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! 

Effects of Music

Music has always been an interest of mine.  I like playing the piano as well as listening to different varieties of music.  I'm not a super hard core pianist or anything so I doubt my brain would be changed, but I found it fascinating to know that anything can affect a person's brain to the extent that it will change it and morph it to be different than a normal person’s brain.  The two most changed areas of the brain due to this are hearing and finger movement, but their gray matter is also increased.  The auditory, motor, and visual spatial areas of the cerebral cortex in musicians tend to be dramatically different than those of normal people.  I believe that this may have something to do with just how much musicians use those things the most.  I searched in hopes to find an image to show visually the difference between a normal brain and a musician’s brain, but didn't have any luck.  However, an article I read said that they are visually different.  The human brain is a fascinating thing and to know that it can be altered is just mind blowing.  I found the article below which also talks about how musician's brains have changed and become more highly developed.    Use it or lose it is basically what I got from it.  The more you use it the more it is strengthened and becomes part of you.  We are responsible for the changes in our brain and musicians’ brain are just one way of proving this.  

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505083421.htm

Neurotransmitters: Fire Away Fire Away

       While I was doing this week's readings, I realized/ remembered how much I hate reading textbooks.  It's not that they're not interesting, it's just that most of the time my attention-span can be very short.  In module 3.1, our textbook talks about synapses and basically what they are and their properties.  Chemical synapses or neurotransmitters, are the communicators of the brain. My quest was to learn about neurotransmitters the way that made the most sense to me.  I found this website below that links to their synapses overview.  I personally liked the picture because it's really colorful and helped my remember it better/easier.  Also, I browsed through their website and found other cool things such as, their synapses journal club, other articles focusing on different parts of the brain and dendrites, astrocytes, etc.  I went back and looked at the astrocytes on because we had gone over them last week and learned that they have relationships with the synapses in the hippocampus.  I thought that was cool and also as I continued looking through the website, I found a reconstruct software that is free and is supposed to let you examine the brain.  (http://synapses.clm.utexas.edu/tools/reconstruct/reconstruct.stm)

next to this picture on the website, it takes you to a microscopic view of the different components that make the neurotransmitters.  I found this useful because drawings are nice, but seeing the real thing makes it amazing to know that those are what the ones in me look like.  It is absolutely fascinating that we start with about 10 ,000 trillion synapses and as we age we end up with roughly 1,000 to 5,000 trillion synapses.  This is a lot less than what we start off with, but the number is still in the trillions.



http://synapses.clm.utexas.edu/anatomy/chemical/synapse.stm