brain

(work in progress) 

Brought to you by The Slippery Brain Sodality

Music is without a doubt a universal language that transcends time, generations, and cultures. It makes for good entertainment, interest, and constructive pursuit that enriches the lives of whomever it touches. Some researchers believe that our natural, almost universal predisposition to the enjoyment of and emotional reaction to music is hard-wired into us – that it has always played a pivotal role in helping humans develop their minds and relationships with others. One writer suggests, “ Babies are born with musical wisdom and appetite, music facilitates well-being and returns people to well-being from mental and physical impairments – it is deep in our genetic structures” (1).

In her book, The Female Brain, Louanne Brizendine describes the stages that the female brain goes through during life, citing brain structure and chemistry as the departure for differences between the male and female brains. Most of the misunderstanding of female psychology, Brizendine notes, stems from the misconception held by scientists during most of the 19th and 20th centuries - “that women are essentially small men in psychology and physiology”. She says that it is important to make the distinction between male and female psychologies because physiological sources for these differences do exist, contrary to the reality that they are usually just brushed off as mere deviations during studies.

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In my previous web paper, I contemplated the idea of a link between depression and the default mode network. I would like to explore the link between the two in this web paper.

Controversial news has broken loose in the mental health community: antidepressants are hardly better than placebos!

   Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink is an exploration of rapid cognition, of the thinking that happens in the blink of an eye, and is an attempt to “understand this magical and mysterious thing called judgment” (Gladwell 260). He refrains from using “intuition” to describe this kind of thinking, as he believes we use that word to describe irrational thought. Gladwell argues that those first two seconds of rapid cognition are completely rational and just involve thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than deliberate, conscious thought and decision-making.

    Imagine an army of ants crawling up your back. Slowly they move up your spine, their short legs scurrying along. Eventually they reach your neck, briefly touching your skin before they move up the back of your head. Does your skin feel tingly? Did your head start to itch? Did you give in to the temptation to scratch? If so, you aren’t alone; I had those same sensations as I was writing this. That inexplicable sensation of itching just by reading about it is not uncommon. Atul Gawande, in The Itch, a treatise on itching published in The New Yorker, described a similar experience.