Men and women are different from one another. This fact isn't exactly the breakthrough of the millennium, but when you look at some of the current work being done to define and elaborate on these differences, especially within the brain, that first sentence takes on new meaning. The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine goes through each stage of life from birth to puberty to post-menopause explaining how the female brain develops and differs from its male counterpart. As the founder of the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic, Dr. Brizendine draws on a lot of her experiences with patients and their families to explain what is happening in the brain and its effects on mood and behavior.

The Old Me

   To some degree in this universe truths exist. If there were no truths, then life as we know it would be impossible. We inevitably must accept that often these truths stem from what we as human beings can witness. Additionally, we know beyond doubt that there are things in this universe that we do not personally witness, but are true non-the-less (for instance, at the beginning of our lifetime we are born, and though we cannot witness this event our existence alone refutes any other logic). In my experience, as a believer, I have never questioned anything around me; neither that which I have been told, that which is tangible, nor that which I have indeed witnessed.

Darwin’s evolution theory revolves around the concept of natural selection.  Natural selection can be seen as a process of elimination.  The quote from Herbert Spencer, “the survival of the fittest” is relevant to the explanation of natural selection.  Offspring that will survive to the next generation are those who possess characteristics or phenotypes that are particularly well adapted to the current environmental conditions.  Therefore the term, “the fittest,” refers to individuals who are capable of coping with the challenges of their environment and in competing with other members of their populations will have the best chance to survive and pass on their genes.  Natural selection eliminates individuals who lack particular attributes that would make them more superior to others are selected against.  Adaptation is what makes individuals superior.  The definition for adaptation is a property that an organism possesses, which could be physiological or behavior traits, of which assists the individual in the struggle for existence.[1]  Some traits that individuals possess will become extinct with time due to the process of natural selection’s elimination of maladaptive traits.             

We concluded the semester with the idea that the I-function, our self-consciousness, is a story-teller, which makes a best attempt to contextualize, temporalize and generally make “sense” of input to the nervous system. With this notion in mind, I was curious if we should therefore assume that language, an innate aspect of “story telling,” is necessary for self-consciousness. Or can we create a “story” of our environment and our place in it without language? In order to approach this question, we should examine the development of both language and self-consciousness. Through examining these developmental processes, can we find and correlative relationship between language and self-consciousness? Even before we analyze the relationship between the two, we must first define what is meant by self-consciousness. There are many concepts of what self-consciousness is, including the “I-function” storyteller, and which concept one believes to be true has implications on the prerequisite of language.

When most of us think about hypnotism or hypnotists we might think back to a high school assembly or carnival show in which we’ve watched volunteers get up on stage and made to act like chickens. For most people, the idea of hypnotism may be more of a magic show than means for psychotherapy or forensic investigation. These two fields, however, have been relying recently on hypnotism to get answers. Therapists may use hypnotism to uncover childhood abuse that can lead to other problems in adult patients, or to rid a patient of a phobia or bad habit. Hypnotism has also been used by the judicial system to enhance the memories of witnesses or victims of crimes. In both fields, however, the use of hypnotism to get to the bottom of things is a controversial subject. Hypnotism can often lead to pseudomemories in the hypnotized subject, which can be very misleading or simply false. With the information that follows, I hope to make readers familiar with the risks of using hypnotism both inside and outside the therapeutic context as well as with when hypnotism can be of real psychological help.

Science, the processes of the natural world, they are without intention. Biological Evolution, the rules of the universe, the properties of the elements, these are all forces without intention. However the way in which humanity understands all of these natural things is very far from being objective or without intention. The human scientific process is tailored to a human experience of the world, the measurements we take and the units that we use are all things that can be understood with the human senses. All of the tests that scientists conduct are tailored to humanities sensory organs, so all the experiments scientists make are made with the intent that the results can be understood using the human senses. This is very useful because if this wasn’t the way things were done there would be no way for us to understand our own experiments but it does mean that all science is done with that intent. That is not the only intentionality surrounding the scientific process however, science is always done with the intent of answering a hypothesis, and this is so the results obtained by experiments are meaningful to humans. It would be very difficult to convince a scientist to conduct an experiment without any intention as to what the results would be or what exactly they were trying to disprove. If there was no intention than the experiment would only be an example of Nature’s random laws and not a demonstration of something that had been quantified by human scientists or of something they were hoping to quantify. A quote from Robert Pollack’s The Missing Moment puts it much more elegantly than I ever could “No scientist…has time to look at all the data that all possible experiments might generate…Instead, every science chooses selectively all the time, and with each choice some data are precisely not gathered, let alone examined. Choices are necessary, and it is at the moment when choices are made that the scientific method departs from the wholly conscious tool of scientific experimentation and enters the human world in which all choices are made in a personal and social historical context, replete with emotional affects and barely remembered feelings.”(81).

Reality

Realidad

Realite

Vagheyat

Somewhere out there we have

the truth:

An untouchable entity

we will never fully grasp.

That which happens

really does happen.

The sandwich has been eaten. The crumbs have fallen.

                The original reason I had signed up for this course was so that I could take an evolution class that was integrated with a literature class.  Being a Pre-Med, Biology major, my mind has become wired to be able to understand things that are “true” and real, and that will have significance in my life.  For example, I enjoy taking science and math classes, such as Calculus, Physics, Biology, etc. for I believe that they have specific methodologies, procedures, formulas and mechanisms that one must memorize and learn to be real.  To me, they are the truth, for they can quantitatively and qualitatively be set before me and applied into my life and also in medicine to make a significant impact on others’ lives in the world.  However, taking this course and discussing the idea of evolution as merely another story of the origins of life was disturbing.  The beginning parts of the course were very interesting, and I loved getting into the Biology portion of Evolution and rethinking through some of the concepts that I had not looked at in quite some time.  At this point, the most valuable thing I could take from class was to realize that evolution really was just another story in our quest for finding truth and reality in life.  I also realized that medicine and certain topics in Biology were also merely stories that were getting things less wrong, and I became comfortable with this idea over time.

By the time we’d reached about age five, we had all come to the realization that the sing-song echo of kids on the pre-school playground, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” was complete and utter bullshit. And once we were old enough to listen to the radio, we realized that the grown-up world had known this all along. No where else beyond the fence of that playground will anyone challenge the concept that feelings can be “hurt”, hearts can be “broken”, spirits can be “bruised”. If you ask our dear Miss Dickinson, she’ll claim it’s everywhere: