I am Santa! Duh!

Christmas Carols for the Psychologically Deranged:

1) Schizophrenia - Do You Hear What I Hear, the Voices, the Voices?

2) Amnesia - I Don't Remember If I'll be Home for Christmas

3) Narcissistic - Hark the Herald Angels Sing About Me

4) Manic - Deck The Halls And Walls And House And Lawn And Streets And Stores And 

Office And Town And Cars And Buses And Trucks And Trees And Fire Hydrants And...........

5) Multiple Personality Disorder - We Three Queens Disoriented Are

6) Paranoid - Santa Claus Is Coming To Get Us

7) Borderline Personality Disorder - You Better Watch Out, You Better not Shout, I'm Gonna Cry, and I'll not Tellin' You Why

8) Full Personality Disorder - Thoughts of Roasting You On an Open Fire

9) Obsessive Compulsive Disorder - Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells...

10) Agoraphobia - I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day But Wouldn't Leave My House

Milner's Mémoire

About two months ago, on October 16th, I attended an amazing lecture at McGill...

My Life in Science: The Excitement of Discovery was the title of the autobiographical lecture given by none other than Brenda Milner aka the mother of neuropsychology. I was looking forward to see her again as I’ve seen her twice already at other lectures. This one however, was quite different as Brenda Milner was speaking about her own life and the discovery of her passion. Before her lecture, there was a fifteen to twenty minutes ceremony with prizes for undergraduate students presenting a research project. Then, Milner’s colleague introduced her and mentioned that science has been defined as a gradual accumulation of knowledge, and that in Milner’s case, she invented a whole field! He also emphasised that, this year, Brenda Milner will be awarded the Balzan Price, worth a million dollars.

Brenda Milner celebrated her 91^st birthday this summer and mentioned in her speech that it was the first time she would give a lecture seated due to recommendations from her medical colleagues. In that matter, Brenda Milner began her speech by introducing her dream as an undergraduate at Cambridge University which was to become a mathematician (to this day, she still wants to be a mathematician). She soon got lonely in mathematics and decided to try philosophy and psychology. After that, Brenda told us that she got lucky at many instances. The first luck was that as she got married to the engineer Peter Milner, they ended up moving to Montreal because of an atomic energy project Peter was interested in. That is when she worked at the University of Montreal (having always a great passion for French) teaching experimental psychology. Her second stroke of luck occurred when she went to a seminar given by Donald Hebb. She was very inspired by Hebb and convinced him to let her work for him. Then, the third lucky instance was that Hebb worked with Dr. Penfield (the founder of the Montreal Neurological Institute) and referred her. Hence, Brenda Milner was in the heart of the action concerning what is now called neuropsychology. Brenda Milner was studying visual perception in patients with lobotomies to the temporal lobes. Those were performed and still are to different extents to relieve a person from epilepsy. However, we all know Brenda Milner for her major work in memory and the different kinds of memory systems. Milner soon had to change interests as her patients complained of memory problems.

This is where it got interesting. She had one patient that suffered from anterograde amnesia (being the loss of the ability to make new memories) which is a very serious memory loss as a result of his unilateral temporal lobotomy (removing the temporal regions on one side of the brain, usually in the left). Later on, Brenda Milner was sent at the Hartford Hospital to study another similar case in a patient called H.M. that had undergone bilateral lobotomies (to both temporal lobes). We can now call him Henry Gustav Molaison as he died this very year to my greatest deception. Brenda Milner said that she was often asked if she was sad. She replied that she cannot be as Mr. Molaison continually saw her every time for the first time. Thus, Henry never recognised her in the decades she worked with him. These two patients (P.B. and H.M.) led her to hypothesise that in order to create anterograde amnesia, both temporal regions must be lesioned in some way. This meant that P.B. had already a damaged right temporal lobe before the surgery. This was in fact correct and was determined only after his death as the technology was not invented to look at live brains. From there, research flourished on memory processing and separating different kinds of “memories” since both amnesic patients showed deficits in specific types of memory for example episodic memory (of events) but not procedural memory (of skills acquired such as riding a bicycle).

Finally, I stopped writing frantically after loads of more interesting findings and discoveries told by this amazing speaker. I remember thinking to myself “God, I wish she was my grandmother!”. This, of course, would have been the most convenient as I’m aiming for a career in neuropsychology. In any case, her speech was fun, interesting and very educational as the knowledge on the subject came from the horse’s mouth. I strongly encourage you (as Brenda Milner did also) to watch the movie Memento (2000): a uniquely filmed thriller focusing on an anterograde amnesiac. It will not only peak your interest on memory processing, but keep you on the edge of your seats for the duration of the movie.

