Dr. Gary Lynch believes all learning should leave a biological trail in our brain. He states that every little synapse that acts up makes a lasting physical impression on our brains. On experiment he ran was that he took sections of rat brain. Then he studied them under a microscope before and after supplying an electrical discharge. The discharge was just like the type of reaction that occurs when a message is sent across a synapse. Therefor, the changes would be seen alongside the synaptic quarantine. During the first ten months there was no concluded evidence that any sort of change had occurred; but during the eleventh month there was a change. There were visual changes alongside the synapse of each sample taken. So because of this experiment, we can conclude that learning does cause a physical change our brain. There is one downside to this area of study, now we have to deal with the consequences of the misuse of the ability of control of synaptic growth.
Dr. Anders Bjorkland took older rats that have difficulty remembering, which is caused by the loss of hippocampo cells, and he injected them with new, healthy hippocampo cells. Before the injection, he took the rats and placed them in milky colored water. There was only one very small stand in the water that allowed the rats to not be in the water, and the rats were exposed to that stand. The older rats couldn’t remember where the stand was, and were therefor forced to swim around the tub aimlessly. After the injection, however, the rats remembered exactly where the stand was and they returned to it without any visible difficulties. Amnesia in humans is very selective, it attacks only a very small part of the memory system. We are trying to find some way to remember what to do, but we can’t. Probably the only way to know how to do something for these victims is through repetition. Take the case of Karl Lashley. When he was given a test in which he would have to solve the Tower of Hanoi, he wasn’t able to do it the first time, even the second time. Only after a few times that he did it was he able to go through the puzzle with little difficulty. If we asked him how he did it, he would answer you quite simply that he doesn’t know, it sort of comes to him second nature.
One way to remember things after you are a victim of amnesia is by trying to substitute different words or numbers by giving them corresponding pictures. Radical or bizarre memories actually quite often tend to work. Trevor Emmott was able to remember 36 random numbers using this type of system. A person would be able to give him a six digit number, and he could put two pictures to that number so that he could later on restate that number in order. Dr. Barbra Wilson was working with a few patients that suffered from amnesia. One of them, Ken, was given several easy steps in a room. Ten minutes later, he was asked to retrace those steps, and all he could remember was one of the several. He later states that he tries not to look stupid or dumb, even though he knows that people do think that of him. He said that he is trying to think. He recalls past memories very well, D-Day and his own marriage; but his wife death, which happened a year ago, he cannot recollect. He thinks that seconds have pasted when in reality minutes have, or months passed when years have. He is unable to carry out a normal conversation for the simple fact that he forgets what the conversation was about, he constantly asks the same questions over and over, and he forgets things that are said to him the day before. For him, life is very frustrating, and the sad thing is that no drugs or any type of therapy will help him. So as you get older, you really don’t forget what happened to you as you were younger, you just move them to part of your brain so that they won’t interfere with the new memories. One reason for this is because it is impossible for our brain to hold every type of memory so that it is on a constant retrieval basis. One man, however, did have this capability. He was a Russian that had a photographic memory. He remembered every single little detail of what ever happens to him. So because of that, his life is also extremely difficult. He is unable to talk to people because any word you would say to him, it would bring a flood of memories to him, and he would be overwhelmed.
“The Two Brains”
The human body is related to many different types of animals. We share the same nerve structure with that of squids, our brains are like that of alligators, and our emotions are like that of a cat. We are the closest in similarities to a chimpanzee, in which 98% of our DNA is the same. Even though through all these similarities we are the only species that can communicate through a language or we can plan things out correctly. The divided brain took about a hundred years to be evolved into what we use today. The brain is divided accordingly to right and left hemispheres, or “the two brains”. Each hemisphere controls the opposite side of the body, or they are asymmetrical; so that the left hemisphere controls the right side of body and the right hemisphere the left side of body respectively. We also are able to shape our environment to our liking. We can alter things that nature intended on happening. Anna Cole is a sculpture. Because of her line of work, she extensively uses the cortex of her brain, or the message sender. The cortex is the wrinkled, outer layer of the brain, it contains a network of brain cells that are used in transferring messages. Our brains were designed for discovery. We love to search, to find out, to do things that we are forbidden to do.
