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.

Cortical magnification, magnified.

Rereading my last post, I kind of got cortical magnification–for lack of a better word–wrong.  It’s odd, because I’ve actually had a good amount of exposure to cortical magnification.  It’s pretty much the phrase to describe the disproportionately huge amount of cortical space devoted to a very small percentage of our visual field.

The training of our eyes upon a fovea is fairly important for us to distinguish details and such, but as I understand it, different people train their eyes to different degrees.  For example, I understand that people who play copious amounts of video games tend to have slightly larger visual foveas, but even less cortical space dedicated to the further periphery, i.e. the space beyond a TV screen.  Similarly, basketball players and boxers and quarterbacks have far more cortical space devoted to the periphery, given that their sports often require them to react to visual cues without acknowledging them with their eyes (telegraphing in boxing).  There are several other examples of the plasticity of the visual system, which I will likely investigate, but only AFTER I have fully prepared for tomorrow’s test.

Blog #10: rather risque musings

When we talk about the visual system and the visual cortex, we consider cortical magnification.  Cortical magnification is a pretty big deal in most perception studies.  In my neurobiology of behavior class, we discussed cortical magnification for several animals with cortically-enhanced areas, like the hands of mole rats (who live in the dark), or the auditory fovea in bats (or humans, really), etc.  In class this week, we discussed cortical magnification in terms of facial recognition, and focus upon the eye region.

My honest curiosity is whether attraction can be measured in terms of cortical magnification.  Would we have extreme cortical magnification of, say, Angelina Jolie’s lips?  At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, if someone is dressed in a revealing manner, it can take quite a mustering of will to maintain eye contact.  I presume the same can be said of girls to guys and guys to other guys, and girls to other girls, with differing sexual orientation.  If we could measure the visual field’s cortical magnification, would we see a large percentage of cells dedicated to the periphery?

In a less crass (although still slightly uncouth) manner of speaking, suppose you find yourself in conversation with someone who has some enormous growth on their face, like a third ear on their forehead.  I think that if I saw someone like that, and then saw a visual representation of my cortical magnification, it would be about 99% third ear.

Blog #9: Blinded by the Light

This week, we discussed vision and light and the way our physical eye responds to light.  At one point, there was the maxim, “What you see is what you can see.”  First, this makes me think about vision, and the limits upon it, and the enhancements we have made through technology, and the enhancements we can find in nature.  We are limited only to the visible light spectrum, which is probably a good thing (as most sensory adaptations are).  But it is then conceivable that we might be able to perceive both UV light and IR light–and we can, with the help of technology, such as IR goggles, which bring those waves into the visible spectrum somehow.

But if you keep going, suppose we could see radio waves and TV waves.  It’s a reminder of exactly how much random energy is flying around our heads at all times–radio, cell phones, wireless, TV, Bluetooth, UV, IR, etc.  Certain animals are highly tuned to motion–that’s another type of information that could be integrated.  I imagine that our minds would find some way to distinguish between these energies, but I wonder just how useful it would be to see things that we don’t really directly interact with.  It would probably make certain types of espionage much more difficult.  It would also just be generally overwhelming, were all these integrated into vision.

Blog #8: Vision

Earlier in class we talked about how visual cues can influence the things we hear. Clearly, vision is our dominant sense. Our other senses are arguably subservient to vision. If we smell something good, we go looking for the source. If we hear something break, we look to see what it was. If we taste something gross in an otherwise delicious food, we spit it out and look at it (unless we’re on a date). If someone on our left taps us on our right shoulder, we look, prompting a “made you look!” and a bit of self-congratulation.

I found a perfect example of our eyes influencing our ears. It’s hilarious:

carmina.ytmnd.com

Anyway, as we begin to study the eye, I’m interested to pick up new nuances of the workings of the organs that bring us our most vivid interpretation of our environment. I was far-sighted when I was little; my eyes couldn’t see things that were close to me. But then, in about fifth grade, the optometrist told me that “my eyes were better.” I don’t really know anyone else whose eyes just healed themselves. I hope to get some insight as to how the eyes grow and change themselves.

Blog #5: Smell and taste

In class, we touched on the idea that smell and taste are specially linked to memory, relative to other senses.  I notice this especially when I go to visit my old schools.  The smell of Ms. Ashton’s third grade classroom (sanitation products and apple cinnamon-scented Lysol), the cafeteria (bleach and far too many intermingling food smells), the football locker room (sweat and evil), and even the pavement of the parking lot each have their own specific memories triggered.

Tastes have memories, too, but less so.  I think the reason we say that taste is especially linked to memory is because taste is linked to smell, which is especially linked to memory.  The taste of Diet Coke always reminds me of a lady from my church who, in my formative years, would carry four or five Diet Cokes in her purse and give them to my friends and me.  But my least favorite thing about Diet Coke is the smell–the “aftertastes”–of aspartame (or whatever it is that makes it seem that way).  It’s a steely sort of smell.  But that’s what makes me think that it’s the smells of tastes that trigger memories, rather than the tastes themselves.

Blog #3: The Pain Train

Wednesday we talked quite a bit about the neuroscientific aspects of perception.  We talked about pathways: pain pathways, sensory pathways, reflexive pathways, and the like.  Most interesting to me was the talk of pain pathways.  Pain, to a hedonist, is the negative half of the human experience.  Some philosophies say pain is merely the absence of pleasure.  Some philosophies say pleasure is merely the absence of pain.  So I had to wonder how much of what we can globally call “pain,” is actually measured in the body.

It’s clearly more than just the result of physical trauma, like cuts and scratches.  The same pain pathways are what lead us to turn over in our sleep, preventing bedsores.  Furthermore, pain pathways are activated in situations of illness.  So I have to wonder if the idea that “the pain pathway is what keeps us from touching a hot stove,” idea is completely accurate.  When our hands jerk away from a hot stove, or an electric shock, or dry ice, that’s the reflexive pathway in action.  And so I wonder if congenital indifference to pain affects the reflexive pathway.  If so, then those people are really in an unfathomable amount of trouble for keeping their bodies safe and healthy.  If not, then they can truly attest to the remarkability of the reflexive pathway.

My second musing was one of whether or not the pain pathway is activated in situations of depression.  Anyone who suffers from depression can describe the feeling as “pain,” and studies have long confirmed that it is indeed a physiological condition with a chemical treatment option.  What effects to antidepressants have upon the pain pathways?  And if none, should the English language introduce a more pointed, analytical distinction between physical pain and emotional pain?

Blog #2

This week we talked about many different introductory concepts of psychology  and the study of how the mind works.  We went over some of the schools of thought–the psychological, biological, and theoretical approaches, specifically.  I’ve had some introduction to psychological studies in high school and in a few courses here at Vandy, but most of my experience to this point has been in the biological field of neuroscience.

When people asked me what neuroscience was and why I was studying it, and I told them that it was pretty much the biology of psychology.  But that’s not quite it–it seems like neuroscience has grown into its own science–and it seems to maintain the momentum as a growing science.

Admittedly, it’s been a bit odd readjusting to a more psychological, behavioral, experimental, theoretical approach to the workings of the mind, and it may take some getting used to.  However, it will be good to take a step back from the microscopic and view the way people interact.  It seems like the real-life applications of psych will be more prominent in this class.  And it doesn’t seem to deny the biological–a look at the different brain scans was just the introduction here.

All in all, I’m excited about this class.