Narcolepsy

Narcolepsy is a disorder that affects the control of sleep and wakefulness. People with this disorder sleep excessively at day and have sudden sleep attacks. It is typically beginning is so at age 15-25 but it can happen to any age. Some symptoms include excessive daytime sleepiness, cataplexy, and visual hallucinations and sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis is a temporary inability to move or speak while falling asleep or waking up. Lasts about a few seconds to several minutes. People with Narcolepsy have very difficult life and can be very dangerous. They can fall asleep doing any type of activity at every time of the day. The video we saw in class tells us only one day of the life of a Narcolepsy called Mohammad. He lives in a constant fight to stay awake to be able for him to make different activities and tasks. He suffers form cataplexies and narcolepsy. He can have approximately about 60 sleeps attacks per day. This makes it very difficult to do normal tasks. Common activities such as walking and eating can be extremely dangerous to the people with this type of disorder. If he is left alone he can sleep risking himself to many different dangerous or even deaths.

Sleep and Dream

The brain needs to sleep to regenerate and while this process it dreams to reorganize data. The brain can shift into different stages when the person is asleep. The brain passes trough five different stages; these are called stage 1,2,3,4 and REM. In the REM period meaning rapid eye movement is where the brain does most of the dreaming. Scientist use people with REM disorder to help them understand this stage of sleep in the brain. These people brain does not turn off the connection of brain and muscle during their sleep making the act their dreams vividly. They have found that you could dream in any stage but REM is where the most vivid and real dreams are found. Scientists have also observed that REM dreams are typically more negative, the found that 3 out of every 4 dreams are negative. They have predicted this because the amygdule, the part that control emotions, is more active because the brain is more active as well. Deep sleep which is responsible by stages 3 and 4 help repair brain cell. REM sleep however organizes data or learns to act in a specific situation. The one who is responsible for the creation of dreams is the Parietal Lobe. Dreams are predicted to occur for many reasons. One is the remembering of thing we have seen or lived. Nightmares however also have their specific function; this is a form a survival. Nightmare help create situations and places that can be dangerous and it’s a drill or training of how to act. Traumatic events happen in the past can also be responsible for such dreams. Research concluded that lucid dreaming can be possible. Lucid dreaming is to become aware of the world while you are dreaming. This can be learned and can be a good training for you to become aware even when asleep.

Sensory Deprivation and It's Affect on the Brain

A very controversial experiment to test sensory deprivation was conducted using g regular normal people and depriving them for 48 hours in a bunk. They tested them for a series of areas in the brain and basic functions before they entered. Some tests were of memory, info processing, verbal fluency and subject. Stimulation is what helps and exercises the brain connections to improve the brain function. After 18 hours of the subjects inside they became to get disorientated and lost track of time. 24 hour through them started erupting upset behaviors. Their brain started to slow down as time passes with no stimulation and it starts to lose some brain connections. When they reach 30 hours they became pacing up and down their bunk. This is a natural response toward their deprivation which is a way for the body and brain to do something. As the clock ticks the subjects begin to struggle with getting distracted this results in the bran occupying itself with imagination. They start imaging and hallucinating things. These hallucinations are not only visual but they can also hear things. They do not control what they imagine but it is an immediate reaction of the brain from the deprivation. After 48 hours the experiment is complete and the subjects are released. They repeat the test given to at the beginning and the results decrease immensely. Their abilities are diminished and they have become much worse. When they go out they began appreciating more the little details around them. This experiments helped scientist observed the frangibility of the brain when humans are left truly alone.

Mental Abilities: Genius, Savant and Autism

1.Explain in detail what "savant syndrome" means.
-Savants are people who despite serious mental or physical disability have quite remarkable, and sometimes spectacular, talents. This is an exceedingly rare phenomena, although there are several well documented cases.( http://www.psy.dmu.ac.uk/drhiles/Savant%20Syndrome.htm)

2. What does genius mean? Explain the difference between genius and savant.
-someone who has exceptional intellectual ability and originality; brilliance: unusual mental ability, ace: someone who is dazzlingly skilled in any field exceptional creative ability, a natural talent(wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn) the differences with savants and geniuses is that savants have a special ability but also has a disability or disorder while geniuses do not carry with their talents a disability in another area.

3. What is a stroke and how could it affect your mental functioning?
-Strokes happen when blood flow to your brain stops. Within minutes, brain cells begin to die. There are two kinds of stroke. The more common kind, called ischemic stroke, is caused by a blood clot that blocks or plugs a blood vessel in the brain. The other kind, called hemorrhagic stroke, is caused by a blood vessel that breaks and bleeds into the brain. (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/stroke.html ) Strokes can disabilities the affected area in the brain or the area that is not receiving oxygen. If a serious stroke it can lead to death.

4. What is a functional MRI and how does it help us understand brain activity?
-Functional MRI (fMRI) is a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based neuroimaging technique which allows us to detect the brain areas which are involved in a task, a process or an emotion.( http://www.imagilys.com/functional-MRI-fMRI/)

5. What is the corpus callosum and what role does it play in your brain's activity?
- The corpus callosum is a huge bundle of nerve fibers found in mammalian brains. It connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and is responsible for most of the communication between the two. (http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-corpus-callosum.htm). This is responsible for the working together of the two hemispheres which allows you to perform task that require multiple functions.

6. What is epilepsy and how might it affect your brain's abilities?
- Epilepsy is a brain disorder that causes people to have recurring seizures. The seizures happen when clusters of nerve cells, or neurons, in the brain send out the wrong signals. People may have strange sensations and emotions or behave strangely. They may have violent muscle spasms or lose consciousness. Epilepsy has many possible causes, including illness, brain injury and abnormal brain development. In many cases, the cause is unknown.( http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/epilepsy.html)

7. What is autism?
-Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism)

8. What is Asperger's Syndrome?
- Asperger syndrome or Asperger's syndrome or Asperger disorder is an autism spectrum disorder that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome)

Synesthesia

1. Synesthesia: “a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color.”(dictionary.com)

2. grapheme-color synesthesia: “is a form of synesthesia in which an individual's perception of numbers and letters is associated with the experience of colors.” (wikipidia.org) It is one of the most common form of it

3. ordinal-linguistic personification : “is a form of synesthesia in which ordered sequences, such as ordinal numbers, days, months and letters are associated with personalities”(wikipidia.org)

4. number-form synesthesia: “A number form is a mental map of numbers, which automatically and involuntarily appears whenever someone who experiences number-forms thinks of numbers”(wikipidia.org)

5. sound-color synesthesia: “: voice, music, and assorted environmental sounds such as clattering dishes or dog barks trigger color and simple shapes that arise, move around, and then fade when the sound stimulus ends”(wikipidia.org)

6. lexical-gustatory synesthesia: “individual words and the phonemes of spoken language evoke taste sensations in the mouth”(wikipidia.org)

Work Cited:
• http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/synesthesia
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia#Number_form_synesthesia