Dreams: Warm-up or Build-up?

Here’s some comments on the article A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain by Benedict Carey [can read or scan quickly at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/health/10mind.html?_r=2&ref=science]. This article points out a new theory of dream interpretation which slightly discards psychological interpretations and replaces them with physiological ones. The article refers to dreaming as being more a brain warm-up before facing the day instead of the build-up and release of the previous day's processing.

There are a few points in the article that I was skeptical about. First of all, this article’s arguments were slightly too reductionistic as some of the researchers, such as Dr. Hobson, stated that the primary purpose of dreaming might be physiological. I find that this article tries to slowly set aside the psychological portion of dreaming since physiological answers are considered more credible.

I still find that the theory of REM sleep being a “warm-up before waking” sounds very plausible. However, I think we face a long debate of what came first, the chicken or the egg? The chicken being the psychological processing of events during the past day and the egg, the physiological warming-up for the day to come.

I find it disappointing that dreams do have a biased and non-scientific past, but reducing them to spontaneous physiological activities doesn’t seem to have more scientific basis than assigning them to psychological symbols.

Also, I am wondering about the 80% of dream contents that the dreamer hasn’t encountered while awake. Reports of lucid dreamers on their recollection of people and places in their dreams only support weakly the idea that only 20% of dreams are “made” of concrete memories since even awake, we sometimes don’t perceive a person or place as familiar even if we encountered it before. Hence, dreams can very well use past stimuli that we weren’t consciously aware of but that was still registered into our memory.

Finally, I found the findings of the study of Goethe and Hobson fascinating. The fact that frontal areas would be involved in lucid dreaming and waking but not normal dreaming is good evidence of the sense of logic and self-awareness one has in lucid dreaming and waking but not in normal non-lucid-sleep that is characterized by delusions and psychotic-like state. Furthermore, wasn’t psychosis associated with deficiencies in frontal areas… Thus, could it be that lucid dreaming research will help us find a prognosis for psychotic patients? This will be in another post. In the meantime…

To finish this comment, it is amazing that lucid dreaming seems to be in between waking and dreaming even in terms of brain activity as EEG data suggests activation of both visual areas and frontal areas (to a lesser extent than waking).

Here’s a recent interesting review on the physiology of lucid dreaming:

The Neurobiology of Consciousness: Lucid Dreaming Wakes Up

https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/IJoDR/article/view/403/pdf_1

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Other links:

Design art made by ROBO Design and found on http://www.robodesign.ro/files/gallery/original/lucid-dreaming.jpg

Side note advice <3

Random tip to all the women out there who ask for advice when a long-distance-guy doesn’t answer their email.

Ladies,

Here are the possibilities to explain this phenomenon in increasing order of probability:

either you wrote the wrong email, 
your email is in his junk mail, 
he doesn't know what to answer, 
he decided not to answer, 
he didn't think you would write that soon, 
he doesn’t know how to type, 
he doesn’t have internet, 
he is an alien, 
he is gay, 
he is pretty, 
he doesn’t deserve you, 
he pretends he’s rich, 
he doesn’t tan, 
his house burned down, 
he has aphasia, 
he is drunk, no, 
he is not drunk, 
he can type when drunk, 
he has a headache now, 
he has dissociative amnesia,  
he is studying, 
he is a girl, 
he is further than you thought, 
he doesn’t understand English or French, 
he is scared of you, 
he forgot your name, 
he truly believes in the bug of 2010,  
he is shy, 
he is stupid, 
find yourself a Montrealer (i.e. local)!

PS: If none of these explanations are satisfactory, check your junk mail.

It Rains Oranges in a Dali Painting: Movie Review

NB: The following does not spoil the movie if you didn’t watch it yet. However, I strongly encourage you to do so as you probably guessed.

The Fall (2006) walks on a thin line between the surrealistic style of it's landscapes and the authenticity of its main characters. The title is a simple but clever choice for this movie, since it first suggest the fall of Alexandria (Catinca Untaru, yes a talented little Romanian girl) from an orange tree. This resulted in a broken arm and her being hospitalized for a while. Alexandria soon wonders around the hospital and meets this young man called Roy (Lee Pace) that is paralyzed in his bottom limbs and that starts to tell her wondrous adventure tales. Another meaning to the title is the fall of governor Odius, in the story’s plot, but it can also refer to the fall of human kind after the original sin. {I was actually surprised to the amount of blood spilled in this movie.}

I found the movie to be an artistic masterpiece! In one scene, the Indian’s wife is trapped in the Labyrinth of Despair that looked familiar (not that I’ve been there of course!) and it suddenly reminded me of a surrealistic painting of labyrinth I saw at an exhibition. When I searched, I found M. C. Escher’s painting of Relativity (the one below); I’m still not quite sure that's the one, but it’s close enough.

In any case, The Fall was also psychologically realistic. Thus, it is done in such a way that we, viewers, see everything and know what Alexandria doesn’t, such as the fact that Roy is quite mentally unwell too. As the story he’s telling her shapes around his state of mind, little Alexandria hopes for a happy ending…

Dreams by Day and None at Night!

The video below shows the trailer of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4 Episode 17 called "Night Terrors". I highly recommend this entire season to any psychology and/or science fiction fans out there. This 4th season is a little different from the others as it is full of mind games, psychopathology and insanity, and touches on subjects such as the crossing of mental boundaries between "alien species". Even though the quality of this trailer is prehistoric and gives you a different impression, it still shows you a preview of the episode and helps me introduce the topic of psychosis.

This star trek episode starts with the ship Enterprise finding another ship that is in perfect shape where the whole crew of 34 people was murdered. As they investigate the problem, the crew on the Enterprise start to experience auditory and visual hallucinations (such as snakes, seeing people that aren’t there, seeing dead people getting up), paranoia and delusions. Also, including many instances of forgetfulness and confusion. Doctor Crusher and counselor Troi soon realize that the whole crew is moving towards the realms of psychosis. This episode, even though sometimes following obvious Hollywoodian styles, is still a good suspense and keeps you intrigued especially if you want to verify if the claims made in the episode are still relevant today.

Thus, the episode is called "Night Terrors" even though it does not explicitly show the phenomenon of night terrors. To clarify, night terrors often occur in children between 4 and 12 years old, (but can easily be experienced by anyone) and consist of sudden awakenings from sleep due to intense fear and panic even though nothing is remembered from the dream itself. Night terrors are different from nightmares since they occur specifically during Stage 4 or REM sleep, whereas nightmares are independent from the sleep cycle. I would suggest watching it before reading the next part in green.

Thus, the symptoms the crew exhibit are consistent with the progression of psychosis such as in schizophrenics, involving  forgetfulness, delusions leading to full blown paranoia and hallucinations. However, these symptoms can be temporary and not due to a specific disorder, but to the environment. A possible trigger for these symptoms when people use hallucinogens, they will then experience both visual and auditory hallucinations, but will also sometimes be subject to delusions, intense panic episodes and forgetfulness.

Also, in a study by Cohen et al. (2005) it has been observed that people with the Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) were also experiencing vivid dreams, illusions (e.g. mistaking objects), hallucinations and delusions. GBS patients also have sleep disturbances. We do not know if the syndrome itself is causing the symptoms or the sleep disturbances do. In any case, it was found that patients with GBS experiencing hallucinations would have significantly shorter periods of REM sleep in their sleep cycles than GBS experiencing no hallucinations and people without the syndrome. In this case, towards the end of the episode, the crew finally realizes that they are REM sleep deprived which causes these psychotic symptoms. Remember, the episode was based on theories already developed involving dreams and psychosis. However, I was still wondering if it was relevant today.  Thus, this previous recent finding still supports the idea that REM sleep deprivation is correlated with increased hallucinations confirming the claims of the episode of 1991. Thus, other examples of peered reviewed articles, one in 1962 by Ralph J. Berger and one in 2008 by Scarone et al., are both associating REM sleep (where dreams occurs) and psychosis. Thus, this shows how across time, even though we do not fully understand the processes involving dreams and psychosis, these two states of mind  are still closely related even decades later. This subject will be further discussed in future posts.

Finally, this episode first reminded me of the movie Solaris (2002) starring George Clooney based on the book with the same name by Stanislaw Lem (1961) and which I won't discuss here either, but highly recommend to anyone!!

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Guillain-Barré Syndrome. (n.d.). Encyclopedia of Medicine. Retrieved September 20, 2009, from Answers.com           Web site:http://www.answers.com/topic/guillain-barr-syndrome.

Night terror. (n.d.). Encyclopedia of Medicine. Retrieved September 20, 2009, from Answers.com Web site: http://www.answers.com/topic/night-terror.

Berger, Ralph J. (1962). Effects of sleep deprivation on behaviour, subsequent sleep, and dreaming. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 108, 457-465.

Cochen et al, (2005) Vivid dreams, hallucinations, psychosis and REM sleep in Guillain–Barré syndrome. Brain, 128, 2535–2545.

Scarone et al, (2008). The dream as a model for psychosis: an experimental approach using bizarreness as a cognitive marker. Schizophr Bull, 34(3), 515–522.

Mind Games: The solution is around your head.

Try to find as many solutions to this problem as you can. It was invented to assess and problem solving in an experimental setting*. I will explain it further and give you the statistics on it after you tried it :)


Here it is: 


"Suppose you are a doctor faced with a patient who has a malignant tumor in his
stomach. It is impossible to operate on the patient, but unless the tumor is destroyed the
patient will die. There is a kind of ray that can be used to destroy the tumor. If the rays reach
the tumor all at once at a sufficiently high intensity, the tumor will be destroyed.
Unfortunately, at this intensity the healthy tissue that the rays pass through on the way to the
tumor will also be destroyed. At a lower intensity the rays are harmless to healthy tissue, but
they will not affect the tumor either.
What type of procedure might be used to destroy the tumor with the rays, and at the
same time avoid destroying the healthy tissue?"


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* I will post the references and credits after a few days, so you won't be tempted to look for answers or hint.

The Soloist: Movie Review *****

This is my personal review of the movie The Soloist (2009) starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.

I'm apologizing in advance if I'm revealing too much about the movie. So if you didn't see it, please read only the next paragraph (up to the video) and watch the trailer!

Thus, for those who didn't see it, I highly recommend this movie. Both Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. are amazing and are acting with humility and professionalism. This is much more than just a touching story about a homeless guy; it is also smart and thoughtful. Furthermore, the Soloist pictures the homeless, the psychotic and the ignorant. It is worth watching for it's simple, realistically written story and for it's ironic turns that represent well what our society is all about.

First of all, what I immediately loved about The Soloist is the transition from one scene to the next. At the beginning of the movie, most of the scenes are eclectic and sudden, but are consistent with how our society drives in the fast lane. Then, later in the movie, when journalist Steve Lopez (Downey Jr.) meets a homeless named Nathaniel (Foxx) and hears him play the cello for the first time, everything slows down and we see some beautiful close-ups of the instrument's strings while he plays his heart out.

Also, I noticed how accurately the journalist represented society's ignorance when dealing with the homeless and the mentally ill. At the beginning of the movie, Steve was quite arrogant and was using Nathaniel just to make a good article. As the movie progressed however, Steve wanted to help Nathaniel but didn't know how. Steve, as the majority of people in western societies, believed that the best solution was to put Nathaniel (who was in fact schizophrenic) on psychotropic drugs and in an institution. Although this solution is highly attractive and easy, Steve soon realizes that one cannot "fix" a person like one would a car.

Also, throughout the movie, Steve's problem with raccoons digging holes in his yard was a perfect metaphor for how the media brought us to believe in instant results and the unlimited power of money. Thus, Steve heard that if he buys coyote urine and hangs it from a tree, raccoons will go away. He finally falls for the idea and later realizes in shame that he invested for nothing. I loved how ironic and realistic that scene was since some solutions are nowadays so simplistic and sometimes even ridiculous without mentioning how we often invent problems that do not really exist.

Furthermore, there was this scene that frustrated me so much where Steve presents Nathaniel with a form for him to sign stating that he has schizophrenia and that he needs supervision, etc. Although the majority of people with mental disorders are NOT violent, schizophrenics do tend to act more violently than others and since they are also anosognosic (meaning of not being aware of a problem or impairment one might have), they will react particularly strongly when judged or confronted with their illness.

Overall, it was a magnificent movie leaving you with hope that humility and generosity will not only continue to help the unfortunate, but will also inspire respect of the mentally ill.

Sex I.D.

Here's a test to assess the gender of your brain found on BBC's website . I find this to be a reliable source as I am fond of BBC's documentaries but also since it uses information based on theories and studies I learned in my psychology classes. Some of these tests are in fact used in neuropsychology and neuroendocrinology. Also, the statisticals findings of researchers are given at the completion of each test to inform you of the correlations they found. Thus, enjoy while learning more about yourself and the brain :)

Take the SEX I.D. TEST!!

