Brain Anatomy, Development, and Plasticity

Prefrontal lobotomy is a hot topic with many psychologists and psychiatrists everywhere. I find this topic to be so very interesting. A prefrontal lobotomy is pretty much disconnecting the prefrontal cortex from the rest of the brain during surgery. Basically, what the surgeon does is cut the connections of the prefrontal cortex towards the rest of the brain. Many physicians reasoned that this might help people who suffered from severe, sometimes untreatable psychiatric disorders. However, this is very dangerous and could have very serious consequences. Many surgeries (or experiments if you’d like to call them) have been done very crudely with instruments that are not seen in hospitals, like metal drills or ice picks. Many doctors perform these tests even while knowing how many horrible consequences they might cause. They do this only for their sole gain or to simply quiet unruly patients. This is seen in the movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” where several patients in the mental ward receive lobotomies to discipline or calm them. They end up leaving he lobotomy affectless, showing no emotion. The narrator of this movie even described how their eyes are all smoked up and gray and deserted inside.

This video is kind of long but it's so interesting, around 1 minute it shows how they perform the lobotomies and how crude it really was. Towards the end it also gives more information about what happened to some of Walter Freeman's patients. 

Synapses, Drugs, and Addictions

I was reading up on various kinds of drugs, when I found opiate drugs. These drugs are derived from, or chemically similar to those derived from, the opium poppy. This reminded me of a Seinfeld episode where Elaine is going on vacation with her boss, for work related issues, but she needs to pass a drug test. They administer the drug test and she fails! They find trace amounts of opiates in her system. This being because every morning before going to work she stops by a local diner and orders a poppy seed muffin. It’s weird how a simple poppy seed muffin provides similar chemicals to those found in drugs like heroin. I personally love poppy seeds so I can just imagine going into a drug test and failing because I ate a poppy seed muffin earlier. I also read that because of this skewed result some federal prisons prohibit inmates from eating these types of baked goods. This has happened so much so, that the federal test threshold for morphine and codeine has been raised from 300 nanograms per millileter to 2,000. Federal agents figure that this will eliminate most of the false positives by eating too many poppy seed muffins. So fellow readers, next time you go into a drug test don’t eat any poppy seeds for breakfast.

This video shows exactly what I’m writing about. The fact that it’s a mythbusters episode, which I love, helps too. It’s a little long but if you fast forward to the end it shows you that the urine, in fact, does test positive for opiates.

Nerve Cells and Nerve Impulses

Nerve cells and nerve impulses are probably one of the hardest things for me to understand. I love psychology and studying the brain and what not, but the physiological side of it is just something I do not get. Something I found very interesting was one part where it talked about local anesthetic drugs. These drugs, Novocain and Xylocaine, attach to the sodium channels of the membrane, which then prevents sodium ions from entering and so stops action potentials. In other, more comprehensible, words when a dentist applies Novocain before starting work on your teeth, your brain receptors are sensing the unbearable pain but the axons can't transmit that message to your brain, which is why you don’t feel a thing. This seemed so interesting to me because I’ve always wanted to know how anesthetics work. There’s times where I’ve gotten anesthesia and it fascinates me how I can see the doctor working and I know it has to be very painful yet I can’t feel a thing. It’s so interesting how it’s the brain that is the main part in this whole ordeal. The only reason why you can’t feel any of the pain is because your brain doesn’t receive the signal that there is pain. Most people don’t really think about that. It kind of reminds me of people suffering from Alzheimer’s for example. At the later stages, once they’ve lost most of their brain functioning, they can no longer walk like they used to before. The reason for this isn’t because they physically can’t move. The real reason is that the part of the brain responsible for movement can’t receive the information that it needs in order for that leg to move. 

I know this video is very short but it's a great example of exactly what anesthesia does and how it works on your nerves. 

Introduction to Physiological Psychology

I think what I found the most interesting about these modules was module 1.1 where it talks about the various biological explanations. There’s physiological, ontogenetic, evolutionary, and functional explanations for various behaviors humans and animals do. I found the evolutionary explanation for goose bumps the most interesting. This explanation I had never really thought about why goose bumps would happen. Actually, I never thought there was a reason for them occurring. In the book it says that when people are frightened they get erections of the hairs especially on their arms and shoulders. We inherited this tendency from our ancestors who had a lot more hair than we do now. The functional explanation is so the animal will look larger and more intimidating because of the erect hairs. They used an example of cats and how whenever they get frightened they kind of stand up a little more and their hairs are erected to make them look bigger and therefore more intimidating to other animals that will try to hurt them. They gave an example of birds as well, in how a 4-month old bird migrates south and probably doesn’t have any idea why he does it. Then she lays an egg and sits atop it and also defends it from predators but again she doesn’t know why. This is kind of like when a human yawns or laughs. We know why we’re doing them but can we really explain to someone the reason why we’re doing them?

I included this video of camouflaging because it's an interesting way to explain how the functional explanation for this would be that it would make the animal inconspicuous to predators and it makes it able to blend into its surroundings.