Sleep

I was reading up on sleep disorders and I think the one that caught my eye the most was narcolepsy. This is a condition characterized by frequent periods of sleepiness during the day and only strikes about 1 person in 1,000. It may run in families, but some cases show up in people with no affected relatives.Narcolepsy has four main symptoms, although not every patient has all four. 

1. Gradual or sudden attacks of sleepiness during the day, which may occur after eating, while driving, or even while talking to someone on the phone. These moments of sleepiness usually only last 15 minutes but they can last longer. 

2. This is categorized by occasional cataplexy – an attack of muscle weakness while the person remains awake. During cataplexy the persons neck will fall an their knees will buckle, they may stay in this paralyzed state for several minutes. This is often triggered by strong emotions, such as anger and great excitement. 

3. Sleep paralysis, which is an inability to move while falling asleep or waking up. Although this is common amongst people without narcolepsy, those with narcolepsy experience it more frequently. 

4. Hypnagogic hallucinations, which are dreamlike experiences that are difficult to distinguish from reality. These often occur at the onset of sleep.

This cause relates to the neurotransmitter orexin. People with narcolepsy lack the hypothalamic cells that produce and release orexin. One possibility for this lack of neurotransmitters is an autoimmune reaction, in which the immune system attacks part of the body – in this case, cells with orexin. Since orexin is useful in maintaining wakefulness, people lacking orexin alternate between short waking periods and short sleepy periods instead of staying awake throughout the day.

This topic caught my attention mostly because I had seen a, probably, exaggerated case in a movie called Rat Race. One of the characters in the movie had severe narcolepsy and would fall asleep at random times throughout the movie. He would fall asleep walking or even running sometimes. I can only imagine someone going through something like this. It would feel as if you lost time while you were awake.

There is, unfortunately, no cure for narcolepsy and currently the most common form of treatment is stimulant drugs such as methylphenidate (Ritalin), which enhance dopamine and norepinephrine activity. Some lifestyle changes you can make can include eating lighter and healthier, perhaps a vegetarian diet. Scheduling a brief nap, 10-15 minutes, after lunch if possible. This is a chronic illness that may be very dangerous but not deadly, and can be controlled with the proper treatment.

This video is incredible. This lady that has narcolepsy is a great example of the condition and how traumatic it can be for her and her loved ones. 

Sex

I was reading up a few things last night and what caught my attention the most was intersex people. This is such an interesting topic, I felt that I just needed to write about it! 

Intersexes are people with a mixture of both male and female genitalia, hermaphordites, or others develop an intermediate appearace because of  an atypical hormone pattern. This being, because testosterone masculinizes the genitals and the hypothalamus during early development. A genetic male with low levels of testosterone or a deficiency of testosterone receptors may develop a female or intermediate appearance. Also, a genetic female who is exposed to more testosterone than the average can be party masculanized. 

An estimated 1 in 100 children in the US is born with some degree of genital ambiguity, and 1 in 2,000 has enough ambiguity to make its male or female status uncertain. This is so crazy to me. It’s surprising how this can happen to anyone. I can’t imagine being a little boy and feeling like a girl or being a girl and feeling like a boy. This must be such a hard thing for those who are intersexed. 

I actually watched a couple of videos on this topic a few years ago and it’s so heart wrenching to see. It’s so difficult for intersexes to live their lives normally. The constant bullying in school is enough, even just wondering why their growing breasts or trying to hide them from others. I can’t imagine not being sure whether I was a boy or a girl. This has to be difficult for both the child and the parents. Basically, what parents would do with an intersex child is just raise it as a girl. What they need to do is wait until the child is old enough and observe them and how they interact or how they play with other toys. Parents should let the child decide what gender he wants to adopt. 

This video explains exactly what I’ve been saying. This woman knew she was a girl at 4 years old! She would look at boys and only pretend to act like them so nobody would notice. It’s so surprising after a 27 year marriage and 6 kids!
 