BEWARE!: This test averages the observations made when comparing spatial, verbal and other abilities of each sex. Keep in mind, there are generalization and many exceptions as well. Furthermore, I believe there is no such thing as a male or female brain. However, there are some areas more developed in one gender than the other and some significant differences in brain activity. For example, there seems to be more lateralisation in the male brain than in the female brain. Interestingly, even if we correct for body weight, the male's brain is still bigger than the female's (of course that is up for interpretation). Also, there are correlations with the performance on a specific tasks and the level of certains hormones in the blood (e.g. spatial ability has been associated with higher testosterone levels and the right hemisphere, usually in males but also in females). Finally, another example, in general, women have a better performance on verbal tasks and abstract thinking, which are associated with the left hemisphere.

Studying How to Learn to Study

This post is for the students out there!

One of the advantages in studying psychology is that you learn how brain processes occur (or at least the hypotheses of scientists about how they occur).We are far from knowing how it does work. In any case, the things we can state with more certainty are the factors that can slow down memory encoding.
Of course, we all KNOW cramming is bad, but maybe we should stop to study how to learn to study...
Thus, here are some hints provided by the study of human cognition on how to study properly and maximize retention.

First of all, the processing of the specific information you want to remember has to be transfer-appropriate. This means that the way you encode or represent some information in your mind should be retrieved or recalled in the same way. For example, if you learned about something in biology using pictures, drawing the biological processes would make you remember better when asked to recall the information.

Further more, when you rehearse information to be learned, you can either rehearse it in an maintenance way (i.e. repeating information taking into account only the physical properties of it) or in an elaborate way (i.e. considering the meaning of the information). Maintenance rehearsal is faster, but it is a shallow processing as you do not get in depth on what the information means. On the other hand, elaborate rehearsal is better for learning but takes longer.

Thirdly, when you learn something, the best way to remember something is to organize it in your mind using categories or labels. Thus, you can also chunk information together and creating one unit of information from two units of information.

Another important thing to remember is that learning is found to be state-dependant. In other words, if you study in a certain state and want to retrieve or remember what you studied, you would have to be in the same state for maximal recall. For example, if you studied in a empty room, for an exam, you would better recall the same information in a empty room. How noisy a room is can be a factor too. Thus, for best future recall, you should study the same material in different areas.

However, learning can also be dependent on the emotional state you are in. Therefore, when you are sad while studying, then you would remember better the information in a sad state.

Further more, when you relate the information to yourself, you are more likely to remember (called the self-reference effect). Therefore, make as many associations as possible with things you are familiar with. In that matter, the examples you find concerning certain theories are better than the ones of the teacher in the sense that you will better remember the theory. However, be careful that your own examples can be accurately linked to the theory in question that you are trying to remember.

Finally, if you do decide to cram, study small chunks of information at a time and take many breaks!!

By the way, the pictures of this post are of some of my notes. As you noticed, using pens of different colors is one of my strategies to remember better as I am a visual person...but that is another subject... for another post...

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Source:
Goldstein, E. Bruce (2008). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Belmond, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

I hear you had a hair cut?!

Sensory illusions help us understand better how our perception works. Among visual illusions that enabled us to explain the complex functioning of visual pathways, there are also auditory illusions. Audition not only permits us to hear recognizable sounds, music and receive language input, but it is also cleverly processed by the brain. As we have two eyes to see, which enable us to perceive the world in three dimensions, we also have two ears. These two are useful to locate sounds in our surroundings. Specific temporal areas of the brain basically process and calculate the time it takes for a specific sound to arrive to each ear. That delay of time between each ear’s reception of the sound gives the brain enough information to locate the sound's source.

I believe that it is also this phenomenon that explains in part the Cocktail Party Effect. This effect occurs when in a crowded room we are able to filter sound and listen to a specific conversation across that room without interference of the other conversations or sounds. Since you can locate specific sounds by a bottom-up process, it would be logical that you can target a specific sound coming from a specific place by a top-bottom process. However, this would become even more complicated when the source of the sound is in motion...

Thus, I'll stop my brain-storming here and introduce you to the beauty of the auditory system by presenting this nice audio file (I strongly encourage you to put headphones on!):

Virtual Barber Shop

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The Musical Brain: Review of a Documentary

I just watched a documentary on CTV at 7h00 PM called "The Musical Brain". It was a very touching and smart introduction on the purpose and on the impact that music has in our lives, but also how music activates the brain and plays an important role in our general brain development. What is extraordinary about music and the brain is that they are both mysteries and will remain so for a long time if not forever. Also, music is an intangible pleasure that we cannot afford losing as it is as important in our lives as eating although biologically speaking we will not die from music starvation... or will we?

