Biology 202 Web Paper 2

“From the very start, the brain’s capacity for making new connections shows itself… as regions originally designed for other functions – particularly vision, motor, and multiple aspects of language – learn to interact with increasing speed. By the time a child is seven or eight, the beginning decoding brain illustrates both how much the young brain accomplishes and how far we have evolved… These three major distribution regions will be the foundation across all phases of reading for basic decoding, even though an increasing fluency… adds an interesting caveat to the unfolding portrait of the reading brain.” (1)

-Maryanne Wolf

 Dreams: Seeing without Seeing

Sociologist Marvin Bressler said that the “dogged preservation of age-old religious belief systems ‘encourages decent men to tremble at the prospect of ‘inconvenient’ findings that may emerge in future scientific research. This unseemly anti-intellectualism is doubly degrading because it is probably unnecessary’” (Ellerman). The majority of religions or organized spiritual systems have had to fight against the findings of science, but the most Buddhists have embraced new research; the methods and modes of Buddhist practice are even shown to have a very firm neurological effect.

 Eve Gleichman

Neurobiology 202

Web Paper 2

Paul Grobstein

Traumatic Stress: A Chemical Approach

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“There’s no logical explanation.”
    -Ron Sato, MD
    Stanford Medical School, Burns & Plastic Surgery

 There has been an enormous amount of violence committed by humans throughout our history, like the Nazis, serial killers, or simply the abusive husbands. The questions are: What causes all these atrocious behaviors? What is going on in the brain of these people as they cruelly push a knife into the flesh of another innocent human being who looks and thinks like themselves? Is it in all of us to commit such crimes? Finding out the answers to these questions is essential to the future prevention of violence.

The Phenomenon of Sleep Paralysis

    Bionics: the study of mechanical systems that function like living organisms or parts of living organisms. This is the topic of recent and exciting scientific endeavors aimed at returning relatively normal functioning to patients recovering from amputations of limbs.  This research is finding ways to restore neural connections to, and thus neural control of, the prosthetic replacement for the amputated limb.  For Amanda Kitts, who was in an accident that left her with only the uppermost part of her left arm, a “stump” in the vernacular, bionics is providing a prosthetic arm that not too long ago would have existed only in science fiction.  Ordinarily Amanda would have been fitted with a prosthetic limb very limited in its ability to replace the