Akinetopsia

Easily my favorite part of this class (and my favorite part of neuroscience altogether) is when we can see examples of the very strange things that can happen when the fragile wiring of our brains is disrupted.  We see several instances of this commonly, like color-blindness or supertasters, but it’s the more bizarre, rare disorders that intrigue me more.  I think it’s for the same reason that I do poorly in all biology-related classes (whether I like them or not): at some point since I graduated high school, my right brain cannibalistically devoured my left brain, and I am only good at conceptualizing poetically interesting things.

Case in point: akinetopsia.  I thought about this disorder quite a bit.  I decided that I would much rather be blind than have akinetopsia.  Fortunately, akinetopsia is extraordinarily rare, so I have a much higher likelihood of going blind (knock on wood!).  To me, akinetopsia would be like having your life narrated as a children’s book: you are given an active auditory narrative, but have to match the actions about which you hear to stationary images.  Or like a comic book: all action happens in “the gutter,” or the space between images, and a person with akinetopsia would essentially live deciphering that action.  I would love to see an akinetopsic take up photography as a hobby–and I don’t mean that like for my own entertainment.  Someone with akinetopsia would have a very distinct understanding of visual activity going on in front of their eyes in a moment different from the one that they have a perception of, so a photographer would have to wait for auditory cues to shoot a picture, and then decide if it was what they had hoped.

The video link to the video we watched in class is called “jazz recital for akinetopsia patients,” and it seems fairly inaccurate with my understanding of akinetopsia.  I would assume that, judging from the patient in the video’s descriptions, single images without motion linger in the mind until some arbitrary cue updates them.  It would be more akin to a youtube video with an awful refresh rate than what they show, which is essentially a jumbled, time-sped-and-slowed video that “skips” like a scratched cd (or like the modern jazz composition involved).

FINAL BLOG ENTRY

I never really acquired a real aptitude for it, but I’ve had a fascination with neuroscience, even after I left premed to become and English major (because it seems that at some point in the summer after high school, my right brain devoured my left, and I went from being a balanced student to a great English student with no aptitude for science.  So it goes). I look at it from a writer’s point of view, as the mechanics behind the human experience. I’m always fascinated with instances of some sort of deficit in this experience. Narratives such as “Flowers for Algernon” and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night” are written from the perspective of someone with major neurological impairments.  And because I’m interested in narrative perspective, perception is very relevant to my interest in writing. That’s why I took this class. For my final blog entry, I researched a question I had earlier about depression and pain pathways.

Depression is, psychologically speaking, a condition of mental disturbance charactarized by feelings of despondancy to a degree and duration longer than environmental circumstances would otherwise dictate, and it is both biological and genetic.  From a writer’s standpoint, it is an internal conflict that has no external resolution, which explains why so many major characters in literature can be judged as suffering from depression.  It’s a fascinating literary struggle.

As neuroscience progresses, we are building bridges between the physical world and the metaphysical world.  For example, perception is now equally important to both biologists and philosophers, whereas it was strictly the realm of the latter a few hundred years ago.  So, then, have we correlated the nature of physical pain, which we studied in depth in perception, and its emotional correlate, depression. This article by Michael Jann and Julian Slade investigates the use of antidepressants in treating chonic pain with antidepressants cites a very high correlation between depression and chronic nociceptive pain.

Antidepressants can be used to treat chronic pain.  This fact alone suggests nociceptive pain, especially over long periods of time, activates not only pain pathways, which, evolutionarily speaking, act as a warning system.  In the same way, depression occasionally acts as a warning system.  For example, poor diet, excersize, and/or sleep habits can act as environmental triggers of depression.  The antithesis is true; that good died, exercise, and sleep habits can in some cases treat and even alleviate depression.  This is a different evolutionary perspective from the more typically accepted evolutionary argument, which is that the symptoms of depression (hypersomnia, decreased metabolism), may have been helpful in getting evolutionary ancestors through winters.  Seasonal Affect working FOR us!

In this way, and in so many others, the human brain is geared to care for the body, both in the short-and-long term.   This provides a depth of understanding to pain, not only of the nociceptive variety, but of the emotional kind.  And this helps us understand that our perception is our greatest conscious tool in caring for our own existence.

Colorblindness

This week in class, I laughed quietly to myself at one point during the lecture. People around me assumed I was not paying attention and watching funny youtube videos or something, but in reality the lecture reminded me of a funny story.

Zack was a linebacker on my high school football team. He was small, but had perfect form. He also had great discipline and was very coachable, but that’s mostly beside the point. Our sophomore year, Zack almost got kicked out of games because he was flagged four (4) times for… sideline violations.

Sideline warnings are about the most pointless penalty you can get. Most other penalties, though bad, will help the team if gone unflagged (that’s called cheating, though). However, sideline warnings and penalties are pure carelessness. The coaches generally just yelled at him, but after the fourth time, he got yanked aside. I happened to be there to hear the conversation:

COACH: Are you stupid? Stay behind the line.

ZACK: I did! I never stepped on the field!

COACH: Are you stupid?

It went on like this for some time. Zack was not stupid; he’s actually a brilliant math student. But the coach asked him if he was stupid about a dozen times before they communicated that there was a second line to stay behind–a team box, rather than just staying off the field. But because our colors were maroon and grey, the maroon team box was completely undistinguishable by Zack, who was deuteranopically color-blind. It wasn’t a big deal in any of the games in which he was flagged, so the coaches were able to laugh about it with him, but the whole team was assigned to making sure he stayed in the right place on the sidelines.

And, for the record, I’m jealous of synesthesiacs. Duke Ellington, Leonard Bernstein, and Pharell Williams are all confirmed synesthesiacs (according to the American Synesthesia Association). I’ve read interviews where John Mayer claims to be one, too. Jimi Hendrix made claims that music made him see colors, but that might also be attributable to the MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF HALLUCINAGENS that he absorbed through pores his temples in his famous bandanas.