Apparently, adults that learned a musical instrument when younger had on average 7 IQ points more than the adults that didn't. The inference that these individuals are more intelligent can be argued since the IQ rating is not the best representative of intelligence. Another interesting thing was that Alzheimer patients in there final stage could not remember a single person, object or event anymore, but music recognition was intact!

One of the highlights of the documentary is Dr. Daniel Levitin (McGill Researcher and Teacher) who did an experiment on the famous musician and song writer Sting. The latter was intrigued about Levitin's Research and decided to participate, which implied putting him in an fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner of the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital. Of the interesting findings of Levitin's experiment, there was the results showing that the caudate was strongly involved in creating new songs. Furthermore, Levitin found activation in the visual cortex and uncommon activation of the corpus callosum (being the major commissure in the brain connecting the two hemispheres) during creation of a song. Levitin stated that as pitch is mostly analysed in the right hemisphere, language is mostly in the left and further suggested that as artist grow more experienced and older, there activation while playing or inventing music is more distributed. Also, in another laboratory, it was found that the medial temporal lobe was strongly activated during improvisation. In yet another experiment, pregnant women or more so the foetuses were exposed to a specific song and, later when the child was born, it was found that those young children were more attentive and expressive when shown that specific song. It is important to mention that at 20 weeks, the offspring inside it's mother uterus can hear, but it does not see.

One of the findings that I really picked upon and that I will for sure mention in the second post on oxytocin is that this hormone is also highly secreted when singing in groups, which increased bonding.

I will end this post with this song A Thousand Years by Sting (cannot chose my favorite since there are so many amazing ones by Sting):


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For the official summary of the documentary, refer to:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/show/CTVShows/20090115/musical_brain/20090119
You can also read the book of Daniel Levitin "This is Your Brain on Music".

In H.M.'s Memory

Last year, I listened to this brief audio news concerning the famous patient H.M. from which we learned so much about memory and the specific areas associated with it. Unfortunatly, H.M. died last December 2nd. Henry G. Molaison (aka H.M.) started having generalized and minor seizures at the age of 16. After many failed attempts to control them with medication, Dr. Scoville decided (in 1953) to surgically remove both medial temporal lobes (including the amygdala, hippocampus, rhinal and parahippocampal cortex) that were considered to be the onset point of his seizures. However, that procedure changed his life forever since it resulted in sever anterograde amnesia (memory deficit involving not being able to consolidate new memories). He also had some retrograde amnesia (inability to remember about 2 years prior the surgery). Brenda Milner, who is still involved at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, was his neuropsychologist since 1956. It is due to this tragic memory loss that Milner among others learned about the memory circuit and the areas of involved in the brain.

In this interview below, I was particulary touched by his lack of emotions... Tragically, due to his lack of emotional reaction (mostly due to the removal of both amygdalas), he lived with his confusion without being upset by it...

Listen Now!

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For a summary of H.M.'s life and the article on his death, see:

HM. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved January 27, 2009, from Answers.com Web site: http://www.answers.com/topic/hm-patient

http://www.montrealgazette.com/Technology/Famous+neuroscience+patient+dies+memory+lives/1035462/story.html

Also, read one of the original writings by Brenda Milner and collegues:

Milner, B., Corkin, & Teuber (1968). Further analysis of the hippocampal amnesic syndrome:

14-year follow-up study of H.M., Neuropsychologia, 6, 215-234.

Traces of our Passage

Here is a nice picture of the mountains in Innsbruck, Austria. I decided to insert some faces of the four of us that went on that trip last summer. There are 9 faces in total. Tell me if you find them or if it's too ambiguous :) I'll post more pictures or drawings involving competing perceptions. Hopefully, I'll get better at creating these... :D

Here I expect, but it is merely speculation, that the people involved in the picture or the people that know who they are will see more faces since there are more familiar with them.

One of the laws of Gestalt deals with familiarity in perception. In this case, it suggests that we see faces all the time and, hence, are very familiar and can recognize a human face in a picture or a landscape painting. Gestalt Psychology focuses on a holistic, overall pattern of the face, but is vague about the specificity and details of a unique recognisable face... There is new research in face recognition that I will discuss when I'll post the solution for this image locating the faces in the landscape. Enjoy :D

Hormones & Psychology: Oxytocin (Part 1)

I find it crucial to discuss the endocrine system (hormonal system) and its role in behavior. I am quite disappointed that it is not a mandatory subject covered when doing a major in Psychology. It is well known that the nervous system works with the endocrine system to elicit different behaviors. Where some are found to be typical of either gender (influenced greatly by the hormone levels), other behaviors are triggered by experience and the processes of cognition in the brain. The endocrine system is also concerned with the never-ending nature-nurture debate as some hormone secretions depend on your genetic make-up (i.e. predisposition) and others depend on more direct environmental factors and past learning. [We know both genetic factors and environmental are responsible for behavior, therefore we should now focus on to what extent.] In that matter, as the nervous system elicits fast responses depending on the external stimuli, the endocrine system concerns itself with more bureaucratic (i.e. slow cascades of responses) with a few exceptions of course.

