Blogs

Article Previously Submitted

According to the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, approximately 250,000 to 400,000 individuals in the United States have spinal cord injuries. Every year, approximately 11,000 people sustain new spinal cord injuries – that’s thirty new injuries every day. The injury comes from damage to the spinal cord that results in a loss of function such as mobility and feeling, and is usually a result of a trauma or disease. (1) One of the most obvious negative effects of a spinal cord injury is the difficulty in walking, forcing many patients to use wheelchairs in order to achieve locomotion. Over the past decade considerable effort has been directed at promoting the recovery of walking and finding effective treatments. The two treatments that are currently considered to be the most effective are rehabilitation and regeneration. Both methods consider a different way the Central Nervous System has of ‘fixing’ itself; regeneration aims to restore a functioning set of connections similar or identical to those present originally, whereas rehabilitation aims for the restoration of function by compensatory mechanisms. In this essay, we will analyze the rehabilitative and regenerative methods of intense training on a treadmill and promoting regeneration of axons in the spinal cord. Which method is more effective in treating spinal cord injuries (SPI)? In order to answer this question it is important to analyze the dynamics of the CNS itself, as well as the concepts or regeneration and rehabilitation and their effectiveness in case studies.

There are multiple DSM categories of Anxiety Disorders, which each affect individuals in various ways (1). However, most people whose lives are influenced by Anxiety Disorders are able to recognize their symptoms. As soon as panic sets in, individuals with Anxiety Disorders are generally able to predict what will happen next. Such anxious individuals will become inconsolably and seemingly irrationally worried and flustered. Their intense fear may be accompanied by physical symptoms such as heart palpitations, nausea, chest pain, shortness of breath, or tension headaches. Thus, because sufferers know how painful situations like this can be, individuals with Anxiety Disorders tend to do everything possible to avoid triggers (2).

It is widely accepted that addiction is the result of not only environmental and genetic factors, but also chemical imbalances in the brain. Certain activities such as smoking, drug use, alcohol consumption, and gambling can alter the neurobiology of the brain resulting in addiction. Interestingly, some of these activities cause unnatural additions and some cause natural addictions but both types have the same effect on reward pathways in the brain. Reward pathways in many cases determine human behavior. Many of the choices we make are guided by our reward pathways. Reward pathways are, therefore, arguably a component of the I-function which gives humans the ability to make choices and to act freely. This paper will argue that addiction, which has been described as a brain disease (Leshner 1997 and Wise 2000), is also an inhibition of the I-function.

When a product seems more enticing and more enjoyable because of a particular brand name, label or expectation, when an individual meditates, when a sugar pill has the capability of ailing a pain: these are all examples of a phenomenon called the placebo effect. The placebo effect is traditionally a deception of the mind, involving the application of a non-pharmacological drug or procedure that results in the improvement of ones health. Why this phenomenon occurs, is an unanswered question which is difficult to medically understand. What takes place in the body and what causes this phenomenon to occur? How deep is the connection between mind and body? To what extent can mind control body on internal, physical, involuntary levels?

I. Introduction:

Based on the premise that a significant perturbation of a interconnection pattern of neurons can reconfigure particular neurons and neuron connections (i.e. behavior), I argue that there are two methods of changing sexual desire more effectively than medicinal treatment due to their effect on significantly altering the pattern of one’s behavior in possibly permanent ways. These methods are the conscious performance of drills on a regular basis and what I term charismatic acts.

Congenital analgesia is a rare condition in which children, usually from birth, do not sense physical pain coming in from outside stimuli. Children with this rare condition often times break bones, lose teeth, get many cuts, bruises and bites without the body even knowing, and this can potentially dangerous, for the obvious reasons. Those who experience congenital analgesia can still feel touch, sensation, and normal body-to-body contact, which tells us that the brain can receive some information filtered through the nervous system; however, when it comes to extreme temperature changes, or any bodily damage that signals the body to react in an emergency fashion, the body instead does not respond. (1) This is a scary thought indeed, for only a very small percentage of our neural connections actually deals with communicating with the outside world, and because there are so few it seems as if we would need all of them! In the case of those with congenital analgesia, the input is either not being perceived or the input is being perceived, but the body knows no matching output.

How Do We Lie?

Tiffany Ngan

What’s in a lie? That which we might present as truth our brains would show just as false. A horrible horrible pun on Shakespeare, however it brings us to the subject: lying as a variable function of the brain.

            The major propagator of the evolutionary process is the press for continuity, the tendency to act in order to increase the probability of passing on genes. In order to preserve ones genes, individuals are in competition, to ensure that ones genes prevail over another’s; this can be accomplished individually or collaboratively (4). While it seems logical that animals would sacrifice themselves for their young or mates, humans seem to present a special problem to this evolutionary theory in that they sacrifice themselves for abstract principles and others that are of no biological relation. A possible key to this oddity is affect hunger, an urgent need for affective bonding, which continues after the critical development period and makes mutuality and sociality as important as competition in the evolutionary process. Affective bonding provokes certain social behaviors, in others, which are necessary for normal neural development. Furthermore, only with normal neural development would an individual be able to exhibit the social behaviors essential in forming affective bonds.

All healthy humans feel like they have some degree of free will, the ability to discern and consciously choose one of a number of possible options. Free will is here defined as a conscious and deliberate process by which an individual comes to choose between multiple options, absent of any involuntary causal determination. But how does free will fit in with neurophysiology and what we know about the brain?

We know that neurons form networks. The particular connections in and between networks are a result of genetics, biology, environment, and every past experience, action, and thought. We know that our brain is governed by physical law, neurons spontaneously fire when the intra and extra cellular concentrations of NaCl change. All the molecular occurrences in our brains are results of previous ones, and cause future ones. So we can imagine that every thought we have, every action potential, is actually the result of every molecular occurrence since (and including) the Big Bang. Newtonian physics supports the idea that once the initial conditions of the universe were set, the rest of history follows inevitably. This is the central idea of the theory of determinism. If we adopt strict determinism, and imagine a thought experiment in which we possess complete knowledge, of every occurrence, every motion of every particle, every value held by every person, everything they have experienced and thought, we would be able to perfectly predict the outcome of any situation. If we are physical systems subject to determinism, there may not be room for free will in the picture.