Biology 202 Web Paper 3

When the brain is exposed to different chemicals, its behavior and action can change. What comes to mind when one usually thinks of chemicals is alcohol and drugs. We all expect exogenous chemicals to cause a change in the brain. What we might not expect, is that simply thinking can change the bath of chemicals our brain is exposed to. In particular, thinking of God.

One of thefirst things we read in this course was a poem on the brain by Emily Dickinson.Having always liked her works, I was pleased that she could be used not only indiscussions on literature and poetry, but also in relation toneuroscience.   However, afterhearing the content of her poem, my first thought was not on her stanzas, buton herself as a writer.  In mymind, I remember thinking, “But Emily Dickinson was crazy!” Yet, it was herethat I began to wonder if, maybe, her words maintained value (or were even more valuable!) because she was a littleloopy. 

            Love is a wonderful phenomenon that almost everyone can relate to despite the challenging, perhaps even impossible task of defining it or describing its many different interpretations and implications. Curiously, the multi-dimensional construct of love leaves many of us with pressing questions, one of which involves the obvious notion that love must somehow be influenced by internal mechanisms, but which ones and how? Logically, it has been stated that love functions biologically to ensure the survival of a species through social attachment and reproduction, so it is no surprise that science has found great interest in

"Perhaps we are hallucinating all the time and what we call perception is arrived at by simply determining which hallucination best conforms to the current sensory input." V.S. Ramachandran here communicates the uncomfortable notion that what we perceive to be real is not reality at all. My body as I know it may really have a different form entirely, I may be typing into nothingness and the ghost that I’m sure I saw at summer camp may have been more real than I am. Maybe new agers do contact extra terrestrials and your dead relatives never really leave your side. Maybe. Does a distinction