Muscular dystrophy and multiple sclerosis are probably the two most well-known movement disorders.  As a result, they have received a lot of research funding, enabling medicine to move closer to finding effective treatments and cures.  There is a movement disorder, however, that is just as serious, but often neglected.  Ataxia is a movement disorder that makes patients’ lives extremely difficult, yet is unheard of by many people.  As a result, research into treatments is significantly far behind.  Awareness of ataxia must be increased in order to drive the research that will improve the lives of its sufferers.
 

Schizophrenia is a disease that has played a significant role throughout my life. One of my uncles was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was in college. The cause for the onset of the disease was always shrouded in mystery, however. If anyone in my family was asked why he developed schizophrenia or if there were signs of schizophrenia in him when he was younger, you would receive a different answer from each person. For this reason I always wanted to know what caused schizophrenia and why it is not always evident early on in a persons life.

When I began to research, the debates regarding schizophrenia centered around three main areas: dopamine production, genetics, and issues with neural development. In this paper I am going to focus on issues in early neural development, how neuron issues can cause schizophrenia, and why the symptoms of schizophrenia may not become evident until later in a persons life.

Colorless Green Ideas- The Phenomenon of Language By: Sasha DeWitt 

As humans we use language everyday to live and communicate. We have created words that give sound and meaning to objects and abstract concepts as well as created grammatical structures to give form to the messages we convey. This paper is a look into the way that language, a uniquely human creation, works.

Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to find you are not in bed at all, but have a bag full of clothes on your shoulder, car keys at the ready, and your hand on the doorknob to your room. You cannot remember getting out of bed, getting dressed, or packing your bags, but the car keys in your hand are very real, and all you can do is count your lucky stars you woke up before you had a chance to use them. Sound unsettling? This is just one of countless stories of sleepwalking experienced by a friend of mine, and not only is her condition unsettling, but it causes a great disturbance to her sleep schedule. As a college student and busy individual, I often take sleep for granted, but for someone with a sleep disorder such as sleepwalking, a full-night’s rest can seem like a gift from the gods.

           Last spring, I was practicing mindfulness (insight) meditation in Burma with the intent to discipline the mind and understand the relationship between the mind and body. Upon the end of my retreat and onset of the post-bacc program, I unexpectedly felt torn between these two disciplines: modern science and Buddhism. At the same time, I felt I could use medicine as a means to understand the mechanics of the brain and ultimately the mind. Encouragingly, brain research has begun to produce scientific evidence for something Buddhist meditation practitioners have been teaching for centuries: mental discipline can alter the functions, structure and even retard the aging process of the brain. Such an exploration is partnering modern science and Buddhism to understand the laws of nature and the workings of the mind (1). Through MRI imaging, researchers, such as Dr. Sara Lazar at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, are finding insight meditation to increase the thickness of the prefrontal cortex and anterior insula where attention, sensory processing, decision-making, and brain-body interactions occur (2). Dr. Richard Davidson from the University of Wisconsin, Madison is translating the mental states during transcendental meditation into high-frequency gamma waves and brain synchrony. He and his team have located the left prefrontal cortex (an area behind the left forehead) as the place where brain activity is most intense during meditation (3). Critics point out that these recent findings on brain activity are preliminary and inconclusive, and such types of research may breach the barrier between science and religion (4). As a practitioner, perhaps I am biased to believe that meditation vastly improves cognitive functioning of the brain. Nonetheless, it is exciting to see that researchers are, finally, finding concrete neurobiological evidence on how meditation structurally affects the brain.

As I do several times a day, I sit at my computer screen with the knowledge that I have plenty of school work that could be done but for some reason I have to check my email (all 3 email accounts), check facebook (maybe someone left me a message or wrote on my wall), and check nytimes.com (for any interesting new stories) before I can begin my work. Even after I start working, I can easily be distracted by a song playing across the hall that I must immediately download and while I’m downloading I will check my email, facebook, and nytimes again to see if something has changed. Am I addicted to the internet or do I have the control to stop myself? In a world where we have access to so much at the touch of a keyboard we seem to constantly search for something whether it’s an email, a stock or a message on facebook and yet we cannot stop. Is this addiction or is this normal? For a college student, is this normal or is this too much? Are we constantly on the internet because it is so accessible or is it so accessible because we want to be constantly on it? Would reading a newspaper ritualistically everyday during breakfast be more normal than checking the latest stories online? Has our world become so reliant on the internet that we cannot distinguish if we are addicted to the internet or not? What is internet addiction and how do we define it? Is internet addiction real or is it a fabrication? I think the concept of internet addiction can be argued both ways and therefore further research should be performed to develop stricter guidelines to determine what is internet addiction and how can this be treated.