What is important to know about the connection between the nervous system and the endocrine system is that they communicate through the hypothalamus (a structure deeper in the brain that is not called a gland but that does secrete many hormones as well).When the hypothalamus secretes a hormone to release in the body or to trigger a cascade of other hormones in the body, this hormone has to pass by the gate called the pituitary gland in order to end up in the blood stream. Substances in the brain are highly controlled and separated from other substances in the rest of the body by the brain-blood barrier (a preventive measure in order to protect the brain from harmful substances). However, you might have guessed that drugs do end up fooling this barrier in order to elicit their effects on the brain. By now, I probably suffocated you with biology… In any case, I would like to discuss, now all that being said, about the hormone oxytocin and its role in behavior.

I haven’t yet done or found a good literature review on the subject of oxytocin. However, I would use a great book published recently on that matter (see its source below). Basically, oxytocin is made by the hypothalamus and secreted by the pituitary gland in the blood stream. Also, when I first learned about oxytocin, I was very intrigued that this hormone is one of the few exceptions that generate a positive feedback on its control center: the hypothalamus. In other words, upon secretion of oxytocin, high levels of this hormone will trigger even more release of that hormone. This being in contrast with most hormones that have a negative feedback on the brain, meaning that a high level of those hormones will trigger the brain to release less precursors (being hormones that will transform in another hormone) or other releasing hormones (hormones that trigger the release of another hormone). One of the major roles of oxytocin is of course during labor when you can understand the importance of a positive feedback as the contractions are getting stronger and more frequent. The second major role is the one of triggering the release of milk once the baby is born (mammary growth, milk production and release being controlled by the other hormones such as progesterone and prolactin). Here is a nice picture of the process of milk release by the mammary glands which is also called the oxytocin reflex or milk ejection reflex.

These bodily reactions are, as you noticed, automatic behaviors that any mother will go through and have no control over. However, some new research found that oxytocin has an important role in more complex behaviors. I would resume on this in a later post…
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BOOK SOURCE:

Neave, N. (2008). Hormones and Behaviour: A Psychological Approach. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.

I recommend you read Chapter 1 of this book since it is one of the best written summaries about the nervous system that I have read. It is concise, straightforward and covers the basic you need to know to get around in articles about the brain. Believe me I am quite annoyed with revisions and introductions on that matter and it is the first time I’ve read this part without being bored to death or pulling my hairs out.

Family Tree

Count the number of faces that you see in the picture above...

Here is one of many drawings that challenges your perception and it takes the brain some time to perceive more faces than first observed. The tree and the two people at the bottom are obviously meant to be recognised right away. However, what we see as branches can be analysed and recognised at some point also as faces. While you are searching for faces, the brain tries to find some subtleties in the branches that could be similar to a face. The reason it takes more time to see those faces is because you ask your brain to perceive those obvious branches as something else. Once you see those faces, your are no longer able to ignore them and you cannot see the tree and the faces in the branches at the same time! I'll describe this phenomenon in more detail in later posts. Thus, there are officially 13 faces, but even I didn't see them all...

Also, another one using trees that is nice but more obvious is the cover for the movie Premonition (2007):

It is time!

I modified a program in Java (I took from a website) that is designed to test your reflexes when reacting to a visual stimulus. Depending on the speed it takes you to click on the colored square, a message will appear with your reaction time and some information and statistics on factors that can change your ability to respond like the average individual. Feel free to try it many times at different speeds to learn more about drugs, the average reaction times and how mental disorders are correlated with different responses. Do not take your results too seriously as your internet speed, mental state and the color of your hair[1] can all affect the outcome.

I could not put the script directly on the blog, so here is a link:

Test Your Reflexes!

