Dream Me Up, Scotty

We all do it. Even if we think we don’t or don’t remember doing it, it still happens.  Why is it that we can’t remember and why do we dream about the things we dream about?  A consistent dream I would have was of an old lady running up to me and stealing my stuff and me running after her screaming that it was mine. Then out of nowhere I would find myself on a spaceship but invisible to everyone. I would have that dream night on end during high school and I hadn't had it in awhile until a couple of nights ago.  So why is it that she has reappeared and what does it represent? Different dream theories would say that this dream represent different things.  For example, Freud would say that she was part of my unconscious desires, thoughts or motivations.  Maybe there was an old lady that was trying to take my things and I wanted to say something, but never did and maybe the spaceship meant I wanted an adventure. With his psychoanalytic perspective, it would suggest that I wanted to act out the aggression in my unconsciousness that I wasn't able to express in my conscious life (or something sexual, but I don’t think really think there's anything sexual to this one). The activation-synthesis model of dreaming would suggest that I was just processing daily activities and trying to connect loose ends.  Maybe I saw that old lady everyday and I had lost something each day or maybe I was wandering around school feeling invisible. I don’t know how this theory would really interpret my crazy lady/ spaceship dream. The video below takes the activation-synthesis model as why we dream.  Also, gives interesting facts on why this is the most effective and how it makes us most effective.  It also helps understand REM sleep and NREM sleep better.  It’s kind of long and he talks really fast so it’s a lot of information to take in but he makes it fun. Bottom line of it is “our brains aren't here to make us friends; they are here to win.” Our brains are here to help us process our days and help us solve our problems while we are sleeping.  While we sleep we are making connections we didn't/don’t make during the day.  In conclusion, it is difficult to figure out why we are dreaming or even how due to the fact that only the person that’s having the dreams can see it.  I can explain the crazy lady in my dream to someone else and even tell them details about the ship, but they will only know what I tell them. What if I myself am not getting the whole story or am missing key details?  And to think that this is only interpreting my dream using these two theories and none of them dream dictionaries or dream interpreter people. Whew! So many possibilities and questions still left to be answered.  Thank goodness for science! 

Oxytocin: The Trust Hormone

Hormones. They're responsible for alot of things, especially how we act and react.  Testosterone for example, helps men grow facial hair, increase muscle mass, as well as help grow male organs.  I think that's pretty incredible, but we always hear about testosterone and estrogen and never really about the other hormones like oxytocin.  Oxytocin is often known as the trust hormone or the cuddle hormone.  It's what makes humans humane.  The link above provides a list of ten reasons while oxytocin is the best thing since sliced bread.  From helping in social situations to helping moms be moms, oxytocin boosts pleasures.  Although it is notoriously known for trust and love, oxytocin's perhaps most important role is helping stimulate contractions of the uterus during deliver of a baby.  To me, I think that helps the most. Imagine if women had nothing to naturally assist ease child birthing.  Today we have medicine and technology and fancy things to help us, but imagine before.   If our bodies didn't produce this hormone in the past, I can't imagine how women would have gotten through that.  The video below is a study on how oxytocin helped men become “nicer”.  Men took either a placebo or oxytocin nasal spray and the ones with the oxytocin typically acted nicer.  It’s amazing how our body has all these chemicals that work for different things.  As time moves on, technology helps us discover newer and more natural remedies to our problems.  For example, the video also states how oxytocin may also be used to treat social anxiety or autism in the future.   One day perhaps all dangerous drugs can be replaces with natural things our body just makes on it’s own. 

