Mellow Marshmallow

I'm currently reading Brain on Fire: My month of madness by Susannah Cahalan. It tells of the endless search for a diagnosis of a rare disease of which Susannah suffers. It took one neurologist to try something unthought of and then follow the clues to the true etiology of her disease. Once the cause was found, effective treatment and recovery could begin. It's an amazing story in itself.

Reading it and reflecting on the success of the neurologist to finally figure it out, I thought about my own connection to neurology. It's kind of lengthy, but I've been thinking on it a lot lately and wanted to share it. It's impacted my life a lot in the past couple of years.

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They did an EEG on Zico, a rapper from South Korea. First - for entertainment purposes - they made him compose a rap about the homunculus and the sensory and motor cortices. That was neat! I learned about those last semester.

Then they did the experiment. They recorded the electric activity in his brain when looking at images. I suspect that these images cause standardized, "normal" patterns of electric activity. That was the pre-test. Then, they had him recite something. I don't know if it was just random stuff, or relevant to the test, or what. The researcher in me wants to know what they gave him to read, but anyway... They did a post-test of the same image thing. Results showed more electric activity in the post-test, which is a "better performance."

BUT listen here, there could have just been more activity simply because it was a second exposure to the test that was administered so soon after the first. And did he know he'd take it a second time, or did they "blind" him? Does recitation of random words, which is a visual-motor-language activity, really help with a visual images test? My research methods teacher would laugh at this experiment. Despite all that, it holds entertainment value because Zico is a celebrity and actually a pretty awesome guy imo. He had dreadlocks once and I love his voice and his raps.

Loss of knowledge, something you take for granted.

Akinetopsia - loss of motion perception. Can you imagine not seeing motion? You wouldn't pay attention to someone waving to you. How would you perceive the world, then?

Auditory agnosia - difficulty in distinguishing environmental noise from speech. How could you listen to people? I tell you how-- you wouldn't. You wouldn't even know how.

Semantic agnosia - wtf!! You look at an object and have no idea of what it is by sight; the moment you touch it, feel it, smell it, taste it, hear it... anything that's not seeing it, you might remember what it is.

Form agnosia - in which you can't perceive an object as a whole, but only its separate parts. What in the world would this feel like?

Interesting stuff. Wear helmets, people. Don't want you getting brain injury and losing abilities you didn't even know you had.

This is so neat. In general (lol, right hemi here) the left hemisphere concentrates on important details, while the right hemisphere looks at a holistic big picture as to what all those details mean together. That's great; fascinating, actually. But it had an effect on culture? Say waaat?

OMG I never thought of it like that, but it makes so much sense! The frontal lobe INHIBITS! That explains so much!

The end got a little too psychological and cultural for me. Perhaps I'm too left-hemisphere orientated? Quite interesting! We are a left-hemisphere orientated culture, and that ending line was so powerful!

Irrational optimism might not always be the best thing for us, but it is the one thing that keeps us moving forward and growing.

It also talks about how memory is flexible and therefore inaccurate. Why is it flexible anyway? Because we also think about the future, and are hopefully optimistic about it! That blows my mind, that the brain might be more future- than past-orientated. The hippocampus does both functions; memory and future. It's all a complicated mess, considering how expectations of the future actually alter it.

And then bring perception in. How do you perceive the events? Is something bad that happens to you a blessing in disguise? Does your brain literally make it a blessing in disguise, just because the information is processed in this lobe versus that lobe?

Your brain is wired to pay attention to positive information and to think about things with positive ends.

Really really interesting article. The brain is really powerful. Think about placebos! They are strong, and powered by illusions and positivity!

On wired.com, there are a few short but really interesting articles.

Musicians discern speech sounds presented with noise better than nonmusicians because musicians have trained their brains to pick out certain musical sounds in the presence of others, which probably bleeds into speech sound discrimination.

Babies might see different colors than adults do, because what we as adults perceive in the world is affected (limited even) by language. Because we have a name for it, we limit it. But since babies don't have language, they are more experiencing the color without any labels or limits. But optic nerves are optic nerves, and the visual cortex is the visual cortex in every human. Hm.

People born blind can use the visual areas in their brain for language tasks. It shows how plastic and malleable the brain is, and that the idea of localization in the brain for certain tasks isn't as set in stone as we'd like to think it is.

Another article about language and its location and processing in the brains of blind people. If language is processed in more than one area, then does that mean it's being processed on a different level and with a different point of view? Does it mean you're "getting more" out of language? Or is the brain just making ends meet and using whatever regions necessary? This article also talks about the differences in young brains and old brains.

Cognitively and intuitively, the role of numbers and counting in culture and language. Fascinating.

This site has tons of pics of the human anatomy. Some are handmade lithographs from years ago, some are modern. It's fascinating. You can even search the region and the view it's in, even the sex of the subject. I typed in "larynx" and a bunch of results popped up.




Brain and peripheral nerves, in 3 numbered illustrations. Brain and cranial nerves, inferior and lateral views. Trachea, larynx, aorta and carotid arteries shown in relation to the recurrent laryngeal nerves. Nerves of the respiratory and digestive systems shown in isolation.

Holy crap, they were devoted and detailed. That's handmade!