brain

Reading Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation for my book commentary for this course, I came across an interesting passage in which Grandin notes that on a very basic level, human beings and animals have the same kinds of brain cells—the same neurons—we just use them differently. Grandin concludes, “That means that theoretically we could have extreme perception the way animals do if we figured out how to use the sensory processing cells in our brains the way animals do” (63).

Book Commentary: Where is the Mango Princess?

You are what you eat: The Gut as the “second brain”

By definition, a stroke occurs as the result of a blood clot in an artery or as the result of a burst blood vessel. Either way, the result leads to an interruption in blood flow to an area of the brain. When this happens, brain cells in that brain region suffer from lack of oxygen and begin to die. As brain damage begins to occur, the abilities associated with that area of the brain become lost. The abilities lost during stroke typically include speech, movement and memory.  The extent of impairment experienced by a stroke patient depends on where in the brain the stroke occurred and how much of the brain was damaged. 

Uncertain how to begin my commentary on Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Human Behavior, I revisited my book commentary for Paul’s Emergence class, which I took in the spring of my freshman year.

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 Eric Kandel: In Search of Memory

Throughout In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, Eric Kandel describes his approach to understanding how memories are stored. While at first glance, the book might seem like a boring biography of an experiment; in the first chapters, Kandel’s captivating writing constantly keeps you wondering about the next chapter.

We generally think that humans have five senses and that those senses are delegated to a specific organ in our bodies. Anyone would agree that we see with our eyes, taste with our tongues, hear with our ears, feel with our skin and smell with our noses. While this may indeed be the case, it is not the whole story. Our senses are all interconnected. They compliment one another and can even compensate for one another if a sense is weakened or lost (1). However, the interactions between the senses are not uniform from person to person. Synesthesia, the name given to any of a number of conditions involving the experience of a usually unassociated sense in conjunction with the stimulation of another sense, provides insight into the ways our senses can interact.<

      The greatest limitation in the field of human biology has traditionally been the inability for research to be conducted upon the body while it is still functioning.  This has been a particularly large barrier to overcome in the study of the nervous system.  Non-living tissue may suffice to study the anatomy of the brain and of the peripheral nervous system, but the activity of nerve cells is difficult to measure accurately even in living tissue, and so for many years the function of the nervous system was understood through the study of animal models and via observation of the effects of neurological disorders and injuries.  The earli