Ay me, for pity! what a dream was here!
Lysander, look how I do quake with fear
William Shakespeare
Midsummer Nights Dream, Act II, scene 2

Dreams are the answers to questions that we haven't yet figured out how to ask.
Fox Mulder, The X-Files

For centuries human beings have experienced the impossible through dreams. In particular, the murky boundary between sleep and waking known as sleep paralysis has allowed us to create in our minds the stuff of fairy tales. Drifting off to sleep one often experiences curious dreams of a nightmarish quality as well as highly unusual bodily sensations. Both during hypnagogia, the period of time just before sleep, and hypnopompia, a similar state just before waking, our minds create hideous hags and ghouls, terrible enitities, the experience of alien abductions, sensations of non-existent pain and the incomparable feeling of flight [1].

             Many people have heard of the ‘placebo effect.’ Placebo pills, sometimes known as sugar pills, are the gold standard control used to demonstrate the effectiveness of drug treatments for conditions like depression, ADHD, anxiety, and so on. These pills carry no useful medication, but can affect change solely through suggestion. However, a placebo must not always come in pill form. The placebo effect can be seen in injections and, perhaps more surprisingly, surgical procedures. This, coupled with the fact that the placebo effect can occur for a range of mental health and medical conditions, illustrates that even a simple sugar pill, and the expectation that it brings, can alter both our brain and physiological state.

Ask a random person walking down the street whether scents or odours can have an impact on behaviour and the answer will undoubtedly be yes. If the person had an interest in science they might even give you a concise explanation of the process. “When odour molecules are inhaled they pass up the nostrils until they arrive at a postage-stamp sized region known as the olfactory epithelium,” she might say. “Here the odor molecules are picked up my chemoreceptors, initiating action potentials, sending messages to the brain. Once recognized by the limbic system, this information is received, interpreted and possibly initiates a response,” she might conclude. (1)

Muscular dystrophy and multiple sclerosis are probably the two most well-known movement disorders.  As a result, they have received a lot of research funding, enabling medicine to move closer to finding effective treatments and cures.  There is a movement disorder, however, that is just as serious, but often neglected.  Ataxia is a movement disorder that makes patients’ lives extremely difficult, yet is unheard of by many people.  As a result, research into treatments is significantly far behind.  Awareness of ataxia must be increased in order to drive the research that will improve the lives of its sufferers.
 

Schizophrenia is a disease that has played a significant role throughout my life. One of my uncles was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was in college. The cause for the onset of the disease was always shrouded in mystery, however. If anyone in my family was asked why he developed schizophrenia or if there were signs of schizophrenia in him when he was younger, you would receive a different answer from each person. For this reason I always wanted to know what caused schizophrenia and why it is not always evident early on in a persons life.

When I began to research, the debates regarding schizophrenia centered around three main areas: dopamine production, genetics, and issues with neural development. In this paper I am going to focus on issues in early neural development, how neuron issues can cause schizophrenia, and why the symptoms of schizophrenia may not become evident until later in a persons life.

Colorless Green Ideas- The Phenomenon of Language By: Sasha DeWitt 

As humans we use language everyday to live and communicate. We have created words that give sound and meaning to objects and abstract concepts as well as created grammatical structures to give form to the messages we convey. This paper is a look into the way that language, a uniquely human creation, works.

Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to find you are not in bed at all, but have a bag full of clothes on your shoulder, car keys at the ready, and your hand on the doorknob to your room. You cannot remember getting out of bed, getting dressed, or packing your bags, but the car keys in your hand are very real, and all you can do is count your lucky stars you woke up before you had a chance to use them. Sound unsettling? This is just one of countless stories of sleepwalking experienced by a friend of mine, and not only is her condition unsettling, but it causes a great disturbance to her sleep schedule. As a college student and busy individual, I often take sleep for granted, but for someone with a sleep disorder such as sleepwalking, a full-night’s rest can seem like a gift from the gods.

           Last spring, I was practicing mindfulness (insight) meditation in Burma with the intent to discipline the mind and understand the relationship between the mind and body. Upon the end of my retreat and onset of the post-bacc program, I unexpectedly felt torn between these two disciplines: modern science and Buddhism. At the same time, I felt I could use medicine as a means to understand the mechanics of the brain and ultimately the mind. Encouragingly, brain research has begun to produce scientific evidence for something Buddhist meditation practitioners have been teaching for centuries: mental discipline can alter the functions, structure and even retard the aging process of the brain. Such an exploration is partnering modern science and Buddhism to understand the laws of nature and the workings of the mind (1). Through MRI imaging, researchers, such as Dr. Sara Lazar at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, are finding insight meditation to increase the thickness of the prefrontal cortex and anterior insula where attention, sensory processing, decision-making, and brain-body interactions occur (2). Dr. Richard Davidson from the University of Wisconsin, Madison is translating the mental states during transcendental meditation into high-frequency gamma waves and brain synchrony. He and his team have located the left prefrontal cortex (an area behind the left forehead) as the place where brain activity is most intense during meditation (3). Critics point out that these recent findings on brain activity are preliminary and inconclusive, and such types of research may breach the barrier between science and religion (4). As a practitioner, perhaps I am biased to believe that meditation vastly improves cognitive functioning of the brain. Nonetheless, it is exciting to see that researchers are, finally, finding concrete neurobiological evidence on how meditation structurally affects the brain.

As I do several times a day, I sit at my computer screen with the knowledge that I have plenty of school work that could be done but for some reason I have to check my email (all 3 email accounts), check facebook (maybe someone left me a message or wrote on my wall), and check nytimes.com (for any interesting new stories) before I can begin my work. Even after I start working, I can easily be distracted by a song playing across the hall that I must immediately download and while I’m downloading I will check my email, facebook, and nytimes again to see if something has changed. Am I addicted to the internet or do I have the control to stop myself? In a world where we have access to so much at the touch of a keyboard we seem to constantly search for something whether it’s an email, a stock or a message on facebook and yet we cannot stop. Is this addiction or is this normal? For a college student, is this normal or is this too much? Are we constantly on the internet because it is so accessible or is it so accessible because we want to be constantly on it? Would reading a newspaper ritualistically everyday during breakfast be more normal than checking the latest stories online? Has our world become so reliant on the internet that we cannot distinguish if we are addicted to the internet or not? What is internet addiction and how do we define it? Is internet addiction real or is it a fabrication? I think the concept of internet addiction can be argued both ways and therefore further research should be performed to develop stricter guidelines to determine what is internet addiction and how can this be treated.

      Addiction is regarded by most as a social problem to be solved with social solutions, i.e. incarceration. But, scientific evidence argues otherwise: addiction is a brain disease. Interestingly though, this clinical condition has both behavioral and social components that need to be attended to, just as other disorders, such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s are treated. Furthermore, researchers argue that addicts should be viewed as victims, suffering from an altered brain state, just as schizophrenics are viewed (1).