Synethesia: I Taste Blue & Hear Orange

Ever wonder what it would be like to hear the color orange or taste the color green? When I first stumbled upon this disorder, I thought it was so peculiar how our bodies could somehow be cross wired and pick up things not meant for them.  It sort of felt like what it would be like being on a walkie talkie on a different wavelength picking up signals meant for someone else.  Most people would find tasting colors is just silly, but to people who have to live with synesthesia that is often the case. Synesthesia is the perception of one sense is simultaneously perceived by another or other senses.  Although this disease has no official established method to diagnose, about every 1 in 200 people have synesthesia.  It is thought that people with synesthesia’s neurons and synapses that are supposed to be within one sensory system somehow cross to another sensory system. It is also believed that these synesthetic experiences happen in the cerebral cortex. The most common form is colored letters and numbers.  The way a person with synesthesia perceives life is involuntary.  They don’t think of what they are seeing they just see.  It is projected outside of the body rather than just in the mind when they are asked to imagine something.  For a patient to have synesthesia, it must be the same everytime.  For example, if you see blue when your try to imagine a 7, it has to be blue always. The video below is a short film I found on Youtube.  The two boys have different kinds of synesthesia.  The boy who is putting headphones into different foods perceives tastes as sounds.  The boy who is on the floor smelling records perceives sound as smell.  The items all coming out of the giant speakers show that sound can be perceived as different colors, shapes or textures. 

Memory: CPU's Muse?

Memory has always been an interest of mine.  The brain is a fascinating thing and no one really knows how it works.  We have tried to come up with different methods and experiments to better help us label each part and assess what part is responsible for what, but when it comes to memory nothing is really concrete, yet anyway.  Hermann Ebbinghaus was a German psychologist whom is often called the father of memory.  Best known for his nonsense non-syllables,  Ebbinghaus was the first to experimentally investigate the human memory.  Using himself as the only test subject, Ebbinghaus would have a list of nonsense non-syllables (basically jibberish) that he would set off to try to memorize and then would test himself later. With this, he established a forgetting curve. The longer he waited to test himself, the more he forgot.   This was one of the first things discovered about our memory.  Since then, many other psychologists have given their fair time to trying to decipher how our memory works.  Most recently, Alan Baddeley has more clearly made up a model that explains our memory.  No system is perfect and his model has been criticized, but his model is the latest and sets a foundation for any future models to come. 

This model, explains the memory most like a computer.  Our sensory memory is seen as the input devices of a computer.  What we see, hear, touch, etc brings in information just like typing into a keyboard or scanning something into a computer would.  What we just saw or felt, is then sent to our brain and can stay there for awhile in the short term memory, but if we don't transfer it to the longer term memory it will be forgotten.  On a computer, we would have something up on the screen, but if we don't save the file, it will be lost and not retrievable.  All this work is all done by the central processing unit (CPU) on a computer which matches our central executive system in our memory.  Below is a video comparing and contrasting why a computer is/ isn't like the brain.  

Acting F.A.S.T

Strokes.  Never really expected just like heart attacks.  That’s why sometimes their called a “brain attack".  When I was younger, my grandpa had a stroke and I had no clue what that was or why half of his body had just stopped working after he left the hospital.  As my education advanced, I then realized that the effects of strokes could be minor to severe.   With the outlook depending on how much brain tissue is damaged, which body functions have been affects, and how quickly it got treated.  For my grandma, the whole left side of his body had stopped working.  From his leg to the right side of his mouth, no movement was shown.  For years, he did rehab daily and I didn’t quite understand what had happened and why he couldn't just get better.  Now looking back, I realize that he had a hemorrhagic stroke. A hemorrhagic stroke occurs when a blocked vessel bursts open causing blood to leak to the brain. For him, his right side of his brain had gotten damaged enough to not be able to control the left side of his body since our brains are contralateral.  

When my aunts had found him, I remember that he was talking to people who he hadn't seen in years.  He was confused about his location and was acting like a drunken person.  For people having a stroke, these are clear signs that something is wrong.  They will have changes occurring to their five senses as well as to their balance and coordination. May is national stroke awareness month.  Over 795,000 people will have strokes in the US.  Every minute that goes by, caused more brain damage.  By acting F.A.S.T., strokes can be caught quicker and can hopefully reduce the risk of brain damage.