Blogs

I. Introduction

One of thefirst things we read in this course was a poem on the brain by Emily Dickinson.Having always liked her works, I was pleased that she could be used not only indiscussions on literature and poetry, but also in relation toneuroscience.   However, afterhearing the content of her poem, my first thought was not on her stanzas, buton herself as a writer.  In mymind, I remember thinking, “But Emily Dickinson was crazy!” Yet, it was herethat I began to wonder if, maybe, her words maintained value (or were even more valuable!) because she was a littleloopy. 

I first discovered The Diving Bell andthe Butterfly when mentioned during the first weeks of classes.  Professor Grobstein spoke of the novel(which is now a movie as well) with a description of the situation andtechnique it was written under. This description immediately caught my attention, for the author,Jean-Dominque Bauby, wrote the novel using only his left eye.  Indeed, his left eye is the only bodypart Bauby can move and control. After suffering a stroke when he was forty-three years old, Bauby nowlives with “locked in syndrome.” As a result of his limite

            Love is a wonderful phenomenon that almost everyone can relate to despite the challenging, perhaps even impossible task of defining it or describing its many different interpretations and implications. Curiously, the multi-dimensional construct of love leaves many of us with pressing questions, one of which involves the obvious notion that love must somehow be influenced by internal mechanisms, but which ones and how? Logically, it has been stated that love functions biologically to ensure the survival of a species through social attachment and reproduction, so it is no surprise that science has found great interest in

In our diverse society, it is necessary to understand that the same treatments may not work for everyone. For diseases that are thought to be caused by differences in brain chemistry, the variety in brain chemistry (as well as the variety in what is felt as "normal" or "baseline") means that certain treatments may not work in the same ways for everyone. Currently the medical community seeks to treat depression and obsessive compulsive disorder in two main ways: psychoactive drugs or cognitive behavioral therapy. However, both of these treatments are not fully understood, nor their efficacy verified.

The ethics of using animals to do research is a hot-button topic that just doesn’t seem to have a right answer (or even a wrong one). Ask two people what they think, and you’re likely to get at least three answers—few are staunchly sure of where they stand on the issue. Animal testing and their use in research is not a new phenomenon; in fact, it can be traced all the way back to the writings of the Greeks in the third and fourth centuries BCE, in the works of Aristotle and Erasistratus (they were among the first to perform vivisections).

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder characterized by persistent, intrusive thoughts or impulses (obsessions) and repetitive behaviors (compulsions) (1).  Obsessions generally revolve around a central theme, the most common of which are contamination, symmetry and order, and safety and harm (2).  Compulsions are thought to arise as a mechanism for reducing the anxiety produced by unwanted obsessions.  Every time a compulsive behavior is performed, anxiety decreases, and the behavior is negatively reinforced, increasing the likelihood of a person performing the ritualistic behavior again.