Language functions are housed in both of the hemispheres equally. We also, under normal circumstances, have a emotional relationship with both sides. The corpus callosum carries impulses to and from each of the two hemispheres. If a person was to damage that link, we would completely alter the mutual relationship that the two hemispheres share. Sometimes it is recommended to surgically remove the corpus callosum, that usually occurs to people who suffer frequent seizures. Vieki is a patient who had her corpus callosum damaged by surgeons. Now she is unable to communicate with both of her hemispheres correctly. She has difficulty thinking something and then completing that task. She is subjected to a test; different bits of information was sent to each hemisphere. When she views something on the left side of a screen, the information is then passed to her right hemisphere. That hemisphere can’t express what she sees, but she can express what she sees on the left side by the use of her left hand, in other words she is able to draw what she sees. If she viewed a complicated object, such as a woman on a telephone, all she could do is generalize what she sees; in other words she saw a woman. So through all of this, it was concluded that she had damaged her left visual field, and her right hemisphere. Her left hemisphere, as well as ours, does most of the verbal awareness that we have. All human brains have the biological making for language. When we experience changes, we then learn something new. The area of the brain concerning the left hemisphere is more dense altogether, it is better constructed then the right side.
Ta was a patient of Dr. Paul Broca. Ta’s name was given to him simply all he could say was “ta”, in other words, Ta couldn’t speak. The area of the brain that Dr. Broca said that Ta’s deformity came from was around the frontal part of the left hemisphere. That area, now called Broca’s Area, is said to control the muscles of speech. Charles Landy had a good legal practice going. Until one day he had a blood clot, which then caused a stroke. His ability to understand language as well as the ability to express himself basically vanished as the stoke passes. Most of his problems are mechanical, he is slow, hard to get going: all as stated by his doctor, Dr. Norman Geschwind. When given something to read, Charles stuttered, he slurred his speech, but in the end he would finish reading it. When Charles was given the statement: “The leopard was killed by the lion”. After that he was given the simple question, “Which animal died?” Charles was unable to give the answer. Basically what happened was this: all his brain heard were the nouns and verbs of the sentence, or ” Leopard killed lion”. He has no comparison between what is heard and what is meant. In 1874, Carl Vernica also contributed to the study of the brain by discovering his own area, or Vernica’s area. Vernica’s area is said to control what we hear. The victim might pronounce all his/her words correctly and clearly, but all of there words make no sense. So the way that the brain processes new idea is this: first, sound travels to Verica’s area. Then, we say what we heard, or Broca’s area is activated. Last on the list is the motor cortex. The right hemisphere of the brain specializes in shapes and sizes. The left hemisphere mostly thinks pictures, not words. Because of this, the right hemisphere recognizes faces of people and different places. One patient that had suffered from a stroke states that she feels like she is living in a weird and unknown place. She can’t remember where she’s been, or she can’t remember the people she has talked to. She gets angry at herself, she hits herself in the head to try to fix everything. She isn’t impaired because of all of this. She is still quite able to give excellent descriptions of the peoples faces she views, but she is unable to give a name to the face. She is most possibly suffering from Prosopagnosia, or the ability to recognize faces of people. The damage of a persons brain that has this damage was viewed through a PET Scan, and the areas of damage were clearly visible. In the past, we believed that face recognition was housed in the right hemisphere. Now, however, we know that each hemisphere contributes something different to the recognition.
What controls brain organizations? New clues on how the brain develops are being discovered. One idea is that our culture and our surroundings contribute to our brain development. The island of Japan has been isolated by centuries, and their culture has flourished without any interference for decades. Usually children in Japan learn two scripts. The first, called Canna, uses symbols as words, and therefor is concentrated on the left hemisphere. The other, called Conji, concentrates on the use of our visual field, and therefor works on the right hemisphere. One symbol may have up to several meanings. Also, in Japan, when a child is crying, it is considered a sound of nature. The Japanese are very delicate to sounds of nature, and therefor they treat as sound like crying as a language. All of that mostly concentrates on the left hemisphere. On the Western hemisphere, we treat crying as a noise, and therefor we put it on the right hemisphere of the brain.
