Reply to comment

My name is Natsu and I’m a Psychology major at Bryn Mawr.  I have a particularly strong interest in developmental and cognitive psychology and starting this past summer, I've been working in the Cognition and Aging lab.  I work many hours every week with elderly people, some of who have Alzheimer's disease.

However, what I am actually really interested in is social behavior and how that relates to the brain, especially in very young children.  I have had a considerable amount of experience working with children who have autism spectrum disorders and language disabilities, and recently I have become fascinated by a rare genetic disorder called Williams Syndrome.  I am particularly interested in the contrast that is made between patients with autism and those with Williams Syndrome – especially the fact that children with autism tend to avoid human interaction and appear to be anti-social or “hyposocial” while those with Williams Syndrome are extremely friendly or "hypersocial".

During my research in the Cognition Lab, I have also been thinking a lot about the social behavior piece.  So far we have been fortunate (?) to work with many nice patients, but I have often heard that there are patients who become extremely unfriendly or mean as they develop Alzheimer's. I find it puzzling and intriguing that disease-related changes in the brain can even change the way people interact with and behave towards others.  Social behavior or sociability is hard to measure in research (how could one really measure meanness or friendliness objectively?) and not often the main focus of research, but I think it is a very interesting and important aspect to look at when considering the effectiveness of treatment.

 Changing the topic a little bit, I saw a clip from ABC news just an hour after we had our first seminar on Tuesday.  It was an interview with Dr. Peter Whitehouse who spoke of his book called "The Myths of Alzheimer's”. I haven't had a look the book yet, but what I found interesting was that the author was trying to redefine the condition that we have been calling Alzheimer's as severe/accelerated aging by arguing that we all develop Alzheimer’s to some degree. I thought I would bring this up, since this seemed relevant to our topic of the week.