Panic Disorder

You have to deliver a presentation in front of your whole class, you walk to the front of the room, the room is silent and all eyes are on you. Your heart starts pounding, your hands become sweaty and you’re having trouble breathing. What you’re experiencing at this moment is a panic attack, something that quite a bit of people go through as they go about their life. It’s not something uncommon, but people who experience these frequently might have something called panic disorder, which is mainly characterized by panic attacks and anxiety. So we know what panic attacks are, but what does anxiety mean. We know how it feels to be anxious, but how do we put these feelings into words? Anxiety is an unpleasant state of inner turmoil, often accompanied by nervous behavior, such as pacing back and forth, somatic complaints and rumination. It is the subjectively unpleasant feelings of dread over something unlikely to happen. Now experiencing anxiety once in a while isn’t a bad thing, like over that test you aren’t too sure you’re ready for, or that job interview for your dream job, so don’t go running to a medical doctor just yet.. We’ve all experience anxiety at least once in our life, and it’s ok that we do, but if we’re experiencing this over every little thing, and you get a panic attack because of those anxious feelings inside of you, and you get these so often that it disrupts the way you live your life, that’s when you know you have a problem that you need to consult a doctor for. Don’t worry there is help that you can receive from many people for this disorder, and maybe you can go back to living your life the way you used to.

If you feel that you have this disorder seek help immediately.

Epilepsy

So today we have another intriguing topic to talk about, and that is epilepsy. Epilepsy is caused by a mutation is a gene controlling the GABA receptor, which is the chief inhibitory neurotransmitter of the vertebrae central nervous system, and the mutation is caused by trauma or infection to the brain, like a brain tumor or exposure to toxic substances. Epilepsy is characterized by seizures, which can vary from brief and nearly undetectable to long periods of vigorous shaking. Although the cause of epilepsy isn’t really know, only about one to two percent of people have epilepsy, and their symptoms vary depending on the location and type of brain abnormality. To help with their epilepsy, people take antiepileptic drugs, which block sodium flow across the membrane, or enhance the effects of GABA. Thanks to these drugs more than ninety percent of people with epilepsy respond well enough to live a normal life. Unfortunately some people continue to have epileptic seizures despite taking these medications, so to aid these people doctors consider surgically removing the focus, which is the point in the brain where the seizures begin (the location varies from person to person). Sometimes though doing this procedure just can’t be done because some people might have several foci. So the idea of cutting the corpus callosum was introduced, to prevent the seizures from crossing hemispheres. This helped because the seizure can’t cross from one hemisphere to the other, it would only effect half the body and as a surprise, doctors found out the seizures became less frequent. Apparently that happens because epileptic activity bounces back and forth between both hemispheres and prolongs the seizures, but with the corpus callosum severed, it can’t bounce and a seizure might not develop at all. So that’s all for today, I hope that you found this insightful (I know it was a little boring).

P.S It is said that Julius Caesar had epilepsy, but some contended that it was migraine headaches that he had.

(This video is about Jenny Labaw, who has epilepsy, and how she lives her life)

 

Trust Me, I'm a Doctor!

