background information on. In my high school psychology class it was briefly talked about when we went through the unit on mental health disorders but my teacher never really went into depth about it. I have always had a real interest in learning what it really was so I decided doing a blog on it would be a great way for me to get insight into the the topic of schizophrenia.

What is Schizophrenia?  Schizophrenia is a life-long but treatable severe brain disorder that effects a person’s normal brain function. According to WebMd, “Schizophrenia is a psychosis, a type of mental illness in which a person cannot tell what is real from what is imagined.” This can cause a person to have hallucinations, delusions, paranoid thoughts, and trouble in social environments. Many of these symptoms cause a schizophrenic person so seem out of touch or frightened with reality. Due to the effects of schizophrenia, many of these people many have trouble in their daily lives and may not be able to keep jobs and may also be dependent on others for a long time. There are many different types of Schizophrenia. They include; paranoid schizophrenia, disorganized schizophrenia, catatonic schizophrenia, residual schizophrenia, and schizoaffective disorder. To find out more on these types of schizophrenia; click here. Schizophrenia does not affect many Americans. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, only 1% of Americans are diagnosed with it.

What causes this 1% of Americans to be diagnosed with schizophrenia? Well, researchers have found that there are some things correlated with people getting schizophrenia but they haven’t found solid, concrete cause for it.  Scientists found that genetics, the environment, and brain chemistry were linked to schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is disease that is passed down from family member to family member. The NIMH found that, “The illness occurs in 1 percent of the general population, but it occurs in 10 percent of people who have a first-degree relative with the disorder, such as a parent, brother, or sister. People who have second-degree relatives (aunts, uncles, grandparents, or cousins) with the disease also develop schizophrenia more often than the general population. The risk is highest for an identical twin of a person with schizophrenia. He or she has a 40 to 65 percent chance of developing the disorder.” Environmental factors include viral infections or stress. The final thing that scientists have found is that schizophrenia is caused by an imbalance of neurotransmitters. According to Mental Illness America, “The imbalance of these chemicals affects the way a person’s brain reacts to stimuli–which explains why a person with schizophrenia may be overwhelmed by sensory information (loud music or bright lights) which other people can easily handle. This problem in processing different sounds, sights, smells and tastes can also lead to hallucinations or delusions.”

Due to the amount of unknown information about the causes, it is still hard to treat the illness. Antipsychotic medications are one of the main ways to treat it but there are also side effects to them. Mental Health America found that these side effects, “range from mild side effects such as dry mouth, blurred vision, constipation, drowsiness and dizziness which usually disappear after a few weeks to more serious side effects such as trouble with muscle control, pacing, tremors and facial ticks. The newer generation of drugs have fewer side effects.” There are also other psychosocial treatments available. To read more about these, click here.

Schizophrenia is a very interesting but serious disorder. Still to this day it is not a curable disorder but it can be treated so that people who live with it can still function and go on with their daily lives.

Have you ever met someone with two different colored eyes or even seen a dog or cat with two different colored eyes? Dogs and cats having two different colored eyes is much more common than a human having two different colored eyes but yes, it does happen. Over the past couple years I worked at a daycare center at my local gym and I had the pleasure of meeting a wonderful little girl that happened to have two different colored eyes! One of her eyes was blue while the other was green; this is called Heterochromia. This refers to “mutations” in someones iris causing eyes to be different colors or have different colors within them. Heterochromia is not very common in humans and is classified in the category of rare disease by the Nation Institutes of Health. This means that less than 200,000 people in the US have the disease.

According to the Scientific American, “Eye color is a manifestation of the pigment that is present in the iris. Brown eyes are rich in melanin deposits, and blue eyes indicate a lack of melanin. The melanocytes of the iris rest in a richly innervated psuedosyncytium, which is necessary to maintain eye color. Two genes control eye color: EYCL3, found on chromosome 15, which codes for brown/blue eye color (BEY), and EYCL1, found on chromosome 19, which codes for green/blue eye color (GEY). Although previously believed to be inherited in simple Mendelian fashion, eye color has proved to be a polygenic trait.”

Now that I’ve given you a little background on eye color, I’ll go into why heterochromia occurs. Well, there are actually many causes. In the case of the little girl I met at work, she was born like this, she did not have anything cause this throughout her life it was simply genetic. There are cases where heterochromia is associated with a syndrome that someone received at birth or even acquired later in life. According to the NIH, the syndromes that are correlated with heterocromia at birth are “Waardenburg syndrome, Sturge-Weber syndrome, Parry-Romberg syndrome, or Horner’s syndrome.” For more information on these syndromes, click here. There are also causes for heterochromia occurring later in life. These can include trauma to the iris, benign tumors, iris cysts and glaucoma. There are many other causes; click here for the full list.

