Blogs

        While having a picnic in a park one sunny afternoon, a small spider crawls onto the picnic blanket of two friends. From a distance,both friends are noticeably afraid of the spider, but upon further observation,one of the friends is displaying fear solely in reaction to the spiderappearing on the blanket while the other is panic stricken. What is the cause of the different reactions?

Questioning Moral Behavior: how should we interpret innate evil? 

This paper stems from the Biology 202 class discussion which asked can self responsibility and neuroscience coexist.   

For many of us in this world, love appears to be the sole purpose for living. We live to find and experience love and sometimes even die for love. Human beings appear to have a "genetic clock," such that they mature, fall in love with a mate or several mates, and thereafter spend their adult life having children. Like most other animals, humans appear to have an innate purpose to reproduce. Humans, like other animals, repeat this "life cycle" over and over. However, there appears to be one major difference between man and the rest of the animal kingdom in this life cycle. We seem to make this life cycle even more complex than it really is. It is because of the way in which we love that causes this complexity.

At first glance, engaging in an activity that puts ones life at risk may seem evolutionarily unadaptive. However, much research and discussion has been initiated with just the opposite idea in mind. Risk-taking tendencies apparently lie deep within our evolutionary framework; our hunger-gatherer ancestors had no choice but to put their lives in danger in pursuit of food, shelter, or protection from danger. As Eric Perlman, a filmmaker specializing in extreme sports, said, “We are designed to experiment or die” (Greenfield, 1999)(1). Moreover, current generations of American descent can ascribe their

One of the common things I’ve heard from friends returning from their junior study abroad was how much they missed being away in the foreign country. On occasion, a few friends even confessed to feeling a crushing sense of distance between their time abroad and their return to school, that they wished they could have taken a semester off because they did not feel mentally prepared to come back to “reality” just yet. These symptoms surprised me because they definitely seemed a large step beyond the typical post-vacation depression. What exactly was it that seemed to make so many peers coming back from their study abroad to feel

Although you have not yet progressed to the second sentence of this lengthy paper, there is almost a 100% guarantee that, before this text directs your attention to reality and essence of tinnitus, you are already knowledgeable about the phenomenon that is the basis for the following discussion. The legitimacy of this estimate can be attributed to the presumption that, at some point in your life, you were made conscious of your ‘head noise’ through the incidence of ringing in one or both of your ears. The presence of some ‘head noise’ is ordinary and natural, and most of us are only aware of its

In “Re-imagining the Sacred Self,” any distinction between self and the I-function is dismissed as an illusion, based on scientific research and ancient Hindu scriptures. What was not discussed, however, was the possibility that this unified perception of an innate self may in fact be “conquered” through self-discipline. This belief stems from the teachings first elucidated in the Bhagavad Gita which tells the devotee that the individual who can master the self will reach

Is “Alice in Wonderland” a pathological product, the result of a single man’s “nerve cells and associated molecules” running amock? The tendency to reduce artistic, religious, or philosophical achievements to bodily ailment was aptly named by William James in “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” “Medical materialism,” he wrote, “finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as a hereditary degenerate” (9). And, I might add, Lewis Carroll as an addict or migraineur.

Today, some people lightly throw around the phrase “panic attack.” When feeling stressed or nervous, they may say, “Oh my goodness, I’m about to have a panic attack.” Though in this case used as an exaggeration, for many, panic attacks are a serious issue. For instance, one woman experiencing a panic