So for today, we are going to talk about lobotomies, I’m sure pretty much everyone has heard about lobotomies, and even some of you might be able to tell someone what a lobotomy is. For those of you who don’t, a lobotomy is a surgical disconnection of the prefrontal cortex to the brain, when the doctors performed this surgery, they’d damage the prefrontal cortex or cut of its connections from the rest of the brain. First a little history on lobotomies, they were first officially introduced into the world by Antonio Egas Moniz in 1935, at that time they were called leucotomy. The process of performing lobotomies was created with good intentions, doctors noticed that when laboratory primates had damage done to their prefrontal cortex, they became tamer without having impaired coordination or sensations. So doctors thought, if it worked on a monkey, it should work on a human. So they started off by preforming these lobotomies on people with severe psychological disorders, people who at the time didn’t have much in the way of treatment for what was wrong with them.  Then as the process of doing a lobotomy grew more notice and doctors/physicians started doing it more often, lobotomies started being used for other, less severe disorders, like depression and by the late 1940’s and early 1950’s about 40,000 surgeries were performed. One doctor who gained much recognition in performing these procedures was Walter Freeman, who created the transorbital lobotomy. For a lobotomy to work, holes would have to be drilled into a patients scalp in an operating room by trained neurosurgeons, but Freeman felt that these types of surgeries couldn’t be performed on the people who needed them most, people in state mental hospitals, where there were no operating rooms, surgeons or anesthesia. So he came up with a new method were, instead of drilling holes in the scalp, they would approach the frontal lobe through the eyes. So the new “transorbital” lobotomy was born, where the surgeons would take a thing surgical instrument and place it under the eyelid and against the top of the eye socket, and then with a mallet they would drive the instrument into the brain to severe the connections (its all much more technical than this).  Common consequences of this surgery were, apathy, a loss of the ability to plan and take initiative, memory disorders, distractibility, and a loss of emotional expressions. They also lost their social inhibitions and ignored the rules of polite civilized conduct. So tell me what you think, do you think the idea of lobotomies was a good thing? Why not?

 P.S I saw a video once about this hospital where lobotomies where performed, and one lady talked about her experience getting one, and how after the surgery happened she forgot, I believe half her life.

 

(A little video on Walter Freeman, a well known "Lobotomist")

We Are All on Drugs

So now we’re gonna talk about one of my favorite subjects, drugs. I enjoy learning about all the types of drugs that are out there, and their effects on a person, I enjoy learning how they came about, how they were introduced into society, etc., this is one subject I could read about for hours. Now most people don’t know this but most drugs out there were introduced into society with good intentions, a lot of them were used for medicinal purposes, until people enjoyed the effects these drugs gave them a little too much and they started to abuse them. People started abusing the drugs because our brain already created the chemicals that get increased when these drugs are taken, and as those chemicals are increased, or decreased in some cases, people enjoyed the effects they caused. Heroin was synthesized from morphine which was created to ease the pain of injured people. The first coca-colas that were created had cocaine in them and they were advertised as a sort of medicine. But those aren’t the drugs that we’re gonna talk about today, today we’re gonna talk about one drug that is well known to everyone, the one drug most people can say they’ve experimented with, the drug that some consider as the gateway drug to other harder drugs, that’s right Marijuana. The technical name for marijuana is Cannabis, but it is known by many other names. Marijuana’s history wasn’t so bad when it was first introduced, it wasn’t considered bad, nobody cared if you smoked it, grew it, whatever, it was widely known when someone did marijuana.  Then it got a bad reputation, people started saying it was a bad drug and it should be considered illegal, they said that marijuana turned Mexicans into super humans, and that was why it should be considered illegal. The war on drugs started and although chemically it wasn’t considered as bad as the other harder drugs, it was placed on the lists of illegal drugs and anyone who had it was arrested and placed in jail. Only just recently has it been made legal in certain states, but on a Federal level it is still considered illegal. Now this post isn’t an endorsement for marijuana, I don’t care either way whether it’s made legal or not, I just think that it’s stupid (excuse my language) that our jails are overcrowded because some people didn’t like that people of a Mexican descent where smoking this drug. That’s all for today, before I go into full rant mode and exceed my word count.

P.S A little fun fact for you: The father of our country, George Washington, grew marijuana in his back yard.

(This video shows more information on marijuana, it's history and the war on drugs. Its a little fast)

Blood-Brain Barrier (Why can't I come up with wittier titles?)