Pain, Olfaction, Pheromones, and Synesthesia

While reading up on our 5 senses I looked into something called synesthesia. This interested me so much, mostly because it’s so unbelievable and strange. Synesthesia is an experience some people have where stimulation of one sense evokes a perception of another one also. In layman’s terms, you may smell an apple and say that smell is bright pink, or someone might say that the taste of potatoes is kind of like the color orange. As weird as this sounds it’s actually something people experience. People with synesthesia have increase amounts of gray matter in certain brain areas and altered connections to other areas. This response occurs in the cerebral cortex and not in the receptors. The idea of a word triggers that synesthetic experience before they have even thought of the word itself. For example, I read about a man who has color vision and reports synethetic colors that he doesn’t see in real life. His brain can see all the colors, but his cones cannot send the messages. A hypothesis for this is that some of the axons from one cortical area branch into another cortical area. This isn’t the case for all but it can be for some. There are also various types of synesthesia. There’s color graphemic synesthesia where letters or colors appear to be colored. Also, there’s spatial-sequence where numbers, months, or days of the week have precise locations in space (1950 may be “farther away” than 1977), or may have a 3D view of a year as a map. There’s also ordinal-linguistic personification, where numbers, days, months, and even letters are associated with different personalities. For example, a synesthetic I read about said, “4 is honest, but 3 I cannot trust…9 is dark, a gentleman, tall, and graceful. I is a bit of a worrier at times although easy-going; J is male and K is female. Over 60 types of synethesia have been reported, but only small amounts have been evaluated by scientific research. This just seems so interesting to me and I would love to actually meet someone who has this. I’ll probably do more research on this topic in the future.

This video is so interesting and I particularly chose this one because it shows how people with synesthesia are completely normal and are happy that they have this type of experience with letters and numbers. This just seems so interesting to me especially the part where the letter in their names had the same colors. 

Learning, Memory, and Amnesia

I used to think Alzheimer's disease was something that only happened to people who suffered a stroke or to people that had that gene in their family. I never thought it could just happen to anyone. But it can. Alzheimer’s disease can happen to anyone. About half of all patients with late-onset Alzheimer’s disease have no known relatives with the disease. This fact to me is frightening to say the least. I can’t imagine myself going through such troubling and debilitating symptoms. My grandmother has Alzheimer’s disease and I’m not saying this to gain sympathy but to show a real life example. It’s been more than difficult these past 7 years to deal with something as tragic as this. From forgetting simple words or stumbling over a few, to loosing motor functioning in both her legs and arms, to not having any recollection of a simple birthday party. It’s a constant struggle to help her walk or to even have a regular conversation with her, which has more than become impossible in the past 2 years. A protein called amyloid-b that accumulates both inside and outside neurons causes this disease. The net effect is to damage dendritic spines, decrease synaptic input, and decrease plasticity. As amyloid-b damages axons and dendrites, the damaged structures cluster into structures called plaques. As these plaques accumulate, the cerebral cortex, hippocampus, and other areas waste away. Another protein called tau separates from microtubules and clumps together to form tangles that accumulate inside the neuron and disable the transport system then destroying the cell. Neurons then disconnect and die which causes memory loss. The brain then shrinks and looses function. The most common treatment is to give drugs that stimulate acetylcholine receptors or prolong acetylcholine release. This increases arousal. Increased arousal improves memory; and people who drink 3-5 cups of coffee per day are less likely than average to develop Alzheimer’s.

This video is so interesting and gives lots of good facts about Alzheimer's and how awareness is the most important thing.

Brain Lateralization

At first, I was going to write about split-brain patients and the constant struggle they face with having one hand completely independent from the other. I was looking for information on the split-brain topic when I found out about Wernicke's Aphasia. This fascinated me so much. Wernicke's Aphasia, which is also known as fluent aphasia, is an impairment in language ability traditionally associated with neurological damage to Wernicke's area in the brain. Wernicke’s area is responsible for comprehension of speech. Speech retains a fluid sounding rhythm, while speech comprehension is greatly affected. Basically, what this means is that patients with this aphasia keep their fluidity of speech, being able to keep talking with no stops, but the words they say are jumbled, kind of like a word-salad, where all the words are mixed together and there's no way of distinguishing them from each other. Reading and writing are also affected with this impairment. These patients have no idea that they are jumbling their speech, which fascinates me as well, and they think they are just talking like any other normal person. I guess it just really fascinates me how you can think you're speaking normally but not really be saying anything at all.

I found lots of videos on Wernicke's Aphasia, each more interesting than the last, but I chose only one to show. I think the reason I chose this video was because this patient is so young and she suffered a stroke at such a young age.