Anxiety disorders can take on many forms and can have multiple causes often acting together to create the neurological disorder. Among the different types of anxiety disorder are panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress disorder, social phobia, specific phobias, and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).(1) Life experiences, psychological traits, and genetic factors all play a role in developing anxiety.(2) Different forms of anxiety disorders receive different amounts of influence from each of these different factors. Panic disorder for example, is influenced more by genetic factors than other types.(2) Symptoms often include sudden attacks of terror accompanied by a pounding heart, sweatiness, weakness, faintness, or dizziness.(1) People who suffer from panic attacks are overcome by a strong sense fear that distorts their reality or distances them from it. They also have a fear of their inexplicable symptoms leading them to believe that they are very possibly about to die. This disorder blurs the lines of reality for many who suffer from it and serves as an example of how the human brain is capable of manifesting reality without being under control of the individual.

How Deadly is Sleep Deprivation?
Emilie Wlodaver

As I sit in front of the computer among this sea of studying women, I can’t help but wonder what kind of damage I am doing to myself and that these other women are doing to themselves from days of irregular sleeping interspersed with days of no sleeping.  It is notorious that college students are sleep deprived especially at this time of year when everyone is struggling to finish their work and cram for those final exams.  The conversations in the computer lab are all the same: “Oh yeah, I only have a 300 page paper on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a final exam in the meaning of life left.”  So what does sleep deprivation do to the brain and body?  I know that I have a headache of the most extreme dimension and it feels like someone has been sitting on my back and I can feel my fingers starting to tingle and my stomach is grumbling but I’m in such a trance of concentration that I can’t bring myself to go get something to eat.  Someone help me!  I guess I only have three more days left until I can sleep a full eight hours, so it’s all good.  I just have to be a trooper for these last few days.

      When searching for a book to read and review, the title of the book by Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment stuck out and caught my attention.  It had a more interesting title than others I had looked at, so I looked it up to see what it was about; what could the forbidden experiment be?  When I discovered it was about one of the many cases of a child who had lived in the wild for a good part of his life until discovered by civilization, my decision was made: I wanted to read this book.  It is human nature to be interested in somewhat bizarre cases concerning their fellow man, and I was interested in finding out the story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron and those involved in his life.  The Forbidden Experiment is an interesting examination of the course of the Wild Boy’s life with a focus on the most important people in his life.  While this was not a subject discussed directly in class, general ideas can be applied to the story of the Wild Boy’s life.

      The word nymphomania is often used in an almost slang sense in modern language, especially in the abbreviated form of “nympho”.  While it is often used loosely, it is important to remember that there is a clinical basis for the word, although the disorder is more commonly called hypersexuality, perhaps to move away from the connotations that are now attached to the word nymphomaniac.  Upon researching hypersexuality, many articles came up that related various drug therapies in relation to hypersexuality, the most common one was any drug therapy related to Parkinson’s disease.  There were also articles about hypersexuality and drug therapy for strokes and epilepsy.  I found this to be quite interesting due to the fact that one does not often associate hypersexuality with older people, who are much more likely to have developed Parkinson’s disease or have had a stroke.  To discover how the two were related, research had to be done to discover what the effects of these diseases and their drug therapies had on the brain.

When it comes to the topic of reality and the nervous system, most of us in the class will readily agree that the brain summarizes what we perceive and consequently acknowledge it as ‘reality.’ To be able to feel everything our sensors communicate to our nervous system would be overwhelming. Can you imagine being constantly aware of each and every piece of clothing you are wearing, the acrylic on your fingernails, the perfume you wore over three hours ago, the jewelry you have on, and the empty spot for each piercing you have? Intense right?! That is why the brain provides us with only what we need to properly function and survive.

The I-function, as explained in Neurobiology 220, at Bryn Mawr College is one’s ability to make internal executive decisions that can and do affect one’s overall behavior and life. In order for one to make decisions that are socially-sound and ethically-viable, one needs the I-function, better known as the ego[1]. The I-function is highly important in exhibiting caution, thoughtfulness, and logical pattern in any one individual. However, it does not exist within a sphere that is not influenced by other factors.