So Today’s post is going to be a science lesson, (so if science isn’t your thing I’d hit the back button know and instead go to YouTube to watch music videos and end up watching a bear riding a tiny tricycle). So today were going to talk about something called the blood-brain barrier, what is a blood-brain barrier you ask? (Excellent question lonely person reading this blog). The blood-brain barrier is a mechanism in the brain that keeps chemicals from crossing from the blood into the brain. So why do we need this blood-brain barrier, what does it do for us? To make a long story short, when a virus enters our body, the cell it infects send out a sort of bat signal to the immune system letting it know it’s been invaded and sacrificing its self for the good of the body. That might work for a regular old cell in the body because they can be easily replaced, but that doesn’t work in the brain because neurons can’t be replaced. (Oh no who will save us from these evil viruses? Don’t worry brain, I the blood-brain barrier am here to save you! My hero). So to protect the brain from harmful chemicals, viruses, bacteria, a wall was built along the brain’s blood vessels (and thus the blood-brain barrier was born).  Wait a minute, how does the barrier work? The barrier counts on the endothelial cells that form in the capillaries because they’re joined so tightly that nothing gets through them. This blood-brain barrier sounds like such a great idea, so why don’t we have this everywhere else? Why, because although it does a great job of keeping out harmful chemicals it also keeps out good, useful chemicals. Because of this the blood-brain barrier needs to use special mechanisms to get these useful chemicals to the brain. So although the blood-brain barrier is necessary to keep the brain in good working order, it does prove to be a disadvantage in getting helpful chemicals into the brain. So that’s all for today, join us next time where we’ll have something else exciting to talk about.

Here's a video that will probably explain it a little better, with pictures and stuff, and talk more about the disadvantages it causes.

Brain Damage

So here we are, our first real post. Are you excited, because I am. So today we’re going to talk about brain damage. “What the heck?” You ask incredulously, why would anyone interested in psychology care about brain damage. (Hopefully you’re interested in psychology and not stalking random blogs). Brain damage is very important to the field of psychology because it helped us realize that different areas of the brain had different functions. So what is brain damage, what does it mean when someone has brain damage? Most people can’t correctly describe what having brain damage does to a person, but they’ll use it to describe all kinds of people, like this Bill Cosby video.

 

 Brain damage produces an inability to recognize faces, to perceive motion, a shift of attention to the right side of the body and world, increase or decrease hunger, memory impairment, changes in emotional responses and other effects. Although we can study the effects in humans, and get great results, those studies are limited. One limit is that few people have damage that is confined to just one area of the brain. Another is that no one has the exact same kind of damage. So to better understand brain damage, scientists have turned to producing damage to the brains of lab animals. To do this, scientists employ several research techniques to study the effects that they cause to the brain. One us an ablation, which is a removal of an area of the brain with a surgical knife. However there are problems involving the tiny structures below the surface of the brain. So scientists employ another technique called a lesion, where they create the damage. To create that damage, they use a stereotaxic instrument. To create the lesion, the scientists anesthetize the animal, drill a hole in their skull, insert and electrode and pass an electric current that is sufficient enough to cause damage to the area. A couple more techniques that are used are the gene-knockout approach and transcranial magnetic stimulation. Although studying brain damage yields interesting results, scientists encounter a problem, and that is that they must specify the exact behavioral deficit. For them to even try to narrow down the possibilities, they would need to perform several other behavioral tests. But that’s a topic for another day. So that’s all the time we have today, I hope this was in some way interesting to you and you learned something new. Hopefully you weren’t bored halfway through this post and left, but if you did read through the whole post, thank you for taking the time to do so.

Hello, Hello, Hello

Do you smell that? That is the scent of a newly created blog (don't breath too deeply you don't want to inhale to many fumes). This was created for my Physiological Psychology class, so the things that you will read on here will about psychology. It will educational (hopefully), but it won't be boring (No Promises). If this doesn't interest you, you know where the door is and you can find your way out. (I don't even know where the door is, so if you don't it's OK, you can just click on the red x at the top of your screen and we can all forget this ever happened). So are we down to that one person in the back who's asleep and doesn't even know what's going on? Good I've reached my goal. Seriously though if you are reading this blog, I hope you'll find it interesting, educational, and witty (yeah right). I hope that with this blog you'll learn things you didn't, and add on to the things you did. Don't worry though it won't just be me blabbing on about the topic in question, there will be links to different, more educational sites, from actual professionals instead of one strange girl and there will be videos (fun ones that you'd show to other people). If I haven't scared you away, thank you for staying awake and reading my whole rambling greeting. Hopefully you'll enjoy reading my post and if you don't, sorry you had to suffer through them.

Sincerely, Your Friendly Neighborhood Non-Superhero

(God how cool would it be to be a superhero?)