http://m.chronicle.com/article/How-to-Study-the-Brain/149945/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Brain Training May Help Calm The Storms Of Schizophrenia : Shots - Health News : NPR
Learning How Little We Know About the Brain - NYTimes.com
Directly applicable to today's discussion about Chpt 6.!
Do any of the above three essays give us different models of the mind than the modularity model we discussed yesterday? What kind of models are being sought?
Christopher Nolan's Memento (thriller whose main character has severe memory loss)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_%28film%29
Background information on Dr. Sacks
http://www.oliversacks.com/
http://www.ted.com/speakers/oliver_sacks
Dr. Sack's TED talk about hallucination
http://www.ted.com/talks/oliver_sacks_what_hallucination_reveals_about_our_minds?language=en
Oliver Sacks sounds like a very intelligent man and I really enjoyed the TedTalk on Hallucinations. When he was discussing the Charles Bonnet syndrome it really had my mind going. After reading some of the comments I got a better understanding of what it meant to have this syndrome on top of what he discussed in his talk. Many of the people have managed to cope with this syndrome so it isn’t detrimental to their life and some even count it as a blessing rather than. I just think it is fascinating how people with deteriorating senses are prone to this syndrome more than others. It is like our minds are trying replace the part of the senses we lost by giving us memories and hallucinations. So I suppose in a way it is a beautiful thing if you want to be an optimist about it.
ReplyDeleteI watched the video as well and think it's neat how you see it as a beautiful thing. I agree with you and based on the way Dr. Sacks presents it, it was as if only one of his patients had a feeling of fear from their disorder. I think it is also interesting how this can provide insight on understanding the brain and that Dr. Sacks pointed out the progress or lack there of in the last 250 years. It shows us there is a long way to go, but we're heading in the right direction.
DeleteI read the article about how little we know about the brain. It was interesting to see what type of experiments that they are working on to give us more information about the brain. I also thought it was interesting what Dr. Abbott said about the experiments. He said, "It is the very beginning of how a brain sorts a flood of data coming in from the outside world, and gives it meaning." One may think we should already know this, but as mentioned in the article we don't yet. As a science student I know that we don't know a lot about the brain and it's nice to see there are some steps being made in understanding it better.
ReplyDeleteDr. Oliver Sacks lecture was very interesting to listen to. I watched the video about hallucinations and Charles Bonnet syndrome and was shocked to find out that hallucinations can be caused by hyper activity in the visual and hearing parts of the brain. Something that also caught my attention was Dr. Sacks patient who had described a road that had split into four roads, and that she felt like she was going down each road simultaneously. That would be wild to see and maybe even a little nauseating. He also mentioned a condition called temple lobe epilepsy. People with this condition hallucinate using all senses and are "transported" back in time to a certain place of importance. One would smell, see, hear, taste, and feel everything that was around at that moment in time and would immediately know where they were. It is amazing how intricate the brain is and what it is capable of. I hope we can study the brain even more and come to a full understanding of thought, and how exactly the brain functions.
ReplyDeleteI thought that the TED talk with Dr. Oliver Sacks was really interesting because it gave me a better understanding of hallucinations. Prior to watching the video, I believed that hallucinations were either caused by mental disorders or drugs. I had no idea that they could effect people in proper mental states. To think that hallucinations could be triggered by hyperactivity in the brain when a person is sufficiently deprived of one of their senses (Charles Bonnet Syndrome) came as a complete surprise to me. Dr. Sacks discussed the difference between psychotic hallucinations (they interact with the individual unlike those that effect sane people) and how many people fail to report non-psychotic hallucinations out of fear of being labeled as mentally ill.
ReplyDeleteIt was also never clear to me what a hallucination looked like to the affected person. Of course, I have seen hallucinations represented in movies and books, but none of these were actual accounts. I always thought hallucinations were akin to dreams. It was interesting that they could be vivid and rather complex for those experiencing them, almost like watching a movie. The visions are clearly not real, but they are perceived by the individual in such a lifelike manner.
Furthermore, certain hallucinations correspond with activity in specific areas of the brain, but the brain is still, for the most part, poorly understood. Maybe when we get a better grasp of the human brain we will be able to understand the mechanism of the hallucination and prevent them from occurring.
Other Points of Interest:
-Sacks pointed our relatively early on in the video was that people could have other sensory hallucinations (besides visual) as well.
I just found an interesting article from the "NYTimes Science feed" section that is on the main page of our blog. The article is called "Why Our Memory Fails Us" and features Neil DeGrasse Tyson, host of Cosmos. The article discusses false memory and how just because someone (especially famous politicians and scientists) incorrectly recalls an event, it doesn't mean that they should be discredited. The article mentions that it is fairly common for people to develop false memories and it is important for these people to accept their mistakes and move on. This article is interesting because, like hallucinations, it explains another way that our thoughts and memories can be compromised. The fascinating thing about false memories and hallucinations is that the person who experiences these things believes that what they are seeing/hearing or remembering is real.
ReplyDeleteHere is a link to the article about false memories: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/opinion/why-our-memory-fails-us.html?partner=rss&emc=rss