[1] This is another one of my attempts at humor :)
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Literature Review of Reaction Times
http://biology.clemson.edu/bpc/bp/Lab/110/reaction.htm

Other articles:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VC9-4GCX1RV-3&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=1149f1f591bff0a0c56a182392f03b8e

Books:

Drug Abuse Handbook

By Steven B. Karch

Edition: 2, illustrated

Published by CRC Press, 2007

ISBN 0849316901, 9780849316906

1267 pages

http://books.google.ca/books?id=F0mUte90ATUC&pg=PA219&lpg=PA219&dq=simple+reaction+time+visual+stimulus+drug&source=bl&ots=f4Mtv4zxGz&sig=LrKQ-hB0kDaoDFDfXPp68W97V7s&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=9&ct=result#PPA229,M1

What shall we do with the paranoid schizophrenic early in the morning

This is a video that attempts to illustrates the problem with finding proper, ethical and successful treatment for schizophrenics. It focuses on paranoid schizophrenia which is a subtype of schizophrenia characterized by delusions (often of grandeur or persecution), phobias, hallucinations and anxiety.

BEWARE!: This video uses an extreme form of sarcasm!

Ask your Doctor...

BEWARE!: What you are about to see and read are NOT tips for a healthy physical and psychological state. Sarcasm is heavily in use.
Tip Number Ein:

Tip Number Zwai:
Lay back and concentrate your pretty green eyes on this picture and the facts on the cause of your failures in life will suddenly appear. An Aha!-moment might follow.

Have a nice day ;)

Euphoric Nightmare!

A few months ago I experienced something very unusual. You probably all experienced having nightmares at least when you were kids since children do have more nightmares than adults. The intense feeling of fear makes us wake up suddenly and out of breath as our heart rate is flying. Also, there are other instances when we wake up suddenly from our dreams as when our alarm clock gives us a reality check ;). The rest of the time, dreams end and we don't even remember most of them as they are part of the normal sleep cycle. It is mostly when we wake up in the middle of a dream that we truly remember it vividly. In that matter, some months ago I had a dream that I would not explain in details here since the events are irrelevant. I was passively going around in my dream when I arrived somewhere I didn’t expect and it made me surprisingly and suddenly very happy. The feeling was so strong and sudden that I immediately woke up in a very agitated state. Just for the record, it wasn't a dirty dream as you might be thinking right now! After some light swearing @#$%^&!, I got perplexed by what happened and it made me wonder...

Most of us know that the brainwaves generated during sleep are different than when we are awake. However, when we dream, we enter a specific stage (among other stages) called the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep where the waves resemble most those when awake than any other waves produced during the rest of the sleep cycle (1 cycle = about 90 minutes). My theory is that since REM sleep is the closest to being awake, any strong emotions could disturb sleep and wake you up since the body reaction is strong and the brain is not able to compensates for factors that might wake us up (such as loud noises) at that stage (compared to earlier stages such as deep sleep when practically no loud noise disturbs our sleep). I would explain in more details each stage and theories on the sleeping brain later.

New Disorder on the Horizon of Problems

You probably heard of people suffering from somnambulism that drove a car, killed people or just hurt themselves in their sleep walking. Now, there is a new harmful thing you can do while asleep. As some people make awkward calls when drunk, others just sleep email. This can be very disturbing as you are not aware of what you sent and to whom.

[http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/40970/113/]

Tip for a Good Night Sleep

I know this is hard for you chocolate lovers out there but you know it disturbs sleep. Thus, AVOID chocolate before going to bed! However, if you absolutely have to have that special desert after supper, you might as well take white chocolate as it contains little caffeine and no theobromine which increases heart rate. :P
[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/health/13real.html?ref=science]

New Drug Latisse: Solution to All our Problems!

In december, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) FINALLY approved the new revolutionary drug Latisse. Latisse has been created to solve the number 1 problem of females: tragically short and thin eyelashes. YES, this new drug enhances the length of our eyelashes that obviously HAVE to be more bushy as well. This drug was derived from the drug Lumigan for treatment of glaucoma (damage to the optic nerve due to high pressure in the eye) as researchers noticed its potential in growth of eyelashes. Botox and Viagra, which are in the same category as Latisse concerning life or death necessity, were derived from other drugs as well. What is also common to those drugs is that you have to buy them regularly, since you cannot permanently enhanced faces, lashes and libido. Latisse is applied to the eyelashes directly and costs $120/month.

You are now probably wondering with growing curiosity and stress: How is this drug related to the brain or psychology? Well my dear-count-on-my-hand-readers, it is quite obvious! This new drug attempts to convince us beautiful women that we desire and need this drug and that this beauty and our social environment is at stake.

However, I must admit I do not find this drug as useless as this other new product developed in Japan by an incredible genius woman who probably knows the meaning of revenge ;)

BEWARE!: This movie might end up giving you a serious brain freeze.