Over the past few classes we learned about the bipartite brain and how through our brain’s interaction with the outside world we continually modify who we are. Recently, I made a trip to the local library to do some readings online for class. I selected a comfortable chair by a window overlooking a busy intersection. Surfing through serendip I came across the idea of “science as an moving up and down (infer from experience, test by experience) approach to advancing understanding”, and ‘humanities’ as a ‘moving laterally’ (infer from comparing stories, test by comparing stories) approach…” (2). This difference was debated among experts in their respective social and natural sciences in Bryn Mawr College, and the consensus was that in order to better understand ourselves, our environment, and others around us, we need to allow ourselves to explore with both; “moving up and down” and “laterally” in learning to discover and enjoy their benefits in a way that is healthy and beneficial.

Isabelle Winer

Evo-Lit

Paper 4

Finding a Path in the Absence of Truth

With billions of people and millions of cultures all simultaneously inhabiting the world today, a universal truth seems entirely impossible.  Every culture has had its own collective mass of experiences unique to them, which have shaped the manner in which they view and participate in our shared world.  Often times these groups even have truths which conflict with those of other groups, but as we have learned over the past semester those conflicting stories are all true to the people who believe them.  We cannot place them in a hierarchy because ultimately they are simply the functional and evolving stories that are the most practical for each group.  Yet having accepted that no story is better than another leads the global community no closer to figuring out how to handle these conflicting stories.  When peoples’ lives and well-being become threatened by these stories it becomes even more pressing to be able to find a functional and fair manner in which the world can govern itself.  In recent years the predominantly African practice of excising the clitoris has become increasingly debated in the global community.  This traditional practice has come to be called, amongst human rights activists and then later organizations such as the United Nation and the World health organization, female genital mutilation (FGM).  Outside of Africa there is a general feeling of disgust at the practice of FGM, but there has also been the opposing argument that this is simply another case of economically powerful nations imposing their own moral judgments upon a folk lifestyle.  Defenders of female genital mutilation, or female genital cutting, range from many of the African women who have undergone the operation to western academics who believe that we cannot fully understand the practice and therefore cannot judge it.  While this practice may be an integral part of a complex culture in which women are glad to undergo the pain and trauma, in its current form female genital cutting is life threatening to the women who endure it.  It has become critical to find a tiebreaker amongst all the stories.  Education and freedom of information are that tiebreaker.  The women of Africa should be allowed to decide their own future, but they should be informed enough to do so.  Currently, the overwhelming lack of accurate information is contributing to the existence of female genital cutting, and that is where the true problem lies.

Throughout the semester in Neurobiology 202, we learned how the brain is not a standing-alone entity; it serves as the center of the nervous system, summarizing all the inputs from our neurons and provides us with a coherent and relatable story. Every class, we became additionally acquainted with the brain’s workings and how that affects our everyday lives. Towards the end of the semester, when the concepts of how our nervous system works continue to become clearer, one thing persist for me, and that is how smart is the lower section of the nervous system; below the neck? Does the rest of the nervous system need to be connected with the brain in order to perform properly? Although the answer might seem obvious, through research I came upon the developing science of locomotive training, which led me to discover alternatives to the ‘brain-in-charge’ model.

Most people at some time in their lives have experienced the rather curious sensation of déjà vu, the feeling that you are reliving a certain moment of your life. It is a phenomenon that has fascinated the world for centuries. Novelists have written about it, movies and television shows have described it and psychologists and neuroscientists have endeavored to explain it from a scientific perspective. This web paper will endeavor to explain how and why we experience the sensation of familiarity known as déjà vu as well as its connection to one of the most mysterious functions of the human brain: memory. By studying déjà vu we may gain insight into the complex relationship between the unconscious part of the nervous system that processes experiences and the neo-cortex that turns them into the stories we call memories.