Heterochromia also comes in different forms. There are three different types; complete, sectoral, and central. Complete heterochromia means that someone has two completely different eye colors. Personally, I think that this would be the coolest one to have, especially since my eyes are the most boring color. Following complete there is sectoral; this means that there is a little bit of color in the iris that is different than the overall/main color of the iris. Central heterochromia is the last type I read about and this means that there is one color in the iris around the pupil and a different one as you go further out from the pupil.

Being born with heterochromia and it purely being genetic is honestly one of the coolest things I have seen. I think it is really interesting when people have two distinctly different colored eyes. When I first saw this little girl from my work I wished that my eyes were two different colors.

If you found this phenomenon as interesting as I did, here is a list of celebrities that have heterochromia.

( Picture Source)

I have come to learn from my own personal experience; most every high school has “cliques.” As defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, cliques are “a narrow exclusive circle or group of persons; especially :  one held together by common interests, views, or purposes.” In my high school growing up there were many different cliques. This was common with many other high schools around me also. The question I had when I finally realized this was, why? Why are cliques so common and what makes them come about? Is it because kids are just mean and exclusive or is there a scientific reason for cliques being formed?

Studies have shown that there are actually psychological reasons for people to form or join cliques. Mark Prigg states, “For years, sociologists have identified seemingly universal human instincts that spur this kind of sorting. These include the desires for familiarity and certainty, for control and dominance, and for security and support.” Although there are cases where people do from cliques to be exclusive and just plain mean, researchers have found that this is not the real reason behind them.  People are just naturally inclined to become friends with people that are similar to them and share their interests. This is also supported in the article “Why Do Cliques Form?” when P.C. Broderick and P. Blewitt state, “Two major forces are at work: first, the need to establish an identity, and second, the need for acceptance (approval) and belonging.” Wouldn’t you want to make friends with people with similar interests so that you feel the most comfortable? Speaking for myself, I would. People form these cliques in order to feel like one in their group of friends.  This claim is supported in the article from the Atlantic, “our preference for familiar people and ideas is deep-rooted, as are our anxieties about people who are different and our ambition for status within our community.” Henri Tajfel, a British psychologist, has a theory on this called the “Social Identity Theory.” This theory is based on the idea that people categorize themselves into two separate groups groups, one being the “in-group” and one being the “out-group.” These groups today, would be classified as cliques.

Similar to many other things in Science there are also other factors that play into why cliques are formed. The environment and “hierarchy” or social structure of a school also have many effects on cliques being formed. Stanford researchers found that if students have a big school environment and a lot of different social/class options they are more inclined to be exclusive and pick out there friends whereas in a smaller environment they do not have as many options and are forced to mix with the other students.

Going through high school and having a first hand experience with cliques; I agree with the claims above. I definitely made friends the people that had similar interests as me. Yes, I did have friends that were not in my “normal” friend group but I did not necessarily go out of my way to hang out with them on the weekends as often as I would the people in my close friend group. I also agree that when people have a bigger class size and more opportunities to pick their classes they migrate to people they know or are similar to because they do have the option given to them. As opposed to a smaller school, the students would not have as many options and would settle for what they have and make friends in those limited groups.

In conclusion, being in clique is very common and most everyone is a part of their own clique; even if they do not realize it. It is our human nature for these social groupings to happen.

Hey Guys!

My name is Shayla Ahamed and I am from Northern Virginia. I live about 30 minutes outside of Washington, DC. I am currently in the Division of Undergraduate Studies but I plan on going into the College of Business. I went to Herndon High School and there are only about 4 people I know here from my high school so making this new transition was pretty intimidating to say the least. One of my favorite things to do is attend concerts because music is a huge part of my life. I attended many this summer and I also attended two festivals. One of them being Mad Decent Block Party in Philadelphia. If you do not know what that is here is a video that kind of gives you a look into it. Also, here is one of the many pictures I took while I was there.

I took this class for one of my general education credits. I am not the best at science related subjects but I heard that this course would be beneficial for someone like me. I am not a science major mainly because I was never really the best science student and I was not really interested in any science related jobs. Even though I’m not the best at science I am really looking forward to this class to get a new perspective on the world!