      Addiction is regarded by most as a social problem to be solved with social solutions, i.e. incarceration. But, scientific evidence argues otherwise: addiction is a brain disease. Interestingly though, this clinical condition has both behavioral and social components that need to be attended to, just as other disorders, such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s are treated. Furthermore, researchers argue that addicts should be viewed as victims, suffering from an altered brain state, just as schizophrenics are viewed (1).

The first time my father told me how everything was energy, I assumed he was embarking on one of his neo-pagan, folk-singing tangents that would wind circles around our original conversation and end with an awkward silence. I didn’t expect it to become a recurring theme in our household, prompting the purchase of various movies and books such as “ What the Bleep do we know about Anything” and “The Secret”. I didn’t expect to be so intrigued by the notion that there may be logic behind the mysteries that puzzled me since I was a child, a link between lucid dreams and extraterrestrials, serendipitous events and the moments when I felt like I had stumbled across a great truth. Controversial as it is, the Holographic Theory of the universe explains how many unexplained phenomenon occur in different disciplines, especially when it comes to understanding the brain.

Autism is a neurological disability which affects the development of the brain as it relates to social interactions.  In recent years, this disorder has gained attention in the American public due to the increase in the frequency of cases (3).  Once considered a rare disorder, it is now found in 5 or 6 per 1000 people compared to one in every 2000 in the 1960s (1).  Little is known about the cause of the disorder, however a myriad of strategies have been tested to mitigate its effects.  One of these methods that has proved to be particularly successful is the use of music therapy.  

According to the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the disorder known as autism has three major groups of symptoms. The first group concerns social relationships; an autistic person may lack interest in social relations, or fail to pick up on nonverbal social cues. The second group encompasses language deficits; some autistic people never learn to speak at all, and those who do may have a limited vocabulary or only repeat what others have said. The final group of symptoms includes rigid routines and interests. One of the best-known symptoms of autism is a narrow or obsessive interest in a certain narrow field, such as trains or maps. In the same vein as these narrow interests, an autistic person may insist on an identical routine every day, or adhere to certain repetitive motions, such as hand-flapping or rocking in place (4).

Given that so many of the behaviors that autism affects, especially speech and perception, are associated with the nervous system, researchers have been working to understand the neurological bases of autism for years. Despite intensive research, however, no exact neurological or physiological cause or causes of autism have been precisely identified. Some researchers suggest that mirror neurons, which register associations between actions performed by the self and another person, are less active in autistic people, which may account for some of their difficulties with social interactions (2) Some suggest that mercury, both from the environment and from the preservative thimerosal, formerly used in the measles mumps rubella (MMR) vaccine, can serve as a catalyst for the disorder (9), although this theory is controversial and has been discredited in many larger-scale epidemiologal studies (7). But many people, noting the diverse array of symptoms that most autistic people present, do not believe that any one theory can explain the condition. Instead, they believe that a number of factors, working together in complex and unpredictable ways, bring about the condition; to try to find a single cause, they say, is a tough, if not altogether fruitless, goal (8).
Since the exact sources of autism are so elusive, physicians and therapists who work with autistic people cannot attack its neurological or physiological root causes directly. Instead, they often focus on changing the autistic person's behavior in childhood, encouraging actions like language use and eye contact and discouraging actions like self-injuring behavior which may affect quality of life later. The most common technique for changing these actions is Applied Behavior Analysis, or ABA. The specific behaviors targeted with ABA differ from child to child, but the basic principles and techniques are similar across cases. The technique, in its most basic form, involves reinforcement for acquisition of "normal" behaviors (such as grammatical speech or eye contact), lack of reinforcement for more "abnormal" or "stereotypically autistic" behaviors (such as repetitive motions or temper tantrums following a disruption of routine). Gradually, reinforcement for the positive behaviors is reduced, and eventually it stops entirely; at this point, it is hoped that the positive behaviors will carry over into other areas of the child's life, outside of therapy sessions (1).
Many autistic people, however, question both the effectiveness and the ethical integrity of ABA (6). One especially vocal opponent of the therapy is an autistic woman named Michelle Dawson. Consider the following claims from her 2004 piece "The Misbehaviour of Behaviourists" (3).