In Australia, Aboriginal children preform worse then while Australian children preform when they use verbal memories. Dr. Kearing was working with them, trying to understand why this is so. There is about a three year difference between the Aboriginal children and the white children. When the Aboriginal children preformed a test, they were faced with the dilemma to remember where a few objects were supposed to go on a sheet of paper. The man made objects in theory should be easier to put back in place, and the stones used should be a difficulty. But for the Aboriginal children, the truth was just the opposite. They remembered almost without any difficulties where the rocks went, and the man made objects gave them a harder time. Culture isn’t the only difference in our brain development; the basis if we are male of female must also be taken into account. There are many different effects to take into effect as we study the differences between the sexes, such as: smell, taste, touch, and coordination. Hand preference, for instance, is developed hormonal in our brain. Males are take up 10% of the left handed population why females make up only 4%. Now being a left handed means two things: one, you are most usually better at the arts, but then again you have a greater chance to have learning disabilities. Why the baby child is still a fetus, the baby that received more testosterone will most likely become a male. There was a woman that had tow active testicles in her body. When she was younger, she received hormonal therapy to induce menstruation. Genetically, she started out as a male. She developed testicles, got testosterone pumped into her, but through a weird disorder, she began to develop the physical features of a female. When she was injected with estrogen, the female body hormone, her brain did not respond to it at all.
Dr. Guather Dorner studies stress and the changes it has on the womb inside of a pregnant lab rat. For two hours each day, the rats were confined and exposed to very powerful lights. They produced adrenaline, which in turn decreased the level of testosterone, thus giving the chance that the offspring was going to be female a better chance. Also, there was a study done in Germany that took 500 homosexuals and found out that any child that was born during the war had a two times greater chance of becoming a homosexual because of the stress put on the women at that time. When the homosexuals were then injected with estrogen, there brains were triggered by this. Dr. Marion Diamond took samples of rat brains, then froze them, then studied them. She concluded that females have thicker left hemispheres, and males have thicker right hemispheres. She also took the newborn rats from their mothers and injected them with visuospatial. Also, she took the testicles from the newborns and she found that those rats produced less testosterone. She also stated that rats that were in a healthy, well taken care of environment had larger cortexes then rats that were in a barren environment.
The way that we treat our children also has a considerable effect on the way that they will grow up. It was concluded that we encourage boys to be more active, to explore their surroundings more. When it comes to girls, however, we are more talkative to, we encourage inactivity, we tell them they are pretty. So is the way we grow up and end up from experience, or is it from our brains development. The answer, probably both.
“Madness”
Our brain has the qualities and capabilities that no other animal has. Because of that, we also suffer from diseases that no other animals have. About 1% of the whole human population suffers from Schizophrenia, or about 40 million people. Out of all the diseases that we have discovered in our human race, schizophrenia is almost certainly the darkest one of them all. About 30% of the patients that suffer from it have little or no response to any conventual therapy. Schizophrenia encompasses madness. It is a battle between thought and emotions; it is a global attack on basically everything that we consider human.
Gerry is a schizophrenic patient that is basically a textbook case of what the disease is. He shows every noted feature of a schizophrenic, he is thought-disordered, delusional, paranoid, and he has disturbances in his mood. He had a normal childhood, he later on graduated as a police officer. His mother now recalls that if they would have caught on then that he had schizophrenia, it would of been much better. He has a constant fear of the fact that someone wants to kill him. Gerry feels that most certainly an assassin type person is going to kill him. He stresses that the way he will die is that he will be electrocuted; the cause of his death would be because of the sins that he has committed in the past. These are not new feeling to him at all, he constantly feels this. He has a great fear of most people. He feels that he was raped a few times when he went to kindergarten, and also when he was trying to raise his hand in class, a black child would stab him in the back of the head with a pencil. All of these statements are false, but because of the fact that he is delusional, he feels that all of these ideas are true and they did happen. When he was asked what he would like to be helped with, he stated that he would “like to quit smoking, cleaned up, go home and back to the bakery, and go to school to become a doctor. He was faced with the decision to stay at the institution that he was in or to get out of there and to be forced by the state to go into a publicly funded type of institution. He kept on repeating that he will stay only if his mother will also stay with him, but she is only able to go to him once a month. The reason why the doctors and his parents don’t want to release him is because they are afraid he will hurt himself. He has voices in his head, usually male voices. The voices constantly accuse him of the past crimes that he has committed. At times, they tell him to do things, such as to stand up and leave the room. They also say things to him that frighten him or disturb him. His mother states “there (schizophrenics) mind is like that of a motor, it’s constantly racing. His mind is always doing some sort of thought, when he sleeps he even has nightmares because of it.